Cabin Music Album

I wanted to play the whole piano at once, in the same way that a single breeze can cause the entire forest to dance and tremble in unison.

James Carson, Pianist

Cabin Music is the culmination of a twenty-year journey to transform what music can be—and to rediscover sound as a form of surrender.

A childhood prodigy with perfect pitch, James Carson had his first orchestral premieres at sixteen and was hailed as “one of the most gifted rising stars” by the Edmonton Journal. But a deeper impulse called him away. After formative studies with Joe Maneri, Cecil Taylor, and poet Robert Creeley at the New England Conservatory, he walked away from music entirely—backpacking from Spain to Japan, farming and moving through silence.

Eventually, he returned to Northern Alberta, where he designed and built a strawbale cabin by hand, for the sole purpose of placing a piano inside it. There, in solitude and total immersion, he began to play again. Not to perform, but to listen. To practice. To explore.

Cabin Music is the sonic documentation of that return: a virtuosic, multilayered recording shaped through the impact of a cross-section of global cultures, deep solitude, and radical inquiry. “I wanted to play the whole piano at once,” Carson writes, “in the same way that a single breeze can cause the entire forest to dance and tremble in unison.”

The result is a body of music unlike anything that has come before—at once meditative and technically unprecedented. Through resonance-embedding ghost notes, ever-shifting, flexible phasing techniques, and daring use of the sostenuto pedal, Carson presents a sonic architecture in which shimmering sheets of sound accompany myriad simultaneous melodic lines; wherein vast forms mirror the movement of clouds, topography, and shadow; whose solitary notes and thundering chords respire and fill the atmosphere. The music breathes, unfolds, and lives outside all previous forms—rooted in history yet shaped by space, silence, and surrender.

Cabin Music is not ambient. It is not classical. It is not improvised in any traditional sense of the word. It is something else entirely: a new kind of pianism and musical freedom that evolves what came before and points toward what might come next.

The project’s companion film, an award-winning feature documentary directed by Carson himself, premiered at DOC NYC in 2022 to international acclaim, with Blu-ray and streaming releases forthcoming. As the live tour expands across North America, Europe and beyond, the album stands as its central pillar: a distilled offering of a life dedicated to musical and spiritual evolution.

Private EPK (Late 2025 – 2026)

A stunning musician… The music is wonderfully evocative of inner and outer states of being, which approach bliss.

THE NEW CLASSICAL FM

Carson is adamantly opposed to labeling his music, instead comparing it to bird songs or any other natural expression. It does not need a name to exist; it just is. The performance reiterated the concept that nothing that repeats is ever the same, even if only because we have changed in the intervening moments.

Feast of Music

This is gentle music sincerely meant, that carries through on its aims, and Carson, a gifted pianist, offers superb performances. No one can doubt the uniqueness of Carson’s idiom.

Fanfare Magazine

I got chills. It felt so good to be given permission to be human. Nothing is perfect – not a piece of music, not a performance, not a moment in time. His way of playing music seems to be about letting the music simply be, and physically being in a place that is more conducive to this way of creating sounds (cue The Cabin).