Nicole Mitchell & Joe Westerlund - Written in the Universe (LP)

All items in your cart will ship on or around November 6, 2026. This date is subject to change due to reasons beyond our control, and you may receive this product after its official release date. If you would like to receive other items sooner, please place two separate orders.

Sometimes Nicole Mitchell and Joe Westerlund finish each other’s sentences. It’s the sort of telepathy that bandmates develop after playing together for a while. Only today during our interview, instead of showing up on the stage, it manifests through words. Mitchell, an internationally acclaimed flutist, composer, and former chair of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), has spent decades expanding the language of improvised music. Westerlund, a percussionist whose background spans experimental rock, jazz, and electroacoustic improvisation, approaches sound with an equally exploratory sensibility. Written in the Universe is the product of such telepathy as well as a resolved duality: imbued with a grounded, natural feeling; paired with an expressive, psychedelic, expansiveness. Echo-imbued, electronics forward and vaguely dreamy, the sound is rooted by a rock-solid polyrhythmic backbone. 

Nicole speaks of the connection thusly. “Well, I think whenever we play, there's always this magic that happens... There's a spark... A “whoa” type of thing.” 

It was that connection, honed during myriad live performances around the Durham, North Carolina area, that led them to record together. Recorded over 2 days at Betty's, a rural studio nestled in the woods outside Chapel Hill, the sessions embraced the unpredictability of improvisation. Surrounded by trees and open space, the environment itself seemed to encourage a way of playing that felt instinctive and deeply present.

Joe added, “A lot of the projects that I've been involved with that are improv-based have had a process of revisions. What was different for me is we really stayed true to what we do when we play live. We spent two days recording, and we probably had enough for three records,” continuing, “we edited through cutting and splicing, but there were no overdubs added to our performances. And that was really different from the stuff that I've been doing for the last five, six years, or so. It felt really good to just preserve the spontaneous quality with Nicole.”

For Westerlund, spontaneity meant embracing Mitchell's approach to music making. Rather than revising performances into polished compositions, they allowed intuition to dictate the shape of the record. It's less a story of compromise than one of invitation: Mitchell draws Westerlund deeper into a creative philosophy she has spent decades cultivating where improvisation is not simply a technique but a way of listening, responding, and building community.

That commitment to resisting revision gives Written in the Universe its expanding quality. The album exists as a pure document. A record that captures discovery, intuition, and reaction unfolding in real time. The soft patter of rain, the stillness of the surrounding forest, and the open air become an uncredited third player, subtly shaping the musicians' responses as much as the music itself.

The scene in Durham was also a factor in what they created. “Here, I feel a sense of safety to just express myself freely without judgment,” Nicole revealed. But what brought her to the area originally was deeper: a “calling to reverse migrate.”

Her family is originally from the nearby Richmond area. “I've lived in the North. I've lived on the West Coast. Chicago, which is where my mother was born – so, Midwest. And it was just really a calling to go back and reconnect with where my folks came from.” 

Mitchell's move to North Carolina wasn't simply geographic. It reshaped how she listened. Seeking a home where she and her late husband Calvin could pursue tending land, she found herself drawn to the region's greenery and slower rhythms.

“At the time, my deceased husband, Calvin and I were looking for a space where we could do our organic farming. I've always dreamed of living on the land. The skyscraper pines here spoke to me.” 

This isn’t the story of the album, of course, but as Joe observed, “It's part of the story… Why you're even here.”

“That's true,” Nicole conceded. It’s a specificity of location that listeners can hear. “I think there's this organic sound that we have in the music and there's even that song, “Trees & Branches.” And that connection to the forest, to the wildlife, is something that's important to me. So, it's reshaping what I choose to do with my music. And it reshapes the sound of the music too.”

Perhaps coincidentally, Joe grew up in the Midwest, “so we have that in common… spending a lot of time there,” he explained plaintively, “And then we were both in LA at the same time, too, but our paths never crossed.” And after years in North Carolina, it wasn’t until Nicole put out a call online for local collaborators that she and Joe finally connected to create this duo that could have only happened there. 

Nicole added, “The music might not sound like anything that's typical from where we live. But, there's a very strong community that's interested in experimental music here. I'm kind of merging two communities together because I'm [also] playing in the jazz scene.”

Although Westerlund arrived through a different musical lineage, the collaboration finds him stepping naturally into Mitchell's world while bringing his own vocabulary with him. Their differences become the album's greatest strength rather than something to reconcile.

“And I share a parallel to that with more of the rock scene that I’ve been a part of,” Joe concluded. “I'd say that's where Nicole and I really connect is that we are both people that straddle different spheres of community and ways of expressing ourselves. We have a shared openness, and that's the thing that I hear in the music.”

The second song, “Thumbs”, features amplified thumb pianos, or mbiras, playing in tandem. 

“I have one, he has one, and they're kind of overlapping,” said Nicole.. “They sound very different from each other because of the way we're amplifying them. I'm not going to call myself a percussionist. But I still have one because I love the sound.” The take that appears on Written in the Universe was initially just to get levels set. 

A shining star of “Orchid Storm” is Joe’s small percussion, reminiscent of a wind chime on a back porch, mixed with electronics. “They're just little sheets of metal that are basically vibraphone bars. My friend Adam Morford carves them out of loading dock material, that grated metal they make truck liftgates out of.”

On the opening track, “Twelve”, there's a point where Nicole’s flute, layered with effect, almost feels like after a rainstorm, the clouds crack open and the sun hits you in the face. It’s organic, natural, kind of open to the elements studded with electronics. “I think it's a shared aesthetic,” Nicole noted. “Joe is definitely a wizard with the effects on the drums. He was a mentee of Milford Graves, and so he's got that polyrhythmic sensibility, but then bringing in a new voice.” By sampling the drums and creating loops, she added, it brings out “certain overtones from the drums. He's got a whole science thing going on over there.”

On Written in the Universe, Nicole delights in experimenting with effects pedals. “It's the aesthetic of discovery, in a sense, wanting to expand your instrument's expression through this processing but wanting to do it in real time.”

Again and again, Joe returns to Mitchell's creative philosophy as much as her musicianship. Listening to him describe her approach, one gets the sense of a musician delighted to step inside another artist's way of hearing the world.

Joe, noting what he called Nicole's “mastery” of the pedals, continued, “There's always a moment where all of a sudden, there's two flutes going on in one of the tracks. And it's like, is that the loop? I don't know which one it is. Nicole often samples herself and immediately mutes the sample, and hangs onto it well into the piece. When she finally reintroduces the captured riff, it feels like a sleight-of-hand trick or something.”

It's an apt observation for an album built less through preconception than attention. Written in the Universe isn't about arriving anywhere. Instead, it invites listeners into the act of listening itself: two musicians responding to one another—and to the world around them—with such attentiveness that spontaneous composition becomes indistinguishable from intuition.

– Ayana Contreras, June 2026