Nicole Mitchell & Joe Westerlund Announce New Album Written in the Universe
October 6, 2026 - By Psychic Hotline
Sometimes Nicole Mitchell and Joe Westerlund finish each other’s sentences. It’s the sort of telepathy that develops between musicians who have spent years playing together, listening closely, and responding in real time. On their new collaborative album, Written in the Universe, that same connection takes shape through sound.
An internationally acclaimed flutist, composer, and former chair of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Mitchell has spent decades expanding the language of improvised music. Percussionist Joe Westerlund’s musical background spans experimental rock, jazz, and electroacoustic improvisation, who 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.
“Well, I think whenever we play, there’s always this magic that happens,” Mitchell says. “There’s a spark… A ‘whoa’ type of thing.”
Written in the Universe grew out of the pair’s numerous live performances around Durham, North Carolina, eventually leading them into Betty’s, a rural recording studio nestled in the woods outside Chapel Hill. Recorded over just two days, the sessions embraced the unpredictability and immediacy of improvisation. The surrounding environment – the trees, open air, and soft patter of rain – became an unspoken part of the recording, encouraging a way of playing that felt instinctive and deeply present.
“A lot of the projects that I’ve been involved with that are improv-based have had a process of revisions,” Westerlund explains. “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.”
The duo edited the recordings through cutting and splicing, but made no overdubs to their performances, maintaining the impromptuness of the sessions. “It felt really good to just preserve the spontaneous quality with Nicole,” Westerlund says.
That commitment to spontaneity is central to Written in the Universe. Rather than revising performances into predetermined compositions, Mitchell and Westerlund allowed intuition to dictate the shape of the music. The result is an album that documents discovery and reaction as they happen: Mitchell’s flute moves through effects and processing, while Westerlund’s percussion provides a dense, polyrhythmic foundation that stretches and shifts beneath it.
The album’s opening track and first single, “Twelve,” offers an immediate introduction to that shared language. Mitchell’s flute, layered with effects, seems to emerge from a rainstorm – organic and open to the elements, but threaded through with electronics and unexpected textures.
“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 the new album, 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.
Written in the Universe is set to be released physically in record stores on November 6, 2026 via Psychic Hotline, with digital street date following on November 20, 2026.
