From deep dives into expansive drone to cosmic guitar noodling, deep dub, experimental rap, sonic artifacts cloaked in tape hiss, and more, New Environments is an exploration of the world we live in—inspired primarily by the laconic late afternoon quiet of Los Angeles that fosters creativity and deeply zonked out experimentation, but good for any environment anywhere you are.

On this month’s episode, Sam is joined by guest Tom Krell aka How To Dress Well.

How to Dress Well is Tom Krell, a multimedia artist and singer-songwriter who lives in Los Angeles. He began releasing music independently through his own blog around 2009 and via labels like Tri Angle, Lefse Records, Weird World, Domino Records and now, with Sargent House for his forthcoming new LP “I Am Toward You,” which comes out on May 10. In his nearly 15 years recording as How To Dress Well, Tom has made a bunch of different kinds of music, from bracing raw noise to crystalline pure pop. Touching on outsider art, r&b, ambient, folk, post-rock, techno, and more – sometimes all on the same song – Krell’s work plays with how we hear, our implicit expectations about what sound is supposed to do, and how we communicate in order to create music that exists somewhere between celestial transcendence and an outsider approach to what pop music can be. In Krell’s musical world, the weight of a sample comes from his history with it, the meaning of a lyric fragment is stretched and distorted, its core skirting universal interpretation in favor of specificity. I Am Toward You is the first new How To Dress Well album in six years: with some of his noisiest, most free, and most poetic music to date, Krell opens the second decade of his career with an album that delivers on the hallmarks of his best work.