Purr24 – V/A (2024) – Album Review

Album: Purr24

Artist: V/A (Projekt Records)

Release Date: November 28, 2024

Very few times in this mad world do my two favorite things collide in a way that feels divinely sanctioned – ambient music and cats. Is there anything more wonderful? The premise of this album is audacious and tender. Fourteen artists tasked with embedding the purrs of their feline companions into fourteen hearty tracks that turn purrs into orchestral textures. Also know as: my dream. Purr24 is what happens when empathy, electronics, and the low rumble of a feline heart converge into a single frequency of calm delirium.

This album is no less than a field study into our quiet devotion to our fluffy guardians of the underworld. You can almost see the musicians hunched over their desks, laptops and synths glowing, a tail swishing lazily nearby. To make a “purr” compositional is the height of our humanity. What’s cool about this is that a low-frequency hum of a purr registers between 25 and 150 Hertz, the same range used therapeutically to promote healing and relaxation. So is it no surprise that I am utterly blown away at how non-kitschy this album feels? I just want to meet all of these cats.

It’s nice to see Michael Stearns continuing to evolve as a musician. I’ve loved his work since the Planetary Unfolding days – those deep spatial meditations that felt like messages from an orbiting satellite. I like him even more now that I know he’s down to make ambient music out of cat noises. You get the sense he’s still charting galaxies, only now the spacecraft has a cat curled up on the console. Speaking of his track, I desperately want to believe those dinosaur noises creeping through the mix are just his cat, time-stretched and dropped a few octaves until it sounds prehistoric.

I desperately need to know if the cats get a co-writing credit for this incredible album. I can just see it now: “Additional harmonic texture by Mr. Whiskers.” Recognition matters. Maybe that’s the true art here: an act of effortless collaboration. The human mind can spend decades mastering synthesis, but it takes a cat’s indifference and majesty to make the whole system feel alive. Okay, maybe I’m just talking about me.

For those of us who live by the hum of machinery and the slow blink of a cat in sunlight, Purr24 is a homecoming. Words won’t do for this album – you just need to give it a listen.