February 11, 2026
Breath Vessels - Liz Allbee
Label: Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu
Catalog #: nvnc-lp058
Location: Luxembourg
Release Date: December 4, 2025
Media: vinyl & digital download
bandcamp.com entry
discogs.com entry
The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House have been engaged in a staring contest with the idea of this review for the better part of a week, each waiting for the other to flinch. Will we find our resolve, putting pen to paper, or will we allow time to dissipate our good intention? We battle not pure lethargy but also the philosophical notion, manifested in the disclaimer to which we often refer and which is reproduced below.
Lest readers be misled, the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House do not place any great weight on the words in any of the reviews on the PPPH blog. The music exists outside these reviews and is neither magnified nor diminished by it. Because we have nothing essential to add, we sometimes find ourselves asking, "Why do we continue to write music reviews?"
The answer we suppose is identified by analogy. When you walk alone along a path and come upon a flower in full bloom you might take a picture and share the photograph with someone, who will find the same pleasure in the folds and color of the petals. Or, if the flowers grow in a wild place, you might even cut some and place them in a vase on the kitchen table, where their fragrance permeates the house. As we write it, the answer seems obvious and this explanation unnecessary; still we are moved to include the disclaimer as a way of expressing the intention behind this collection of inconsequential reviews.
It appears the balancing act between action and inaction has failed in favor of writing a review—a happy result for which we claim no credit.
To set the mood, we begin with a reference to a short piece written by the American author, Donald Barthelme, published in the New Yorker on December 4, 1973 and titled "Nothing: A Preliminary Account". We provide an excerpt from the full text.
...Nothing is not a telephone number or any telephone number or any number whatsoever including zero. It's not science and in particular it's not black-hole physics, which is not nothing but physics. And it's not (quickly now, quickly) Benjamin Franklin trying to seduce, by mail, the widow of the French thinker Claude Adrien Helvetius, and it is not the nihilism of Gorgias, who asserts that nothing exists and even if something did exist it could not be known and even if it could be known that knowledge could not be communicated, no, it's not that although the tune is quite a pretty one...
In December, 2025, Vermonter Liz Allbee released an album, titled Breath Vessels, on Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu, the only label from Luxembourg to release music that ever reached the ears of the PPPH staff (appropriately, we suppose, as Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu translates as "neither seen, nor known".) Like most vinyl records, there is music on both sides. Side A contains a single instrumental solo piece Elegy For The Lost At Sea. The instruments used to make the music include "breath vessels", a nomenclature new to us. The album sleeve reveals fragmentary photos of the instruments. We looked at the sleeve a few days ago. The image, perhaps inaccurate due to flaws in memory, which persists in our mind is of a Florence flask (a type of laboratory glassware with a round body, long neck, and usually a flat bottom) with which creative liberties had been taken. As readers of these reviews know, the PPPH staff have a demonstrated weakness for unusual instruments of many kinds. One need look no further than the masthead at the top of the page. The prospect of the discovery of an instrument unknown to us induced us to purchase the album. In every sense Breath Vessels makes good on its promise to entertain and to engage our mind and ears.
We liked side A the most and have listened to Elegy For The Lost At Sea multiple times. Perhaps it is the title that brought to mind the image of a low warning horn sounding through the fog off a rocky coast. Even without the aid of the title, we think the sound itself was sufficient to conjure a memory of a maritime foghorn. Describing the music as an elegy imbues it with a solemnity that is wholly appropriate.
Side B contains three tracks in a different style. Two of the songs have lyrics and the instrumentation varies. We are fairly confident that there exist in this world listeners who would prefer side B to side A and, of course, that is just the way things should be, at least as far as we are concerned.
In any case, we found the music on "Breath Vessels" to be wonderful and listening to the album in its entirety to be a rewarding experience. We suspect, although we have no physiological data to provide as evidence, that the music stimulated the release of endorfins from the pituitary gland, which invoked a sensation of enjoyment and well-being! We hope that this review encourages others to seek the music out.
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