I don’t have a lot to say in the intro this week, so apologies in advance (I’ve been doing a bit more writing/sharing on Patreon in recent weeks, especially on these Saturday weekly update posts, so I don’t want to repeat myself). I will say that if you haven’t listened to Helado Negro’s episode of Songs of Our Lives, it’s as joyful as the spirit he brings to so much of his music. Roberto loves to share music with people and that comes through so clearly on the show. A couple of the things he picked that I wasn’t familiar with – most notably this incredible album from Luiza Brina – have been on regular rotation since we recorded a few weeks ago. Don’t forget to listen to his wonderful new record, PHASOR, when it comes out on Friday.
Otherwise, my latest album as The Starless Oracle is still very new, and every single album I write about below is worth your time.
Damsel Elysium Whispers from Ancient Vessels (AD 93)
Give thanks. Take it back. Whispers from Ancient Vessels is a cryptic unfurling of multiple threads, frayed sonic twine coming apart in pieces. A chorus of ghosts speculates on the unraveling through esoteric cello renderings and enigmatic vocal incantations. Damsel Elysium’s music builds the remnants of archaic spaces so she can unearth the secrets hidden within. Piano arrangements spin eulogies from both sides of the veil, sending out resonant tendrils to pull the liminal spaces together into a singular, expansive whole. The lost forays into the abyss crystallize into operatic silhouettes and a funereal choir lulling us into the darkness so we can be exorcized by morning.
SUNJIRŨ blue on a green world (Self-Released)
Dimensions are bent together on blue on a green world as the enigmatic SUNJIRŨ scours multiple sonic realms in search of what it means to be home. Obscured views manifest through lush, deconstructed synth arrangements and hazy atmospherics. Rhythms cluster in bunches like our shadows scattering against unfamiliar ground filtered through the Nairobi-based artist’s technological framework, sounding simultaneously distant and immersive. Each passage disintegrates into alluring forms, inviting us into this world of exploratory electronic arrangements and fragmented cadences. Serrated basslines don’t upset the illusions, but they build out the foundations so we can glide through faded neon arches as though we’re weightless and free. This is excellent.
Bobby Jewell Wind & Water (Katuktu Collective)
Whimsy claims a sentient form in the dancing woodwinds and glistening arpeggios spread across blue-green mirages. Jewell listens to the world around him with a cautious ear, turning the allure of a spirited, natural canvas into a call to notice the changing landscapes surrounding us. Synth passages glow with an effervescent lightness that heightens the gravity buried with solemn chord changes and patterns. Even when Wind & Water feels like an escapist sonic fantasy, there’s an introspective weight to the music, a specific flow that helps push our gaze outward. There’s an intimacy present here, too, in the close whispers of flutes, the bareness of flowing water, and the considered melodic progressions, but Wind & Water is beautiful and expansive.
Pat Thomas WAZIFAH volume 3 (scatter archive)
Each new installment of Pat Thomas’s fantastic WAZIFAH series opens another floodgate and expands the palette of these electronic expressions. Piano shards are melted down and reformed into dancing digital spindles, wiry and jarring, but tinged with a mesmerizing intensity. Horns and pipes are put through a blender to intersect disjointed rhythms and percussive textures, creating an intricate matrix that spits out enticing melodic oddities. WAZIFAh volume 3 is relentless in its pursuit of new forms and concepts, but Thomas stitches these tangled tonal wires into something captivating and impossible to trace. This is music of abundance and generosity. Thomas shares so many ideas like blips on a map of endless possibilities.
Cerca Spirit Witness (Self-Released)
Sometimes when I close my eyes and listen to Spirit Witness, I feel woozy and adrift. There’s something in the discordant guitar scrawls and how they mix with feedback drones is like being gently pushed through a wormhole into another dimension. But that’s when the fun really begins with haze-fueled bouncing rhythms and mud-encrusted riffs sending cracks through the walls. Movement comes in waves, but the buoyant cadence is like cosmic dust channeled into infrared, sacred grooves. Cerca washes it out with opaque gloss, but the light never fully fades in the fleeting harmonic currents. We just have to brush it off as though it was never a memory in the first place so we can dive third-eye first into melodic shade and tape-mangled silhouettes. Catharsis lives in the margins of Spirit Witness, grinding off the edges until they’re smooth enough to let the aural splendor wash into infinity.
IKSRE abundance (Constellation Tatsu)
Warmth runs through the veins of abundance, the lifeblood of this vitalizing music. Phoebe Dubar creates music that presses us in waves, primarily using synthesizers, voice, and viola to build gentle and enveloping sound worlds. Remnants of muted glass tones stretch beyond infinity, crafting an ephemeral horizon that glows with dulcet invitations. Dubar builds solace with repeating patterns that tell a story and evoke subconscious memories of past lives and future selves. These sounds are so uplifting as though we find ourselves in a beautiful state of impermanence, weightless and free to bask in the sonic effervescence flowing through each expressive melody. As ever, IKSRE gives us space to find the moments we need.
Talk West Bartlett Square (Aural Canyon)
Binary codes are pulled apart and reimagined as a concrete oasis once Bartlett Square really takes off. Dylan Aycock crafts an ode to places that become fixtures of our youth before everything washes into the sea. Wistful shadowlands build monuments with synthesizers. Faded beats become the scaffolding surrounding each spiral drone before the intricate shapes melt and leave the spires sinking under gray skies. Aycock spins melancholic yarns with gilded guitar passages and rusted electronic boiling points until there are no layers left to unfurl. With some help from Gary Peters on pedal steel adding an elegiac theme, Bartlett Square is a reminder, a sonic grip on memories, keeping them close so they don’t slip out of reach. Great album.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden.
