Bit of a strange week here where it wants to be early summer and late winter within the space of about 12 hours. Everything is confused. I took my kid to the planetarium last night and we learned about exoplanets. It was an absolute blast, and now I’m dreaming about working at a planetarium. I don’t remember a lot from college (not because of drugs, but because I am not a person who enjoyed school), but I do remember the astronomy class I took my freshman year, and going out one night (as part of an assignment) to look through a fancy telescope the department had. We saw the rings of Saturn and some nebula I don’t remember the name of, but it’s perhaps the most lasting memory of college I have. In another life, maybe I’m a high school astronomy/science teacher (except that whole thing where school and I don’t mix). Anyway, like I said – a weird week.
Oh, and it’s [redacted] Friday this week, so grab some things so your favorite artists get a few bucks and the vultures don’t. Weird ass new Wet Bear EP on The Jewel Garden is out Thursday.
Panghalina Lava (Room 40)
This trio of Helen Svoboda, Bonnie Stewart, and Maria Moles lives in the spaces between echoes. Clattering rhythms scratch out messages with the sonic detritus, casting long shadows across ecstatic movements. A lilting framework draws breath from the intangible, voices rising with effervescence, adrift on emotive electronic soundscapes. Through inward explorations, bright timbres glow for moments and fade away before repeating the pattern, like a warm, luminous heartbeat. Lava dances in the rhythmic grooves, cut through like a knife through the damp, clay earth. Panghalina create a world held in restraint, knowing the instant to cast off and break free. It’s an engaging and exhilarating album that hides surprising stories in the details.
Tristan & Titania Glyphs & Gods (Nonlocal Research)
This duo of Eva Titania Soledad Van Deuren (Orphan Fairytale) & Tristan Vloeberghs create wondrous, shapeshifting soundworlds. Glyphs & Gods bounds through the airy on muted sparkles and amorphous melodies tinged with psychedelia. Van Deuren and Vloeberghs spiral skeletal rhythms into darkened corners like they’re being chased by water ghosts from another dimension. The music flits from formless whimsy to blurred terror the deeper it goes. Moments in the glaciated ether step downward and spit out sonic shards of guitar rinse and resonant vocal spells. Going further into the core of Glyphs & Gods only gets stranger, and more enticing. Textural globules are cut into tiny bubbles by sharpened timbres, opening a space for haunted houses to make themselves at home. It’s all a setup to punch through into some kind of celestial paradise where we levitate on synthetic winds and the stillness of never. Highly recommended.
Hiram Yucca Music (Perma Culture Media)
Melodies float away on the wind, rising above the sunkissed sands that stretch beyond a fading horizon. Gilded tones become light as air as each note twists into cloud-like shapes and creates vignettes within the larger, self-reflective narrative. Eyes closed, this music spreads across our minds and bodies like a trance-inducing sonic spell. Flute explorations open up new baths as they glide across synthscapes pulled down from unseen dimensions untouched by time. This is music that exists in the ether, there and waiting until someone can touch and bring it down into the tactile world. Yucca Music is pure, beautiful expression.
K. Nogami & CIRCA ALTO Oyasumi (A Quiet Room Recordings)
What if the memory of an entire life was encapsulated in a drop of water? What if tomorrow’s promise becomes a distant sparkle? Oyasumi embodies the impossible and the infinite through stillness and gentle sonic expression. Piano arrangements float through minimalist watercolors in considered choreographed movements with soft electronic washes and calm electronics. Buoyed with field recordings and textural percussion, Oyasumi flickers in the night, its melodies emotive and ancient. A whispering flute tells of an eternal embrace beyond what we can see, as a glow from looping silhouettes opens pathways to follow. This music is timeless and inviting. Each tranquil passage is like a new story borne of glassine echoes and drifting aural mementos. Beautiful.
Cody Yantis Opticks (Flaming Pines)
Emptiness comes in all sizes and in varying textures. It’s not all expansive through a wide lens but sometimes is minuscule and raw. Cody Yantis changes speeds on Opticks and finds the view fluctuating and inconstant. Tiny frequencies move in slow, pointillist patterns before giving way to vast, gilded drones that don’t simply stretch toward the horizon, they become it in all its triumphant pomp. Chord progressions sharpen to a point, dancing on stilts above the dehydrated quicksand. Yantis finds signs of life in the margins, but there’s still a distance to them, as though birdsong only exists in eroded memories and the gaps between oscillating waves. Opticks is progressive, stripping the air for parts as it grinds ahead with vacant purpose of etching disjointed melodies on disintegrating environments. A special one.
Eva-Maria Houben aerophone (kvieto)
Finland’s kvieto label is an endlessly fascinating resource of new, minimalist works. Eva-Maria Houben’s multiple entries in the series turn quiet spaces into engaging, immersive sonic environments. On aerophone, slow-motion movements become a catalyst, crystallizing hollow organ notes into a sharp, discordant reverie. It’s like emerging from the darkness for the first time and being encased in resonant drones. This incredible feeling is followed by the remnants, as though the particles left behind in the endless blackness are finding ways to reconfigure moments of stillness into defiant expressions. I can’t recommend this album, and this label, enough.
Youga Listening To The Stones (Neotantra)
Indonesia’s Youga pieces together familiar tones and sounds to explore ancient, unseen worlds. Fluctuating drones spill out of underground crevices and melt into the surface where insect recordings and aqueous soundscapes take hold. Listening To The Stones immerses itself in mythological recollections. Melancholic harmonics rise and fall, breathing with an ageless spirit. Darkness creeps into this music’s core with expressive woodwinds, distorted oscillations, and midnight hues, like the connective tissue of this soundworld is being stretched to its breaking point. Youga packs countless ideas into these pieces, but Listening To The Stones flows with an underlying narrative, searching for new living pathways.
Imka When I Find You, You’ll Understand (Evidence of Yesterday)
Imka’s latest offering is a small suite that cycles through and processes grief. Resonant, looping piano arrangements grow in stature hovering above heartbeat-like footsteps, pulling our focus toward the core of this music. Melodies flow and break apart. We sit in stasis while sonic blankets wrap around us, washing away the darkness. In the distance, chimes flicker and beckon. The horizon is near. The sun is waiting if we can make it through these rising harmonic waves. Imka immerses us in windswept song patterns that trace this moment forward from fading memories; people and places we won’t forget, but we won’t quite remember with the same crystallized sheen.
Somnambulists Ascending Planes (Zum Audio)
Ascending Planes grabbed me in a way that not many electric guitar records have in a while (and, to be fair, there’s some pianobass, and cello here, too, but it’s the guitars that shine). Warren Ng’s four pieces are shapeshifting, spectral, and expansive. Layers fall apart and into each other, dissecting moments of bliss and contemplation with sonic stasis that becomes immersive as it continues to churn through lilting stretches. Searching for notes with clear-eyed ruminations, Ng leans into the hypnotizing spectacle of transient melodies that sparkle in patterns amongst the resonant emptiness. Beauty is hidden in each hidden corridor, shrouded by a hazy aural veil that only offers glimpses behind the shimmering drones. Ascending Planes is such a lovely surprise.
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