Welcome to the first Capsule Garden of 2025. Year four of doing these (semi) regular columns and I wonder if it will go better than last year (these columns really dropped off the last quarter due to various outside commitments, but I hope to not drop the ball as much this year). As ever, there is so much great and interesting music around that it is impossible to get at it all, but this is a small selection of releases over the last month or so that have been in the back (or front) of my mind.
If you appreciate Foxy Digitalis and hope it continues chugging along, I would certainly appreciate your financial support with a Patreon subscription, a Ko-Fi donation, or picking up some great tunes on The Jewel Garden. You can also hire me for a variety of services ranging from writing your bio to mastering your album. To everyone who has committed support so far, it means the world. It’s rough out here.
Rush Falknor/Natty Gray split (Cult Love Sound)
A crack in the cosmos lets a forlorn piano melody float down from the void. Fragmented memories become sparks. Using recordings from different public pianos in Chicago, Falknor weaves together a 45-minute expedition that is both languid and whimsical. The melodic progressions are in constant motion, fading into the background not because they’re easily forgotten, but because they feel sacred. It is stillness in glass. Gray’s side drifts behind the curtain, stretching elegiac drones through disjointed decay. Shifting arrangements follow an unconventional pathway, gleaning remnants of ecstasy while diving below the shadows of the comedown. Ghost murmurs hum at the edge of dissonance, minor chords fusing with repeating, nebulous mantras. Words aren’t needed. Everything simply evaporates in the sunlight.
Kaho Matsui Absolver, Kill Me While My Eyes Are Closed (Self-Released)
Just before dawn breaks, in the still quiet and only faint light cracking through the margins, the voices linger. Kaho Matsui navigates delicate frameworks with sharp, sonic exorcisms. Vocal melodies are silver drops from the sky cutting through intricate patterns of razor wire, small electronic flourishes that permeate chord progressions like ionized sadness. The heartbeat of Absolver is obscured behind disjointed arpeggiations that leave more questions than concerns. Silhouette drifts mask themselves in blurred guitar escapades, refined through a tenuous fog so only the somber notes find their way through. Closer listens reveal that the secret messages aren’t so secret after all, and beneath all the tender ambiance is an immovable core. Absolutely fantastic.
Two Way Mirrors Endure (Frosti)
When the opening track on something is called “They Found Your Rotting Head (In A Peat Bog,” a good time awaits. Thomas Ragsdale’s Two Way Mirrors may not be exactly that, but it’s a lush, slow-motion drive through invented memory and vestiges of hope. This music is always searching, a sentient database unlocked by emotive chord progressions and lithe harmonic flickers. If we feel stuck, it’s on purpose. Momentary rapture is a bonding wedge between ever-darkening horizons. Ragsdale blends repeating melodic laments with a poetic atmosphere, an opaque shroud that never quite constrains the album’s boundless opulence. But Endure isn’t pristine. The drama and ecstasy are cut through a half-remembered lens, blurring the gilded edge into soft, enveloping sonic landscapes. There is mystery and wonder, but we’re never sure if anything is real. Stellar.
Clément Vercelletto L’Engoulevent (unjenesaisquoi)
The future of birdsong is conjured from a repurposed, archaic past. Vercelletto uses a small organ with its pipes replaced by bird calls to create L’Engoulevent. A relentless, high-pitched cacophony sparks a wild, unfolding sonic paradise. Drifting landscapes with brass sheen wheeze and expand from a ticking clock, mixing mechanical procedures and ethereal dreams. Sharper frequencies play a role too, pointing skyward while being pulled back underground with aqueous rehashing. It’s all a bit weird and disorienting, but that’s a central theme throughout L’Engoulevent and one of its charms. Even at its whimsical heights, where melodies flutter like magical automatons, an urgency lurks in the margins. Dark shades are never far from the heart of this music, but all the dreaming in the world will hopefully keep it at bay. A delight.
DUNZA Live To Tell (Self-Released)
Live To Tell is almost like two separate EPs – the original and the Versions. James Toth uses sampled (and resampled) tape-recorded trance breakdowns to find broken neon shards in the interjacent darkness. Plaintive melodies emerge out of the buried layers, Toth’s voice an arrow through hazy fantasy. Everything is muted as though the sharpest edges have all been worn away by time and exigent expression. In the original mixes, sniping rhythms cut across the lethargic sling creating a time-traveling dichotomy, pushing the drama forward. We get stuck in time, awash with reverb-soaked synth progressions and wistful shades, but Toth pulls us out with a cadence that frolics through foreboding midnight hues. This is living.
Suzanne Doogan & Alex Homan s/t (Apartment 421 Tapes)
Swimming through junk piles, all the way upstream, is where the most gold hides. Ramshackle, fried folk pyres are borne out of whispered incantations and splintered acoustic guitar spells. Doogan lulls the fire’s sharpest points with whimsical vocal melodies, followed by Homan in stages. There’s a searching quality buried in here, but it’s like we’re only finding it in the aftermath. Loose and frenetic strands coalesce, and solid matter forms before being charred back into scattered pieces. Poetry is written on leaves and sent up. Casiofied cadences grow out of rich soil and tape-saturated drones. A psychedelic stew spills from all these disparate ingredients, flagged by vivid, cut-up strips and hell-bent on frolicking through myths. Huge recommendation.
PJS Spirals (Cosmic Winnetou)
First, a world of glass is refracted through a digital lens. We are motionless figures situated in the center of reflecting images moving in slow motion. New landscapes materialize from levitating tonal ether, sifting melodies through golden silhouettes to heighten their inviting glow. As the distance to the horizon closes down, strings resonate in blurred patterns, rippling outward. Melodic swirls are sonic lamposts along this inward journey, whether infused with synthetic bliss or ghostly hums. PJ Dique and Jordan Christoff create immersive soundscapes that blend into a singular, expansive form. Spirals is beguiling and effervescent.
Alison Greenwood Seasonal Guilt (Self-Released)
Seasonal Guilt has a narrative stitched into its core. Alison Greenwood uses a crystalized palette to move us through varied spaces and dreamy sound worlds. From the opening moments, winter moods set in with acute clarity. Greenwood’s harmonic ventures are awash with points of light cast against blurred, grayscale backdrops. The movements are subtle but striking, chord progressions rising in hopeful swells. So many moments on Seasonal Guilt are fueled by stillness, by creating warmth in the pockets between notes. This is music for closing our eyes and drifting, quiet and restored.
Hasco Enjoyments Wow! (Rope Worm)
Wow! creates a perfect world with nothing out of place. Everything is bright. Everybody matters. Synths glisten in tropical festivities, hopping on buoyant rhythms and decadent soundscapes. Sadness exists, sent out through guitar code and saxophone whispers telling us things we didn’t think existed here. Hasco Enjoyments bleed holographic blood. A silliness keeps things light, but certain realities are inescapable. Chord progressions creep through navy blue corridors, imbued with a hopeful spirit that the neon dream is around the next corner. They find it, they do, but it’s never quite the same. Everything is floating again with flute whimsy as the organic siren song, but the last gasps of Wow! indicate the hollowness will come back.
giselle best view of an angel (immersive love)
Massive drones pull downward straight through the center of the earth as best view of an angel begins. It’s huge, immersive. giselle’s latest draws us into microscopic, insular soundworlds before bursting beyond the stars. Scratchy timbres from field recordings add tactile fascination to the dense, distorted layers. The whole thing wants to squeeze every last breath from our lungs before jettisoning us into deep space. Beats erupt, propelling the narrative forward as giselle’s voice swirls and drifts beyond this astral plane. Once we have the full view, though, the aural strings collapse us back inward. Reflecting and recollecting, best view of an angel becomes a whispered memory of ambient dust.
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