April is flying by, new tunes are blowing up my inbox, and I’m embracing that keeping up doesn’t exist and leaning into drowning. Something like that. I can’t remember if I mentioned this here, but earlier this year I started a new column over on Patreon called Dollar Bin. It’s quick write-ups of excellent albums (or EPs) that cost $1 or less (or, one of whichever currency it’s sold in, more accurately). I know my budget has been stretched thin this year, so it’s been great unearthing so much great music that is super affordable (and still directly supports artists and tiny labels). If that interests you, sign up for the Patreon today! The ongoing support really does keep Foxy Digitalis humming along, and I have massive gratitude for everyone who has signed up over the years.
One other quick mention/pitch before getting on with it. If you are an artist/band/label/whatever and need a bio, album mastering, one-sheet, cover design, etc. – get in touch. I’d love to work with you. It all helps keep the lights on.
HXH Stark Phenomena (OFNOT)
On Stark Phenomena, Chris Ryan Williams and Lester St. Louis craft forward-looking soundscapes, blending trumpet and cello explorations with rich electronic textures. Across three pieces, hopeful embers quietly glow. Bubbling basslines ripple through hollow spaces, giving Williams the freedom to explore vast night skies. Shapes shift from amorphous abstraction into a welcoming path, a way forward. St. Louis’s cello arrangements and Ayorinde E. Peebles’ monologue offer both comfort and provocation, transforming wistful echoes, and casting light on a glowing road map. Williams and St. Louis move with intention and grace, their soundworlds carefully constructed yet always open to bloom. Unexpected moments find quiet resonance in reflection, leaning into mirror-like stillness and using its fuzzy cadence as a threshold into something new. Stark Phenomena is a journey of subtle beauty, clarity, and surprise.
Kirk Barley Lux (Odda)
When I imagine a world rebuilt after the collapse of everything, it feels something like Lux. Equal parts mechanical motion and organic bloom, it glows with a quiet, radiant hope. Barley conjures a landscape where bounded melodies unfurl like cascading light, prismatic forms scattering into new lives of their own. Looping patterns comb the ruins for traces of sonic memory, fragments to be repurposed and rephrased into shapeshifting, mechanical dreams. There’s richness here: in texture, resonance, tone, and vision. Hollow, percussive notes intertwine with gleaming synthetic tones, stitching across jagged faultlines with echo-laced incantations. At the core of Lux is a delicate playfulness; its spark of wonder fused with a vulnerability that feels raw and rare. It’s music that doesn’t deny what’s been lost, but builds from it. Lux imagines a future carved from the wreckage and softened by light. A world reassembled not with certainty, but care. And it’s the future I want.
Elka Bong Alpha Bete (Self-Released)
Living machines consume organic detritus, growing stronger in the margins and inventing shadow languages. Irregular clatter sets the cadence. Fizzing electronics form a bloodstream, linking disparate elements into a fluid, crackling miasma. Tones drift like ghosts, ephemeral and elusive, while sharpened frequencies unearth decaying melodies, dissecting and repurposing them. Margolis, Wright, and Menestres wriggle through tangled wires, exhaling smoke into winded memories in a ritual to reanimate the inanimate and trample over our hoarded wreckage. Strange, captivating, and alive.
Zosha Warpeha & Mariel Terán Orbweaver (Outside Time)
I appreciate that this was released by the Outside Time label because Orbweaver exists within its own temporal sphere. Strings spiral in melodic ruminations, both mythic and terrestrial in tone, summoning vocal incantations from unseen threads. The instrumentation itself is striking: Warpeha’s Hardanger d’amore and Terán’s array of wind instruments (including moseño salliwa, pifano, sikura chu, tarka), as well as chajchas, offer a sound palette that is at once grounded and transportive. While certain tones may feel familiar, these instruments tilt the sonic landscape, stretching emotional sequences into otherworldly rituals and fusing ancient energies into something new. Contrasting textures are essential to how this music moves; hollowed winds brush against resonant strings, opening angular intersections where sound feels both tactile and spectral. Orbweaver builds a distinct aural world that feels sacred, exploratory, and unlike anything else. It’s a remarkable piece of work.
Joshua Burkett & Lau Nau ~ (A K T I)
Wait long enough and some dreams really do come true. If you’d told me in 2005 that Laura Naukkarinen and Joshua Burkett would one day make a record together, I’d have lost my mind. Nearly two decades later, the collaboration exists, and it’s as spellbinding as anyone could’ve hoped. Fractured songforms emerge like light through mist, gently unraveling from a quiet cocoon. Burkett’s guitar is blurred into soft, wooded atmospheres, carrying the frayed, luminous tenderness of Naukkarinen’s voice. Captured in everyday moments with rough-edged tape textures, these songs feel lived-in, like glimpses of life gently moving forward. Piano trickles like an old faucet, still managing to coax new life from the ground, where melodies root themselves in soil rich with longing. Naukkarinen and Burkett are natural collaborators, kindred spirits whose approaches are steeped in old magic and quiet knowing. Eight sketches of reverie and solace, woven into the fabric of some half-remembered dream. An ageless memory garden, blooming softly in the background.
Fadi Tabbal I recognize you from my sketches (Ruptured)
A fire smolders in the ragged corridors of Fadi Tabbal’s latest opus. Elegiac soundscapes drift through quantized rubble, their jagged edges fused with a sharp, unflinching reflection on isolation and change. Minimalist in structure yet emotionally expansive, these pieces build repeating forms from glassine synths, piano, and guitar, all buoyed by purposeful, understated rhythms. Samples sourced from a range of Beirut-based collaborators are stretched, bent, and submerged in layers of tape saturation, grounding memory and idealism in the immediacy of the present. Tabbal moves forward by shedding old skins, letting go of the weight that can’t be carried anymore to find moments of quiet triumph. Through broken-down sonic architecture, he builds new structures, horizon-stretching harmonies that rise like enveloping clouds. At the heart of this music is a spirit that remains searching and restless. Weathered but resolute, it pushes toward transformation, toward light.
paszka estoy chillando (LOM)
This is wild and engrossing. The sonic clarity throughout estoy chillando is hypnotic. Each detail unfurls into its own fully formed sound world. Vocals are splashed across aqueous shapeshifters, electronics bubbling in a wire-wrapped cauldron that brews raw electricity from a dancing elemental stew. It’s frenzied and melodic all at once, with paszka steering the rhythmic chaos into ever-shifting sonic terrain. Every piece feels like a whimsical, radical charm dangling from an infinite bracelet. Twinkling timbres blur into swampy bass hallucinations. Meditative motifs glitch and stumble into strange, beautiful matrices. All the rules are none of the rules, and estoy chillando pulses restlessly, vibrating just beneath the surface, almost hoping not to be seen.
Turmeric Acid y Bardo Todol Sonopædia (Strategic Tape Reserve)
I am choosing to believe this music washed up on shore in an old, rickety crate stamped with the name of a lost mythical land. Wobbly sonics bleed from warped tape samples and found sound oddities, cascading down cracked melody arrays. Slowed voices add to the surrealist atmospheres of Sonopædia, buoying its relic-like feel. Systems break down into fleeting wonders, metallic cadences humming and frittering away. Dissonance creates blurred spots in environmental recordings bent through prismatic filters. Bells spell out secret codes in resonance floating in the ether above a woozy marching band and alien crickets. Everything is slightly off, giving this otherworldly document a firm grip on our memory.
