Life has been a whirlwind lately of collapse and good fortune, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it all. What I do know is that there is a lot of great music coming out right now, and this is only a small taste.
Elijah Jamal Asani ,,, as long as i long to memorise your sky ,,, (AKP)
Elijah Jamal Asani’s ,,, as long as i long to memorise your sky ,,, unfolds like a slow exhale beneath canyon walls, where time stretches and sound becomes sediment. Recorded during a residency at The Grand Canyon, the album is a quiet cartography of place and presence, where field recordings (bees, birdsong, water, wind, etc.) melt together with zither, piano, and synthesizers to form a kind of sonic mycelium. Each piece feels like it’s listening as much as it’s speaking. Asani doesn’t impose structure; he lets the landscape speak. The result is music that feels like a memory forming in real time. It’s fragile, luminous, and shaped by the echoes he allows to linger.
CIA Debutante & Zhu Wenbo In Beijing (A K T I)
In Beijing is a disoriented transmission from a half-lit room where language and sound fold into each other until neither holds shape. CIA Debutante’s muttered phrases circle Zhu Wenbo’s tactile clatter, brushing past each other like loose wires. Humming tonal scraps drift in and out of focus, threading a delicate line through the murk. There’s a sense of something overheard, but the context has eroded. Only texture remains: hiss, scrape, whisper. The pacing is patient, even when the noise isn’t, with tension built on the feeling that something is about to slip away. It’s music that resists clarity, and in doing so, becomes strangely intimate.
Family Ravine Horizonites (Eiderdown)
Family Ravine’s Horizonites drifts in slow arcs, where melody flickers at the edges and form unspools into vapor. Kevin Cahill blends electric guitar, mandolin, kalimba, and accordion into long pieces that shimmer like heat off distant pavement. Melodies disperse haunting memories through repeating patterns and high-frequency flickers. Titles like “Circle Over A Line Moving Skyward” evoke geometric meditation, but sonically, this feels more like orbit: gradual, and never fixed in the hand. These are movements stretched toward disappearance, each one folding into the next without urgency. The air thickens, light bends, and something unnamed lingers just beyond reach.
Yumiko Morioka & Takashi Kokubo Gaiaphilia (Métron)
Gaiaphilia rises like a slow-growing lichen, tuned to the quiet frequencies of decay and renewal. Lush piano and harp explorations surface and recede, woven into a living fabric of field recordings of lapping waves, distant birdsong, and the gentle hum of open air. There’s a pull between harmonic reverie and grounded presence, as if each phrase is waiting for the earth’s breath. Pattern-like arrangements form slowly, not as rigid loops but as murmurs that echo briefly before fading into themselves. Fleeting whimsy drifts at the edges, like a melody half-remembered or light shifting across water. The music resists urgency, settling into warmth and porosity, resting fully in its own rhythms.
The Hemphill Stringtet Plays the Music of Julius Hemphill (Out of Your Head)
This music balances raucous spirit with a kind of whimsical gravity, as if Hemphill’s unruly brilliance had been distilled into chamber form without losing any of its pulse. The stringtet—Curtis Stewart, Sam Bardfeld, Stephanie Griffin, and Tomeka Reid—plays with deep attunement, carving space that is both grounded and mercurial. As an ensemble, they move like a single organism with many limbs, swerving between radiant dissonance and moments of surprising melodic clarity. There’s tension, yes, but also lightness; a sense of structured play that keeps the pieces in motion even in stillness. The grain of the bow, the snap of plucked bass, the glide of harmony, all of it speaks in Hemphill’s voice, now refracted through a new body. It’s not reverent, exactly—it’s too alive for that. More like a conversation with a ghost who keeps changing shape.
Miłosz Kędra Their Internal Diapasons (Pointless Geometry)
Their Internal Diapasons feels like walking through a sculpture made of electromagnetic residue, each movement smeared with quiet pulses, feedback ghosts, and corroded air. There’s a constant sense of proximity, as if the sounds are happening inside a body rather than around it. Long tones waver like held breath, occasionally pierced by microscopic detail or tape-scuffed interference. The whole thing vibrates in a fragile equilibrium between collapse and bloom. It’s meditative in the way that rust is meditative: slow, inevitable, full of texture. Nothing here insists, and that restraint becomes its own kind of gravity.
Bashi Rose Rhythm in Flux (Sensitive Documents)
There’s something about Rhythm in Flux that moves like a living ritual. It’s raw, immediate, and deeply attuned to something beyond the self. Bashi’s drumming feels less like performance and more like communion, a physical dialogue with ancestry and spirit. Each phrase emerges from the body, shaped by breath, tension, release, and silence that feels carved instead of empty. Rhythms fracture and reform, not to disorient but to free, to make space for something unspoken to surface. It’s music that sweats, listens, remembers, and invites anyone within earshot to do the same. Highest recommendation.
Modern Folk Electronic Ensemble s/t (Debacle)
On the latest from J Moss’s Modern Folk Electronic Ensemble (alongside Amelia Riggs and Chad Beattie), they drift further into the dissolving blur between drone, folk, and bedroom psychedelia. It’s like tuning into a shortwave broadcast from an alternate Appalachia. Warbled loops and modular moans shimmer against tape-worn guitar fragments, as if memory itself had been recorded over too many times. It’s tender, rusted music where bass grooves and hazy melodies coalesce as atmosphere, a kind of sonic mildew growing in the seams of forgotten media. Each track feels like it’s being unearthed rather than played, radiating a strange warmth beneath the hiss. A quiet ritual in the static, devotional in its disrepair.
vierzig skizzen screening (Lily)
It only takes a moment for full immersion, but when it happens, screening flickers like a home movie dubbed over too many times. Piano ghosts, tape hiss, blurred field recordings, and translucent electronics spiral through a half-memory loop. Lithe sonic collages hum with soft psychic interference, as if beamed in from a room that no longer exists. Everything is smeared at the edges, dissolving into itself—fragments of sound that feel more like afterimage than music. Drones bleed through the static, sweeping lost melodies into shifting electronic grids. It’s not ambient so much as ambient’s faint echo, flickering across a dream-coated reel. A strangely sympathetic haunting, barely tethered to time.
Tenniscoats Zenvu Yume (Self-Released)
Moments get lost in time on Zenvu Yume, and it feels like tracing sunlight with your eyes closed, everything gentle, wobbly, and softly refracted. Tenniscoats conjure a private, breath-sized world where language blurs into melody, and melody into air. The songs move like small weather systems, drifting between toybox minimalism and effervescent, sun-kissed pop music. Guitar phrases unravel slowly, almost shyly, while the vocals float just above the surface, full of warmth and flicker. There’s a kind of weightless clarity here, like remembering something before it fully forms. It doesn’t unfold so much as hover, intimate and quietly luminous. I love this band so much.
Anaïs Maviel & The Rhythm Method “Wind” (Protomaterial)
Anaïs Maviel’s “Wind” is a remnant of sunlight refracted through sound. Her voice lilts and leans, not toward language, but toward elemental vibration. It hovers with warmth, buoyed by strings that shimmer at the edge of resonance, never quite dissonant, but aware of its pull. The bowed textures sway and flicker like the hover and dip of swallows at dusk, while the kamele n’goni enters with bounding, arpeggiated phrases that feel both grounded and airborne. There’s a sense that the piece is watching itself spread, listening as much as it sings. It’s less a song than a radiant field—slow, alert, and open to weather.
I love this monthly blog. It opens my mind to new music every time. Thank you SO MUCH for sharing this. And you have an amazing capability with words–your first sentences especially are always intriguing and beautiful. I love what you do and admire you.