So many things and so many pieces are moving at different speeds and in different directions lately that I want to just let go of the ride and see where I land. This is not a complaint, at all, because most of these things are excellent, yet overwhelming nonetheless. Summer is upon us, though, so let’s get into some tunes.
P.S. It’s a great time to subscribe to The Jewel Garden or join the Patreon. A new Charlatan album was released last week on my birthday, and sometime today a 50+ minute piece I recorded recently is going out to subscribers. So – think about it. It helps keep the site humming (and a million thanks to those who have signed up!)
Alan Graves A Possible Wind (Bathysphere)
Alan Graves builds with slow decay. Sounds gather and scatter—searching arpeggios, vapor static, soft pulses that seem to falter just before arriving. A Possible Wind doesn’t move forward so much as curl inward, folding time into a kind of hushed recursion. The synthesizers carry warmth like a breath held too long, frayed at the edges by tape hiss and magnetic drift. Nothing announces itself. It just emerges, shimmers, recedes. There’s a tenderness in that restraint, a sense of care in how each texture is introduced, and then allowed to blur. What’s left feels like the residue of touch, a map of soft impressions carefully placed and already half-forgotten. Highest recommendation.
Hyldýpi Heilun (Past Inside the Present)
A slow breath drawn beneath the ice, Heilun unfolds like a memory suspended in meltwater, guitar phrases drifting out into cavernous air. Hyldýpi shapes quiet thresholds where sound barely announces itself, instead pulsing, dissolving, returning. There’s a fog of resonance here—not oppressive, but sheltering, like moss over ruin. Each piece seems carefully unsettled as if built from the echo of something just left behind. The record listens like recovery, or the moment just after rupture, when the body hasn’t moved but knows something has changed. We don’t so much hear it as slip into its temperature. A field recording of grief with no words needed. Beautiful.
Jacobo Vega-Albela Un-Belonging (577 Records)
Un-belonging aches with immediacy, not in volume but in presence. Beneath the tension and friction, there’s an understated gentleness that threads it all together, holding space for the more rhapsodical horn runs and emotive sonic phrasings to land. The trio speaks their own language, one built from tactile restraint and quickening pulses, where rhythms veer from punchy to enveloping in a single breath. Breath and fingers scrape the edges of silence without tipping it over. Fragments of melody hover and dissolve as if the music is constantly remembering and forgetting itself. Nothing here feels settled. It’s improvised music as a state of heightened awareness, where even the quietest moments seem to vibrate.
J.G.G. Bombolla (unjenesaisquoi)
J.G.G. floats in his own strange atmosphere on Bombolla, humid, elastic, and a little hypnotized. The grooves feel handmade, wobbling slightly out of time like they’ve been stretched and folded in on themselves. Vocals murmur through layers of tape hiss and low-end fog, more texture than text, more trance than song. It’s a record that resists sharp edges, where rhythms lurch forward then melt, and melodies seem to rise up from underneath rather than land on top. Everything feels porous like you’re listening through steam or some half-remembered dream.
Cecilia Lopez & Wenchi Lazo Desposable (Tripticks Tapes)
Nothing here feels fixed. Drum machines stutter and decay, synth lines smear like worn tape, and each track seems to emerge from the residue of the last. Desposable operates in a state of erosion, where repetition grinds against itself and form becomes a suggestion rather than a rule. It’s rhythmic but destabilized, electronic music stripped down to its exposed wiring. There’s a scorched quality to it, brittle and raw, like it’s rebuilding itself from memory after some unnamed collapse. Every sound feels purposeful in its imperfection, locked in a loop that never quite returns to where it started.
somesurprises Year Without Spring (Self-Released)
Even in its densest moments, Year Without Spring feels like it’s barely touching the ground. Guitars ripple and expand in slow motion, wrapped around Natasha El-Sergany’s vocals like morning fog clinging to glass. There’s a restrained ache throughout, a kind of suspended sorrow that never quite resolves but keeps shifting shape. Songs don’t build so much as bloom, gradually and deliberately, until they dissolve back into the soft hum they came from. It’s music that trusts the listener to lean in, to sit with the blur, to find clarity in the drift.
HHY & The Kampala Unit Turbo Meltdown (Nyege Nyege)
Everything jitters and snaps, pulled taut then shattered, as if the rhythms are breaking free from their own architecture. Percussion is squelched and synthetic, bass lines wobble with a melted logic, and the textures feel like they’ve been chewed up and spat back out through a rewired sound system. It’s chaotic in the most deliberate way, effusive. Fragments loop just long enough to leave an afterimage. Turbo Meltdown lives in that ecstatic space between collapse and propulsion, where structure is less important than sensation. There’s a manic clarity running through it, playful and volatile, refusing to sit still long enough to be decoded.
Flora Yin Wong Dead Loop (Paralaxe Editions)
Dead Loop moves like a slow exhale, suspended in layers of fractured texture and melted signal. Flora Yin Wong weaves together glitched frequencies and warped field recordings, shaping a sonic terrain that feels both ritualistic and weathered. The pieces hover in a constant state of flux, circling around themselves without ever landing. There’s a quiet tension running underneath as if the sound is tracing the outline of something that’s already disappeared.
Belinda Campbell Sons secs, mouchoir (Small Scale Music)
Tape-strewn sounds accumulate and fall away—voice fragments, askew piano notes, scrapes, soft collisions—each one landing with a kind of deliberate fragility. Sons secs / Mouchoir moves with the precision of a careful gesture, attentive to space and decay. Electronics burst from molten ground, pushed back by gravity, and dissected by obtuse melodies. It’s not about building momentum, but about revealing what’s already there in the quiet. Campbell works in miniature, but the listening feels expansive, like peering into a small, shifting architecture made of breath and tension. Nothing is wasted, and everything vibrates with silent intensity.
