I’ve been spending a lot of time painting and drawing over the last few weeks which means I’ve been listening to a mountain of new music in the process. I finally figured out a good system for taking notes so I’ve been able to put together capsule reviews more regularly. It feels good! There is, as ever, so much music coming through that I know I’ll never get to it all, but I’m excited to be able to listen and share more.
We’re well into summer break here, which creates numerous scheduling challenges, but so far, we’re managing. That said, I have some openings if you need a new bio, an album mixed or mastered, a one-sheet, podcast help, or more. Check the rates, get in touch!
With that, here’s some excellent music to dig into.
Claudia Khachan & Ziad Moukarzel The Vapornet (Ruptured)
A whisper pulled through a fogged signal chain—fragile, elusive, and deeply physical. The Vapornet feels like correspondence unfolding in slow motion, where melodies arrive as fragments and vanish before they settle. Khachan and Moukarzel shape a terrain of hissed organ swells, murmuring basslines, and distant voices that surface briefly, only to recede into the blur. Beneath it all is a quiet insistence, a pressure that never quite breaks through. The album isn’t interested in resolution. Instead, it lingers in the tension of distance, in the intimacy of listening closely to what might dissolve. This is a blurred transmission, carefully held.
Maria Gajraj exhale (People Places)
Maria Gajraj transforms the organ into a living, breathing instrument, one that moves like weather and remembers like water. On Exhale, she expands minimalist piano works by Hania Rani and Ann Southam into long, resonant forms that feel suspended in time. The commissioned piece “Forest Fire” surges with tension and release, its clustered harmonies and pulsing figures evoking heat, collapse, and renewal. Framing the album are improvisations on the medieval organetto, looped and processed into glimmering ambient textures. Each piece holds stillness and movement in equal measure. This is music shaped by wind, rooted in tradition, and always listening forward.
Adam Badí Donoval A Mirror Where the Image and the Mirror Wholly Coincided (mappa)
Eerie, creeping chord progressions rise and fall like fading breath, hinting at a ghost world filled with decaying specters and carousel dreams. Nothing on this record unfolds cleanly. A disjointed cadence runs beneath it all, tugging at the base of each piece like a slow undertow—field recordings stutter, haunted melodies lean sideways, and the whole thing feels like it wants to be seasick. Distortion doesn’t sit on top of the sound but fuses itself into the root of each note, giving the music a grounded heaviness that lingers just below the surface. On A Mirror Where the Image and the Mirror Wholly Coincided, Adam Badí Donoval continues to shape sound like something excavated from a dream left too long in the dark. Time stutters and stretches, memory flickers, and nothing quite resolves. It’s not ambience, not entirely decay, but something quiet and unstable that hums with the feeling of something once known, now softly slipping away. Incredible.
Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen Resonant Flows – Reflections and Beginnings (Sawyer Spaces)
A hush settles in first, then the gentle accumulation of tone and texture begins to stir. Resonant Flows: Reflections and Beginnings moves like breath through open windows, carrying fragments of memory, air, and filtered light. Field recordings, organ-like drones, and soft electronic traces drift in and out of focus, creating a space that feels both porous and carefully held. The album listens as much as it speaks, offering patience instead of momentum, and presence instead of narrative. Each piece feels like a beginning that chooses not to arrive, only to resonate quietly in place.
Keith Berry Xanadu (VSM Theory)
Laid-back rhythms move like slow elevators through mirrored lobbies, each step cushioned by soft light and synthetic air. Keith Berry’s Xanadu floats in this atmosphere, shaped by mellow outer-ring vaporwave and the gentle blur of city pop fragments. The electronics drift with ease, never pressing forward, always hovering just above the surface like reflections on still water. Faded graphicscapes stretch outward in soft tones, while gentle cadences give the album its unhurried pulse. It’s a skyscraper of synthetic wonder built from quiet motion and timeless melody, a place where memory softens and everything gleams a little at the edges.
Tatsuya Yoshida and Martín Escalante The Sound of Raspberry (Wash & Wear)
This is a serrated, psychedelic jazz feast: unrelenting, electrified, and impossible to contain. The Sound of Raspberry ignites with a flying horn squeal that rips open the heavens and paints it all black. Martín Escalante’s saxophone erupts in raw combustion—no pedals, no effects, just breath, muscle, and fury turned into a storm of bleeds and splinters. Tatsuya Yoshida meets him with frenzied, raucous rhythms that bend and burst, constantly pushing the pulse beyond control. The interplay is volatile but exacting, each gesture teetering between collapse and precision. Synths and piano emerge like mirages, thickening the chaos with unexpected textures that blur the edge between ritual and rupture. It’s a sound built on combustion and communion, improvised with the force of a world tearing through itself.
Aiko Takahashi The Grass Harp (laaps)
Ghostly piano arrangements hover just above the surface, barely tethered, as if dreaming of drifting away. On The Grass Harp, Aiko Takahashi shapes a world where time stretches and folds, where nothing arrives abruptly but everything feels inevitable. Chord progressions seem to rise from nowhere, carrying the weight of something long remembered. A subtle melancholy lingers beneath each piece—not heavy, but warm and familiar like dusk settling over a quiet room. Field recordings flicker at the edges, their textures woven into loops and tape haze, dissolving the boundary between melody and environment. This is music that doesn’t demand attention, yet pulls you inward with each delicate gesture.
Filalete Aeternitas (Cruel Nature)
Filalete’s Aeternitas unfolds like a quiet, patient map of a life—each piano piece tracing breath, growth, passage. The melodies are spare but resonant, carrying a sense of spiritual momentum without urgency. There’s a kind of hush here that feels devotional as if each note is being held up to the light. Across nine compositions, the album moves from the intimacy of birth to the unseeable expanse beyond death. What remains is feeling—tender, solitary, and gently transcendent. It’s music for sitting still with the idea that time doesn’t end, it just changes shape.
