It may still be 100 degrees outside, but in my mind, summer is officially over. Mainly because my kid started back at school yesterday (entering middle school – oof!), so I have to try and transition out of summer-camp-dad-mode. How am I going to do that? No clue, but hopefully I’ll start feeling less fried. I’ll keep this intro short and sweet. Grab something from The Jewel Garden today to help keep Foxy Digitalis alive. And listen to these sweet albums, too.
Plume Girl Unnameable Glory (mappa)
Sowmya Somanath builds cathedrals out of breath and memory, where Hindustani ragas weave through ambient drift and family laughter becomes melody. Her voice maps territories beyond words, moving from whisper to radiance while guitar arpeggios catch light like water, and synthesizers tremble on the edge of recognition. Each arrangement feels like dawn breaking over different landscapes simultaneously, collaging the domestic with the transcendent until a mother’s giggle and temple bells occupy the same sacred space. There’s a profound gentleness here that doesn’t shy away from complexity, where cultural inheritance and personal revolution exist without contradiction, where the act of listening becomes a form of prayer. Unnameable Glory dwells in the beautiful impossibility of trying to hold what can only be experienced, creating music that honors both the urge to capture wonder and the wisdom of letting it slip through our fingers. Moments of sparseness punctuate the lush arrangements like pauses between breaths, creating space for silence to speak its own language. This is sound as sanctuary, where the holy reveals itself not in grand gestures but in the iridescent ordinary, in the hush that settles when we stop trying to name what moves us and simply allow ourselves to be moved. The album becomes a quiet manifesto for presence, suggesting that perhaps the most revolutionary act is simply to exist with eyes wide open, meeting each moment without the armor of assumption.
Stefan Christoff and Daniela Solís Chapultepec Atmósferas (Jeunesse Cosmique)
Stefan Christoff and Daniela Solís let Mexico City settle into their bones on chapultepec atmósferas, where coffee conversations dissolve into six pieces that shimmer like heat mirages above concrete. Searching, haunted guitar melodies spiral through the San Miguel Chapultepec district’s heavy air, their open tonalities becoming vessels for the city’s own exhalations, eight million breaths transformed into something approaching reverence. You can feel the weight of the metropolis pressing against every sustained note, not intruding but inhabiting, until reverb and resonance blur the boundary between human sound and urban atmosphere. What emerges from resolutions spoken softly is a tender vulnerability that transforms active listening into a form of sonic archaeology, unearthing melodies buried in the spaces between gestures. This is instrumental communion with place, where two creative spirits learn to breathe in unison with a city that never sleeps, turning the simple act of making sound together into an offering to the restless ghosts that move through Mexico City’s smog-filtered light. Huge recommendation.
Anthony Vine Reliquary Grammar (Celestial Excursions)
Anthony Vine transforms seven years of accumulated moments into something approaching liturgy on Reliquary Grammar, where field recordings from the Côte d’Azur bleed through studio windows like half-remembered prayers. His characteristic melancholic guitar work drifts between baroque elegance and rustic intimacy, creating sonic shadowboxes where Mediterranean winds carry the weight of unspoken histories. The ten tracks unfold like pages from a weathered journal, each piece a meditation on how memory crystallizes into sound, how footsteps on cobblestones become rhythm. Vine’s acoustic acuity captures that liminal space between documentation and dreamstate, where the act of sifting through archived fragments becomes its own form of devotion.
Omid Dolatkhah 3 (Self-Released)
Something shifts in these numbered pieces from Iranian composer Omid Dolatkhah, scattered moments that refuse the weight of titles, leaving only the raw accumulation of months spent listening to the world breathe. Field recordings bloom into synthetic reveries, water moving through circuits like memory through consciousness, each track a threshold where the organic and electric dissolve into something altogether more elemental. Dark ambient spaces crack open to reveal piano fragments, not melodies so much as gestures, reaching toward light that may or may not be there. The shadows here are deep enough to dream in, expansive enough to lose yourself, while distant arpeggios speak the only universal language that matters: the one that says we are not alone in this beautiful, dissolving world. I highly recommend checking out all of Dolatkhah’s work on his Bandcamp.
Richard Youngs Zerkelus (Fourth Dimension)
Named for a phantom ruler who never was, this sprawling two-part expedition begins as chamber music might if performed by spirits learning their instruments for the first time. Oboe breathes against unnameable textures while voices drift through what could be ritual or rehearsal, building tension in the spaces between notes until the second movement erupts with molten bass that transforms reverence into something feral and howling. Richard Youngs has crafted a document of beautiful unease here, music that refuses to settle into any recognizable shape before shattering whatever fragile peace it briefly allowed. This is sound as warning, as reminder that comfort is always temporary, that beneath every drone lies the possibility of eruption.
Madeleine Cocolas Syndesis (Room 40)
Ancient stones echo through modern speakers here, where twenty years collapse into the space between bell and breath. Madeleine Cocolas has woven her return to Greece into compositions that feel like archaeology performed with synthesizers, each piece excavating the sediment between who she was and who she became. Water laps against fortress walls while electronics drift over marble ruins, creating music that exists in multiple temporalities at once. Syndesis becomes less album than pilgrimage, sound transformed into the bridge between bloodline and geography, between the weight of ancestral ground and the weightlessness of memory. This is music as homecoming, where field recordings don’t document place so much as resurrect the emotions that places hold, creating space for the listener to trace their own invisible maps.
Lagoss & Abagwagwa Island Slang (Discrepant)
Two continents converge into a single heartbeat, Atlantic islands and East African plains discovering their common rhythm in territories where borders dissolve. What emerges from this live capture feels inevitable yet surprising, percussion that summons ancestral voices while synthesizers bend toward psychedelic horizons and vocal ecstasies spiral through spacious grooves. The drumming never dominates but carves out breathing room for something transcendent to unfold, each piece becoming ceremony in pursuit of higher frequencies. This is music as gateway, as gathering place, where distant shores and imagined tropics merge into an intoxicating ritual that opens its arms to all who dare to enter.
Luiz Ser Eu Sarja (Phantom Limb)
Luiz Ser Eu’s Sarja dissolves into vaporous sonic fragments that reassemble into something altogether more unsettling than their component parts suggest. These songs drift through warped domestic spaces where melodies bleed through cracked plaster and harmonies pool in forgotten corners like stagnant water. The Brazilian artist constructs his soundworld from processed field recordings that morph into tonal building blocks, creating an architecture that feels both intimately familiar and disturbingly alien. Tracks like “Carvão Branco” hover in the threshold between lucidity and hallucination, where whispered vocals and fragmented instrumentation spiral into synthetic reveries that shouldn’t work but absolutely do. There’s a queasy beauty lurking beneath these compositions, a sense that we’re eavesdropping on transmissions from a parallel dimension where pop songs melt and reform in endless, hypnotic cycles. Sarja manages to capture that rare sensation of hearing something completely new while simultaneously feeling like a half-remembered dream you can’t quite shake upon waking.
Tam Lin Fizzy! (Jollies)
Tam Lin maps the fever dream of being always elsewhere, where broken transmissions bleed into liquid beats and every voice hovers between human and code. These are songs caught mid-mutation, pixels stretching into melodies while glitched percussion hammers against the thin membrane separating presence from absence. What emerges feels like scrolling through the wreckage of intimacy, each track a different room in the endless house of screens where we live now. Fizzy! throbs with the peculiar loneliness of being seen but never known, understood but never touched, its mutant textures reflecting back our own fractured reflections in infinite black mirrors. This is what it sounds like to exist simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, to be perpetually logged in but always searching for signal.
Secret Places of the Lion High Gardens (Not Not Fun)
Secret Places of the Lion transmute Western Massachusetts into a threshold realm where bronze-crowned synthesizers process ancient algorithms and MIDI percussion strikes like ritual hammers on temple doors. High Gardens unfolds as ceremony for a world caught between collapse and transcendence, where oracle organs speak in digital tongues while phantom melodies drift through marble corridors that exist only in the mind. This is music for initiates of some unnamed order, cryptic and luminous, building architectures of sound that feel both futuristic and impossibly old. The album becomes a kind of cyber-monastery, offering shelter and mystery in equal measure, its six movements conjuring secret chambers where the sacred and synthetic converge into something that might save us yet.
