Foxy Digitalis
RVNG’s FRKWAYS series has helped facilitate so many essential intergenerational collaborations I never knew I needed. On the latest, they strike gold again with Ka Baird and Pekka Airaksinen. Given Airaksinen’s passing six months after Hungry Shells was recorded, the album has an added layer of importance to it. Airaksinen and Baird created Hungry Shells in Utrecht in 2019, […]
Tuning in to the infinite frequencies saturating whatever psychic plane is currently decaying into dust, Lebanese artist Anthony Sahyoun’s proper debut, Proof By Infinite Descent, is a masterpiece. Harnessing raw shards of familiar touchstones, Sahyoun posits a world where tragedy and disaster aren’t the necessary currency to uphold the status quo. Sifting through fields of sonic […]
The experience of listening to Ekin Fil’s stunning new album, Feelings, is like the momentary blindness experienced leaving someplace dark and walking out into the daylight. Everything goes white; a pensive stillness takes over, time becomes momentarily infinite. Feelings is stuck there, rife with anxiety and longing, but also grounded with a stoic determination to not shield our […]
Emma Palm’s first full-length as No Translation, Inner Distance, crafts spacious aural shapes out of the most intimate and personal moments. As ever, Palm builds her soundscapes primarily using synthesizers and her voice, but the deepest cuts of Inner Distance come from the collected field recordings used that she and her mother, in Tapei, made […]
Chicago guitarist and composer Daniel Wyche turns the grief of dealing with loss into an outward swinging pendulum. Earthwork, written and recorded over a veritable lifetime, speaks to the complicated tangles within us; to the idea that the impermanence of living and breathing is offset by the permanence of memory. Wyche uses these soundwebs as a […]
Calm waters greet us in the verdant fantasy world of PJS’s lush Environments. The duo of Patrick Dique and Jordan Christoff has sailed across countless universes in their 15-year history, yet Environments is laden with fresh blooms. Environments is a welcoming place, adrift in a cloudless sky, floating on a bed of whimsy and mirth. PJS takes us on an […]
Cassette available via Astral Spirits / CD available via Relative Pitch. I know I keep repeating myself, but what a year it’s been for solo(ish) guitar albums. Just when I thought all the barn burners had been launched, Ava Mendoza drops one last bomb on 2021 with New Spells. I’ve been excited about this one for […]
A dark cloud beckons in the opening moments of Snake Union’s latest slab, To Whom I’ve Never Met and Only Imagined. Constructed from recordings initially made in 2019 at EMS in Stockholm, the granular details living within these walls of synthesis come in waves, like electricity storming through winding corridors underground. The duo of Chuck Bettis […]
It always takes me a little while to process Lucy Liyou’s work and the journey it takes me on. Visceral scenes become sonic assertions in her hands, the ambient drift churning out mountains of pensive tension cascading toward a heaven promised in our better days. Once the moment hits, as it always does in her […]