GEOGRAPHICNORTH

With Immortal Word, David Jacober, Dope Body drummer and Baltimore percussive extraordinaire, returns to the gleefully eerie apparitional atmospheres first excised on his Geographic North debut, The Gray Man in 2015. On this tenth installment of the Sketch for Winter series - highlighting compositions intentionally crafted for the colder season - Jacober sets gaze to the sea, beachcombing his way through frigid fog and frosted flotsam to cull 6 new songs of hypnotized hauntology effortlessly blending climatic bombast with the tranquilizing harmonics of marimba.

Immortal Word opens with “Four Horsemen”, rippling across an incoming tide of bubbling, frothing percussion and mirthful melody. “Toast” breaks through the misting, overcast skies with a pulsing, sifting rhythm and wide-eyed optimism. The album’s namesake, “Immortal Word” turns that positivity inward, exploring a pile of tuneful textures and playful phrases.

On the B-side, “Flashbacking” wafts through a vacated, shadow-lined boardwalk in a euphoric daze of unhurried movement. The cold gust that is “Witching Hours” reels itself upward in a reversed rain of dripping tones. Closer “Universal Sign” makes calm space to host a sort of moonlit seance, decked in a wistful cloud of peripheral synesthesia.

Ever the aural adventurer, Carmen Villain has long traversed a boundless array of sounds, deftly moving from art nouveau pop to fog-laden avant-dub. Yet at every artistic turn, the Norwegian-Mexican’s chameleon-like charm seldom loses its alluring, organic beauty. Fresh off her contribution to 2020’s A Little Night Music… compilation, Carmen joins Geographic North’s Sketch for Winter series for its 9th installment. Perlita, named after Carmen’s grandmother living in Puebla, Mexico, is a sweetly somber reflection on the ever-present cycle of and hibernation and reemergence.

The A side begins with “Everything Without a Shadow”, a wide-angled and windswept vista of expansive permafrost and still-glowing embers of a recently extinguished fire. A sign of life in an otherwise desolate place. “Two Halves Touching” continues to drift through the frigid scene, lightly pulsing underneath a muted but vibrant tundra until coming upon echoes of voices chanted into the snowdrift. “Light in Phases” follows the cue with hurried hesitance, uncovering a sonic slush of radiant zither, blurred voices, and calm resolution.

“Things That Are Solid” begins to thaw the B side, strolling through newly uncovered verdancy, welcoming murmurs peeking out of the snow. With “Molina”, any last remnants of Winter have disappeared, leaving only a solemn suite of piano motifs breaking ground like seedlings bursting to life. With help from Johanna Scheie Orellana on flute and alt-flute, the album’s closer “Aqua Azul'' floats along with unencumbered motion like a happy stone skating across a tranquil pond.

The midnight hour crept unto thee with hasty caution, revealing ‘A Little Night Music: Aural Apparitions from the Geographic North’, our third putrid prowl into Halloween-inspired sounds to torment and tantalize throughout the season. For this bout of distinguished dementia, we culled 31 brand new tracks of haunted hysteria conjured by some of the most alluring ambientists and outer auteurs from around the world.

Spanning over two hours across two cassettes, ‘A Little Night Music…’ unfurls itself in a literary horror structure, appearing and disappearing through a stirring Prologue and Epilogue by London-based cellist Oliver Coates, with each side of the cassettes introducing its Chapter with a chilling dirge courtesy of the inscrutable Geographic North House Band.

What fills the ensuing pages is a mirthful tale concocted by an assembly exploring a realm all at once mournful and fatalist at its core. Entries from Clarice Jensen, Malibu, and the collaboration of Like a Villain and Christina Vantzou bring about endless glacial landscapes accented by pitch-grey skies. Conversely, transmissions from Michael Valentine West, M. Sage, Gregg Kowalsky, and Austrian ambient stalwart Fennesz explore richly textured mines of foreboding glee.

Suspicion is the word when considering Zelienople’s eerie horse-carriage clip-clop, Nick Malkin’s neon-lit noir-jazz, or Carmen Villain’s gripping dub excursion. Elsewhere Ki Oni, Takagi Masakatsu, and Mary Lattimore (joined here by Paul Sukeena) provide glimmers of warmth amidst a tortured chill. Notable is the resurrection of Lotus Plaza and his solemnly hopeful piano composition, while barren hallucinations courtesy of Alex Zhang Hungtai, Ilyas Ahmed, and Danny Paul Grody set the stage for a third act confrontation from Atlantans Fit of Body and Algiers, providing a one-two serving of sensual unrest and cautionary homily.

Unsung heroes of the ambient underground, Aria Rostami and Daniel Blomquist have quietly created some of the most aurally alluring sounds released in the past five years. And although that time has solidified the duo’s prowess of production and tenacity of texture, it has also shown its share of disruption and disorder. Having met and recorded all of their past works together in San Francisco, Sketch for Winter VIII: Floating Tone marks the first release made by the pair apart, with Rostami’s recent move to Brooklyn. But rather losing touch or stalling collaboration, the duo’s bond only grew stronger.

Rather than perform live improvisations in the same room, Rostami and Blomquist repeatedly passed material back and forth to be altered over time - sometimes involving extensive alterations, and others barely none. The result brings an astoundingly varied mix of melody, texture, and movement that speaks to the pair’s inherent bond.

“The Sloping Tower” seeps into focus in a haze of pristine clatter, celestial chords, and synthetic detritus. Distant disembodied voices appear through rippling waves of melody, leaving only a tapestry of tattered sound. “The Sleeping Floor” meanders with a nocturnal melody that lulls and placates with a deft, delicate touch. A-side closer “The Guessing Hand” cultivates a seething but subtle soirée of nonchalant noir, suggesting some solemn and forgotten subterranean piano bar.

“The Running Glass” wafts in a cloud of blissful warmth, backlit with dimmed glee and neon vibrancy. “The Sinking Tone” turns the focus back to our piano, heaving in a lush and all-consuming storm of shimmering texture and noise. “The Floating Table” closes things out with utter resolve, reflecting on the receding action and dabbling in some amorphous beauty.

It’s a powerful new chapter in Rostami and Blomquist’s journey that solidifies their past and suggests endless opportunities ahead.

Louise Bock is the nom de guerre of Taralie Peterson, a venerable veteran of the American avant-garde. Whether solo or together with Ka Baird as Spires that in the Sunset Rise, Peterson has spent nearly two decades exploring the outermost limits of ecstatic, free jazz-influenced improvisation. The sonic range of Peterson’s opulent oeuvre is matched only by the variety of instruments she employed, including but not limited to voice, saxophone, clarinet, guitar, banjo, lap harps, mbira, spike fiddle, and so on. Now, under the sobriquet Louise Bock and focusing solely on the cello, Peterson returns with Sketch for Winter VII - Abyss: For Cello, a profound work of considered minimalism composed during and intended for the dead of winter.

Deciding to focus entirely on the cello, Peterson rid herself of any other self-imposed rules, analysis, and judgment that ultimately unlocked unforeseen revelations. Opener “Horologic” offers a sustained seethe of heaving, serrated textures. “Jute” offers a dynamic run of striated tones that slowly dissolve into a pool of peaceful resolve. “Actinic Ray” brings a kaleidoscopic blur that offsets heaving lurches of chordal sound with almost acrobatic flecks of melody. “Oolite,” featuring Kendra Amalie on guitar, is an engrossingly unsettling piece of auditory hysteria, balancing a fascinating and fine line between allure and aversion. Closing track “Prithee” prolongs a potent interplay of deep, dense resonance and exquisitely elegant static.

Through these ruminations, Peterson’s cello exposes immense beauty, sorrow, and joy that is altogether deeply hypnotic and discreetly haunting.

Since embarking on an enchantingly forlorn run of musical activity, Ilyas Ahmed has remained incredibly active both as a visual artist and an incredibly versatile musician. Ahmed has cultivated vibrantly esoteric collaborations with Liz Harris (Grouper) and Matt Carlson & Jonathan Sielaff (both of Golden Retriever), among others, is an active member of heady, genre-defying experimental instrumental band Grails, and steadfastly issued quiet epics of psych-minimalism. Now, the Pakistan-born, Portland, Or.-based musician returns with Behold Killers, perhaps his most alluring and distantly seething work to date.

"Pass No Jazz" unfurls its tattered but tranquil tapestry over the entire A-side, tracing each step with unhurried care and curious composure. "Metal Freedom" leads the B-side in a synth-laden cloud of shimmering tragedy and seething hope. "Mad Love" dials things down for a modest symphony of gritted minimalism and soot-covered, negative space. Closing piece "Wild Violet" shimmers in a desolate dance of eerie weightlessness and wretched resolve.

Best consumed in the dead of night or frosted isolation, Behold Killers is an aural yarn explicitly woven for the trodden.

Sandy is a Brooklyn-based trio comprised of Samantha Pathe (synths/vocals), Stephen Pathe (drum machines/samples), and Jeff Carter (synths/vocals). The trio arose from the devastation wrecked by Hurricane Sandy throughout the Jersey Shore in 2012. After the storm destroyed the house Jeff was living in and left him stranded, Steve offered Jeff a room in his Manasquan, NJ house. Under the same roof, under unfortunate circumstances, the pair naturally started playing music together. They soon brought in Steve’s sister Samantha to play and write music with them and Sandy – the band – was born.

Traces – the group’s first release since its self-titled debut on Night People in 2014 – is a work of duality. The band’s layered synths and beats build a richly woven tapestry of seemingly disparate and opposing forces that forge new ground in electronic music. The songs are both ambient and anthemic. And yet, they are anthems with restraint, always pulling back just before entirely breaking through the carefully composed tension. The lyrics are both mournful and hopeful, a binary that is embodied in the music itself.

Dreamy, overlapping synth parts wash over you while the songs take twists and turns that command your attention and get your foot tapping, if not your body moving. Specters and spirits abound, as drums appear and later disappear out of nowhere like an apparition, and haunting synth lines sound like they’ve been ripped out of a score to an eerie sci-fi film of your imagination. By Traces’ end, you feel like you’ve experienced something – something cohesive and whole, carefully built within the fabric of these four songs, as if Sandy has told the story they wanted to tell in the amount of time it took it tell it.

Clarice Jensen is a composer and cellist based in Brooklyn, NYC. As a versatile collaborator, Jensen has recorded and performed with Jóhann Jóhannsson, Stars of the Lid, Owen Pallett, Max Richter, Tyondai Braxton, Blonde Redhead, and numerous others. As the artistic director of ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble), brought to life some of the most cherished works of modern classical music, including pieces by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Gavin Bryars, Dustin O’Halloran, and more.

Jensen now follows her debut album For This From That Will Be Filled with Drone Studies, highlights Jensen’s improvisational prowess, venturing even deeper into the meditative mire but with more organic, naturally expressive air.

“The Organ that Made You Bleed” presents a succinctly striking suite that opens in medias res, awakening in a howling chorus of disembodied tones. This tragic ocean of estranged sound ebbs and flows, almost unnoticeable growing in a swell of hymnal hysteria. The calmly chaotic frenzy soon gives way into a layered composite of deep drones and tidal textures. Hopeful harmonies clash with eerie dissonance, suggesting the deeply human balance between darkness and lightness. It’s a magnum opus told in a sequence sketches, and each new turn is a cavern of radiant resonance.

“One Bee” perfectly foils the A-side with an insomniatic interplay of pure tones and richly repetitive cello phrases. The piece begins as a blank canvas, simultaneously empty and brimming with potential. One by one, solitary tones reveal themselves in the foreground until forming a small choir of complementary combinations. This beautifully odd ritual plays out in slow motion as Jensen’s cello performs a tight loop of emotionally expressive notes.

Taken as a whole, Drone Studies a harrowing set of deep listening that uncovers new gifts with each repeated listen.

Copies available in the UK/EU via Boomkat

Moon Diagrams is the solo recording project of Deerhunter co-founder and drummer Moses John Archuleta. Two years after his debut album Lifetime of Love, Archuleta returns with Trappy Bats, a mini-LP that interweaves three brilliant new Moon Diagrams tracks with radiant reworks from Shigeto, Angel Deradoorian, and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.

Trappy Bats was largely recorded in a single night as a means to process the intense intersection of Archuleta’s social, political, and personal hysteria. Having been arrested for an unknown, missed court date, Archuleta spent 24 hours in a holding cell, offering ample time to reflect on his life, the current state of the nation (the jail televisions were showing a constant feed of the then-active Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville), and the other inmates stuck inside the containment center. Upon being released the next day, Archuleta found himself suffering from a bout of insomnia and feeling the need to process everything through music.

Here, Archuleta is in his freest and most grateful state, channeling the turmoil and confusion he was experiencing into an unencumbered fit of creativity. It’s pure, unadulterated escapism with an even more callous palette of sounds than before, clearly split between two different moods.

The end result is an extended traipse through Saturday evening fever-dream techno, Sunday morning cigarette jazz-pop, and every blank-thought in between.

Matthew Sage is a composer, producer, label owner, and publisher based in Chicago, IL. Since his earliest recordings, Sage has carefully considered and crafted each of his various approaches to experimental music. His debut LP A Singular Continent was an endless epic that charted imaginative aural cartography and seemed to soundtrack actual worldbuilding. Now, after five years personal changes and growth, Sage returns with his tried and true sonic trademarks, but with a noticeably liberated approach to his brand of experimental studio music.

Catch a Blessing shows Sage in a much more impulsive light. Where past work existed in space that was cerebral, meditated, and composed, the music here is more natural, playful, and effort-less.

Opting for chance and the unknown rather than rules and conceptual rigor, Sage "practiced" an amorphous technique that led to profound moments of accidental, unplanned beauty.

The moods and modes are constantly, entirely at odds with themselves: private vs. public, abject vs. profound, rural vs. urban(e), and so on. Where other players of experimental studio music take a more high-minded, often stuffy approach, Catch a Blessing floats in airier, more refreshing modes. It’s endlessly lush but sincerely marked by decay. This is naturalism in the truest sense.

Los Angeles-based DJ and composer Nick Malkin is perhaps best known for his noirish, backlit ambient dance music under the name Afterhours (Not Not Fun). Malkin’s also moonlighted as a casual collaborator with LA Vampires and Sun Araw, served as an early DJ with Chinatown-based experimental radio station KCHUNG, and currently hosts a radio show of atmospheric selections on NTS radio called Post-Geography. Now, Malkin returns with Slow Day on Brilliant Drive, his most radiant work to date.

Along with Maxwell Sterling (double bass) and Jon-Kyle Mohr (percussion), Malkin self-instituted an intricate form of collaboration that required extensive amounts of improvisation, meditation, and editing. Malkin introduced a curated series of loops to his collaborators, who then embellished them with textures and muted motifs. Malkin then laid everything out and went to work scouring, polishing, and re-contextualizing certain elements into something entirely new, with elements within dating back to 2014.

The end result is a profound live-band ambient record that celebrates a curated but communal musical dynamic, along the lines of The Necks or Supersilent but heavily informed by the micro-delicacy of Mille Plateaux’s most fathomless works. Even with the highly disparate sound sources, Slow Day on Brilliant Drive is a deeply cohesive and surprisingly intimate work that speaks to Malkin’s uncanny ear and devotion to a concept.

Félicia Atkinson is a composer, sculptor, painter, poet, and publisher from Rennes, France. Atkinson has led a fruitfully fantastic run of eerily blissful, serenely euphoric sounds. Whether under her own name or via her defunct recording pseudonym Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, Atkinson has released work on Umor Rex, Digitalis Limited, Aguirre, and Shelter Press, an imprint co-run with Bartolomé Sanson.

'Coyotes' is an EP inspired by Atkinson's last voyage to New Mexico in February 2017, when she visited and took in the geographic landscapes from Taos to Ghost Ranch. The same vistas also inspired much of Agnes Martin's and Georgia O'Keefe's painting, as well as Jerome Rothenberg's poetry and translation's works.

Atkinson describes a 'Coyotes' as a "Carnet de Voyage," a tape you could directly play in your car while traveling somewhere, a kind of imaginary map to a sentimental journey. A spontaneous gesture, close to the notion of gift or offering. Or, simply, a postcard to a friend. But it's also a praise to the conservation of national and state parks and its human and non-human souls, menaced as we know now by drilling and violent economic speculations.

Here, coyotes act as a kind of metaphor of ambiguity and doubt, a state of mind that Atkinson find interesting to transcribe musically; the ambiguity furthered by Atkinson as a literal "foreigner" in New Mexico. She conveys a sense of visiting these native sacred lands and wondering what you are doing there.

Musically, 'Coyotes' is composed of two long tracks, "Abiqiu" and "Lighter Than Aluminium." Each track features an effervescent froth of piano, midi sounds evokes marimbas, Fender Rhodes, bells, sub-basses, and spoken word poetry written by the musician to display a melancholic landscape made of transparent but deep layers of pale colors and blurry lines.

Rafael Anton Irisarri is an American multi-instrumentalist composer, record producer, mastering engineer, and curator living in the state of New York. Irisarri embodies a new kind of composer: one who "exists in an undifferentiated welter of pop, techno, and classical," according to Pitchfork.

Irisarri's latest work Midnight Colours comes after a starkly stunning run of releases on Ghostly, Morr, Room40, and Umor Rex, among others. The eight new songs were conceived as a sort of soundtrack to the "Midnight Clock or Doomsday Clock" — a symbol which represents the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe. Recorded in 2017, when the Clock was at 2½ minutes-to-midnight (the second-closest to midnight since the Clock’s start in 1947), Midnight Colours permeates with the melancholy of memories resurfacing as you get close to the end of life: the regret, the closure, the uncertainty, the anxiety, and so on.

The result is perhaps Irisarri's most moving and introspective work to date, unfurling a sort of epiphany symphony and sounding like a sunrise in slow motion. Irisarri experimented with the use of heavily "degraded" tape, played through a mis-aligned Otari 8-track tape machine that was constantly on the fritz. "I felt using tape gave the music a particular texture & character, like when you watch old news reels from the 1950's, you know those that talk about the H-bomb, and how we are all doomed," he explains.

Opening suite "The Clock" and "Falling Curtain" offer an elegiac dirge into the unknown, soldering on with humanity but pessimistic reality. "Oh Paris, We Are Fucked" retreats into a blur of mournful curiosity, while "Circuits" brings a glimmer of tragic hope. "Every Scene Fades" is brimming with eerie beauty and a distant, heaving rhythm that perfectly contrasts the morbid optimism of "Two and a Half Minutes." "Drifting" and "A Ruptured Tranquility" bring a soberingly sense of reality, closing out Midnight Colours harrowing narrative.

Night Cleaner first surfaced early 2015 with 'Sketch for Winter III: Green Sleeves,' a hermetic dose of bedroom psych-music that saw Atlanta guitarist and songwriter Matthew Lambert diverting away from the sprawling squall of his main band All the Saints. Now, Night Cleaner reinvents itself with 'Even,' a new set of six songs written, performed, produced, and recorded solely by Lambert.

Using a mix of MPC, guitar, Juno, Casio, and Rhodes, 'Even' wafts in a woozy cloud of sounds from the underbelly. It's a dizzying and mystifying run of bizarre resonance, seemingly run through some disfigured diesel engine. In fact, the album was largely inspired by continuous drives around the city of Atlanta–downtown, East Point, College Park, and Decatur, to be exact.

Opener "Forty" sets the stage with an eerie mix of heaving, vaguely disgruntled guitar and slurred chants, all shepherded along by some autonomous and chugging vehicle. "Privacy Light" kicks into a slightly higher gear, stomping through its shambling beat culled from a drum machine and a slew of hand percussion. "Tight Nights" closes out the A-side with a blitz of isolated post-punk and a tonal symphony of feedback and noise.

"WDE" recalls Night Cleaner's early meditations on stoned and blissed-out psych-pop while "No Tint" is a modern kraut-pop masterpiece, riding a muted but brilliant riff and pushed along by a perfectly monotonous beat. Closer "Even" strips everything back for a more austere, altogether haunting drift of rural psychedelia that burrows deep into the subconscious.

Lifetime of Love is the debut album by Moon Diagrams, the solo recording project of Deerhunter co-founder and drummer Moses John Archuleta. Recorded in Georgia (Atlanta and Athens) and Manhattan (East Village) over a 10-year period, Lifetime of Love finds Archuleta processing various stages of love, loss, and regeneration via forlorn outsider pop, minimal techno, and warm, weightless experimentation.

Throughout each of the 8 songs, Archuleta follows sudden fits of inspiration or moments of chance. By lifting samples from thrift store-sourced LPs, removed from their sleeves and chosen at random to find loops and textures, Archuleta lets the unknown happen naturally, but still confined to a specific set of boundaries.

"Bodymaker" and "Nightmoves" feature Archuleta's earliest solo recordings, captured between the release of Deerhunter's 2007 breakout LP Cryptograms and 2008 LP Microcastle. The two songs also show Archuleta's willingness to venture outside of the taut, mesmerizing drone rock of his main band. The chilling, ambient techno of "Nightmoves" perfectly foils and compliments the broodingly sullen but sincerely beautiful shuffle into the dark.

In 2012, Archuleta decided to pick up his recording activity, challenging himself to make a solo album. Locking himself in his practice space and using only the spare instruments laying around, Archuleta would enter near-fugue states in recording sessions. This period yielded a disparate mix of sonic sketches, from eerily bucolic choir recordings ("Playground"), dusty art-pop ("Moon Diagrams"), and infectiously jubilant dance pop ("End of Heartache").

For the final period, Archuleta found inspiration after an extended stint in Berlin, estranged from his friends and family. But Archuleta used the relative isolation to take in the city's dark energy, eventually returning home to finish the album with a newfound sense of resolve. Subtly grandiose and quietly epic, the album explores a nascent beginning, a morose middle, and a bittersweet, optimistic end.

Love is the Capital the debut LP by Hiro Kone, the recording alias of Nicky Mao. The album is a follow-up to the incredibly well received Fallen Angels cassette, bringing with it some of Mao's most emotionally and politically driven work yet. It is Hiro Kone's long coming opus, examining a number of all-too-relevant themes: capital, the state, egoism, anxiety, and steadfast optimism.

The eight songs on Love is the Capital highlight Mao's austere, politicized techno battling for the greater good. Songs are visceral meditations of rhythm, noise, and melody in the vein of Pan Sonic, Chris & Cosey, Muslimgauze, and Kangding Ray.

The sounds were often recorded in scenes of isolation, whether physically or emotionally. "Infinite Regress" was during a trek with Roxy Farman (Wetware) up to the sleepy, upstate NY town of Palenville. There, frozen in a cabin with the most DIY of recording booths, Mao recorded Roxy's vocals and what would be the track that would put into motion the entire album. "Less Than Two Seconds" was written in a single afternoon in late December 2015 when it was revealed that the grand jury had declined to indict the police officer who shot to death 12-year old Tamir Rice.

The taut techno, industrial minimalism, and aural upheaval is embedded in tracks "Rukhsana" (featuring Drew McDowall formerly of Coil & Psychic TV, on modular synthesizer), "The Place Where Spirits Get Eaten," and "Less Than Two Seconds," an emotionally wrought blitz of serrated Monomachine tones flanked by timeless recordings of essayist, poet, and social writer James Baldwin. Mao ventures deep into heady, prismatic runs of hypnotic techno, on "Don't Drink the Water" and "The Declared Enemy." On opener "Being Earnest" and "Love is the Capital," foreboding motifs brood their way back into the narrative.

Still, the album maintains a sense transformation, burdened with an alien tension—the awareness of an impending and necessary collapse. And what may come next.

Strategy is the longrunning solo project of Portland, Or. producer Paul Dickow. While Dickow has been involved with a number of unusually varied bands, collaborations, and labels, Strategy remains Dickow's most prolific, perpetually evolving and versatile project.

The Infinity File presents the final chapter in Dickow's long investigation into the mysterious power of cassette tape loops – an exploration previously heard on Strategy's Noise Tape Reggae (Entr'acte, 2008) and Noise Tape Self (Further Records, 2015). This process was confined to only a variable-speed, four-track tape deck and Dickow's own hand-made effects boxes.

Opener "Noise Tape Emax" opens the set with a series of wide-eyed blips and a meandering, dislocated rhythm. The oddly-angled chant of synth noise soon takes shape into something else entirely. The various loops lock into one another at chance but perfect intervals. "Be Careful With That AX-60, Eugene" floats in a wash of clipped, stuttering clicks and shifting chords. You can't help but get lost in its calm, undulating hysteria. "Two Echoes" is a slow-burning drift of fluorescence that channels William Basinski without retreating into overly elegiac murk.

B-side opener "Persistence of Memory" distills an amorphous cosmic drone seemingly beamed from some distant and unknown place. "Occurrence at the Triple Door" and closing opus "Requiem for Apex Predators" unfurls a dopamine cloud of hazy bliss, not unlike pop ambient godhead Gas at his most lethargic and lysergic. The fog eventually dissipates, making way for a blurry bassline that recalls the atmospheric funk of Strategy's classic Future Rock (Kranky, 2007).

Geographic North proudly presents 'Death on the Hour,' a ghastly collection of Halloween-inspired recordings intended to spook and seduce through every turn of the season. Spanning 10 harrowing tracks, Death on the Hour boasts a ghoulish smattering of Geographic North mainstays and a healthy dose of new blood weaving through original recordings as well as disfigured renditions of Halloween classics.

Arriving long past the witching hour, the looping vignette of Moon Diagrams' (Deerhunter's Moses Archuleta) "Omegaplex" repeats a curious and oddly familiar phrase of suspense not far removed from the "Opening Titles" of John Carpenter and Alan Howarth's Prince of Darkness suite. Similarly, Leech's (Brian Foote, Peak Oil/100% Silk) "Utah" writhes in fits of rhythmic revulsion, perfectly soundtracking some doomed narrative of paranoia and peril.

For a more spectral sense of evil, Windy & Carl's (Kranky, Music Fellowship, Darla) "Witch & a Cauldron" drifts in a cloud of black feedback and tonal haze proving once again that Dearborn's darling duo can find weightless beauty in a fit of foreboding harmony. Another product of the Great Lakes, Lansing's Auburn Lull opens the B-side with "Unknown Color," layering distant metallic clatter, muffled low-ends, shuffled static, and processed throat singing. It's a jazzy and noirish waltz through similar scenes haunted by Pan•American and Moritz von Oswald.

M. Sage (Patient Sounds) revises "I Put a Spell on You" into something equally mesmerizing, covering Screamin' Jay Hawkins' blues ballad into an unsettling bit of obscured, manic pulsing, lo-fi pop.

A warm and delirious trip through hauntingly alluring astral planes.

Arp is the solo project of Alexis Georgopoulos, a composer/artist/producer based in New York City. Inversions is the latest chapter in Arp's evolving narrative, a diverse musical sprawl that has issued sets of captivating brilliance on the likes of RVNG Intl., Mexican Summer, and Smalltown Supersound. This cassette fortuitously bridges together Arp's shapeshifting identity, from avant-koscmische tinkerer to avant-classical composer and dance-floor modulator.

"Raga for Moog & Violin" and "Flamingo" were originally created for a sound installation presented at Jack Hanley Gallery in New York City in 2014. Both tracks were composed in the same key (C minor Dorian), chosen for its ability to be heard in great lengths of time, its root in cultures from ancient Greece to India, and its link to visions of futurism, Arp's sound installation reflects and refracts themes explored by both creative studio RO/LU and filmmaker Paul Clipson.

Using a Moog synthesizer, and featuring Nicky Mao (who records under the name Hiro Kone) on violin and piano, the mode allows the listener/visitor to focus on sound at times and plays a subliminal, sometimes barely perceptible role, at others. Analog synthesizer overtones give way to violin, moving gradually at first, then building into a cascade of sound, before receding. This process regenerates over the course of the piece, each time doing so differently.

Inversions also includes "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," a track intended for the installation that was not used in the end. Here, it refinds its original companions.

For nearly two decades, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has led an ambitious and exploratory trail through a variety of sounds and genres. As a member of longtime underdogs Tarentel, Cantu-Ledesma broadened the horizons, challenged genre constraints, and pushed the boundaries of the entire post rock genre. Later, Jefre established with several experimental bands (the Alps, Portraits, Moholy-Nagy, etc.) and collaborative projects (Raum, with Grouper). But Jefre has also operated a bit behind the scenes, issuing heady sets of experimental music and film through Root Strata, the label he co-runs with Maxwell August Croy.

As a solo artist, Cantu-Ledesma creates deeply emotional sets of drone, noise, tape collage, and field recordings on the likes of Type, Mexican Summer, Digitalis, Students of Decay, and more.

Jefre now joins Geographic North with In Summer, a cassette that furthers the nostalgia and melancholy portraits of A Year with 13 Moons (2015 Mexican Summer) and Songs of Forgiveness (2014 BARO) for briefer, yet more potent tape loop meditations.

"Love's Refrain" opens the cassette by plunging into depths of reeling, Cocteau Twins-esque clouds of guitar and patient drum machine. Riddled with static and glorious, hypnotic tape warble, the song perfectly sets the stage for In Summer's emotional arc. "Little Dear Isle" meditates on a series of field recordings and unbelievable calmness.

"In Summer" exists in a rolling simmer of aural infidelity and physical, circumstantial magic. "Blue Nudes (I-IV)" creates a deep and undulating traipse through various vignettes of hope, love, loss, and admiration, while "Prelude" closes things out with a calm, understated but permeating sense of calm optimism.

Although he spent a number of years traversing various astral planes with Tarentel and the Drift, Danny Paul Grody also records his own brand of vibrantly melancholic music for guitar and synthesizer. Having already issued a number of captivating and alluring recordings with Three Lobed, Root Strata, and Students of Decay, Grody now joins Geographic North's ongoing 'Sketch for Winter' series for a modest excursion to aurally catalog icy, western terrains.

Equipped with Cormac McCarthy's sense of brutally beautiful western naturalism and at times resembling Loren Connors translating a frostbitten, desertous sunrise through an electric guitar, Grody weaves frostbitten sounds for the American West.

The opening, eponymous track drifts into frame like a polar wind, charring the landscape before it with consuming frost and distant but legitimate hopefulness. "On Leaving" sees the clouds break for a moment of inner and outer meditation, accounting for the highs of lows of past, present, and future. The meandering optimism of "For Western Skies" is delivered with ambulatory glee, as Grody permeates space with illuminated and paced transcendence.

"Mineral Springs" opens the B-side in a wide-eyed state of bucolic rusticism, surveying the elusive but apparent sense of life and loss in this natural setting. "Only" hosts a brief and solitary contemplation on one's self and surroundings, retreating into a deeply introspective haze of comfortable isolation. Closer "Cloudhand" resembles an aural yarn of some lonesome cartographer in an unknown place, accompanied only by a set of mapmaking tools and the barest essentials of survival.

'Other States' speaks to the heart of our appreciation of the emotional scope of the season. This is Sketch for Winter VI.

Atlanta's Lyonnais returns with its second LP, strangling the expansive highs and narcotic lows of its 2011 debut full length for Hoss Records into a more rhythmic affair. The quartet, featuring members TJ Blake (drums, also of Lotus Plaza) and Lee Tesche (guitars, also of Algiers), Farzad Moghaddam (bass, synths, Geographic North co-founder), and Farbod Kokabi (guitar, vocals, Geographic North co-founder), parallel the frostbitten modes of This Heat and Clan of Xymox.

"Pavilionism," the unflinching opening transmission from Anatomy of the Image eschews any formal attempt at inauguration. Its purpose rather? A succinct 6-minute palate cleanser granting listeners left standing to permeate in a collection of spectral and skeletal drone-punk groovers.

Produced and mixed in the dog days of a Los Angeles county summer by Ale Cohen (Pharaohs, Languis), using sessions recorded at Brooklyn's Rumpus Room with the recording/engineering team of R. Mexico (Hoss Records, Mexcellent) and Ryan Rasheed (Leblaze, Prefuse 73), Anatomy of the Image stands a singular statement on the anxiety of self.

The stirring, moonlit gospel "Vienna Circles" is a liable force of nature, driven by a not-so-subtle sense of desperation. "Friendly Fires" sees Section 25's classic offering of modern warfare reworked and reappraised, stretching its post-punk canons into a breathless ambiance. The original's strident rhythm section remains, now existing in a vacuum co-inhabited by Playing With Fire-era Spacemen 3.

In "Hyperblues" we find Anatomy's linchpin. A romanticized, sympathetic listening; an arresting dream-pop epic exploring a trapdoor in the void. Apprehension, repentance, resolve—the ultimate human condition as defined by the anatomy of the image.

Reviving Geographic North's 'Sketch for Winter' cassette series and launching the label's 2016 output, Mark Van Hoen ushers in Sketch for Winter V: It's Not Me, a six-song suite tailored for the season's frostbitten aesthetic.

Van Hoen has been behind of some of the most emotionally-driven electronic music produced in the last three decades. Under a slew of solo aliases (Locust, W.F.O.) and revered collaborations (Seefeel, Scala, Black Hearted Brother), the England by way of Los Angeles producer's work has been highlighted on such hallowed labels as Touch, Editions Mego, R&S/Apollo, City Centre Offices, and the Tapeworm.

"It's Not You (In A Way)" leads the set with a dimly-lighted waltz around some forebodingly anonymous obelisk. Van Hoen choreographs the eerie ritual in a darkly seductive light, illuminating curious curves and revealing deeply emotional arcs along the way. "City of Dust" beams itself into the stratosphere, floating in a digitally-stricken haze and seemingly spiritually directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. "Noise Blues" closes out the A-side in a dreary drift of sultry, atmospheric tones, echoing through a desolate jazz bar that's been heartbroken but quietly content for years.

The B-side continues to ruffle through Van Hoen's wintry landscape, but in much more abstract terms. "Frontier Song" catalogs a number of lost souls stranded on a celestial plane, speaking to the highs and lows of each individual searcher in an amalgamation of hope and loss. "Xmas" processes the yuletide magic into a cascading wash of glittering texture, while closer "The Fall" dives completely into oblivion, collapsing in on itself in a glorious smear of retreating sound.