GEOGRAPHICNORTH

'High Cube' is the beat-focused brainchild of Brian Foote [Peak Oil, Leech] and Paul Dickow [Strategy, Community Library], two low-key legends of the American experimental underground. After some 30-odd years of making music separately and together, Foote and Dickow are collaborating in earnest for the first time as a duo. For this debut, the pair enforced a simple, stringent set of rules: five machines, a one-hour timer, and a total ban on overthinking.

The result is a record that is the sound of two old friends unplugging the usual levers and letting the "accident" of their chemistry take the wheel. It is drier, sparser, and decidedly chunkier —a fictional band stepping into a suit to drive around for a while. It is neither dance nor chill-out, but a moody, complex trajectory defined not by the gear used to make it, but by the narrative mood it compels. Woven together, the six extended tracks of 'High Cube' are tethered to nothing but the ether—a giant sonic leap of peripheral absurdity from two artists with a lifetime of shared rhythm.

DANIAILYAS is the collaborative, cross-continental project from Barcelona-based composer Dania Shihab (Paralaxe Editions), and Portland-based avant-gardist, Ilyas Ahmed (Grails member and collaborator with Liz Harris, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and Golden Retriever). Having both previously issued solo works through Geographic North, a remote one-off collaboration soon manifested into an on-going aural dialogue, yielding the duo’s debut ‘Enough For Me To Remain.’ The album stands as a hallucinatory masterclass, charting into the theater of the uncanny—Dania's transcendent vocal melodies and cathartic synths exquisitely woven between Ilyas' mercurial guitar in some vaporous dance of beauty. A love letter scribed in blood. A bloodletting drenched in hope.

Opener “The World Spins” immediately establishes Dania and Ahmed pairing as a truly exalted engagement—a nascent collaboration with boundless potential and cosmic chemistry. It’s the best of both worlds, with Ahmed’s spidery, open-ended acoustic gestures providing the perfect backdrop to Dania’s double-tracked and echoed lyrics spoken into the darkness. The morbid mise en scène of “Be Where” creaks with diegetic gloom and deeply sullen composure, straddling the physical, astral, and ethereal plane at once.

Commencing in a blur of solemn acoustic genuflection, “Walking Through Another Door” ambles along with wordless, funereal focus. Vocally, Dania meticulously layers various vocal parts into a unified, mellifluous missive delivered with disembodied elegance and weightlessness. It’s equal parts angelic and grievous, striking a chord of heart and mind. “Breathe and Start Again” continues the emotion into more kaleidoscopic patterns, with a heaving manipulated clarinet motif turning over and over again through its habitual dance and Dania’s spectral coos floating by like storm clouds at dusk.

“The Pilgrim” ushers in an unassuming epic of dust-swept vistas haunted with spirits of yore. Beyond capturing a “cinematic” feeling, the song is essentially “pure cinema,” conjuring aural images that are both historic and timeless. In the song’s final moments, Dania’s refrain “Feeling dark again” enters the weighted darkness, bringing a flash of light and hope amidst the oblique obscurity. Closer “Coming Home” offers the most vulnerable and delicate moments on ‘Enough For Me To Remain,’ creating ample safe space to console and comfort in these weary times.

As a member of Tomato Flower, Austyn Wohlers creates free-range art-pop that’s littered with atonal tendencies, rhythmic detours, and emotional indulgences for a wholly listenable barrage of sound. Now, the Baltimore-via-Atlanta musician, composer, and author joins the Geographic North family with ‘Bodymelt in the Garden of Death’, a richly enigmatic affair that explores harrowingly relatable themes in a sensory overload of aural viscera.

As Wohlers explains, “I recorded most of it during a pretty intense year for me -- the title [‘Bodymelt in the Garden of Death’] is a phrase that came into my head while I was hugging my mom in Atlanta the summer after an extreme medical crisis I wasn't sure she’d make it through. She's a gardener and we were surrounded by her flowers. It was sunset and had just rained and all the colors were lush and hot and glistening.”

Opener “Grasshopper Heaven” perfectly presents Wohlers’ tonal palette, permeated with a cacophony of cicadas, floating dust, and softly serrated textures. Seemingly a soundtrack of the uncanny, the song presents a despaired walk through the moonlit woods that rivals Wolfgang Voigt’s perfect permafrost sheen as Gas. The rustic psychedelia continues on “An Angel’s Emerald Wing”, a shimmering squall of celestial noise that features frequent Wohlers collaborator Ruby Mars on harp. A-side closer “Life-Near-Others” offers a kaleidoscope of light and color buried under a fertile layer of topsoil and delicate delay.

“Preagricultural Summer” is a symphony of stabbing electronics, flourished feedback, and clanging metal, while “Attachment Illusion” seemingly inverts the action into a howling chimera of solitude. Feeling like a tidal wave of sorts, “How Heavy the Slow World” swells into its epic frame through a cycle of maxed-out tones and dis-harmony, its swirling storm of sound plowing through everything in its path and changing the landscape in its wake. Album closer “Meadow of Tears” culls a siren-like setting that’s both unsettling and comforting, a nod to the dire dilemma we all inevitably face.

In the end, ‘Bodymelt in the Garden of Death’ is an unassuming triumph of sonic bereavement, transmitting and translating deeply emotional uncertainty into wholly consuming sounds.

‘Chamber of Tears’ marks the poignant debut offering from the Los Angeleno (by way of Buenos Aires) composer Alejandro Cohen under his own name. Here, the chameleon-like boatswain of arts and culture sheds the detuned mutant -funk of his former ensemble Pharaohs (100% Silk; ESP Institute), instead opting for a solo LP of high-minded melancholy, platonic playfulness, and sardonic sweetness. Presented across thirteen songs, ‘Chamber of Tears’ allows Cohen to act as some kind of sonic-farmer tilling and toiling the Earth, gently excavating deep-rooted melodies with an air of open-ended rusticism not far removed from the likes of Penguin Cafe Orchestra, or even Gastr del Sol. Gentle vignettes of guitars plucked and strummed often transcend into lush canopies of texture and unhurried contemplation. It is this dichotomy that makes ‘Chamber of Tears’ grandiose in its limitless exploration, yet tender in its sincere intimacy.

“Instances of Silence” spills out onto the floor like an unearthed treasure box, filling the air with glittering dust for the forthright jubilance and lyrical instrumentation of “American Primitive.” “In Safe Gardens” bursts out the back door and burns across the lawn in crisp sunlight, into the cool shade of “The Seven Dolphins,” a bowed and jangly meditation that channels the same aquatic exuberance of the song’s bestial namesake. Furthering the animalian references, “Penguin” nearly waddles into frame with patience and quaint competence. The spurious simplicity is fleeting though, as the song morphs into a sort of Prog-petite. A-side closer “Del Mar” evokes the childlike composure of Penguin Orchestra, instilling a versatile sense of both complexity and simplicity in one fell swoop.

“Heart-Shaped Rock” is a balmy salve for the soul, employing a range of instrumentation from classical guitar, electric piano, malleted bars, and other sonic detritus in a calming symphony. “Sail-On, 1969” brings a bout of tear-streaked melancholy that rides the crashing waves in a stormy sea of emotion. For “Otherwise,” the LP’s solitary substantial vocal offering, Cohen sings longingly with inner turmoil but ultimate resolve. It’s a sweetly idyllic portrayal of nowness, loneliness, companionship, uncertainty, and an endless stream of potential epiphanies. The one-two punch of “Chamber of Tears” (parts 1 and 2) wallow in a wading pool of actual ambivalence, while album closer “Deep Blue Dream” drifts in a lulled cloud of airy hums and celestial melody.

‘Chamber of Tears’ reveals that Cohen’s aural world is full of sunlight in spite of shadows in between.

Haruspex Palace is the solo recording project of Carrboro-via-Bellingham, WA sound engineer and songwriter Casey Proctor. Having release a number of small batch solo recordings, lent her talents to Pacific Northwest mainstays Grails and Holy Sons, and more recently formed the shoegaze parvenu Verity Den, Proctor now unveils an entirely new side of herself with Haruspex Palace’s self-titled debut, an eight-song suite of humble grandiosity and gossamery iridescence. Using an uncanny arrangement of mellotron, op1, acoustic guitar, autoharp, casio beats, electric guitar loops, layered vocals, Proctor deftly explores themes of potent self-reflection, intimate isolation, and inner solace for our collective, unrequited want.

“Distraction” bursts things wide open in a warm, cinematic glow. Proctor’s voice cycling through a glittering and hulled mantra, flanked by dusty electronic warbles and intricate vocal harmonies. The calm and balmy bossa nova groove of “Valley Light Show” is simultaneously psychedelic plastique and space-age fantastique, riding a weightless arc into space. A-side closer “Lens Deliquesce” brings a wordless, Morricone-like march toward the warm embers of a cool sunrise. It’s Faust-ian to its core, vibing with the godfathers of kosmische musik and entertaining a deal with someone’s devil.

B-side opener “Plateau” is quickly passing but nonetheless potent invites a calm vehemence that’s both comforting and unnerving. It mops up the same tears shed by Bronksi Beat’s heartbreak anthem “Smalltown Boy”, but modernized and mutated into something entirely its own. “Homecoming” is an endlessly cyclical earworm of art-pop in a round with each lyric and melodic note chained and overlapping in an elegant, melancholic tapestry. “Spyder” unfurls a rustic, moonlit drive in the back of a pickup truck perhaps, the fog in the air almost as thick as the sullen romance. Its beauty is obscured and hard to make out, but a surly spectacle nonetheless.

As Ki Oni, Chuck Soo-Hoo creates balmy soirees of bubbly minimalism and buzzy weightlessness. And while Ki Oni graced our 2020 Halloween compilation, his proper Geographic North debut An Evening Stroll to the Garden Party sees the L.A. resident and dublab delinquent bring two mini-magnum opuses that are rife with romance. Here, Ki Oni art directs an entire evening in a half-hour of moonlit mystique and lascivious luxury.

Pergola wanders and wades through an indulgent, glimmering din of gauze. As the sun begins to set, Ki Oni graciously takes your hand with his dear and deft touch, descending down the path to the scene of the sublime. There, melodies bloom and perfume on the scented scaffolding that towers toward the night sky.

On Ornamental Plants, Ki Oni cultivates a cerebral conservatory of flourishing flora. A sweetly scented stream of saxophone, wind chimes, and other terrestrial trimmings blur in a warm fog. Elsewhere, curious wildlife traipse around like some enchanted dream sequence.

An Evening Stroll to the Garden Party delivers two side-long odes to the night, ultimately heightening Ki Oni’s place as a consummate charmer and melodious master of ceremonies.

Ilyas Ahmed has spent nearly two decades trudging through the murkiest sonic territories with patient consideration on his own, as a full time member of Grails, and together with the likes of Liz Harris (Grouper), Golden Retriever, and most recently Jefre Cantu-Ledesma on their 2021 collaborative LP You Can See Your Own Way Out. Across a string of exquisite releases on Root Strata, Immune, Digitalis, and Time-Lag, the Pakistan-born, Portland, Oregon-based musician has spread out a tapestry of spectacular solitude, somewhere between off-kilter folk and grimly contemporary ambient music.

Now, Ahmed returns to Geographic North with A Dream of Another, a spiritual successor to the distantly seething Behold Killers and his most hallucinatory and benevolently bereft record to date. Here, Ahmed sets out a new, more oblique path than ever before, eschewing lyrics and vocals, incorporating a solemn drum machine, and charting a series of waking dreams.

The end result is a masterful LP written, recorded, and performed entirely by Ahmed, mastered by Chuck Johnson, and continues the excruciatingly beautiful, pained traditions of somber avant-melodists like Vini Reilly and Loren Connors.

Over the past few years, Andrew Osterhoudt has quietly curated a slew of comforting kosmische musik that gazes deep into the stars while peering just as deeply inward. Now, the Brooklyn-based composer sets their sights on more tangible artifacts and nearby nuance with Out Together, an earthbound fit of maniacal mindfulness mixed with calm chaos.

Constructed on a scaffold of juxtaposed symmetry, the two sides of Out Together foil and compliment each other in delicate harmony. Live collaborations with Ka Baird and John Also Bennett (JAB) colligate with manipulated found sounds from records and digital audio files from old broadcasting sound libraries, recontextualized into moments of ambient turntablism. The search for harmony shines throughout. Take the final tones of A-side closer “Runoff” drifting downstream with bubbly textures and arpeggiated bliss, trying to reach harmony with the initial tones of B-side opener “Frequency.” The latter ultimately spotlights a fortuitous flute duet from Baird and JAB born from Osterhoudt’s own graphic score.

The patient pointillism and avant assurance of “Crowds” balances out the opposite side’s “Everyone Arriving, Eventually,” a tone poem of sand-like textures flowing through melodic reeds and other sonic detritus. “Undergrowth” awakens in a steam-drenched run of modulated meditation, focusing on Ka Baird’s singularly enraptured vocal exorcisms which perfectly reflect its B-side counterpart “The Breathing Green,” engaged in a din of rustic psychedelia with waves of buzzing, ember-like tones and unseen fauna.

As a whole, Out Together presents a vibrant spectrum of feelings ranging from magnified isolation to zoomed-out, wide-angled euphoria.

Born in Baghdad, raised in Tasmania, and now based in Barcelona, Dania Shihab moves between cultures and continents with an amorphous creative vision directly tied to her transient existence. As founder of experimental outpost Paralaxe Editions, Dania divides her time between Spain and the remote corners of Australia, where she works as an emergency doctor. Now, Dania presents her solo debut Voz, which finds her rediscovering her voice as a primary instrument.

The title “Voz”—Spanish for “voice” and signaling to her transnational experiences between Spain and Australia for the last decade—is especially fitting, as Dania grew up in a household where singing was culturally frowned upon.

Dania sets the scene with the melancholic majesty of “I Lied,” a solitary chorus of lifted and lilted vocals and peripheral drones wafting through the air. “Aleph” floats in an ascending, slow-motion sprawl of synth tones, distant pianos, and kaleidoscopic lyrical abstractions. The low-fi churn of “Fire Dash” offers a vibrant milieu of witching hour merriment; a sinister snapshot that searches in the shadows to find even odder beauty.

“Whale Song” departs the well-trodden path and ventures into a thick brush of humid ambiance like a sweltering aural travelog of some uncharted place. The backward drift of “An Individual” levitates in a bubbly fog of heavenly harmonics, while “The Other Thing Is” awakens in a calm, piano-drenched state of hustle and bustle. “Anomaly” closes Voz in a grandiose din of ethereal melody and glorious devastation.

Smoke Point is a duo composed of Brian Foote (Peak Oil, Leech, Kranky) and Sage Caswell (Spring Theory). With their self-titled debut LP on Geographic North, the Los Angeles-based duo takes a captivating cruise through heady ambient drifts and ruthlessly rhythmic loop dreams.

Foote and Caswell first teamed up to create a series of improvisational atmospherics throughout a multi-room art gallery. The pair conceived of a sprawling, dynamic experience with tones, rhythms, and textures that varied from room to room, yet were inextricably tuned and melded together. Visitors could serve as a sort of human crossfader, moving through the gallery and dialing up or down aural aspects as they pleased. And although the collaboration came together to create music for a specific physical space, the concept was never fully realized until what is now the duo’s first record.

Smoke Point brings five extended, cruise-controlled exercises that calmly violate the Venn diagram's overlap between boundless dance music and unfathomable ambiance. But beyond the boundaries of an album as a set of songs, Foote and Caswell cracked things wide open and recontextualized the album as an actual DJ tool onto itself; ambient leaning and melodically focused. To achieve this, Smoke Point offers a bounty of loops in the form of endless locked grooves on the vinyl edition and brief but equally utilitarian snippets on the digital edition of the LP.

Forever an associate of the American avant-garde, Taralie Peterson has been baring her soul on outward-leaning recordings as a solo artist (as Louise Bock and Tar Pet) and with a dazzling array of collaborators (most notably and fruitfully with Ka Baird as Spires That in The Sunset Rise). The Madison, WI based musician now steps out as Tekla Peterson with Heart Press, a garishly gripping set of songs that simmer in a stew of heartbreak and survival. Put simply in Peterson’s own words: “This music came from the fiery flames of pain from the ending of my 20 year relationship.”

Matching these previously uncharted emotional areas are Peterson’s experiments with pop structures paired with fruitfully barren arrangements and vivid, pseudo-string textures. No polished ennui or overly gory details, just transcendent beauty and universal emotion.

The set opens with “Soda Pop Jam,” an eerily enchanted earworm that writhes in a sultry bed of melody and melancholy. “Swarm of Gnats” heightens the morbid musicality that drips onto a desolate dance floor littered with emotional detritus. “Cancel Out Effect” offers a scruffy, operatic opus that traipses through a litany of confessions and castigations.

Casting things in an entirely different light, “Between a Rock” and closer “Count Out Shadows” bring a neon-lit, neo noir of nonchalance that pair perfectly in a downstream drift of sullen musings. “WWIB” is a cacophony of catharsis, a fever dream fugue that cycles into an infinite blur.

Heart Press presents the ultimate breakup album that devastates everything in its wake, but Peterson finds true beauty in the emotional valleys and eventual peaks with poise and prowess.

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Matthew Sage is about seeing the big picture, but focused through the most intimate and personal lens possible. Best exemplified on the gauzy, cartographical opus ‘A Singular Continent’, as well as his impulsively meditative Geographic North debut ‘Catch a Blessing’, Sage’s imagination yields fully realized sonic suites to worlds both imaginary and referential to his own.

Now, the Chicago-based composer, producer, label owner, and publisher returns with ‘The Wind of Things’, a personal and pastoral oblation to the wild and wind-blown waters and mountains, both from Sage’s own memory and writ large. Absent are the processed sounds and filters that have come to define Sage’s work; the album finds Sage stripping away the synthesized sounds that alchemied his past work into aural gold, instead favoring an entirely acoustic and natural palette.

Sage called upon a myriad of long-time collaborators, who together form the aptly-titled Spinnaker Ensemble (featuring Patrick Shiroishi, Chaz Pyrmek, Nate Henricks, Chris Jusell, Allison Sheldon, Martin Albertz, David Hirsch, Matt Wenzel, and Ang Wilson) to help realize his vision and further the melodic potential of the living and breathing field recordings that permeate the album. Tapping into an intimate sense of self, these field recordings derive from natural places that are significant to Sage. Lakes, mountains, and rivers he grew up boat-racing on and swimming in; tall fields of grass in rural Nebraska near his family’s birthplaces; wildlife on the pond of his in-laws home in Texas; the harbors and beaches of Lake Michigan that he frequents; all serving as places of occupation for these compositions to live in and blow through.

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.

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.

For more than a decade, Jon Porras has carved out a sprawling, emotionally evocative niche of sound using a variety of sonic elements and associations in his solo work on such seminal imprints as Root Strata, Important, and Thrill Jockey. But Porras has also been associated with a number of celebrated collaborations, with musicians Evan Caminiti (as Barn Owl), Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Ellen Fullman, Stephen O'Malley, Jacob Felix Heule, and visual artists Paul Clipson and Wilhelm Sasnal.

Tokonoma is Porras' fifth solo work, ending the almost four-year silence since his last release. More than a comeback though, the album serves as one of Porras' most enlightened works to date, touching on the dark, expansive tones explored on past releases and shedding light on Porras' bright future.

Assembled gradually from layers of Yamaha DX7, physical modeling instruments, synthetic voices and analog tapes, processed with complex programming and outboard patching, the six pieces explore the musical possibilities of improvising against mathematically generated patterns. Through these chance operations, MIDI programming and other generative principles, Tokonoma uses algorithmic tools to reexamine composition in the age of information overload.

"Generative Counterpoint" opens the set with a run of effervescent synth tones that beam up into the sky with unending hope and optimism. Deep throbs of rhythm pulse into the space as waves of color wash across the frame. "Stochastic Return" turns the narrative into more modern classical territory, performed by an entire virtual symphony of synthetic sound but conducted with entirely human sensibilities and emotions. "Still Life" continues the vibrant minimalism with a heaving hum of shimmering tones and meditative repetition.

On "Dissolving Boundaries," Porras examines an ever-evolving pattern of piano miniatures that shift and modulate into the infinite. "22/7" is perhaps the most pointillistic piece of the set, perfectly balancing moments of total sound and near-silence in a forceful blitz that's both highly complex and genuinely natural. "Ultraviolet Interval" closes the tape with a blur of phased color and chopped beauty that eventually dissolves into a cloud of static white noise.

Café Ale is Los Angeles-based musician and producer Alejandro Cohen. An irreplaceable fixture in LA's sprawling music scene, Cohen has contributed his deft auditory touch to projects ranging from the hallucinatory Balearic bliss of Pharaohs (100% Silk, International Feel, ESP Institute, Holy Mountain) to the fuzz-drench auteur pop of Languis (Plug Research, Pehr). In addition to his acclaimed musical output, Cohen is responsible for corralling a wholly inclusive and globally-minded stable of tastemakers as director of dublab, Los Angeles' long-running radio station.

Spanning eight shimmering sketches, Transformative Nature marks Café Ale's debut set of recordings. With help from a revolving cast of collaborators, Cohen has crafted a tantalizing medley of evocative, rhythmic burners suited more for a breezy sunset than the dance floor.

Opener "Devout" is an uplifting drift of noise and melody, floating down a river of serrated drones and serene piano keys. "Push-me Pull-U" unfurls its noir-ish, neon-flecked careen through saxophone-littered vistas. "Subir Es Lo Mejor" slithers with a muted and stuttering house beat, perfectly balancing rhythmic meditation with hypnotic transcendence. "Hymn" dials the narrative back into a warbled and woozy ambient symphony of synthetic beauty.

"Stranded" plays out like an autumnal raga for an unseasonably warm backyard house party, while "Dress'n Up" nods to some grand and cosmic melodrama. "Dead Child Song" brings a disarmingly moving melody of love and loss, countered by closer "Fallen Angel," a curiously shoegaze-y traipse through a slurred and heady, effects-laden dream sequence.

A captivating statement that shows Cohen's dynamic, wide-ranging, and wholly unique approach to dance music.

Originally released in 2012 by the now-defunct Atlanta imprint Double Phantom, "Blood" b/w "Black Eunuch" marks the seething, debut transmission from avant-gospel-punk provocateurs Algiers. This critical, now-out-of-print 7" has been reissued on blue vinyl with alternate artwork by Geographic North to commemorate the band's 2017 European dates supporting Depeche Mode. Later rerecorded for their self-titled, 2015 LP on Matador Records, these original offerings remain as pertinent and compelling as ever.

"It sounds less like a song and more like a living, breathing condemnation from God that crawled out of a swamp somewhere in the South to force America to face down its hideous past and pathetic political present."
–Stereogum

"…the we-shan't-overcome dejection of 'Blood' is chillingly framed by a tambourine rattle and handclap that feel like lashes from a whip."
–Pitchfork

"Although the fusion may have been touched upon in recordings related to both The Birthday Party and The Gun Club, Algiers are dedicated to grafting gospel music onto post-punk guitar-cuzz…this record is mesmerizing and really sucks you in with its weird power."
–Byron Coley, WIRE Magazine

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).