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Eli Keszler (LuckyMe, 2025)

Amusingly, the first Eli Keszler album that I ever heard was 2011’s Cold Pin, which was centered around a complex percussion installation that used motors and microcontrollers to attack strings and metal squares, so my expectations regarding the rest of his career were definitely quite different than the trajectory that it ultimately took (film soundtracks, a Grammy nomination, etc.). I always enjoy Keszler’s drumming, of course, but some of his chameleonic reinventions definitely appeal to me more strongly than others. This self-titled album (billed as “a freewheeling, Lynchian song-cycle”) is an especially cool one, as Keszler enlisted Stones Throw artist/DJ/electro-pop diva Sofie Royer as the vocalist for a handful of killer noir-jazz gems. The rest of the album is a bit more eclectic and varied, but some of those other directions are compelling too (and there is often some virtuosic drumming to be found as well).

The opening “Wild Wild West” is perhaps the album’s most perfect channeling of Lynchian vibes, as its sultry shuffling rhythm, breathy torch song vocals, twangy surf-noir guitars, and psychotropically buzzing synth bass instantly evoke a slow, sexy dance at Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse. There are also some cool dubby percussion touches, but they are icing on an already perfect cake, as Keszler and Royer slay on pure atmosphere alone. I wish the whole album stayed in that vein (it does not), but the closing “Drip Drip Drip” is at least an absolutely killer (if more macabre) companion piece. 

Notably, the percussion is a bit more inventive and industrial-inspired in “Drip Drip Drip,” but the best bits are generally the mood, the guitars, and Royer, which is not what I would have expected from an album by a percussionist. That said, Keszler does allow himself to go a bit wild on the kit for the piece’s second half, which illustrates a central feature of this album: unusual and unpredictable song structures. Keszler described the album’s creative arc as “I aimed to take a feeling and let the music move freely across mediums, materials, and genres,” though there is also a crucial unifying theme of “everything coated in a sheen of despair and grandeur.”

The remainder of the pieces are an eclectic mixed bag of different experiments and moods. For example, there is another excellent Royer showcase in “Speak For Me,” but it abandons Twin Peaks for an aesthetic best described as “a more libidinous Portishead.” Elsewhere, Keszler goes entirely solo with the unsettling and otherworldly “Sun,” which combines discordant submerged synths and clattering broken beat drums to form a very weird and seasick-sounding strain of futuristic dub. “Ever Shrinking World” is yet another solo banger, approximating an improbable and industrial-damaged collision of Rhythm & Sound and Bark Psychosis (and the skittering drums are quite nice as well). Keszler also channels some other cool influences with varying degrees of success, as “When I Sleep” sounds like an hot improv session between a shoegaze-inspired ambient artist and a free jazz drummer, while “Low Love” feels like blurred and hypnagogic pop à la Julee Cruise (until the machine gun drums kick in, anyway).

Part of me admittedly wishes this album was a bit less stylistically fluid and that Keszler had instead just set out to craft a hot batch of killer singles with Royer, as the two definitely locked onto a winning vision with “Wild Wild West” and “Drip Drip Drip.” I suspect that Keszler is too creatively restless to be satisfied with just composing a bunch of cool singles though, as this album is teeming with disparate other ideas that he was keen on exploring. As such, this album is best appreciated as a kind of imaginary soundtrack set in the neon-soaked world of a city in the small hours after all the wholesome people have gone home: sex, melancholy, and desperation mingled with occasional glimpses of beauty or clarity. 

Unlike traditional songs, most of these pieces abandon the expected “verse, chorus, repeat” formula to take unexpected yet cool detours, which is kind of how film soundtracks work: if the scene changes after two minutes, the score changes with it. That stylistic instability can certainly be frustrating when Keszler abandons a promising theme for something else, but it works pretty well in an album-sized dose, as there is a compelling arc here and the various interludes and jazzy flourishes keep things fresh and pleasantly unpredictable between the major highlights.

Listen here. 

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the fun years, “baby, it’s cold inside” (Barge (2008)/Keplar (2025))

Newly remastered and reissued, this drolly titled 2008 album is generally regarded to be the jewel of the fun years’ discography, so it is quite a pleasant surprise to have it back in circulation again after the folding of the duo’s previous label (Barge). Notably, baby, it’s cold inside still feels fresh and contemporary almost two decades later, as Ben Recht & Isaac Sparks were definitely on a trip very different from the rest of their early 2000s ambient/drone peers. Stylistic resemblances to ambient and self-deprecating humor aside, the fun years share a hell of a lot more common ground with avant-garde turntablists like the late Phillip Jeck, but innovatively enhance the crackling, hissing magic of Isaac Sparks’ vinyl manipulations with looping melodic accompaniment from Ben Recht’s baritone guitar. That was (and continues to be) a cool vision, but my favorite aspect of this duo is how their compositions sometimes resemble a complex puzzle being slowly assembled or disassembled piece by piece.  

The album’s centerpiece is the opening “my lowville,” which slowly and elegantly expands from a subtle, droning backwards loop with vinyl crackle into a beautiful and bittersweet guitar melody as more and more looping notes accumulate. That intricately assembled puzzle-piece melody alone is enough to make it an absolutely sublime highlight, but that proves to be only a mere starting point as the piece expands and intensifies into a wonderfully immersive maelstrom of sensuously hissing and layering magic.

The following “auto show day of the dead” is initially a bit more somber, as a minor key piano loop and warbly swells of backwards melody weave a gently hallucinatory and vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding spell. Unsurprisingly, it follows the same “slow-motion loop architecture” arc as its predecessor, as that introductory motif is gradually fleshed out with new crackles and shivering guitar intrusions, but the sounds ultimately become increasingly gnarled and distorted en route to a buzzing, spacey crescendo. The colorfully titled “fucking milwaukee’s been hesher forever,” on the other hand, evokes a lazily summery and hallucinatory suburban idyll of hissing sprinklers and distant barking dogs that gradually dissolves into a gently pulsing and trebly reverie. 

Elsewhere, “re: we’re again buried under” is arguably my second favorite piece on the album, but it is more of a quiet headphone pleasure than the instant gratification of “my lowville.” In fact, it has quite an ingeniously elusive “barely there” feel, as field recordings lazily pan and fade in and out of focus over a low rumble. It is essentially just a hyper-minimalist one-note drone piece at its core, however, and the subtle mutations of that drone are endlessly compelling even when it is reduced to little more than a hum and some crackle. Notably, all of the album’s pieces segue into each other like they are all just interrelated passages in a single album-spanning opus, so the closing “the surge is working” has the feel of a culminating crescendo for both the previous piece and the album as a whole (particularly when the intense and insistently strummed roar of shoegaze guitars comes in. 

To their credit, however, Recht and Sparks do not end the album with that roiling eruption, as the piece’s coda dissolves into sensuously shivering and hissing washes of static that gradually collapse into confused rhythms and submerged, blown-out wreckage. That last bit is an especially fine example of why the fun years is such an enduring and beloved project, as Recht and Sparks are both uniquely skilled at painstakingly crafting ambient loop-scapes and uniquely skilled at finding interesting and unusual ways for them to detour (rather than simply fading out once all of their loops have finally locked in place for the big showstopper). 

The overall effect is akin to time-lapse footage in which new lenses and filters are constantly being sneakily and seamlessly swapped in: the overall image is certainly evolving, but the once-familiar details of that image are in a permanent state of flux as well (submerging, breaking apart, blurring, smearing, or resolving into sharper focus). In short, Recht and Sparks are a couple of ingenious textural wizards, which makes the fun years an endlessly absorbing project for anyone who chooses to their work listen closely enough. While this particular album is justifiably a fan favorite, the sublime pleasures of this project definitely run much far deeper than this album and god was like, no. That said, this one is certainly an ideal entry point for the curious.

Listen here.

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Cyrus Pireh, “Thank You, Guitar” (Palilalia, 2025)

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I had not encountered this Detroit-based guitar visionary’s work before this debut for Bill Orcutt’s Palilalia label, but it seems like Pireh was already blowing minds with his previous album (2022’s Visitor). It is easy to see why Pireh’s playing would appeal to Orcutt, as the two share a love of scrabbling note flurries and ragged, soulful catharsis, but Thank You, Guitar does not resemble many other solo guitarists that I have heard (though Fred Frith is name-checked as a reference point in the Tom Carter-penned album description. Carter also zeroes in on one of the main things that sets Pireh apart from other artists in avant-guitar milieu, which is that he is a proper shredder armed with a goddamn 9-string guitar (very amusing that he wound up on a label run by a 4-string guitarist, incidentally).

As a former aspiring shredder myself, I tend to grimace whenever a guitarist is praised for their technical mastery, but Pireh’s dazzling dexterity is thankfully an enhancement to a singular and compelling vision rather than an endpoint unto itself. Summarizing that vision is a tall order, however, as he covers a lot of unusual stylistic terrain over the course of Thank You, Guitar’s ten songs. That eclecticism is partially explained by the amusing bio on Pireh’s website, as he is an flamboyantly mustached Iranian-American anarchist with a graduate degree in music and an interest in building/modifying amps and pedals. That bio also notes that he was a high school valedictorian who has variously worked as a projectionist, a nanny, a janitor, a sound engineer, a school bus driver, a restaurant host, a mosaic glass cutter, and a music teacher (among many other things). 

Surprisingly, “conceptual artist” is missing from Pireh’s wild resume, but there are a couple of impishly amusing pieces here that fall into that category. The first is “Amen Family,” in which he transposes the iconic Amen break into convulsive, scrabbling harmonics. Elsewhere, Pireh unleashes a roiling, tremolo-picked single-note assault as “Infinite Shred,” which sounds like something I would expect to hear right before ‘80s-era Slayer emerged from a haze of fog to launch into “Hell Awaits.” Amusingly, it ends abruptly rather than transforming into something more, but “Amen Family” unexpectedly turns into a cool coda of chiming, interwoven arpeggios. “JRA is Legend” is another ambitiously unusual piece, as a meditative arpeggio theme acts as the backdrop for a host of subtle, sliding fretboard sounds that resemble a ghost turntablist absolutely ripping shit up at the ghost club.

The strongest pieces tend to be a bit more straightforward, however, though there are some notable exceptions. The opening title piece is the most instantly gratifying of the lot, as a pleasantly chugging motif is beautifully enhanced by melodic arabesques of sweeps and hammer-ons. The closing “Truth” is similarly delightful, as it sounds like the introduction to the greatest song that Built To Spill never wrote, but it remains stuck in a mesmerizing state of stuttering, tumbling, and overlapping suspended animation rather than moving forward. Elsewhere, “Free Palestine” is a more subtle pleasure, as it sounds like overlapping out-of-phase tape loops of an simple, pretty melody, but the way the notes hesitate, linger, and bleed together into ephemeral smears of distortion is quite beautiful. More nakedly beautiful is “Sheep Graze,” which sounds like something that would be performed at a beautiful outdoor autumn wedding if all of the guests were artists and musicians. 

While I imagine some guitar fans will wish that the album’s balance leaned a bit heavier on fully formed pieces, I quite liked all of Pireh’s more eccentric and indulgent interludes, as almost every one seemed to have an unusual and genuinely compelling idea at its core. Technique aside, Pireh is one hell of a distinctive and fascinating artist and this is one hell of an album. Thank You, Guitar is pretty much essential listening for anyone remotely interested in the current cutting edge of underground/avant-garde guitar stylists. 

Listen here.

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Death and Vanilla, “Whistle And I’ll Come To You” (Fire, 2025)

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This is Death and Vanilla’s third re-imagined soundtrack to date (the others being Vampyr & The Tenant), but it seems like a much higher profile release than the previous two since Fire saw fit to release it on vinyl. I can understand why, as Whistle And I’ll Come To You is quite a uniquely beautifully elegant and mesmerizing album. In fact, it makes me wonder if re-imagining soundtracks might actually be the Swedish trio’s true calling (rather than battling it out with Vanishing Twin to be the strongest of Stereolab & Broadcast’s psych-pop descendants). If it isn’t, the band at least have unquestionably excellent taste in cinema.

Notably, this latest foray differs from the band’s previous soundtracks in that Whistle And I’ll Come To You is a cult BBC favorite rather than a proper film. It was directed by Jonathan Miller and was first broadcast in 1968, presumably blowing many young minds and predating the similarly iconic The Wicker Man by five years. At the time, it was rightly hailed as “unconventional” and a “masterpiece,” but there are several other interesting and unique facets to it as well. 

For one, it curiously aired as part of BBC’s Omnibus documentary series despite not being a documentary. Also, Miller was quite an interesting character in his own right, as he was variously a medical historian, a comedian, an opera director, and a neuropsychologist at various stages in his outsized life. Similarly, the author of the original short story was the legendary M.R. James, whose supernatural fiction was a major influence on both H.P. Lovecraft and David Tibet (among others). Remarkably, Miller’s film has enjoyed a similarly outsized influence, as it directly inspired BBC’s cult favorite A Ghost Story For Christmas anthology series in the ‘70s. As series director Lawrence Gordon Clark eloquently put it, the unique allure of both Whistle and the later series it inspired lies in the “focus on suggestion” and a desire “to chill rather than shock.”

The film, shot in stylish black & white, tells the tale of an academic who finds a mysterious bone whistle in a Knights Templar cemetery while on a lonely vacation in a coastal East Anglian village. Naturally, the whistle has a cryptic Latin inscription (translated as “Who is this who is coming?”) and our unfortunate protagonist predictably seals his own doom by blowing it, as a ghost soon begins tormenting him in the night (even intruding into his dreams). 

Before the climactic supernatural events unfold, the most striking scenes tend to be those of the professor simply walking alone on the beach and the best pieces on the album fittingly combine a sense of forward motion with a mood that I would describe as bittersweet and wistful. The two strongest pieces in that vein are “Has It Been Good Here?” and the two-part “Walk On The Beach.”

The former is built on a gently bubbling groove that resembles a spacier, more hallucinatory Neu! before it vividly blossoms into a beautifully haunting and understated organ melody. The first part of “Walk On The Beach” is similarly organ-driven, as an epic-sounding  and snaking melody endlessly repeats and occasionally seems like it is overlapping itself like an ouroboros. The second part is more meditative and yearning, as its languorous and subdued melody is evocatively enhanced with beach sounds of seagulls and crashing waves. Notably, the same melody is later reprised with flute and xylophone in the similarly excellent “Evidence of Spiritualism.”

The album’s bookends are also pretty fucking brilliant (albeit very different, unsurprisingly, as the protagonist ends the story in a dramatically different state than he was in at the beginning). In any case, “Intro” is shockingly good for a piece with such a prosaic title and function, as a slow but insistent drum machine groove and a looping bass line provide the backdrop for a cool ghostly choral-sounding motif and gently haunting flute melody.“ The closing “Apparition” is also anchored by a simple yet insistent drum machine beat, but it is soon fleshed out by chugging electric guitar, yet another cool organ melody, and viscerally wild crescendos of vibrato-heavy synth howls.

Impressively, the remaining pieces prove to be just as effective at sustaining the album’s spell, as there are really only a few major melodic motifs and they continually resurface in dreamlike, cyclical fashion without ever overstaying their welcome (though there are a couple of divergent interludes like the brief wind chime ambiance of “Spooky Breakfast”). In fact, I feel confident in describing this album as something of a masterclass in composition, as Death and Vanilla display incredible thematic focus, weaving one timelessly haunting atmosphere after another while subtly deepening the sense of mystery and escalating menace and they kept their arrangements incredibly tight and uncluttered while doing it.

That said, I was even more impressed with this album as a stylistic feat, as band seamlessly wove together elegant arty austerity with the kitsch of vintage horror movies and library music and managed to wind up with something that feels fresh, contemporary and much greater than the sum of its parts. While I was a fairly devoted fan of Death and Vanilla before this album, I always viewed them more as a fitfully great singles band rather than a truly distinctive project with a bold vision and the skill to back it up. This album definitely changed that for me.  

Listen here.

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Biosphere, “The Way of Time” (AD93, 2025)

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This latest album from Geir Jenssen’s long-running ambient/techno project admittedly blindsided me a bit, as I had not been keeping up with his recent releases on his own Biophon label. If I had been, I would have known that he’s been on a bit of a synthesizer album kick lately, but The Way of Time is quite a bold outlier even within this current era, as the emotional heart of the album is a series of samples of Joan Lorring’s voice from a 1951 radio play of Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ The Time Of Man (first published in 1926). 

In broad strokes, the novel is a coming-of-age story that follows a poor girl from rural Kentucky farming community through her life of hardship and seems to be about the strength of the human spirit and finding simple joy in community and the natural world. While Jenssen sparingly uses only a few choice passages, Lorring’s wistful sense of wonder packs quite a heartbreakingly emotional wallop within the context of Biosphere’s darkly futuristic synth motifs.

Notably, there are two pieces that tower above everything else on this album: “The Way of Time” and “Like The End of The World.” The first piece is built upon a tensely burbling synth motif that initially sounds like it could have been a slowed-down Caterina Barbieri piece and a repeating sample of Lorring’s Ellen Chesser character observing “night comes and then it gets to be day and that’s the way of time” in a hopeful-sounding Southern drawl. As the piece unfolds, however, the intricate web of interwoven synth melodies seems to speed up and deepen in intensity. It has the ominous feel of walls closing in, which Jenssen capitalizes on in devastating fashion with a final sample of Chesser lamenting that she’s never been to the ocean or found true love and that she is now growing old.

The synth theme in “Like The End of the World” is even more coldly futuristic-sounding, but it works brilliantly as a pure synth piece once the slow, lurching stomp of the beat locks into place and a rhythmic melodic hook loops into the groove. The sample that Jenssen eventually adds to the mix is another killer, as the song comes alive with nocturnal bird songs and Chesser observes that they make a “lonesome sound like the end of the world,” then asks “are you a-feared of the end of the world?” Fittingly, Jenssen’s synth motif features a subtly nerve-jangling howl that endlessly repeats, which gives that otherwise innocent question a haunting sense of looming dread or the feel of an insistently flashing cosmic error message.

The remaining pieces are a bit of a mixed bag, though the closer is a pretty solid reprise of “The Way of Time” with a squelchy new synth motif added. There are plenty of great ideas that don’t fully blossom into great songs, however, as I liked the way the phrase “The time of man” was used as a melodic hook in the opener and the gorgeous ambient fade-out of “All The Stars Have Names” is wonderful as well (it anomalously sounds like Orb-style ‘90s pop techno before that point).

Honestly, however, the near-misses don’t really matter much with this album, as the twin highlights are more than enough to make this album a powerful and memorably heavy artistic statement. Jenssen’s brilliant use of radio play samples sounds like nothing less than an urgent warning beamed a hundred years forward into a future that has already missed its chance to correct its path. While I don’t want to romanticize rural poverty and desperation, it definitely seems like humanity has only enslaved itself further and become even more disconnected from the natural world over the last century (though our our travel and entertainment options have admittedly improved immensely, which can be a nice distraction from our endlessly accelerating death spiral).

Music aside, it was genuinely a deeply intense and unsettling experience to be reminded that humans have largely abandoned deep connections and their innate sense of wonder for an inescapable dehumanized dystopia of meaningless jobs, social media likes, unfettered greed, pointless wars, xenophobic cruelty, endless surveillance, the relentless ascent of unwanted artificial intell…wait, what? No, I am NOT crying—YOU’RE crying. Anyway, I am going to be thinking about this album for a long time, as The Way of Time is a seismic psychological depth charge disguised as a cool synth album. Juxtaposing heartfelt soul and sincerity with inhumanly insistent electronics and circuitry was quite an inspired idea.

Listen here.

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Jake Muir, “Campana Sonans” (enmossed, 2025)

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Colorfully described as “a synapse-popping electro-acoustic soundwalk around Western Europe’s cathedrals,” Campana Sonans is a pair of deeply immersive and hallucinatory sound collages inspired by the daily sounds of church bells in Muir’s recently adopted home city of Berlin. While his Bathhouse Blues previously delved into an immersively soft-focus and vibe-centric evocation of a specific environment, this latest album plunges much deeper into Chris Watson-esque field recording/sound collage territory. 

Unlike Watson and his more purist approach, however, Muir transforms his own field recordings into a shifting and dreamlike fantasia through subtle use of effects. Then again, maybe Muir is a bit of a purist himself, as everything here sounds like it was directly sourced from field recordings without further instrumental enhancement. It certainly sounds enhanced by effects though, as the overall effect is less “Muir made some cool field recordings of church bells” and more “a lucidly dreaming Muir managed to sneak some field recording gear into a sensuously flickering, elusive, and time-bending urban dreamscape.”

The first piece, “Erzklang,” borrows its sounds from a number of different churches throughout Berlin along with “snippets of local ambiance – traffic, chattering tourists and birdsong.” Enmossed describes Muir’s vision as a “blurry snapshot of the city” in which its “its idiosyncratic color spectrum” has been “queered by various digital processes,” which feels like a pretty apt characterization, but the character of each piece is a bit different due to the nature of the bells themselves (the Berlin bells are described as more “sober” than their cheerier, more melodic English counterparts). 

Unsurprisingly, Berlin’s bells are the omnipresent heart of “Erzklang,” though various street sounds languorously drift in and out of the piece throughout its duration. The character of those bell sounds evolves quite dramatically over the course of the piece, however, as Muir inventively stretches time, transforms the acoustic environment, lowers their pitch, plays with reverb length, creates feedback, and pans sounds around spatially in a shapeshifting psychoacoustic fantasia. 

At one point, it even sounds like two bells are locked in a duel, but Muir’s most impressive feats are one stretch that approximates the eerie whistling of Tuvan throat singing and another that sounds like giant metal birds fluttering across a stone courtyard. The shadowy atmosphere can be quite beguiling as well, as Muir evokes a kind of lysergic noir of hissing rain, mysterious footsteps, murmured conversations, and passing trains.

The title of the second piece (“Changes”) alludes to the UK’s “distinctive ‘change ringing’ technique, where a team of bell-ringers play long varied sequences on a set of tuned bells.” In practical terms, that means that there are a few joyous and melodic crescendos that depart from the moodier tone of the Berlin piece. 

In all other respects, however, it is quite similar to slow-motion sonic sorcery of “Erzklang,” though it sometimes also sounds like the rapturous clang of Christmas morning or the happy conclusion of a beautiful spring wedding. Aside from that, there are also a couple of other unique passages, such as one where it feels like the fabric of reality is slowly rippling as deep, slow-motion waves of vibrations rhythmically roll towards me or others where the melodies start to overlap to form stammering, confused, and unfamiliar new patterns.

That last bit is something of a recurring feature through Campana Sonans, as Muir seems to relish slowly transforming order into entropy and vice versa. In fact, it occurred to me at one point that this album sounds like God himself took a couple of massive bong rips and decided to amuse himself by playfully toying with the very physics of time and sound in real time. Similarly, one particular passage amusingly made me feel like the dream machine creating my altered state had started to falter and flicker, allowing some harsher, more mundane sounds from lame-ass physical reality to bleed into my cocoon of meditative bliss. 

They quickly bled the fuck back out again, thankfully, but it was enough to make me aware of how beautifully Muir balances sharp and blurred sounds through the album. While I was easily lured into this album by both the concept and my appreciation of Muir’s other work, I definitely wasn’t expecting to be nearly as entranced by these collages as I ultimately was. Muir’s execution truly elevates the familiar sounds of church bells into something endlessly absorbing and even downright transcendent at times. This is some of the most sublime and immersive sound art that I have encountered in a long time.

Listen here.



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Pye Corner Audio, “Lake Deep Memory” (Quiet Details, 2025)

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This latest album from shapeshifting synth conjurer Martin Jenkins is his first for Quiet Details and captures him in one of his more “immersive soundscape” moods. Notably, I have historically been only a casual fan of the playfully retro “library music” side of this project, but Jenkins has previously beguiled me with his The House In The Woods side project on 2021’s Spectral Corridor and this latest opus repeats that feat. In fact, it may very well be his most mesmerizing release yet. It certainly is for me, anyway. 

Notably, Lake Deep Memory was inspired by a 2024 trip to Guatemala’s singular Lake Atitlan, which is located inside a massive volcanic crater. It is also the deepest lake in Central America and a sacred place for the Maya villages that surround it. Channeling that level of sublime natural beauty into music would be a challenge for anyone, but Jenkins wildly exceeded my expectations with the album’s first half using just a simple palette of synth and some well-chosen field recordings taken during his stay.   

Fittingly, the opening title piece opens with the sound of gently lapping waves that share the focus with a gently warping and flickering synth shimmer to conjure a gorgeously sun-dappled dreamscape of happily chirping birds and immersively hallucinatory bliss. It is the sort of piece that I could happily listen to in an infinite loop, so I was a bit sad to see it go the first time that I listened to this album, but that regret soon became a distant memory once the following “Pyroclastic Flow” proved to be similarly stunning.

Stylistically, “Pyroclastic Flow” is a bit closer to expected Pye Corner Audio terrain, but it is still very much on the slow-burning and psychotropic side of the spectrum, as a simple synth pattern is gradually enveloped by rolling motif that pans and smears its way to a deliriously hallucinatory crescendo. Remarkably, it somehow gets even better from there, as it gradually dissolves back into a more trippy, futuristic, and subtly smoldering variation of the opening motif like a phantasmagoric palindrome.

Improbably, the following “Beneath The Noise Floor” marks Jenkins’ third masterpiece in a row, as a sea of simmering distortion gradually reveals recordings of singing children buried deep within the static (like a less sinister variation on Poltergeist’s iconically creepy television scene). That proves to be just the starting point, however, as it then starts to morph into a beatless dub techno motif that leaves plenty of space to luxuriate in the subtle crackle, hiss, and dissolve of the chords. Impressively, Jenkins still managed to save one last feat of sublime sorcery for the final act, as the dub techno motif gradually starts to resemble a jazzy, hypnagogic strain of yacht rock fighting to emerge from the hiss of a broken radio.

Jenkin’s white-hot run finally starts to winds to a close with “Infinite Symphony,” which is a bit more New Age in its tone than the previous pieces, but is absolutely rapturous in its execution, as sensuously looping “strings” gradually blossom into swaying celestial dreaminess. More importantly, it is the most illustrative example of Jenkins’ organically fluid and sublime vision, as themes seamlessly bend, smear, and transform in a beautifully wave-like way, as each lovely passage is gradually washed away to be replaced by something equally beautiful.

Given that murderers’ row of hits, the album’s second half necessarily feels like a bit of a comedown or coda, but the only real dip in quality is that the album merely downshifts from “sustained, song-length stretches of brilliance” to “a brief flash of brilliance in every piece.” For example, there is a section of the half-pastoral/half-kosmische “Beneath The Noise Floor Part Two” that has the dreamlike doppler effect feel of a harmonica chord emanating from a passing train, while the phase-shifting synth drone in “Volcanic Rock” feels like it is radiating psychotropic vibrations directly to the center of my mind.

“Memoria Del Agua” is the strongest of those second-tier highlights, as an dubby, enigmatic percussive sound fades in and out and moves around spatially like it is being carried by shifting wind patterns. There is also a cool choppy, shuddering motif near the end that suggests mysterious black helicopters flying low over a deep forest, which is not something I would  necessarily want hanging around a sacred volcanic lake, but it makes for a pretty killer track nonetheless. In that regard, it certainly has plenty of company, as Lake Deep Memory is positively bulging with ambient bangers. Jenkins really outdid himself with this one.

Listen here.

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Hugo Randulv, “Drunkna I Ljus” (Discreet, 2025)

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Billed as a “minimal masterpiece of immense beauty,” this second album from Enhet För Fri Musik’s Hugo Randulv is composed of two longform pieces for electric cello and controlled feedback. Notably, I was a huge fan of Randulv’s debut (Radio Arktis), so it was quite nice to discover that its follow up was similarly beautiful and visionary yet otherwise quite different in some very interesting ways.

The opening “Drunkna I Ljus” (Drown In Light) is the more traditional of the two pieces, though it deceptively opens with an extended stretch of sensuously groaning and slightly out-of-phase string drones before opening up into a lovely unaccompanied cello melody. Gradually, however, additional layers of cello creep in to form warm and beautiful harmonies. Compositionally, it is quite a simple piece, as it is essentially just a single wistful motif languorously repeated with subtly shifting harmonies and some fitfully intense undercurrents of a deeper drone, but the illusion that Randulv weaves is quite an achingly beautiful one: the piece has the rustic, not-quite-fully-in-tune feel of a rural village’s traditional music ensemble performing an arrangement of a bittersweet folk melody as a heartfelt outdoor elegy for a beloved bandleader. 

The following “Med Darrande Händer” (With Trembling Hands), on the other hand, feels like a tenderly beautiful cello performance in an empty stone church conjured from an array of distressed tape loops. It mostly shares the rustic, homespun vibe of the opener, but there is one extremely cool and significant difference, as a chirping feedback tone appears to flicker and flutter around the piece like a small flock of hallucinatory bats in the rafters. 

At times, that feedback can get surprisingly harsh, slicing through the dreamlike spell like an extra-dimensional scythe, but then the bottom suddenly drops out entirely and it feels like I just woke up next to a remote pond in the middle of the night after consuming a Herculean amount of hallucinogens: all of the usual nocturnal pond sounds feel grotesquely amplified into a viscerally shrill and sizzling insectoid whine. Thankfully, that unsettling passage doesn’t last long, but it beautifully sets the stage for the unexpected return of the opening theme that feels quietly rapturous and soul-stirring after my lysergic journey through the realm of feedback phantoms.     

Both pieces are pretty damn amazing and complement each other nicely, as the more straightforward opener and the more experimental closer feel like they achieve some kind of perfect Zen balance of light and shadow or yin and yang or whatever. I can definitely understand why there was a four year wait between Randulv’s solo albums, as he clearly spent that time further distilling his vision into something quite unique and sublime. 

Then again, maybe he just felt like making a solo electric cello album one day when he wasn’t busy with other projects like Amateur Hour. Who knows. Either way, Drunkna I Ljus is the second great Hugo Randulv album in a row, which means that he is currently sitting on an absolutely flawless solo discography. Anyone looking for a good entry point into the endlessly fascinating “contemporary homemade music from Sweden” underground would be well-served by starting that journey with either this album or Radio Arktis, as Randulv is most definitely one of the more accessibly melodic & reliably inspired proponents of that endearingly weird and insular scene. 

Listen here.

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Laura Cannell, “LYRELYRELYRE” (Brawl, 2025)

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This 11th solo album from Laura Cannell was amusingly inspired by an eight-year-old conversation with writer/researcher/foghorn enthusiast Jennifer Lucy Allan, who once wrote the titular pun on a post-it note. No stranger to ancient and forgotten instruments herself, Cannell became interested in the history of the lyre & set about bringing it “back into the (Suffolk) landscape it once lived in and into her fold of feral chamber music.” In that regard, she succeeded on both counts, as she plays a copy of a 7th century lyre unearthed in Sutton Hoo, Suffolk back in 1939 and recontextualizes the instrument in an impressively feral way. 

Unsurprisingly, the lyre is one of the central instruments here, but Cannell’s bass recorder does most of the melodic heavy lifting, as she frequently uses her “gut strung lyre-hearpe” more as a roiling, visceral, and delay-enhanced percussion element rather than a melodic one. That’s just fine by me, as I am always a fan of Cannell’s ghostly recorder evocations, but she also memorably throws a double-reeded crumhorn into the mix in the eerie drones of “High Above the Sea Meadows.” That particular piece impressively & improbably suggests an intense & hallucinatory late-period Coil drone performance at a Renn Faire, but most of the other pieces feel considerably more spontaneous, fiery, and improvised.  

As she did with The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined, Cannell expertly harnesses the transformation power of delay to turn the expected sounds of the lyre into something that feels considerably more mysterious and unfamiliar. For example, “A Ship Sunk in Earth” is essentially a rolling landscape of overlapping strums, while sections of “Beneath the Gorse and Bracken” sound like Cannell is furiously trying to conjure as many layers of texture and overtones as she can before the decays fade into silence.

I was most impressed by the closing “Twilight Falls Again,” however, as a hazily wistful recorder melody langourously snakes across the rolling, rippling, and  rhythmic waves of her woody strums. The opening ”Wake the Slumbering Lyre” is another highlight on the more melodic end of the spectrum, as Cannell’s smoky, flicking recorder melody lazily flutters, winds, and forms subtly otherworldly harmonies over a spare backdrop of echoing plucks.

Overall, LYRELYRELYRE is quite an interesting and inventive album within the Cannell canon, but it feels a bit too improvisatory, delay-heavy, and experimental to rank with her strongest work. I’d categorize it more as an inspired detour. That caveat aside, I am genuinely impressed with the unexpected direction that Cannell chose, as her resurrection of the lyre is both very “garage rock” and very avant-garde, as it feels like she conjured up these furiously strummed and sometimes outright convulsive pieces in real time with just a delay pedal and a looper. I have no idea if that is what she actually did, but it does sound like there is a minimum of overdubbing and that many motifs follow a looping, cyclical pattern. 

While I am not a recording purist of any kind, that approach certainly brings out the “feral” edge that Cannell was hoping for and that is really the central appeal of LYRELYRELYRE: Laura Cannell absolutely ripping shit up on an ancient lyre copy. There is an additional deeper and more innovative layer lurking beyond that though, as pieces like the closing “Twilight Falls Again” weave a gorgeously rippling and beautifully textured bed of rattling strings that evokes the rolling waves of a wood and gut-string sea, while “Keep the Beacons Burning” evokes the unpredictable movements of a hallucinatory cloud of wood & metal bird marionettes. Neat trick.

Listen here.

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Kara-Lis Coverdale, “From Where You Came” (Smalltown Supersound, 2025)

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I was beginning to despair that I may never hear a new Kara-Lis Coverdale album ever again, as it has been eight years since the Montreal-based composer last surfaced with the stellar Grafts EP (the strongest release of her career). This latest release is definitely not what I was expecting as a follow up, however, as it often resembles an ‘80s New Age synth visionary attempting to perform a hypnagogic live soundtrack to a classic Disney fairytale, but a mischievous projectionist spliced in some surprise scenes from a vampire film, a kooky carnival, and a tropical vacation to keep her on her toes.

The fairytale that I envision is quite a unique one though, as the plot that I imagine is that a cool princess in a magic crystal castle emerges every evening to give an eclectic freeform Mellotron concert to an enraptured audience of unicorns and delightful woodland creatures who love every single allusion to 20th century jazz and avant-garde composers or 19th century programmatic music.  Nothing bad or frightening ever happens (aside from the occasional dissonant harmony or viscerally slicing texture) and everyone lives happily ever after.

That is admittedly not stylistic terrain that I ever expected to embrace, but these pieces are so charmingly playful, unpredictably experimental, and full of wonder that I quickly fell in love with this album in spite of myself. Even the darker moments have their share of endearingly wonky bits, as the lurching, gasping, and scraping industrial groove of album highlight “Offload Flip” erupts into a deliriously squirming and jazzy synth solo around the halfway point. 

Elsewhere, the Fourth World-inspired “Daze” suggests something between a Tim Hecker residency in the lounge of an exclusive tropical resort and something you’d hear playing in a New Age bookstore after dark when they bring out the wild stuff (like a secret tape of ayahuasca-fueled Laurie Spiegel improvisations or something). As for the remaining pieces, the evoke everything from a Siren’s fogbank serenade to a newly cured vampire greeting his first sunrise to a dueling synth showdown at a Renn Faire to a slowly deflating brass band being gradually engulfed by a swell of blissed-out synths. In short, this is a memorably fun, inventive, and freewheeling album. It may not much resemble the Kara-Lis Coverdale that I thought I knew, but the current Kara-Lis Coverdale has one hell of a wild and oft-revelatory vision.

Listen here.

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