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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 an 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.

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. I don’t want to romanticize rural poverty and desperation, but it definitely seems like humanity has only enslaved itself further over the last century (though our our travel and entertainment options have certainly improved immensely).

Music aside, it was genuinely a deeply intense and unsettling experience to be reminded that humans have largely abandoned tight-knit communities and the beauty and wonder of the natural world for an inescapable dehumanized dystopia of meaningless jobs, shallow connections, greed, pointless wars, xenophobic cruelty, endless surveillance, and the relentless ascent of unwanted artificial intelligence. 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.

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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Romance, “Love Is Colder Than Death” (Ecstatic, 2025)

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The latest release from this oft-fascinating (and anonymous) London-based project is billed as a “noir ambient masterpiece” and a “fever dream in the lineage of Dashiel Hammett and David Lynch.” That paints a pretty accurate picture of what to expect, as Love Is Colder Than Death is a shifting, elegant, and sensuously hallucinatory dreamscape of haunting torch song melodies, smoldering femme fatales, lazily curling cigarette smoke, and snatches of classic movie soundtracks enigmatically shrouded in a fog of distressed tape hiss and murk.

Unsurprisingly, The Caretaker & Pinkcourtesyphone are close reference points, but Romance’s vision has a more narcotically seductive and hopefully sentimental tone than either—like I am experiencing the troubled dreams of a young starlet who has just gotten her first glimpse of Hollywood’s dark underbelly. Moreover, the spell that Romance casts is a gorgeously immersive and evocative one, as I often feel like I am living inside a luminous black & white version of Mulholland Drive when I listen to this album on headphones.

The opening “Too Much Love” is a prime example of that vision, as a lovesick and sultry disembodied chanteuse sings “Too Much Love” from South of St. Louis in a hallucinatory haze of ghostly ambiance with an occasional splash of discordant piano. “Farewell My Lovely” is another smoldering stunner in that vein, as it resembles one of Carl Stone’s recent delirious chopped-up pop song experiments applied to the slowed and pitch-shifted piano jazz of a lonely cabaret where it is always 3am.

While that particular vibe was exactly what I was hoping for, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the eclectic detours that Romance takes along the way. For example, “Spellbound” has a lushly romantic spaghetti Western vibe that conjures a doomed gunfighter saying farewell to one true love before his final showdown.Elsewhere, the warmly beautiful “Two Of A Kind” feels like the theme music for a wide-eyed ingénue who just arrived in Hollywood with just a suitcase and a whole lot of hopes and dreams. Stylistically, it suggests gorgeously dream-like, soft-focus Celer-style loop mesmerism coaxed from the locked groove of a sentimental old Western soundtrack.

The album’s most achingly beautiful piece, however, is  “Kiss The Blood Off My Hands,” which sounds like a ghostly, hiss-soaked recording of a rapturous classical mass that leaves hazy vapor trails in its wake that linger like a mysterious perfume. The whole album is essentially one inspired motif after another though and it all flows together beautifully from the first note til the last (the slowly dissolving violin loop of closing “End Credits” evokes the kitschy horror of Carnival of Souls, for example). 

This is honestly my favorite Romance album by a landslide, as it transcends the  ambient genre so beautifully that it feels like it could have been an iconic classic film soundtrack in its own right. Or, more accurately, it is an album so rich with light, shadow, emotional depth, mood, and mystique that it feels like it is actually a film itself (and quite a fucking good one too). Love Is Colder Than Death is an absolutely mesmerizing headphone rabbit hole. 

Listen here.

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Ash Fure, “Animal” (Smalltown Supersound, 2025)

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This is arguably the solo debut from iconoclastic NYC composer Ash Fure, but it has been preceded by quite an impressive & eclectic run of ambitious performances and major accolades (an experimental opera, a Berghain performance, a Guggenheim Fellowship, etc.). Musically, Animal’s closest reference points are the building-shaking frequency sorcery of emptyset, the more abstract/deconstructed side of Pan Sonic/Mika Vainio, or one of Francisco López’s immersive sound installations. Conceptually and artistically, however, Fure is in a category all her own, as Animal was devised as a sort of performance/installation hybrid in which she plays an upturned subwoofer rig of 12 inch speaker cones with a large reflective sheet of polycarbonate. That sheet acts as a “real-time filter” for sound and light” and its “translucent material allows her to interact with lights built into the instrumental rig, and beam reflected sound and light around the exact architecture she’s in” (fittingly, Fure’s partner/collaborator Xavi Aguirre is an actual architect).

While that admittedly sounds very technological/futuristic, the album’s title is both intended as a bit of a swipe at artificial intelligence and as a literal reference to the sweat-drenched physicality of Fure’s performances and her desire to unleash sounds that “cause a bodily reaction” in her audience. Notably, the visceral nature of this work is inspired by Fure’s time haunting Detroit and Berlin techno clubs, but the resemblance to techno is otherwise limited to the constrained sound palette of “sub-bass, sonar clicks and white noise” that she seamlessly transforms into a series of pulsing psychoacoustic mirages. In more concrete terms, Animal is a shapeshifting fantasia of noise, drones, seismic bass, and percussion patterns that continually form new constellations as the various elements wax, wane, spatially pan, or fade in and out of focus. Sometimes the sounds can be meditative (slow-motion bass throbs) or eerily beautiful (glassy, feedback-like sounds), but the most stunning passages tend to be the crescendos that evoke everything from circling helicopters in a hallucinatory jungle warzone to a cloud of whirling knives to heaving industrial machinery slowly sinking in a bubbling tar pit with a laser light show accompaniment. In short, brilliant stuff all around. Hopefully I will someday manage to catch one of Fure’s actual performances, but Animal makes a great consolation prize in the meantime as both boldly visceral/unique sound art and one hell of a headphone album. 

Listen here.

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Pacific Walker, “Lost in the Valley of the Sun” (Bluesanct, 2025)

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This is the second release from the trio of Isaac Edwards, Michael Tapscott, and Raphi Gottesman, but the three artists have a long history together, as all were previously members of Odawas. While Odawas certainly delved into similarly psychedelic folk territory, the difference between the two projects is quite a dramatic one, as this album is more of a hallucinatory and impressionist fantasia than a collection of songs. The opening “Induction Ceremony” makes for a bit of a deceptive introduction, however, as it initially sounds like an beatific hippy jam around a campfire before it gradually dissolves into smeared and whooshing cacophony of chanting voices. Once that descent down the rabbit hole is complete, however, this tape sounds like something that would have been found in the overgrown jungle ruins of Jonestown if everyone there had been raptured up to heaven instead of dying in a mass suicide. 

More specifically, Lost in the Valley of the Sun feels like an enigmatic chopped-and-screwed fever dream of private press New Age mysticism and outsider hippy cult/commune ensembles like The Source Family. Beyond the wonderfully bleary, blissed out, and hallucinatory vibe homage, however, lies an ingeniously crafted and legitimately transcendent headphone album centered around a single sublime song.  That song’s most perfect iteration is “Blessed in The Chapel of the Tears (Crying),” a sensuously swaying dream of strummed acoustic guitar, slowed-down vocals, an unexpectedly soulful sax solo, and hallucinatory vapor trails of vocal effects. 

The same “Someday I’ll find…” vocal hook continually resurfaces throughout the album, teasing out poetic lyrical fragments until the whole song comes together with the closing “Some Kind of Guru,” but some of the most beautiful moments on the album are the evocative ambient dreamscapes along the way (“Bustuarii Tears for di Inferni” and “Birds in Paradise”). The overall experience feels akin to slowly waking up stoned on a beach to a sublimely gorgeous sunrise or blissfully dissolving into a beam of pure white light in a remote jungle. Given that, Lost In The Valley of the Sun is an absolutely mesmerizing and immersive experience on pure vibes alone, but I was also a bit blown away by the ingenious construction of Pacific Walker’s halcyon jungle paradise. This entire album is a sublime feat of minimalist magic, refracting just a few simple chords and words into a kaleidoscopic swirl of  haunting melodies and oscillating, dreamlike vapor trails of decay and delay. Brilliant work.

Listen here.