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Romance, “You Must Remember This (Expanded Edition)” (Ecstatic 2020/2025)

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Newly issued on vinyl in remastered and expanded form (and almost instantly sold out), 2020’s You Must Remember This was the mixtape that first introduced this anonymous London-based project to the world. Since then, the project has evolved considerably and released several collaborations with both Ecstatic co-founder Alessio Natalizia (Not Waving) and long-time David Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley.

Notably, that latter union already seemed preordained by fate even at this early stage, as both Mulholland Drive and Angelo Badalementi are pretty obvious touchstones, but Romance’s plunderphonic vision of tape music also feels equally informed by minimalist loop-weavers like Celer and William Basinski and the haunted luxury hotel ambiance of Richard Chartier’s Pinkcourtesyphone project. The sublime moods that this mysterious composer conjures up are distinctly their own, however, as these dreamlike vignettes re-envision smudged, slow-motion melancholy as something considerably more sensuous and sexy than usual.

Aside from the new format, the remastering job by Demdike Stare’s Miles Whittaker, and the addition of two additional pieces not included on the original cassette, this reissue is also significant for finally revealing the album’s song titles. That said, I use the word “song” loosely here, as the album is essentially a series of loop-driven mood pieces that have been stitched together into an immersive, pink-hued fantasia. 

Notably, one of the “new” pieces borrows its title from The Smiths’ lovesick classic “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want,” which nods towards Romance’s genuine and well-documented fondness for pop music love songs both cool and otherwise (a trait that manifested itself most strongly on 2022’s Celine Dion-inspired In My Hour of Weakness, I Found a Sweetness EP).

Elsewhere, the album’s title provides yet another clue to one of Romance’s central inspirations, as it is a reference to the first line of “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca. It may also be an allusion to Karina Longworth’s long-running podcast of the same name, as the secret and forgotten history of Hollywood definitely seems like it would be of great interest to this enigmatic artist. Classic Hollywood film soundtracks loom very large in Romance’s world.

As Ecstatic eloquently observed back in 2020, this album straddles “the Warholian line of high / low culture,” as Romance elegantly blurs the “winsome emotive nostalgia of Hollywood symphonic soundtracks” with ostensibly kitschy borrowings from pop music to craft a wonderfully pulp/noir-informed “psychotropic, time-smearing mixtape” of “chopped & screwed romantic classical and new age ballads.”

To my ears, Romance’s “classic Hollywood” side is best represented by the sensuously swooning, flickering, and endlessly restarting string loops of the opening “Come Closer,” but that piece is also a prime example of why future Romance albums would surpass this one, as the grandeur and achingly beautiful delirium of that piece only lasts for a minute and half before dissolving into the next piece. Maddening brevity aside, however, “Come Closer” is rapturously beautiful while it lasts, as Romance definitely knows how to weave pure magic from little more than an insistently looping fragment of melody.

Thankfully, however, there are a few more divergent gems that linger around long enough to make a deeper impression. My favorite of the lot is “Just Like Me,” which casts a seductive, slow-motion spell of unintelligibly time-stretched and murmuring vocal melodies, but I am also quite fond of the similarly glacial “Songbird,” which combines Badalementi-esque synths and hallucinatory chimes with a skeletal groove of clicks, pops, and cymbals distilled to little more than rhythmic hiss and sizzle. 

The piece that best captures this album’s essence, however, is the spectral, hiss-soaked, and decidedly uneasy ambiance of “And So To Sleep Again.” The piece’s central motif is a murky, stammering, and subtly hallucinatory minor key piano theme, which departs from the rest of the album’s smudgy, soft-focus sensuality and blissed-out ambient interludes to feel like a séance in which a prophecy of impending doom supernaturally bleeds though a veil of hissing static. It acts as a fleeting and chill-inducing shadow that suggests that the story is unlikely to end well for our hypothetical starry-eyed ingénue despite the warm, poignant beauty and romance that otherwise pervades the album.

To circle back to David Lynch once more, the album resembles a version of Mullholland Drive that ends long before things start to get truly dark, but mingles flickering and elusive memories of tangled sheets, luxurious hotels, soft-focus eroticism, and Hollywood glamor with enough ephemeral glimpses of curdled dissonance to suggest that this languorously sexy, and glittering dreamworld is just as precarious and fleeting as an actual dream.

That is quite a subtly sophisticated and emotionally complex world for a debut album to conjure, so it is easy to see why You Must Remember This deserved a deluxe reissue such as this one. While I do think that this project fitfully continued to get better and better with successive releases, Romance’s vision was already distinctive, immersive, and fully formed even at this early stage. Moreover, the two new pieces make this incarnation an unexpectedly significant improvement upon the (already wonderful) original, as the billowing dream fog and chimes of the new closer make for a sublimely beautiful finale. This album is one hell of a immersive and mesmerizing delirium.    

Listen here.   

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The Humble Bee, “Morning Music” (Cotton Goods (2010)/Dauw (2025)

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Newly remastered and reissued for the first time ever, Morning Music was the second handmade release from Craig Tattersall’s solo tape music project. Notably, Tattersall had already been involved in several great bands by this stage (Hood, The Remote Viewer, The Boats), but the simple, intimate ambient soundscapes of The Humble Bee were a new direction for him and the original 4CD collection was a major statement that has deservedly acquired a cult following over the years through unofficial uploads. Notably, the album’s title is quite literal, as these pieces were all recorded over the course of a frigid Manchester January between 6am and 7am each day (before Tattersall left for work) and each piece needed to be fully composed, recorded, mixed, and documented within that one hour. 

Given that tight time constraint, these pieces are all understandably quite brief (two or three minutes each) and quite simple as well (usually just two or three interwoven loops). That brevity and simplicity seemed to suit Tattersall just fine, however, as these tender and sublime miniatures cumulatively add up to languorously beautiful and immersive extended reverie. Unsurprisingly, Tattersall’s palette was quite simple as well, as he wove his magic from little more than a few blearily frayed and murmuring chords, an occasional gently flickering fragment of melody, and a healthy amount of crackling, hissing, and fluttering tape noise. That last bit is unusually important, as it gives these delicate pieces a satisfying physicality in which they seem to be crackling with electricity and life. Those non-musical sounds also often play an integral role in shaping the hypnotic rhythm of these looping meditations.  

In keeping with the theme of meditation, the essential beauty of these pieces lies in the Zen-like harmony of Tattersall’s combined loops, as he proves himself to be quite adept at finding the ideal balancing element for each of his central themes. For example, the gentle murmuring ambiance of “06.01.2010” unexpectedly blossoms into deep, languorous beauty around the halfway point when a warm, repeating bass tone and wobbly two-note melody appear. Elsewhere, “17.01.2010” is another highlight, as a sensuous and whistling melody resembling a singing saw gradually emerges from a cold rumble. I was also struck by a back-to-back pair of lovely piano pieces on the album’s second half (“19.01.2010” & “20.01.2010”), as twinkling and rippling melodies lazily circle over a backdrop of warm, wistful chords.

That said, the individual highlights are far less important than the overall experience, as Morning Music feels like a blissful morning spent in a cozy cabin with a crackling fire and manages to sustain that heavenly illusion for the duration of two full LPs. Actually, scratch that: it actually feels more like a warm memory of such a morning, as the warped, stretched, flickering, and submerged textures of the tape loops imbue these pieces with a dream-like sense of unreality that is an extremely alluring place to linger. In fact, I can think of few albums more deserving of a reissue than this one, so Dauw deserves a lot of credit for finally coaxing Tattersall into making that a reality. I especially envy the people who managed to snag the original hand-assembled Cotton Goods release with the daily photographs from Tattersall’s window and the diagrams of his set-up, as Morning Music is an absolute classic of intimate and soulful home-recorded magic.  

Listen here.

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Skullflower, “Draconis” (Cold Spring, 2014)

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It is hardly newsworthy to report that a Skullflower album is a blackened, face-melting fusillade of gnarled guitar noise or that it sounds like shoegaze turned occult and murderous, but Draconis still kind of blindsided me. Though it is characteristically grinding and brutally heavy from start to finish, Matthew Bowers and Samantha Davies unexpectedly balanced their caustic maelstrom with a bit more structure and melody this time around. Not all the time, mind you, but when the combination of harrowing noise and buried melody comes together just right, Draconis feels like one of the most brilliant albums in the Skullflower canon.

Draconis was ambitiously and curiously billed as “synapse-scorching occult industrial prog noise folk,” which probably does a fine job at summarizing late-period Skullflower’s inspirations, but is a bit misleading in describing the actual content, which falls much closer to “drone-damaged walls of guitar noise.” Though it thankfully has some structure (historically not Bowers’ strong suit), there is nothing here that suggests the complex, byzantine structures of progressive rock, nor is there much to suggest “folk” in the traditional sense (like, say, an audible acoustic guitar, a traditional melody, or any vocals). Instead, Draconis is mostly a series of roiling oceanic soundscapes of metallic bowed strings, throbbing low end, and smoldering guitar noise. That said, there is definitely something deeper happening as well, even if it is not overt: Draconis still somehow feels like concept album in its own weird way, evoking an otherworldly ritualistic atmosphere and occasionally blossoming into unexpected vistas of relative calm.

Unsurprisingly, the best pieces are those where Davies and Bowers augment their noise squall with some kind of perverse anti-hook. For example, “To Raise Wolves” beautiful enhances its trebly Black Metal guitars with washes of white noise and an insistently swooping “air raid siren” synth motif. Such innovations appear with far more frequency on the superior second disc than on the first, with nearly every song standing out in some inspired way. Some major highlights are the warped shoegaze guitars of “Autumn’s Trinkets” (which call to mind the smoldering ruins of a Swervedriver song) or the rippling undercurrent and howling roar of the epic and hallucinatory closer “Dakshninikalika.” The most stunning piece, however, is “Sunset Dreams,” in which the duo’s tortured, dissonantly harmonizing guitars unfold over an unrelenting, slow-motion chord progression and an omnipresent shivering hiss. The overall effect is quite an apocalyptic one: “Sunset Dreams” would be the perfect soundtrack to deserted city of collapsing buildings.

If Draconis has a flaw, it is that its many moments of sublime, alien beauty are interspersed with some rather harsh noise, which may make it a rough ride for those solely looking for warped guitar genius. Also, the best pieces on the album inadvertently call attention to the fact that the weaker pieces could have been much better if they had only incorporated some kind of additional hook or twist to the formula. Such pieces are hardly boring though—their rewards simply lie in their sheer massiveness, raw power, and textural complexity. Also, I personally enjoy harsh noise done well, so I am delighted by the idea of an excellent and blistering noise opus that periodically blossoms into something much more wonderful. Though it is undeniably very “niche,” Draconis feels like an absolute tour de force/possible career-defining masterpiece to me. This was easily one of my favorite albums of 2014 and it is still one hell of a ripper more than a decade later. Blackened grandeur at its finest. 

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The Shadow Ring, “Hold Onto I.D.” (Siltbreeze (1997) / Blank Forms (2025))

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Newly reissued, this singular 1998 album is billed as arguably being The Shadow Ring’s best-known and most accessible album, but there are a couple of important caveats to that claim. The main one is that The Shadow Ring’s entire discography had been maddeningly out-of-print for years before Blank Forms ambitious reissue campaign began and this album was the only one available on streaming platforms, so it is arguably their best-known album for reasons other than its merits alone. Secondly, accessibility is a relative thing and “most accessible Shadow Ring album” essentially means “a bit more accessible than a Jandek album.” Despite the clattering martial-style percussion on de-tuned drums, Lambkin’s discordant guitar abuse, and Goss’s queasily disorienting synths, however, this album is an improbably fun and haunting glimpse into a deeply weird and unfamiliar world.

Notably, I personally find the earlier Wax-Work Echoes to be much more musically satisfying and easier on the ears, but the more spoken word-centric Hold Onto I.D. is a fascinating and unique release in a completely different way, as it offers an unsettling and vaguely sinister account of Graham Lambkin & Darren Harris’s new life in Coombe House (a former ambulance station) after moving out of their parents’ homes (which were still within walking distance). While Blank Forms rightly describes this as the band’s “most overtly autobiographical” release, the actual reality of Coombe House is transformed into a curdled magical realist nightmare in which our two dour protagonists are continually besieged and menaced by an alarming infestation of sea creatures.  

Notably, this is the Shadow Ring’s second album to feature Tim Goss on electronics and keyboards. In theory, the reduced emphasis on Lambkin’s jarringly discordant out-of-tune guitar strums seems like it should have heralded a big leap forward in listenability, but that is again not always the case here, as Goss unleashes some willfully annoying and incredibly shrill sounds in Hold Onto I.D.’s first two pieces. Also, there is still plenty of dissonant and gleefully inept guitar playing to be found. There have been plenty of bands over the years that have transcended their crap gear and lack of instrumental competence to make magic, but the Shadow Ring is not one of them on this particular album. 

Fortunately, the combination of Lambkin’s half-sardonic/half-creepy lyrics and Harris’s amusingly bitter and hostile-sounding readings of said lyrics are compelling enough to make the music itself feel like a somewhat irrelevant afterthought. Apparently, Lambkin made a conscious effort to use bureaucratic language on this album, which often makes Harris sound like an incredibly disapproving government official grumbling about snails and other prominent Shadow Ring concerns. In fact, I am tempted to characterize Hold Onto I.D. as a wonderful and bat-shit crazy spoken word album that also happens to have some music.

My favorite pieces are “Coombe House” and “Like When,” but the real appeal of this album is akin to a found footage horror movie mingled with flashes of jet-black deadpan comedy (though the band repeatedly insist that it is “no occasion to laugh” and dourly add that “prawn got a bit involved”). Fittingly, “You’ve got to watch the water” is the overarching concern this time around, as Harris laments snail infestations and notes “leaving this house becomes a dream” (a sentiment that the band’s lone hapless neighbor probably echoed as well). While the aforementioned sea creatures allegedly send the band’s piano to a simultaneously watery & grisly grave at one point (no occasion to laugh again, obviously), there are also plenty of amusing and pseudo-autobiographical details that suggest Coombe House is not entirely an unending nightmare. For example, Harris proudly notes at one point that he can now cook whenever he wants or open any window at any time he wants and further notes that “the washing up gets done” (“aided and abetted by brushes and things”). Concerned listeners will also be relieved to learn that “there are no dictators anymore over fat-free milk.”

There is also a good deal of deadpan meta-commentary on the album itself, as a microphone abruptly quits and vows “to work with better bands” at one point. Harris also drolly notes “I am not concerned with the music tying in with the words—not now…and I never was that bothered before.” Lambkin also throws some wonderfully groan-inducing dystopian jokes into the lyrics, as “Basic Everyday Life” finds Harris warning of a future in which fish are only caught in “internets” and robots determine whether you have chicken or tripe for dinner. They also arguably break the fourth wall at the end of “Coombe House,” as Harris grimly insists “black out…NOW.. Do it now.” Of course, that may have instead been directed at Harris himself by Lambkin (he DOES stop speaking for the song’s final minute). 

While I can certainly see why the aforementioned disgruntled microphone sought refuge elsewhere, Lambkin, Harris, and Goss were really onto something quite amazing on this release: every time I listen to the entire thing, I get sucked deeper and deeper into The Shadow Ring’s mind-bending rabbit hole of dissonance, rot, and improbable apartment problems. I think that makes this some kind of outsider masterpiece, as my deep immersion in this album this week has left me feeling like a half-mad resident of Coombe House myself (though I am thankfully not yet fearful of my shower drain).

Listen here.

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The Shadow Ring, “Wax-Work Echoes” (Corpus Hermeticum (1996) / Blank Forms (2025))

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Amusingly, The Shadow Ring’s third album was originally intended to be a collection of outtakes and live recordings for Bruce Russell’s new Corpus Hermeticum label, but a crucial recording from the band’s US tour was accidentally left in a bar. That setback was ambitiously overcome by recording an entire album of new material instead and it was notably the first to feature Tim Goss as a full-time member. Notably, Goss had been making sample-based music with a computer, so his inclusion coincided with the arrival of some better gear. Consequently, this album significantly departs from its more primitive predecessors with improved sound quality, a strong emphasis on electronics, and the involvement of the Goss family piano.

That said, Graham Lambkin’s discordantly out-of-tune guitar strums remain a central feature at this stage and Goss occasionally proves himself to be similarly adept at unleashing his own eruptions of annoying dissonance. At other times, however, the trio unexpectedly conjure something best described as outsider musique concrète along with surprisingly effective squalls of noise and feedback. Unsurprisingly, Darren Harris’s vocals remain delightfully unsettling, compelling, and enigmatic as ever, but this album is unexpectedly more significant for its flashes of brilliance with the music itself, which is not something I often say about The Shadow Ring.

The opening “You’re Holding All Your Feathered Stock” is one of the stronger pieces on the album as well as one of the more representative pieces (for better or worse), as Lambkin’s thorny guitar strumming gives the pieces the feel of some kind of ragged and ritualistic occult procession while Harris ominously announces that the screaming birds are being kept away from sunlight and harm. It’s great while it lasts, but it also boasts a lengthy self-sabotaging outro of shrill synth indulgence. The following “Catching Sight” has the opposite trajectory, as it begins with somewhat half-baked piano hammering yet gradually (if lazily) blossoms into a mystifying yet vivid sound collage that feels like a collision of farm machinery, sprinklers, animal sounds, spacy synth throb, and a mechanical monkey. It then closes with the explicit introduction of some of the album’s unlikely central themes (and recurring refrains) about the importance of taking some time to get it right and the question “who says vermin are shy?” Elsewhere, the trio’s “self-mythologizing lyrics” additionally “celebrate the clicking of horse hooves, ponder the sociability of rats and mice, and warn of the dangers of poultry.”

My favorite piece is “Recovered Meat,” as the trio gradually whip up a properly unhinged and visceral onslaught of howling electronic mayhem over an understated beat and a pleasantly bleeping and squirmy synth motif. Elsewhere, “Camel or Carthorse” is album’s most charming piece, as Lambkin somewhat tunefully (if morosely) sings a lilting melody about fur bonnets and other Shadow Ring concerns over comparatively amiable acoustic guitar. It has the feel of an outsider sea shanty (not unfamiliar terrain for the band), but then Harris suddenly crashes the party with a spoken (and vaguely threatening) meta-narrative about what the song has accomplished so far and warns “I’ve got some more of this music” and further declares that “a hit is a hit.” “Rats and Mice” is a perverse delight as well, as Harris again urges listeners to “get things right” through a veil of distortion over a distracted and shambolic martial rhythm strafed by electronic chaos and feedback.

That said, the quality of the individual songs on Wax-Works Echoes is really secondary to the experience of being immersed in The Shadow Ring’s insular, unsettling, and half-creepy/half-funny headspace, as there is nothing else quite like it. There is rarely a moment in which the nexus of provocative art, willful obnoxiousness, and elaborate joke is not incredibly blurry, but that gives the album a sense of macabre fun no matter how dour Harris seems about the various absurd plights facing him. While there are certainly cerebral shades of a conscious musique concrète influence and Jandek-ian guitar misuse as well as actual poetry, the band are equally likely to play mattress springs, abuse walkie-talkies and answering machines, rant about vermin, credit non-existent band members, or bring in a guest like Richard Youngs to make noises with a chair. Anything goes and it is all gleefully deranged. 

Given that. sometimes this album can admittedly be really damn annoying, but the moments when everything works feel like a haunting and inscrutable transmission from a grimy, hallucinatory, and mouse-plagued alternate dimension and there is nothing else quite like it on earth. The band were definitely in the thrall of some (curdled) white-hot inspiration here. Also, I genuinely admire the fact that three resourceful broken-brained weirdos living with their parents in a coastal resort town took the time to get things so gloriously wrong that they grabbed the attention of underground music luminaries all over the world (and managed to do it without Harris’s parents even noticing that he was in a band for several albums). This is one of my favorite Shadow Ring albums.

 Listen here.

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Anadol, “Uzun Havalar” (Kinship (2018)/Pingipung (2019))

This 2018 album was not Anadol’s debut, but it was definitely the first album from the project that actually managed to reach a wide audience (quite deservedly, since it is an absolute banger). The project (named after an old Turkish automobile brand) is self-described as “psychedelic synth folk” this time around, as Uzun Havalar is assembled from “collective improvisations of Middle Eastern folk songs called ‘uzun hava.’” While the album was recorded in Istanbul with a varying ensemble of talented improvisers, Anadol is ostensibly the solo project of Berlin-based photographer and sound artist Gözen Atila, who delved into lo-fi synth pop to escape the “darkness of serious music.” In that regard, she succeeded quite spectacularly, as Uzun Havalar evokes the kitschy magic of a fun (and remarkably virtuosic) ‘80s Turkish wedding band indulging their wildest prog & space rock dreams.  

The heart of the Anadol sound is Atila’s fondness for “mini organs manufactured during the 70s and 80s,” as she clearly relishes using their preset rhythms as the playful foundations for these pieces. Anyone who ever owned a cheap Casio will likely recognize a festive pre-programmed “samba” or “bossa nova” setting or two on this album, as Atila loves the inherent humor and challenge in “working with clichés” and transcending the limitations of retro electronics and minimalist gear.  She also has a deep fondness for the “tavern music” aesthetic that was popular in Turkey’s nightlife in the 1980s, which usually involved a lone musician with a keyboard singing an eclectic array of pop hits to drunk middle-aged couples in pubs.

While I would probably love a pure pastiche of that era, that is just one of the many eclectic inspirations behind Uzun Havalar, as Atila and her ensemble gamely assimilate everything from classic Euro/Turkish film soundtracks to Dada-esque art provocations to outsider artists like The Space Lady. Hell, I think classic Pink Floyd may even be in there as well, but the actual influences matter less than the fact that Atila and her cadre of Turkish improv luminaries manage to keep things sizzling and propulsive despite the campy and improbable genre collisions that they are continually navigating. 

Most of the strongest pieces fall on the first side of the album and the best of the lot is either “Ay Çürüdü (The Moon Decayed)” or “Casio Havası.” Notably, the latter is the only solo Atila performance on the album, but its kooky and sensuous groove somehow sounds like a killer jazz ensemble borrowed the gear from a minimal wave act for a smoldering afterhours set at an Turkish nightclub. It absolutely rules, but so does the similarly wild and weird “Ay Çürüdü.”

“Ay Çürüdü” deceptively starts off with little more than melancholy synth chords and some smoldering and soulful contributions from saxophonists Fehmican Gözüm and Suphi Sökücü and trumpeter Serkan Emre Çiftçi, but catches fire in sublime fashion once the wistful vocal melody comes in. I am honestly not sure if that melody is vocalist Lale Kardeş singing through some effects or if it is the “voice” setting on one of Atila’s organs, but it is sensuous, slow-motion heaven regardless. There are also plenty of spirited whoops and gales of laughter along the way, a trippy synth solo that recalls classic Pink Floyd at their spaciest, and killer production that makes the brass bits sound absolutely amazing on headphones. In short, it’s an absolute tour de force. 

I was also a bit blown away by the freewheeling opener “Görünmez Hava (Invisible Air),” as a locked groove-style bass line and a jazzy pre-set rhythm anchor a weird and wild trip though an eclectic array of organ sounds. Unusually, Atila is joined by Emir Özer on synth, so there is an amusing “dueling synth” aspect to the piece that sounds like the pair are gleefully channel-surfing through various proggy and spacey synth sounds, but they also seem to always have a cool melody idea already locked and loaded for each fresh setting. The dubby effects on Askin Kirim’s trumpet are quite nice as well.

While the remaining four pieces do not ascend to quite the same level as those highlights, they are at least memorably eccentric and outré. For example, “Adieu” lands somewhere between the carnivalesque and a manic jazz score to a chase scene in a ‘70s underground animation film, while “Bir Garip Kan İçme Töreni (A Strange Blood-Drinking Ceremony)” sounds like it could be a Nintendo game theme colliding with the ululations from hammily over-acted scream queen auditions. Both “Ya Evde Korksan (What If You’re Scared at Home?)” and the melancholy guitar closer “78 Yılının En Uzun Dakikası (The Longest Minute of ’78)” have their share of cool moments though.

Normally, I would not hail an album with only three great songs as a masterpiece, but Uzun Havalar is a rare exception, as the best bits are almost impossibly cool and it is also damn near impossible not to love Atila’s cheerfully deranged and endlessly entertaining “anything goes” aesthetic. At its best, this album sounds like it could be an imaginary Sublime Frequencies comp entitled “Killer Turkish Wedding Band Inexplicably Got Booked to Play a Psychedelic Laser Light Show at a Planetarium (and They Absolutely Smashed It).”

Listen here. 

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ssabæ, “azurescens” (Few Crackles, 2022)

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This is the third album from an enigmatic and self-described “nebula of friends gathering in studios, meadows and tiny apartments all over France” and fittingly borrows its name from a species of psychedelic mushroom. While the mushrooms, the meadows, and the mysterious revolving cast of musicians certainly all suggest that azurescens is likely to be packed with interminable and loose freak-folk jams, absolutely nothing could be further from the reality. In fact, the only real similarity to freak/outsider folk music is merely the timeless and hallucinatory vibe that this collective beautifully conjures. Someone in this nebula clearly knows their way around a studio and set out to craft an absolutely sublime, minimalist vision. Whoever it was, they succeeded quite beautifully (my money is on saxophonist Gwen Jamois, the given name of world-class crate-digger and electronic music producer lueke). 
 

The album opens with its most eerie piece, “tous les murs sont des portes,” which sounds like a nursery rhyme recorded by either a cult or a coven of witches. It is also quite hauntingly beautiful though, as vocalist Margaux Delatour hypnotically chants a few French phrases over a stark backdrop of discordant autoharp strums, strangled saxophone squawks, and trippy dub effects. It is quite an ingeniously constructed piece as well, as Delatour’s sensual sing-song chant provides perfect the melodic grounding to free up the rest of the ensemble to unleash a quietly vivid and spatially mobile psychedelic storm of smeared drones, jangling chimes, and broken sounding arpeggios.While the rest of the album is considerably less witchy in atmosphere, the remaining songs can almost all be reasonably described as variations on the same killer theme, as each piece is built from a simple melodic motif that is immersed in a gorgeously lysergic swirl of otherworldly sounds and textures.
 

In the following “le matin,” for example, a delicate harp and a repeating bass line form the melodic backbone of the piece, but the atmosphere is largely driven by the surrounding sounds of singing birds and laughter (along with some subtly hazy synth shimmer). The overall effect is somewhere between Portishead DJing a sizzlin’ party at an aviary and a chamber music nightmare haunted by hollowly cheerful sounds. Elsewhere, “en équilibre” is a considerably warmer highlight, as Delatour wordlessly hums a pretty melody over a minimal backdrop of conversation and Spanish-sounding guitar. To my ears, however, the final piece on the album (“l’archipel fractal”) that is the real stunner, as a gently pulsing and glassy sounding melody languorously unfolds over a simple backdrop of still more Spanish-sounding acoustic guitar. It makes me feel like I am being serenaded by a heavenly dream calliope while napping on a beautiful patio overlooking the Mediterranean, but it is also mingled with a sense of unreality akin to living inside the tropical version of a snow globe.
 

That said, the title piece is another fierce contender for the album’s zenith, as Delatour’s melancholy and sensuous vocals initially evoke a torch song chanteuse performing an a cappella tour de force in front of a gently hissing waterfall. It gradually fleshes out a bit with some saxophone and light psychedelic magic in the periphery, but the real beauty lies in how Delatour’s voice lazily pans around spatially and sometimes feels incredibly close and intimate. That trick in particular captures the essence of what makes this album so fucking mesmerizing and immersive on headphones, as ssabæ distill their vision to such perfect simplicity that every single note and texture can make a big impact and potentially send shivers down my spine. This is an absolutely sublime and mesmerizing release.

Listen here. 

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lilien rosarian, “a day in bel bruit” (Self-Released, 2019)

This self-released 2019 debut from NY-based tape loop artist Lilien Rosarian has become something of an underground cult classic, but there is not a hell of a lot of biographical or background information available about her work. I do, however, know that Rosarian was still in college when she recorded this album and that she originally started off making instrumental hip-hop, but moved onto working with physical tape loops because she grew weary of staring at computer screens all the time (very relatable). Also, her brother Corey played all the instruments on the album and provided the cover art.

Unsurprisingly, the album details are similarly scant, but deliciously so, as it is fitting that such a singular and mysterious album would have a singular and mysterious premise at its heart. In essence, a day in del bruit is a vision of a single day in an imaginary abandoned village in which the sounds of the departed denizens have been replaced by broadcasts from a satellite dish haphazardly built on a bell tower. Notably, the inclusion of the word “haphazardly” is quite important, as this album is more like a Ligotti or Alisdair Gray-esque nightmare than magical realism, as the idyllic sounds of the town are often rendered grotesquely gnarled, gnawed, and convulsive by the mangled tape loops (the French “del Bruit” roughly translates as “of the noise” incidentally). In the world of the album, that satellite dish is NOT functioning at the peak of its powers.

Happily, there are plenty of genuinely beautiful passages to be found as well, but the brutality that Rosarian’s tape loops experience places her work light years away from anything I have heard from other tape artists. I am always a sucker for a good tape loop artist and Rosarian inventively shifts the focus away from the obvious pleasures of frayed textures and out-of-phase rhythms to evoke a demonically possessed tape machine that transforms the cheerful sounds of a bustling village into something unsettling and faintly sinister.

The album is roughly divided into two halves, as Rosarian envisioned the first half as daytime songs and the second as nighttime songs. The opening “theme for empty village” sets the mood nicely, as a squall of static gives way to a collage of gently smeared music box melodies, a chorus of happily singing birds, and the submerged, indecipherable voices of the happy non-existent villagers. That veiled vision of pastoral bliss is unnervingly precarious, however, as the sounds fitfully distort and curdle into considerably more nightmarish territory. It also sometimes sounds like two very different movies are bleeding into one another (one portraying a pleasant day at the carnival and the other portraying a tale of supernatural suspense from the 1940s).

Obviously, The Caretaker and William Basinski are the big reference points for frayed and decaying tape loop fantasias, but Rosarian’s vision reminds me much more of filmmaker Bill Morrison’s Decasia, which collaged badly oxidized silent film-era reels into a mesmerizing mindfuck of blistering, bubbling, warped, and solarized abstraction in which characters are regularly obliterated by streaks of corrosion or enveloping voids of blackness.

That said, pieces like the excellent “dead flowers still seem to smile” also feel like a compelling innovation upon Oval’s early work with skipping CDs, as it Rosarian’s loops often stammer in a state of suspended animation before abruptly lurching into the next passage, yet the stuttering loops are also continually warping and varying in both speed and pitch even within their imaginary locked grooves. Elsewhere, “the marketplace” is a very different type of highlight, as wistful piano chords and strummed acoustic guitars evoke a lazy, sun-dappled Sunday afternoon, but they also seem to be dragging a gnarly undercurrent of howling and murky chaos in their wake (and there’s even a surprise backwards coda to boot).

I am also extremely fond of “singalong in the village square,” which is a whooshing and churning maelstrom that suggests a collision of time-stretched roller coaster excitement and a goddamn hurricane. In fact, that piece is one of several prime illustrations of what makes a day in bel bruit such a weirdly beautiful and haunting experience, as Rosarian warmly and sentimentally evokes an enchanted mid-20th century rural village full of happy birds, chiming bells, carnival calliopes, friendly neighbors, and pretty music box melodies, yet proves herself equally adept at making that idyllic mirage fray and flicker to reveal glimpses of churning cosmic horror or sinister transmissions from space. If you have ever felt like you are living in a malfunctioning simulation, this is the fucking album for you. In short, this album rules. Rosarian has truly crafted one hell of a deeply immersive, timeless, and truly unique album and I do not expect to hear anything quite like it ever again (not even from Rosarian herself, as she opted for a much less disturbing vision with 2022’s every flower in my garden. 

Listen here.

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Nein Rodere, “Form & Feeling” (Horn of Plenty, 2023)

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This wonderfully unique and unsettling album is the work of Berlin-based artist David Roeder, who apparently has a background in both painting and psychodynamic art therapy. The latter adds quite an interesting facet to Roeder’s vision, as much of Form & Feeling sounds like Jandek set out to make an eclectic lo-fi pop album and fucking nailed it. That said, Roeder thankfully has more wide-ranging taste than Jandek, as well as a self-aware & jet black sense of humor. Roeder also seems a bit more inclined to tune his guitar, but he does share The Representative From Corwood’s “late-night dirges recorded in a lonely room on a boombox” production aesthetic some of the time. Early Smog is yet another solid reference point.

At the time of its release, Form & Feeling was billed as Nein Rodere’s first album of entirely new material, as his previous Horn of Plenty LP (Catch up with What Party +) was a mixture of new pieces and reworked older material from self-released tapes. Incidentally, Roeder was also previously in a Scottish band called Mordwaffe, which is noteworthy because two of his bandmates later went on to form the similarly great and deeply weird lo-fi project Guests. One other bit of interesting trivia is that Mordwaffe were based in Glasgow, as my favorite song on this album (or any other Nein Rodere release) seems to be inspired by the Bristletown neighborhood in a completely different Glasgow (the one in Kentucky).   

The aforementioned “Bristletown(I-II)” is an especially haunting example of the Nein Rodere vision, as a wobbly and warped tape drone gives way to an insistently repeating motif of strummed minor key chords and Roeder’s creepily deadpan surrealist narrative (“it’s heaven and hell…it’s nothing much”). Much of the narrative is just a matter-of-fact recounting of everything in the town (two corner shops, a traffic light, etc), but the overall effect is akin to that of a deeply unsettling Thomas Ligotti or Alisdair Gray story come to life. 

Elsewhere, the German-language “Herzogstatt” is another dark masterpiece, as Roeder’s morbid musings unfold over a cool squelching and hissing rhythm enlivened by a melodic bass line and arhythmic “percussion” that sounds like the clattering of a restaurant kitchen. The actual source of the clattering remains a mystery, but the “mundanity of everyday encounters” is one of the primary inspirations behind the collaged non-musical sounds that regularly creep into these songs (coughing, train announcements, etc.).   

Roeder is truly a goddamn master at conjuring bad vibes from the starkest of palettes, but not every song is quite as bleak as “Bristletown(I-II),” thankfully. He is also quite an unusual and eclectic composer, so the album is filled with strange and unexpected surprises and flourishes of legitimately pleasant musicality (the sensuously jazzy chords in “ADATWC,” the hip-hop sample giving way to harmonium drones in “&,” the would-be smoldering groove of “Feeling Form,” the female vocal harmonies in the Novy Svet-esque pop of “Ryukku Sakku,” etc.). Those more musical moments are certainly still unsettling, bloodless, and mumbled, but their casual competence and/or legitimate hookiness makes for a fascinating collision with other moments where it sounds like Roeder is indifferently trying to remember chord fingerings or has abruptly lost in interest in whatever it was he was doing.

Unsurprisingly, some songs are much more substantial than others and there are a number of mystifying pieces strewn throughout the album (the spacey chopped-up choral interlude of “Form,” the subway platform saxophone of “Friemod”), but those seemingly disjointed and random moments form a unique and fascinating mosaic as a whole. Therein lies the genius of Nein Rodere, as Form & Feeling is less of a collection of songs than it is a raw, honest, and diaristic collage in which Roeder’s inner thoughts and the sounds and people in his daily life bleed together into hallucinatory psychogeographic sound art.  

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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