***Based in Oakland, California, GREGG KOWALSKY and MARIELLE JAKOBSONS share internationally spanning solo careers as creative practitioners with a solid foundation in drone music composition and performance. However, it is a mutual love for analogue electric sound sources and tape multitracking that has resulted in their psychedelic, trance-inducing collaboration as DATE PALMS. Honey Devash, Date Palms’ first release on Mexican Summer, is testament to their captivating skill for layering and balancing timbres into long-form, immersive slow burners. Astonishingly evocative of desert heat, summer nights, dry sandscapes of fuzz bass, fender rhodes, synth, violin, tanpura and feedback shift gradually like dunes in hot winds, as wavering mirages in the distance are picked out through slow melodies on keyboards, piano and flutes. Two tracks of incredibly slow-panning consideration, Honey Devash feels like a hazy meditation on survival; a prolonged buzz of tension and uncertainty melding with simple acceptance as the sun, unrelenting, beats ever down.