Wave Temples

Panama Shift

Not Not Fun

Over a decade since its inception, Wave Temples continues to refine and refract the project’s visionary mythopoetic exotica. Panama Shift presents a 20-track kaleidoscopic star map inspired by “the euphoric cults, both then and now, that come and go in the vast ritual of night.” Bleached keys, devotional synth, and driftwood percussion align in minimalist vignettes shaded by tape hiss and field recordings of streams, waves, wind, and birds. Dedicated to the late Japanese-born American anthropologist Yosihiko H. Sinoto (whose portrait graces the cover), famed for his excavations throughout the Pacific and French Polynesia, the album embodies a similarly voyaging spirit: “chasing ancient mysteries… and rekindling with the esoteric journey of the human spirit.” This is music of forgotten shores, sea air, and saltwater shrines, echoing in shells scattered across the altars of Atlantis.

Wave Temples

Portals

Not Not Fun

Expansion pack of Wave Temples transmissions accompanying the Panama Shift vinyl suite. Its creator contextualizes Portals as the first volume in a tarot-style card game of the same name, to be used for divining prophetic strategies. Each of the 13 pieces here unfolds like a glimpse to an inner realm – or a past life. Hazed vignettes of primitivist anthropological fantasia, warbly and windswept, suffused with déjà vu. Insects and macaws sing from the periphery, while beach fires glow along an abandoned coast, the tide like a language lost in the tunnels of time.

Fratila, Stefana

I want to leave this Earth behind

Not Not Fun

Between December 2018 and 2019, Canadian composer Stefana Fratila went on a series of research trips throughout North America – including to NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre – to meet with astronomers and scientists to answer a complex question: “If each planet in our solar system were a room, what would each room sound like?” Her findings culminated in Sononaut, a collection of open-source VST plug-ins for digital audio workstations emulating each astral body’s atmospheric conditions. (Artist Jen Kutler collaborated on the project as well, using calculations by NASA astronomer and planetary scientist Dr. Conor Nixon). During a residency at CMMAS (Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras) in Morelia, Mexico, Fratila began writing the album on an octophonic sound system, then added additional synthesizer, finalized arrangements, and incorporated Sononaut at her home studio in Toronto. The results are surreal, expansive, multi-colored, and mesmerizing. I want to leave this Earth behind is an odyssey of cosmic voyaging and technological innovation, fusing science, sound design, and stargazer reverie into eight cosmic portraits of our vast galactic family.

Edren, David

Relativiteit Van De Omgeving

Not Not Fun

Antwerp synthesist David Edren describes his latest solo collection in conceptual terms: a harmony of space and time, elements and environments, perception and impermanence. Conceived in the morass of 2020, he began envisioning a widescreen suite of electronic compositions connected to the hidden rhythms of what surrounds and affects us. The 12 tracks of Relativiteit Van de Omgeving trace a chain of miniature terrariums, from misty meadows and moonlit gardens to cosmic vistas of asteroid showers. It’s music both subtle and symphonic, attuned to the sweeping planetary clockwork of water and wind, birds and insects, seeds scattered in soil forever being reborn: “skating the thin ice of ideas, like a heroic water strider.”

Golden Hallway Music

Rules & Chance Vol. 3

Not Not Fun

Manhattan’s resident innerspace organist Zack Tornaben centers the third installment of his ongoing Rules & Chance series on breath, tone, and the ancient Qigong practice, “Eight Pieces of the Silk Brocade.” Working once again with the classic Golden Hallway Music palette of a pair of reel-to-reel tape machines, a 49-key Acetone combo organ, and an 80’s synth clone, he records everything live without overdubs in sprawling séance sessions, then digitally transfers them for distillation into choice excerpts. Swirling, shivering reveries of skylines and stained glass, Tornaben’s process prizes intuition, intimacy, and “feeling around in the dark,” inspired by a pantheon of greats from the grand tradition of harmonic divination – Young to McClellan, Brouk to Battiato. Rules & Chance Vol. 3 gently expands his evolving lexicon of daydream minimalism, levitational and limitless, born of passing thoughts and everyday joys, rippling in the mind like light on water.

Childese

Minor Eden

Not Not Fun

The music of St. Petersburg keyboard fantasist Vova Kolbin aka Childese fuses reverie and melancholy in a wobbly mirage of memory, tape hiss, field recordings, and cosmic church organ: welcome to Minor Eden. Inspired by a particularly idyllic childhood summer spent in a dilapidated country house with his fisherman father, the album feels dazed and suffused with longing and wonder, nostalgic for early mornings out on the lake, dawn light streaking the sky. Kolbin describes his process as a form of magical realism, at the threshold of new age and hypnagogia, shaping sound like a funhouse mirror. This is devotional music in its truest sense, in thrall to times enshrined and things past, to golden ages and paradises lost, the hourglass of youth forever spilling softly in a dream half-remembered.

Frunk29

The Fifth Season

Not Not Fun

Moscow multi-instrumentalist Marat Shainsky aka Frunk29’s newest opus of bedroom Balearica birthed in a room with a view: trees, rolling hills, and a mountainous, majestic landfill (“It looks like Fujiyama in winter – or how I imagine it”). Stirred by a muse he describes as “magical and foggy,” he began crafting soft-focus fusions of 4th world electronica and sunrise shoegaze with synthesizers, 5-string bass, and a thrifted Phil Pro electric guitar. The Fifth Season floats between warm and wavy, hang gliding above windswept fields and glittering harbors. It’s music of vistas both seen and felt, looming in the distance and hidden in the heart.

Tokio Ono

Individuals

Not Not Fun

Yokohama multi-instrumentalist Tokio Ono’s debut is a collection of 13 confinement compositions woven from field recordings, percussion, various keys, samples, and a sense of being far away. He characterizes it as a type of “island music” – isolated but introspective, fueled by fleeting dreams of “the space between.” Like some surrogate 4th world travel brochure, Individuals spans a 50-minute map of emerald atolls, shimmering bays, and fog-shrouded isles, equal parts dislocated and devotional. Shuffling rhythms tip-toe, shape-shift, and spiral through tropical temples and whispering villages, attuned to innerspace horizons forever unfolding and indivisible: “Differences don’t separate, but bound all things and people in one individuality.”

Multi-Surface

Aesthetics of Inequality Triangles

Not Not Fun

Yamaguchi electronic landscaper Tomokazu Fujimoto aka Multi-Surface returns from an eight-year hiatus with a slow-blooming suite of radiant terrains and looping lullabies, named for a geometric technique utilized in Japanese gardening: Aesthetics of Inequality Triangles. Prior tapes for Lillerne and Patient Sounds explored parallel spheres of smeared tranquility, but his recent work skews even more sun-flared and crystalline, percolating patterns of texture, melody, and circuitry into states of suspended transience. The album’s 10 tracks lull, unspool, and refract, lapping like waves against aerial shores, flickering rainbows glimpsed in raindrops. The titles offer further clues, mapping a morning walk beneath too blue skies along a path lined with ceramics and stones, pastel flowers gently billowing in a breeze blowing from tomorrow.

Rue, Gryphon

A Spirit Appears To A Pair Of Lovers

Not Not Fun

New York artist and composer Gryphon Rue likens his latest album to a viewfinder: “layers come into view, are obscured, and reemerge.” Begun in late 2020 as a series of intuitive patterns for multi-tracked Farfisa organ, harmonium, and modular synth, he later wove in field recordings from Puebla, Mexico and rolling thunder (“and a truly magical coyote visitation”) captured in Abiquiu, New Mexico. The result is a beguiling suite of elusive instrumentals combining electronic instrumentation with the natural world. Rue cites a fascination with the mimetic potential of electronic sounds – their ability to suggest biological actions or molecular events, from insects building mounds to nervous system synapses firing. Above all, the music was made “with people’s pleasure in mind.” A Spirit Appears To A Pair Of Lovers unspools a saga of transformations via modal voyaging, devotional drone, mantric percussion, percolating circuitry, and amniotic ambience, shaded in a nuanced haze of threshold consciousness. Rue’s vision of “keeping the human hand in electronic music” remains constant throughout, a biofeedback between chaos and control, dream states and design. It’s a music both versatile and visual (all 10 tracks are accompanied by original videos by different artists), cerebral but celestial, born of and in thrall to our garden of earthly delights.

Saphileaum

Ganbana

Not Not Fun

Multi-media mystic Andro Gogibedashvili aka Saphileaum’s latest slate expands his “spherical ambient” lexicon into increasingly celestial terrain, inspired by visions of galactical oases, sparkling starscapes, and elemental serenity. Ganbana takes its title from a Georgian word for ‘cleansed by water,’ which aptly characterizes the album’s six liquid-tribal compositions. Rolling oceans of hand percussion flow below soothing swells of electronics, streaked with ocarina, insects, and sitar. Snippets of mantric voice occasionally cut through the devotional trance but otherwise Saphileaum’s world is one of solitude and ascent, attuned to a time and space outside our own, where “a second is a century, and a century a second, as the waterfall of cosmic nectar is poured over your being.”

Skyminds

Terra Preta

Not Not Fun

The third and latest offering from Sean Conrad and Michael Henning’s Bay Area devotional duo Skyminds spans six years of steady freeform collaboration, meeting weekly for reflective, contemplative improvisations at the axis of new age noir, prayer rug jazz, and twilit ambient. The patience of their process is self-evident: this is music of shade, shimmer, and hush, divined as much as designed. Terra Preta threads twelve tracks across a full hour, unfurling a grand, glimmering vision of cloaked alchemy and quiet raptures. Conrad speaks of their music as seeking a sensation “of the moment” – amber-frozen synchronicities of texture and timing, beyond what either player can control or recreate. Keys, synths, strings, percussion, and FX trace vibrational gradients through clear water and changing light, attuned to camouflaged currents in a deepening dusk.

X.Y.R.

Aquarealm: Sub-Aquatic Compilation

Not Not Fun

Companion offering to the recent LP, Aquarealm Mixtape interweaves an array of choice album tracks with a selection of discography deep cuts for a one-hour saga of shape-shifting aquatic bliss. Drawing on the classic X.Y.R. palette of Formanta Mini, Korg M1, FX, a loop station, and field recordings, the mix’s 16 songs slipstream seamlessly, despite being sourced from across a decade of work – testament to the constancy of its creator’s vision and the renewable vastness of his muse.

Acid Twilight

Mustang Zodiac

Not Not Fun

Buenos Aires slow burner Acid Twilight’s second collection of modal voyaging spans 52 minutes of “curves and cliffs, immense dunes and quiet lagoons, nights through the desert in the light of the full moon,” attuned to a muse both contemplative and kaleidoscopic. Mustang Zodiac took shape quickly, sourced from sprawling sessions on organ, synth, guitar, and miscellaneous percussion, then focused into their ritual essence. Mantric ceremonies of keys and shakers, insects and wind, played outdoors under cryptic constellations. Music of flickering starlight and ancient ways, coaxing hidden embers while flames lick the dark.

Scout Island

Laurentian Voyage

Not Not Fun

Named for a familial forested retreat on Wisconsin’s Shell Lake, Scout Island is the vessel for Jungle Gym audio boss Jared Carrigan’s compact and compelling instrumental guitar vignettes. His latest, Laurentian Voyage, charts a rich trip down river through the North Woods of Minnesota and beyond, a formative landscape of his youth and recent Covidian isolation. The collection’s 19 tracks flow through twilight psych, sunset jangle, dockside devotionals, and whispering pines soft rock, a gallery of glimpses into scenes and seasons come and gone.  Lean guitar figures ripple, riff, refract, and reverberate, framed by filtered drum loops, organ, synth, or bass. The mood softly sways between reverie and reflection but skews more autumnal as it unfolds, a sense of waning warmer days, a paler shade of light, campfires long since lit. Even so, the embers of memory cast their own warmth: faces, cabins, summers, music drifting out across the water. The clarity of fleeting moments, captured in snippets of strings and melody, slicing through choppy waves like the nose of a boat towards distant lightning.

Thick Air

Pillars Of Creation

Not Not Fun

Maine’s psychedelic fountainhead Matt LaJoie traffics in a multitude of mind-expanding entities (ML Wah, Herbcraft, Cursillistas, Endless Caverns, etc) but even by his standards Thick Air is a heady sphere. Longform improvisations on a Yamaha PSS-270 and loop units born of deep listening and higher consciousness, channeling notions of French mystics and astral planes. Pillars Of Creation takes its title from the iconic 1995 Hubble Space Telescope photo, and radiates a similarly interstellar mood. Bass tones wobble in spiral patterns beneath slow blooming arcs of celestial keys, like dawn breaking on some nameless gaseous moon. Gradually a gravity takes hold, drawing its disparate harmonic cosmos into a unified field, bound by some vast astral unknown.  LaJoie cites intuition and accident as foundational to the Thick Air genesis, trusting the freefall process of creation and decay, motion and miasma. Tweaking presets through banks of FX in pursuit of a levitational singularity, soaring and swimming through solar winds, forever unfolding and unfound.

X.Y.R.

Aquarealm

Not Not Fun

The tenth official full-length by St. Petersburg synth savant Vladimir Karpov aka X.Y.R. is a liquid suite of surreal tranquility, divined and designed to soundtrack the shimmering mysteries of underwater life: Aquarealm. Inspired by vintage Soviet cartoons, nature documentaries, and his own colorful aquarium fish, the album’s seven songs share a mood of contemplative depths and dizzying beauty, adrift in deepwater currents and bioluminescent tides. Hazy tones swell and swirl while crystalline keys, loops, and echoes swim in the periphery, rising like bubbles to the surface.  Karpov describes these compositions as flights of fantasy, born of an oceanic muse as idyllic as it is infinite. It’s music simultaneously serene and cinematic, conjuring blue horizons of kelp forests swaying above rainbow reefs, casting shadowplay on sandy floors. A realm both real and imagined, submerged but transcendent, rippling from the mind’s eye to the great beyond.

Forgiveness

S/t

Not Not Fun

Moscow duo Forgiveness fuse tower block trip-hop with stargazer downtempo into a smeared Soviet Balearic haze, equal parts dust, dreams, and delirium. Collaborators Alexander Kalinin and Ilya Kasharokov share a history of deejaying, production, and party promotion in various guises (Michura, Ellipse) and vibes (lo-fi, breaks, beyond), but their debut was born from “bedroom jams” of MPC, synth, guitar, FX, and field recordings, seeking a smokier synergy. The album’s eight tracks float between quiet and cosmic, blissed and busted, a sleepwalker’s paradise of secret streets and low-hanging clouds. Loose but never lost, the songs sway, slip, and slouch through moonlit alleys of rhythm, echo, breeze, and melody, vivid vignettes for lone souls in the outer limits of the afterhours: “Judge nothing. Forgiveness is key.”

Coral Club

Turn To

Not Not Fun

Alexander Sirenko’s second odyssey as Coral Club, Turn To, centers on transformative synesthetic childhood experiences retriggered in meditation. Although composed using a similar Groovebox / Electribe / FX rig as his NNF debut, Nowhere Island, the album’s nine tracks skew looser and more levitational, lost in cloud currents of color, memory, and solar fantasy. Hazy keys loop and climb to shimmering heights, lifted by churning synthetic rhythms, equal parts 4th world futurism and past life ascension mantra. Sirenko speaks of these pieces as “journeys through inner worlds,” distilled across two years of patient creation. Visions turned to sound, reveries to rainbows – this is music of the senses and the spheres, approaching rare summits of celestial convergence.

Severed+Said

Tragic Seeker

Not Not Fun

John Touchton aka Severed+Said’s third thaumaturgic synth document for NNF, “Tragic Seeker,” deftly conjures the mood and mythos of the Floridian void lurking behind its “eternal shores and menacing skylines.” Conceived and captured across three extended sessions at Jacksonville studio bunker Long Jump Records, the songs were repeated until they refracted, turning liquid and hypnotic.  Drum machinery and spiral synthetics flicker in webs of midnight heat, dry ice, and isolation, simmering at the perimeter of forbidden portals. The album obliquely mirrors the alluring tropical oblivion artwork by native Florida painter Jason Gvvl – both blend mirage with malevolence, attuned to dreamscapes in decay. This is music of glimpses and vanishings, pitfalls and parallels, desire and undoing. To seek is to sink into depths unknown, under horizons still gleaming with the glow of other suns.

Soda Lite

Aqua Solar Cura

Not Not Fun

Tasmania-based gardener and composer Alex Last aka Soda Lite specializes in an elusive, ethnographical mode of outer reaches ambient, alternately immersive and immaterial, uninhabited and uninhibited. Their latest collection, Aqua Solar Cura, is a meditation on “relationships to land,” triangulating its titular elements – water, sun, care – within a woozy, warbling palette of keys, haze, and field recordings. Trills of birds and the gurgling of creeks murmur from windswept peripheries; dawn light shimmers in dewdrops and emerald ponds. Each piece feels excerpted from a vaster ongoing ecosystem, teeming with lifeways and hidden cellular harmony.  Much of the source material, from commingling waterfowl to screeching Tasmanian Devils, was tracked at Trowunna, a progressive wildlife sanctuary that rehabilitates species to be returned to the wilderness – a prime expression of ‘cura.’ These tracks evoke a similarly protean harmony, panoramic and indivisible, suffused with the synergy of seasons and seedlings adrift on fragrant air. It’s music of reverie and regeneration, glimpsed mid-bloom, in league with the brave mysteries of nature unveiled.

YAI

Flowers From Home

Not Not Fun

Storied NY multi-instrumentalists John Thayer and David Lackner join forces as YAI to transmute world-building into new digital frontiers. Flowers From Home, their debut, embraces improvisation and manipulation within a laptop jazz palette of warped percussion, horns, electric bass, electronics, keys and tactile atmospherics. The duo cite fidelity as a central facet of their sound, utilizing rack mount FX and multi-phonic strategies to splinter and smear instruments into altered state harmonics, simultaneously intimate and estranged. Their chemistry slips between softness and shadow, wind-woven but cybernetic, attuned to the moods of futures as yet unrealized.

Andra Ljos

Fountain Of Inspiration

Not Not Fun

Both albums by Russian Armenian artist Aleksandra Evseeva aka Andra Ljos are themed around mythical wellsprings: last year’s debut of bewitched synthetic exotica, The Oasis Of Little Birds, and her latest, Fountain Of Inspiration. Conceived as a suite of imaginary ancient Grecian compositions for organ and sampler, the songs thread the saga of a sacred Greek island water sanctuary where the nymph Castalia drowned while escaping Apollo, and where visitors to the Oracle of Delphi bathed before receiving prophecy.  Fountain feels appropriately holy and harrowing, eight cryptic processionals of keys, strings, sitar, backward whispers, and percussion, like hidden hymns for forbidden temples. Her background as a member of St. Petersburg wilderness ambient trio 2muchachos (alongside Vladimir Karpov / X.Y.R.) manifests in the music’s devotional mood and arcane reveries, conjured in mystic solitude at her Vilnius home studio. Andra is her mother’s pet name for her and Ljos is Icelandic for ‘light,’ due to having white hair; but combined they create an enlightened presence, channeling the siren frequencies of enchanted thresholds to realms both unreal and, till now, unheard.

New Mexican Stargazers

Highway Dreamscape

Not Not Fun

The latest by liminal lo-fi trawler New Mexican Stargazers is an ode to hypnagogic horizons and interstate bliss, nodding off in the backseat while desert midnight radio whispers on the wind: Highway Dreamscape. Streaked in hiss and spliced with jump cuts, the songs snake through moonlit vistas and nameless neon truck stops, a mix of blasted keyboard cruising and planetarium parking lot raga. It’s music of delirium and dusty airwaves, homegrown and half-conscious, revved up road trip anthems melted into woozy astral Americana. A roamer’s paradise, ripping and dipping through lost lands of enchantment, until the infinite grid of freeway lights dissolves into the grainy glow of meteor showers.

Golden Hallway Music

Rules & Chance Vol. 2

Not Not Fun

The latest by urban kosmische keyboardist Zack Tornaben aka Golden Hallway Music is a full eclectic hour of voyaging inner-harmony themes and meditations, recorded across the pandemic winter in the hallway of his Manhattan apartment. Utilizing his signature rig of a 1968 electric combo organ and primitive drumbox run through a two-machine tape delay, the songs spiral, slipstream, and shimmer, equal parts open road and cosmic ascension.   Rules & Chance Vol. 2 is the sequel to last summer's Vol. 1, expanding the lexicon with foggy ragas, highway hymns, and East River devotionals, inspired by longs walks and drives around the city, upstate, and down through the Great Smoky Mountains. Tornaben cites a sphere of historic modal keys masters as influences, from Ethiopian experts to Italian minimalists and new age time travelers, but ultimately the wavelength he channels is one unmistakably his own – music of return, reflection, and repose, “live from the fantasy country, in the quiet of the night.”

Liila

Soundness Of Mind

Not Not Fun

Portland duo Danielle Davis and Steven Whiteley aka Liila formed during a shared tenure at a Zen Buddhist monastery, bonding over mutual fascinations with deep listening and exploratory vibrational fields. Soundness Of Mind, their debut, was conceived on synthesizers, samplers, and laptops in “forgotten corners of the monastic grounds” as well with an array of acoustic instruments at their eclectic home studio, both before and during pandemic lockdown.   Interlocking tiers of texture, echo, and fractal electronics coil and cascade in exquisite mosaics, equal parts voyaging ambient and “molecular dance.” They characterize the album as “an ode to myriad internal realms,” which manifests across the questing depths and hieroglyphic raptures of these unique hybrid-synthetic seances, as attuned to beauty as the beyond.

Coconut Dealers

S/t

Not Not Fun

Russian Federation rogue naturalist Konstantin Shkolnikov launched Coconut Dealers in 2011 after being gifted a unique vault of research recordings by an oceanographer friend. Inspired by their beauty and blankness, he began shaping them into ethnographic collages of rolling surf, sundazed keys, hand drums, tropical waterfalls, and tape hiss, “like notes in the diary of some traveler,” compelled by a compositional muse he describes as “pure visionary.”  After three self-released digital collections the project ceased activities in 2012. Totaling nearly two hours, this remastered box set presents the entirety of the Coconut Dealers soundsphere, spanning all manner of aquatic and equatorial hallucination: “sunny archipelagos, woeful lagoons in the night, sleepy sand bays of restless waters with no horizon.” This is music of the mind's eye, adrift and ascendent, divined from and for the infinite seas within.

Masahiro Takahashi

Flowering Tree, Distant Moon

Not Not Fun

Japanese multi-instrumentalist Masahiro Takahashi 's latest album is a meditation on seasons and distance, recorded in isolation at his temporary home studio in Toronto. Following “the coldest winter I have ever experienced,” he began crafting hushed, lush vignettes of color wheel electronics with an array of software synthesizers, granular samplers, plug-in FX, MIDI controllers, and a shruti box. The songs sway, shimmer, and unspool in sparkling arcs, between reverie and lullaby, inspired variously by blooming apple trees, gagaku music, the “nostalgia of immigrants,” and longing for home. Flowering Tree, Distant Moon moves from soothing to surreal, a swirl of quiet melody and imagined landscapes, as transportive for its listeners as its maker: “I dreamt of places outside my room and traced the music from my memories”

Troth

Small Movements In Radiance

Not Not Fun

The latest by deep listening duo Amelia Besseny and Cooper Bowman aka Troth exists in the outer reaches of open air ritual and crouched quietude, born of the seclusion and slanted sunlight of their garden-shrouded shed studio in Newcastle, Australia. True to its title, Small Movements In Radiance unfolds gently and luminously, hushed ceremonies of haze, harp, glockenspiel, tuned metal, and field recordings, variously inspired by “sublime bushwalks in the Blue Mountains,” sonic sleep aids, and the notion of “ambient music for children.”  There's a uniquely ageless, sacred feel to the album's five pieces, lulling but liminal, alluring resonances heard faintly from distant hillsides. Elements interweave across long, opaque arcs, then elusively re-isolate in stark tableaus of hiss and absence. Bowman cites a desire to resist “a world inhabited by far too many negative forces,” which these vulnerable but veiled environments softly do – carving out fragile terrain for escape, reflection, or renewal.

Unknown Me

Bishintai

Not Not Fun

The inaugural LP by Tokyo Metropolis electronica entity UNKNOWN ME, Bishintai, is a sublime synthetic suite of cosmic wellness transmissions exploring “the unknown beauty of your mind and body,” appropriately named for a kanji compound meaning “beauty, mind, body.” Crafted with software, synthesizer, steel drum, rhythm boxes, and robotic voice by the core quartet of Yakenohara, P-RUFF, H. Takahashi, and Osawa Yudai, the album unfolds like a holographic guided meditation, soothing but cybernetic, framed by subways and sky malls. Latticework electronics flicker with texture, glitch, wobble, and mirage, themed around sensory perception and body parts.   A diverse cast of collaborators assist in actualizing the collection's uniquely urban expression of new age ambient, from psychedelic footwork riddler foodman to multi-instrumentalist institution Jim O'Rourke to Japanese underground shape-shifters MC.Sirafu and Lisa Nakagawa. Although the group cites a therapeutic muse (“made for the maintenance of the minds of city dwellers”), Bishintai shimmers with an alien strangeness, too, like decentralized relaxation systems obeying sentient circuits. This is music of utopia and nowhere, channeling worlds within worlds, birthed from a sonic ethos as simple as it is sacred: “in pursuit of beautiful tones.”

Acid Twilight

S/t

Not Not Fun

The self-titled debut document by Argentinean underground entity Acid Twilight spans shifting dunes and darknesses of lunar modal psychedelia, in pursuit of “climatic music of a high order.” Their method mixes “ancestral sounds” with contemporary techniques, weaving synthesizers, organs, and electric guitar among Andean rattles, bells, tarkas (a war flute used in indigenous battles), and field recordings from Bolivia and Peru. The songs swerve between high desert séance and swamp ritual, improvised and elemental, low-lidded devotionals for starlit vanishing points. An hour's march across the ancient mesa, dreaming of fires in the sky.

Dravier

Earth Mirage

Not Not Fun

The hypnotica transmissions of Jungle Gym exec Caleb Draves encompass every terrain and trance-state, from equatorial drone to aquatic miasma to stardust murmur, divined as much as designed from fluctuating wooden floor gear assemblages: software, FX, keys, miked ephemera. Earth Mirage collects 11 of his most recent and revelatory rippling ecosystems to paint an expansive panorama of the Dravier dimension, high and low and longform, alternately windswept, psychic, and subterranean. Elements of gamelan, hand percussion, synthesizer, rainstick, and field recording ebb and echo and decay in opaque symmetries, like tarot symbols scrawled in smoke on cave walls. A limited selection of these tracks appeared previously on Jungle Gym or its sister division Tourist, but in altered form; the rest are fresh additions to Draves' deepening discography. Totaling a full hour, this is as close to a definitive work as the project has yet ventured, a gallery of masks and mirages, for earths both future and forgotten.

Filthy Huns

Cursed At Birth

Not Not Fun

The 4th full-length by Elysian Heights motorcycle whisperer Nick Koenigs aka Filthy Huns reimagines the hero's journey as bastard's quest: doomed since day one, condemned to ride or die, forever revving against the long shadow of permanent midnight. Cursed At Birth is a return of sorts to the project's rusted roots, renegade reflections for cracked highways and black hills, wolves howling at cold crescent moons. Its mood fits the year: isolated and estranged, vistas of desolation and plague under darkening skies. Recorded in the garage dust of his Echo Park machinist's shop, the album's six songs channel a headspace of fog-shrouded junkyards, grease-stained chug, ghostrider dub, and ominous engines fuming on the horizon. Music for mystic desert roads, nomads headed nowhere, ragged skull flags flapping in the final twilight.

Iguana Moonlight

Jaguar

Not Not Fun

The sophomore offering by Moscow illusionist Ilya Ryazantcev aka Iguana Moonlight centers on a lost shaman's soul transmuted into a mythical jaguar lurking in the Amazonian unknown. As with his 2017 desert island debut, Wild Palms, the music acts as both score and summoning, remote dreaming a gradient of sights, sounds, and smells via synthesizers and field recordings. The six songs of JAGUAR waver at the threshold of fantasy and hallucination, saturated and surreal, awash in colors not found in nature. It's a virtual reality jungle of smeared neon, steel drums, and deep bass, hyperreal fauna floating in fluorescent mist. Purist portal music at its most potent, born of and for black mirror retreats past and present.

Coral Club

Nowhere Island

Not Not Fun

Moscow electribalist Alexander Sirenko birthed Coral Club in 2016 but the bulk of his debut didn't emerge until 2019, in the wake of a particularly “depressive winter” when the solar thaw of spring struck “like a lifeboat.” Long forest walks sparked a multi-sensory reawakening of rainbow electronics, spiral melody, field recordings, and FX, wondrous but wobbly, like rhythms roused from heavy hibernation, blinking in the beautiful glare. Tracked live in lengthy improvisational sessions, Nowhere Island's nine swirling songs span a spectrum of ecosystems and energies, from dense mystic rainforest to glittering psychedelic tide pools to dusk coastlines dotted with distant fires. In places the album evokes an explorer's audiobook, questing into alien terrain with multi-directional microphones, but elsewhere Sirenko scrambles any illusion, reveling in surges of tape hiss and synthetic noise, possessed by the joyous catharsis of burning maps to places that don't exist.

мхи и лишайники [Mosses & Lichens]

Piss On The World

Not Not Fun

Нассать на мир ["Piss On The World"] is a Russian doll of dystopian sci-fi industrial-synth mythologies. The premise is: on the last day of 1987 an unidentified numerology-obsessed time-traveller recorded five songs of cathode-blasted Cold War cold wave out of misanthropic desperation at having become locked in a time loop, reliving the same day, unable to die. Modeling his music on esoteric Polish art group Oneiron, he released the album via vanguard underground outpost PSI, then disappeared, fate unknown. The music’s actual creator, мхи и лишайники [Mosses & Lichens], tracked the album in two days on New Year's Eve 2018, using battered synthesizers, drum machines, and a 4-track at the home of Oneiron’s founder Andrzej Urbanowicz, who passed away in 2011. The songs sound appropriately trapped in time, tape-hazed and grey-scale, minimal-wave relics scavenged from some rusted basement dimensional gateway. Occasionally a stray voice cut through the purgatory smog (“your move, creep”) but the bulk of it seethes in psychic malaise, Eastern bloc electronics blasted from and for the void.

V. Kristoff

Sydra

Not Not Fun

Elusive electronicist and co-captain of the Jungle Gym ambient assembly line Jared Carrigan has cycled through a gallery of aliases across the past half decade but his recent work as V. Kristoff ranks among the most refined and rapturous in his vast catalog. Sydra sequences 11 mesmeric explorations of texture and time dissolution into a shadowy aquamarine odyssey, recorded in California and Catalonia using an array of compact equipment; some tracks were crafted using only an iPhone and FX plug-ins while sleeping in cars along Costa Brava last spring.  Like the ancient water clocks alluded to in its title, these pieces capture V. Kristoff at his most liquid and systemic, percolating synthetics shaped into potent tools of mirage and reflection. But the passage of time is never neutral: serenity sinks toward dread as easy as glass frosted by breath. The album grows more opaque and ominous as it deepens, the minutes a shivering spiderweb traced in the dust of our unbecoming.

X.Y.R.

Pilgrimage

Not Not Fun

Vladimir Karpov’s questing Soviet synthesizer designs as X.Y.R. evoke desolate landscapes, lost worlds, and labyrinthine inner realms but his latest is less destination than journey: Pilgrimage. Comprised of two simmering, serpentine side-long compositions – “Black Monk In The Dunes” b/w “Echoes Of Time” – the album summons a sense of pensive processions across shifting sands, “an internal dialogue with reflections and obscure images,” twilit horizons dimming to starlit mirage. Karpov likens these long-form voyages to temple meditations, “trips in search of something,” looking in as looking out. Whispery pulses of percussion echo under ancient cosmos keys while devotional textures drift like smoke from nomadic encampments. The sound of water in a well or an exotic caged bird occasionally cuts through the holy haze shrouding these ceremonies but the truth of their trance never wavers, the guiding star holds its light, the pilgrim progresses. Attuned achievements by a deepening master.  Mastered by Alex Nagle.  Art and design by Dieter Durinck.

Sip

Leos Naturals

Not Not Fun

Cosmic Chicago modal organ grinder Jimmy Lacy developed the dexterous dialect of SiP some years back while helming a happy hour residency at a Logan Square cocktail lounge that required he vamp rambling three-hour sets nightly. With such a wide window to fill, he free-flowed serpentine mandala keyboard motifs across 15-minute expanses, soaking in every spiral, stasis, and sliding scale. These hypno-motion strategies were rehearsed and refined across stellar radio performances (notably for Planet Catieo, WLPN 105.5FM) and studio sessions, finally culminating in the sidewinder séances of his dazzling debut: Leos Naturals.  Lacy speaks of SiP as a headspace “in sync with my own clock and rhythms,” which is apparent in his uniquely attuned playing, both motorik and meandering, between raga, rave-up, and reverie. Limber lotus position keyboard designs interweave with soft threads of bass clarinet, melodica, kalimba, and percussion, deepening the spectrum and expanding the trip. It’s a music elevated yet earthbound, loose but precise, natural magic for unnatural times.

Vague Imaginaires

L'île D'or

Not Not Fun

The music of Grenoble gardener Denis Morin aka Vague Imaginaires cross-pollinates modal synthetics, equatorial ambience, and drum circle minimalism into ecological fantasias of “natural forces and enchanted worlds,” seven of which comprise his spacious debut, L'île D'or.  Recorded in anticipation of the birth of his daughter (an experience Morin likens to “an ancestral journey”), the album alternates between ritual and lullaby, spirit vine questing and chill-out tent meditation. Guyana forest field recordings and the sounds of springtime birds color the songs with wind and wildlife, evoking lagoons clouded in mist and steam, overgrown paths winding through twilit jungles. It’s an intimate, emotive vision of archipelagos and mirages, epiphany and escape, free-ranging across islands of golden light of the mind.