Not Not Fun

Rosnet, Jean-Emmanuel

Les Alentours

Not Not Fun

French constructionist Jean-Emmanuel Rosnet describes his latest suite of sound collages as “improvised landscapes and odes to everyday moments,” woven from a patchwork of modular synthesis, tape techniques, resampling, and digital processing. Les Alentours evokes overlapping dimensions of its creator’s ‘surroundings’ – physical, metaphysical, sonic, psychic. Flickering electronics and hymnal hazes murmur within a web of restless ASMRbient dissociatives: crackling, pitter patter, plucked strings, smeared horns. Recorded both before and during a relocation from Lyon to the rolling hills and glacial valleys of the Livradois-Forez natural park two hours west, the album’s nine pieces capture a mood of whispered transience and unfamiliar thresholds, crafted from vignettes of “poetic intimacy in which to become lost and disappear.

Shakali

Rihmastossa

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Based in the South Moravian city of Brno, Finnish multi-instrumentalist Simo Hakalisto aka Shakali crafts surreal terrariums of strings, synthetics, wood, and wind, teeming with bio-electronic synchronicities. Rihmastossa further finesses the project’s eclectic lexicon of electro-acoustic world-building, utilizing a gallery of instruments both ancient and advanced: solar-powered sine wave generators, singing bowls, metallophones, microtonal synths wired into tree slabs, lap harps, amplified found objects, percussion filters, flutes. This is world music in the most naturalistic sense – subtle spatial ecosystems of climate, vibration, landscape, and species, as alluded to in the track titles about fungal colonies, extinct birds, rare worms, and pine forests. Hakalisto’s work in various exploratory duos (Gnäw, Lunar Horns, Thistle) has honed his instincts for atmospheric improvisation, but when alone he embeds even deeper into the terrain, acting as conduit as much as creator. Across seven free-flowing fugue states of texture and resonance, his touch simmers beneath the surface, guided by shifting light and hidden hands.

Yayoba

A Maze Of Glass

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4th-world fusion trio Yayoba triangulate warped constellations of electronics, woodwinds, hand percussion, and field recordings via their respective bases in Brighton (UK), Turku (FIN), and Wiesbaden (DE), coaxing a sound they describe as “like a beam of light passing through translucent glass walls in a labyrinth.” Comprised of legacy experimentalists Paul Wilson (F. Ampism), Jani Hirvonen (Uton), and Johannes Schebler (Baldruin) – the latter two of whom also moonlight in “crypto-botanical” electro-acoustic unit Grykë Pyje – the group operate spontaneously and post-geographically, file-sharing sketches, textures, and FX until an alien synergy takes hold. A Maze Of Glass collects 16 of the project’s headiest and most hyper-sensory improvisations into a 47-minute microcosmic odyssey of fractal, radiophonic exotica. Circuit-bent devotionals dovetail into pixelated mists; diaphanous lifeforms lurch through psychoactive caverns; cybernetic miasmas dance and dissipate. It’s music both placeless and perplexing, undulating and uncanny, hieroglyphic transmissions echoing from the depths.

New Mexican Stargazers

CASINO 2223

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New 90-minute brainbath by rogue cosmic bookie New Mexican Stargazers takes as its muse a surreal, smoke-soaked gambler’s paradise two centuries in the future: Casino 2223. Part soundtrack and part summoning, the collection sprawls and stumbles through sparkling caverns of slots, neon, video portals, and tape hiss, alternately devotional and desolate. Cracked astral keys slipstream over cheap metronomes, zoned voids, and decayed haze, disappearing into outer reaches, backrooms, and nights that never end. NNF’S expanded edition also includes five outtakes from the C2223 sessions (originally digitally self-released in 2023), capturing NMS at their most sublime and subliminal, away from the noise, tracing ancient dunes lit by spheres and pyramids beaming columns of light straight into the stars.

New Mexican Stargazers

CASINO OUTTAKES

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Companion suite to the new New Mexican Stargazers odyssey Casino 2223 unspools five long-form desert parking lot outtakes sourced from the same sessions. Capturing the project at its most sublime and subliminal, this is music for ancient dunes lit by LED spheres and pyramids beaming columns of light straight into the stars.

Swanox

Rhodyrunner

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West coast riddler Anthony Boruch-Comstock aka Swanox has laid low in recent years but his cracked, contemplative vision of Golden State malaise has only refined in the interim. Rhodyrunner unspools a five-song cycle of heavenly dirge, outer sunset guitar, skeletal slow-core, Pacific lullaby, and glacial roadhouse psych. Assisted by Texan riffer Joe Knight aka Rangers on bass, synth, and extra guitar, plus Sam Rezendes on “Wrong Jury,” the tracks trace a twilit road trip through Bay Area badlands and gentrified future ruins. It’s music of reflective private depths, swirling beneath rusted bridges spanning old worlds and new truths.

Torn Hawk

Through Force Of Will [2024 Edition]

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New York musician Luke Wyatt describes his instrumental hypnagogic guitar guise Torn Hawk as “music of a noble fabric whose weave is flawed and frayed.” With a decade of hindsight, the looping beats, smeared synths, and grainy hooks of 2014’s Through Force Of Will have taken on a richer cast, like closing credits anthems to heroic 80’s films long since forgotten. From widescreen new wave (“I Am Returning”) and baggy psychedelia (“Palace Racket”) to shredded New Romanticism (“Streets On Fire”) and glassy shoegaze (“Blindsided”), the songs fuse victory and vulnerability, soaring solos and tape hiss. Wyatt characterizes the songs’ low fidelities and “distressed edges” as “intentional lace,” smudging outlines and degrading surfaces to carve out “more room to dream.” This 2024 memorial edition adds 25 minutes of unreleased vintage bonus material, expanding Torn Hawk's vision of “error and compression” across echo-soaked riffs, smoky synth fugues, and blazing technoid rock. Throughout, the music surges, yearns, and burns, unrestrained and undefeated, forever in pursuit of Wyatt’s mission to lift the listener from “the cave of loneliness to the amphitheater of self-love.”

Frunk29

Sequentia

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Paradisal axe master Marat Shainsky returns with a fresh 13-song suite of mantric jangle and coastal guitar instrumentals ripe for a world in need of cool breeze: Sequentia. Bleached bedroom cruisers, faded synth skylines, city pop miniatures, stereo organ bops, and sparkling ambient percolations weave in wide arcs across 53-minutes of refined remote dreaming. Whether wielding electric strings, sequential circuits, or skeletal rhythm boxes, Shainsky’s touch skews effortless and elevated, poised for escape to brighter shores. These are themes of leaving and leisure, of warmer climes and worlds away, suffused with haze, hope, and the great rose-colored unknown.

Geraldi, Phil

AM/FM USA

Not Not Fun

Itinerant journeyman Phil Geraldi has hitched and hustled from Humboldt Bay to Brooklyn to Portlandia and beyond, working in a variety of guises both artistic (cathode noise project Mystics In Bali, farmhouse show coordinator at Arcata’s Mex N’ Wow, mystic mixtape maker) and survivalist (bike courier, sex shop custodian, apartment photographer, pool boy). These years of bicoastal interstate migrations seeded the vision of AM/FM USA, his latest and loftiest solo creation. Two side-long collages of radio static, pedal steel, crickets, and great plains haze, the music moves between lost highway melancholia and truck stop concrète. Shades of The KLF’s meta-twang opus Chill Out echo in the ether, but overall Geraldi’s heartland mythos is grainier and more interstitial, scrambled by ancient airwaves across the big sky voids of North America.

Tegu

Forest Hills

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Rogue Florida entity Tegu debuts with 12-track nocturnal dub fever dream, Forest Hills. Field recordings, tape loops, vocal haze, FX, and thrifted Yamaha keys coalesce and dissipate on narcoleptic night walks past palm-shaded ponds, orange orchards, and fluorescent swamps murmuring with birds, frogs, and insects. Recorded largely in a single 24-hour block of attuned lo-fi improv, this is music of peripheries and private spheres, traced in faint horizons of hanging moss, water, and moonlight. Lost tropics for liquid memories, treading shrouded pathways of constant change.

White Poppy

Sound Of Blue

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From the grey-skied isles and horse farms of British Columbia comes the second volume of Crystal Dorval aka White Poppy’s “Paradise Gardens” trilogy: Sound Of Blue. Originally conceived back in 2016, the album was then recorded, finessed, abandoned, resurrected, overdubbed, and finally mixed into nine refinements of daydream shoegaze and therapeutic pop, born from bedroom epiphanies and long winters of the heart. From slowdive reverie (“Apathy,” “Melancholic Serenity”) and color wheel psychedelia (“Time”) to spiral chorale (“Happy”) and finger-picked drift (“Wiser”), Dorval’s songcraft moves between escape and acceptance, tracing delicate melodies from undercurrents of loss, light, and solitude. It’s music for memory gardens and pastel horizons, dreaming of bliss and distance, but bound to the here and now: “Thinking about leaving here forever / thinking about leaving here for good / but I keep holding on for something / hoping that it could get better than this / what’s one more night?”

Acid Twilight

Shadow Wrangler

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Argentine modal master Acid Twilight’s third raga saga maps a dusty plain of tumbleweeds, circling vultures, and bleached bones, across which rides a nameless stranger: Shadow Wrangler. Inspired by visions of high noon dread and the textures of psychedelic twang, they turned westward, layering shakers, synths, spurs, and six-string navigations into 12 crooked canyon instrumentals. Shades of spaghetti western, Spacemen 3, and outlaw country whisper in the wind, but ultimately AT’s mode is more silhouette than song, at the axis of campfire jam and commune improv. Loping and loose, windswept and waterless, blowing over the sand of trails long since vanished. Another smoke signal rises in the distance; another scorpion sunset begins to dim. The Wrangler rides on.

Hugh B

Live From The Gonsch

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Live From The Gonsch showcases Sydney head (and O.T.I.S. label boss) Hugh Burridge aka Hugh B’s lesser known domestic dub mode, low-slung and low volume, tracked on headphones during hidden hours, often with his daughter strapped to his chest. The album’s eight cuts are built from rhythmic modular loops layered with snaky bass, swampy guitar, and occasional hazed vocals, dub-mixed to 2-track cassette through hand-built FX (Burridge runs a boutique delay pedal business). The mood throughout is loose, soupy, and slippery, shaded in echo and spring reverb, glimpsed through tall grass. The title alludes to Burridge’s recently retired Skylab radio show, “Mornings From The Gonsch,” which repped a spectrum of home recorded modes, from bedroom dub to hybrid new age to lost synth songcraft. Here he blends these muses into a woozy fusion all his own, dub-adjacent daydreams of time, money, stasis, and absence, hummed and half-heard beneath a bleached blue sky.

Drapizdat

Myth

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Drapizdat is the umbrella banner for Russian producer Vladislav Godzevich’s rogue gallery of musical identities. Its name derives from a fusion of samizdat (illegally reproduced publications of censored materials within repressive regimes) and drap (slang for marijuana; an early beat music alias was Papa Drap), which aptly evokes his ethos of covert altered state transmissions. МИФ presents a constellation of tracks spanning five projects, four years, and 73-minutes; taken together it fully delivers on the hidden acronym of its title: M = music, И = elected, Ф = fragments [combined = ‘Myth’]. Each entity spelunks its own vibrant catacomb: Сам Себе Па (“tropical industrial 5th world dada”), Ито Кумаре (“metaphysical ambient music”), Jeans Escape (rhythmic liberations from reality), Reather Weport (“free form music of the spheres, vibrations beyond the universal caves”), Drapula (“black moon feasts on the blood of soul and funk”), Клаксон Гансон (“psychedelic ethno-mutant punk”). Godzevich describes his process as a metamorphosis, created at night, “with minimal light.” Percolating loops of percussion, texture, and melody, summoned into warped trances of alien grace. Elements align and obscure like celestial phenomena half-glimpsed, half-dreamed: “I plunge deeper and deeper to gather golden sand from the bottom of time and show it to the world, building islands in this dilapidated world.”

Alvarez, Lorena & Alejandro Palacios

Paisajes Para Torcer al Reloj

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Paisajes Para Torcer al Reloj (“landscapes for bending the clock”) is a collection of six collaborative improvisations between keyboardist / DJ Lorena Álvarez and multi-instrumentalist Alejandro Palacios recorded at the Nieve & Smog arts residency in Santiago, Chile in the spring of 2022. Theirs is a wispy, whispered chemistry, softly thrumming Rhodes laced with trumpet, guitar, and golden dust. The pieces unspool with a daydream logic of “hazy clocks and floating doors,” inspired by the holy trinity of Hassell, Riley, and Cherry. Both Álvarez and Palacios have carved eclectic bodies of work – the former as part of minimalist dance trios Cuerpo Docente and Los Bárbara Blade, the latter via psychedelic lounge-dub suites for Nonlocal Research. Yet Paisajes finds their common ground in more hushed, hidden terrain. Lulling, electro-acoustic landscapes of texture and resonance, shaded in wood, brass, and batteries, flowering at late hours in dimly lit rooms.

Fratila, Stefana

I want to leave this Earth behind

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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.

Voyage Futur

In Constant Change

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Voyage Futur’s second collection of 2023 broadcasts its muse of eternal flux in the title: In Constant Change. A shape-shifting suite of glitches, loops, vignettes, and visions, the pieces diverge and converge in hybrid states of open horizon drift, memory synth, and oblique exotica. Relaxed but restless, idyllic yet immaterial, it’s the sound of kaleidoscopic hearts and lingering dreams, glimpsed against a backdrop of deepening blue.

Voyage Futur

Wellen

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The past works of Viennese world-builder Voyage Futur have mapped places (Secret Earth), spaces (Inner Sphere), and phenomenon (Virtual Moonlight), but their latest zooms out and up for a sky’s eye view of planetary fantasy: Wellen. German for ‘waves,’ the album’s 12 tracks ebb and flow in cinematic tides of mandala electronics, utopian fusion, and elevated ambience, shaded in gradients of DX7. Voices, mallets, strings, and bass slide and stretch like liquid plastics, tracing liminal landscapes of sunset shores under pixelated stars. It’s music both lush and lost in time, remote but rapturous, lit by the warmth of futures passed.

Wave Temples

Panama Shift

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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

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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.

Edren, David

Relativiteit Van De Omgeving

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.