Not Not Fun   Page 2

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Wave Temples

Tales From The Cymatic Abyss

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A prime divination document by elusive Floridian entity Wave Temples finally receives full presentation rites: Tales From The Cymatic Abyss. Tracked in fragments from 2013 through 2015, this collection captures the essence of the project’s illusory allure, cross-fading vignettes of coastal drift, thatched hut percussion, and aquamarine dreams into a seamless séance of the inner Keys.  Excerpts appeared on limited Rainbow Pyramid formats half a decade ago but the complete open sea saga has remained hidden on privately circulated artist editions until now. Totaling nearly an hour, Tales traverses windswept shores, campfire ruins, quiet villages, and rainbow reefs, restless but reflective, tape-hiss and tropical bliss interwoven in psychic landscapes at the end of the earth. Mastered by Alex Nagle.

White Poppy

Paradise Gardens

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British Columbia dreamer Crystal Dorval’s latest and lushest kaleidoscope-pop long-player took root four years ago as a hazy notion of “new age shoegaze bossa nova.” Across reflective summers and long winter nights in a thin-walled shack on a remote rural horse farm the vision evolved, eventually centering on a mythical muse, Paradise Gardens, somewhere between utopian sanctuary and decaying tropical apartment complex. Though the songs began as attempts to “transcend darkness,” over time they absorbed shadows and sorrows of their own, becoming lessons in coexistence: “learning to be with it all.” The album evokes overlapping vignettes within this layered fantasia: fading flowers along a balcony, distant birds above the surf, light glittering off a courtyard pond, sunset skylines darkening to lavender night. It’s a place of healing but also heaviness, fragile peace contoured with pains of the past.  White Poppy’s music has always been mirage-like but here her voice, guitar, keys, and soft-focus siren designs feel uniquely potent and distilled, weathered and wizened by years and yearning, the weight of memories of memories. These are melodies of psychic questing and self-discovery, at the edge of illusion and insight, glimpses of heaven half-remembered and half-imagined: “Paradise is a place within.”

Babbitt, Ben

Paris Window (Original Score)

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Director Amanda Kramer’s prompts for composer Ben Babbitt’s soundtrack to her enigmatic film Paris Window read like magnetic fridge poetry – “warped ambient bumper muzak tension” – but the results skew closer to some hypnagogic contemporary noir: lulling, low-lit, and laced with lingering dread. Electronics, strings, and percussion swoon and seethe in heady mirages of dreams and delirium, romance and menace. The narrative it accompanies is equally opaque and out of time: two eccentric siblings psychologically unravel through divergent fixations, one obsessed with the hypnotic infomercials of a mysterious self-help institute while the other falls in love with an ambiguous doppelganger.  Babbitt’s background scoring experiential video games (Kentucky Route Zero) and collaborating with exploratory songwriters (Angel Olsen, Weyes Blood, Eartheater) is evident in his versatility and finesse, flowing fluidly between minimal and maximal modes. Like all dynamic film music, the pieces weave a story of their own. Serene synthetic swells decay into murmuring television static and eerie vocal fragments; close-mic’d drones turn acidic then claustrophobic, mirroring sleep paralysis transformed into panic. Babbitt builds a window into a surreal world, seen through shadows and smeared, street-lit glass.

Channelers

For Being

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Inner islander Sean Conrad started his splinter ambient endeavor Channelers to make what he calls “essentialized sounds:” loose liquid states of intentional non-intentionality and letting go, conjured with keyboards, bowed guitar, flute, and voice. For Being, his latest, began in 2016 as a series of sessions all sharing this title, as an experiment to “steer my subconscious mind.” Each emerged patiently, from a place of intuition and experiential listening, eventually totaling roughly 40 pieces. Next Conrad cut them down, looping sections through FX and layering in minimal whispers of electric and acoustic textures, seeking to evoke “the simplest conceivable state: being.” From the chiming horizon infinity of “Tune In” to the stardust planetarium glow of “Through And Through,” the album achieves a unique synergy of naturalist wonder and subliminal bliss, effectively disappearing within its own subdued cyclical serenities. It’s music as refracted light, clouds spilling down peaks to the sea, the molecular resonance swirling inside every cell. Tellingly, Conrad cites the “reclamation of time” as a key Channelers motive, which suits these elusive levitational mandalas, where minutes contain multitudes, time unfolds, and being becomes a shining path. Mastered at The Gentle Ways. Design by Sean Conrad.

Dreamers Cloth

Vitrospection 2008-2009

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Danish textile texturalist Jonas Frederiksen’s solo endeavor Dreamers Cloth materialized late last decade in response to “a new-old type of sound” then ascendant among the international innerspace cassette community, characterized by bleached drift, miasmic memory, and inexpensive keyboards. Working from a wire-strewn Copenhagen apartment studio alcove, he quickly amassed a tapestry of tapes exploring parallel pathways of coastal fantasia and interstellar hallucination, issued via his own Relax With Nature imprint as well as various esteemed European esoterica outposts like Ikuisuus and Stenze Quo Musik. Frederiken speaks of seeking a sound evocative of daily suburban life while still cloaked in layers of “cosmic radiation, astral projections, crystal caves, shakra energy, dolphin communication, and extra-terrestrial presence.” Vitrospection 2008-2009 distills his dense but concise discography into a patchwork voyager’s hour of highlights, reflections, and reveries, ripped from the original spools for optimal aughts intra-sensory simulacrum. Mastered by Alex Nagle. Design by Britt Brown.

Rangers

Europe On TV

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Nearly a decade after their original assembly, two crucial early volumes of Texan ranger Joe Knight’s voyaging kaleidoscope kitchen sink-psych have been dusted off and dressed up for a new generation of suburban tourists. Europe On TV collects the entirety of both 2009 outings on freeform Pittsburgh imprint As Above So Below, totaling 110 twisted minutes of miasmic guitar heroics, sci-fi city surf, face-melt glam, no-fi jangle, art rock squall, and bootleg new wave, pocked with 4-track feedback bramble and cathode-blasted voices.   Taken as a whole, these sides vividly remind just how omnivorous, inventive, and scrambled Knight’s sound was in its infancy, like scanning low-watt stations in a shitty car cruising the industrial outskirts of a foreign city. Fragments of mangled melody and rhythm beamed from crumbling radio towers in the distance, half-heard through static before the road turns and the signal fades. An alien and absorbing revisitation to the restless roots of Rangers.  Remastered by Alex Nagle. Design by Britt Brown.

Dravier

Spirit Channels

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Prolific proprietor of the Jungle Gym recording empire Caleb Draves aka Dravier has trafficked all manner of hypnotic vapor, emotive drone, and extraterrestrial atmospheres across several dozen micro-edition documents issued the past few years but Spirit Channels spans an even wider, weirder breadth of sound and mood, and feels as close to a definitive collection as he’s yet attempted.  Free-flowing through 50 minutes of equatorial new age, narcotic lounge, surrealist exotica, desert island serenade, sunrise sky-surf, and devotional tape hiss, the album sustains a poignant, plasmatic wavelength, sensory and spontaneous, wandering alone along winding coastlines. Field recordings of nocturnal jungles, insects, waves, and distant birds ground the songs with a sense of landscape but this is equally music of inner voyaging, adrift in archipelagos of memory and meditation. Mastered by Matt Tammariello. Design by Britt Brown.

Unknown Me

Astronauts

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Japanese synthesis squad UNKNOWN ME’s latest sequence of electron blueprints is true to its title, evoking a sense of lunar wonder and stargazer reverie, inspired by notions of “20th century space development.” Astronauts expands the group’s signature mode of spatial restraint and hushed harmonics with accents of angelic voice, solar samba, sleeping pod hiss, and futurist vocoder, flowing between moods of heavenly astral drift and nostalgia for life on earth. The album’s eight songs float in an airless limbo of exploration and emotion, final frontiers and memories of home, zero gravity ambient zones conjured from an array of old analog Roland and Juno synthesizers. UM visualist Osawa Yudai’s artwork furthers the theme, abstracting “the universe, the stars, the lives of the space ship into the shapes of sound grains and waves.” Lift off and prosper.

Takahashi, H

Escapism

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5-year anniversary expanded LP edition on white vinyl, includes 2 vinyl-only bonus tracks. Tokyo architect Hiroki Takahashi is a world-builder both in matter and sound. His latest collection of serene micro-miniatures was inspired by “the dissatisfaction with reality that I feel on a daily basis.” Escapism offers exactly that: percolating patterns of fiberglass synthetics and fluorescent melody, assembled into minimalist bio-domes of refracted light and hanging gardens. Recorded during metropolitan commutes, afterhours office meditations, and various windows of urban stasis, the album’s six songs actualize the ambient muse of their maker, willing space from density, tranquility from tedium. As with his work in exotic atmosphere unit UNKNOWN ME, Takahashi’s touch is hushed, precise, and prismatic, coaxing spectrums of illusion and bliss in its tinted glass spirals: “Extreme tension produces extreme relaxation.”

Les Halles

Zonda

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Composed in conjunction with the latest Les Halles long-player, Zephyr, Zonda stands unique among Baptiste Martin’s output both in duration and diversity of source material, smearing samples of Baegu music from the Soloman Islands, J.S. Bach, Max Cilla, and the Croatian Sea Organ of Zadar into a sixty-minute suite of surreal celestial navigation. Flutes, waves, strings, insects, percussion, pitched voices, and spatial synthesis float in and out of frame, alchemizing and unraveling in unexpected ways. It’s a vast, perplexing, and poignant listen, spanning solar winds, subdued harmonics, and elusive constellations of transmutational beauty. Compiled & mixed by Baptiste Martin. Design by Dieter Durinck.

Magnetophonique

Une Cartographie Ideale

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In 2011 Charles Belpois and Baptiste Martin became roommates in Dijon, France and began making music, both together and alone. The solo projects they birthed – Magnétophonique and Les Halles, respectively – share a similarly introspective mood, vignettes of emotive, smeared ambience conjured from private communions with tape hiss, loop stations, and bleached keys. The label they founded, Carpi, issued many of their early recordings (typically in editions smaller than 50) but ceased operations in 2015, with Belpois’ last release coming out on defunct Mexican imprint Dept Tapes the year before. Une Cartographie Idéale collects 12 gems from the Magnétophonique catalog to map a nuanced portrait of his evocative mirage exotica, wavering between bliss and abandonment, paradise and prison. Isolation and island fantasy intermingle in bewitching delirium, the sound of waves and tropical birds refracted through heat-stroked haze while melting cassettes unspool degraded melodies into lost horizons. Escape is heaven – until it isn’t; in the artist’s words: “You’ll never belong here.” Recorded in Dijon and Lyon, 2011-2014. Remastered by Alex Nagle.

Les Halles

Zephyr

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The welcome and wondrous return of Lyon musician Baptiste Martin’s aerial ambient identity, Les Halles, following a year’s sabbatical from recording, Zephyr takes its name from a light westerly wind, which aptly evokes the warm, weightless, whispering spirit of these beguiling ambient designs. Working entirely with a computer for the first time, Martin’s sample bank swelled in both depth and detail, giving his compositions a crisper focus and finer grain. Slovakian fujara flutes shudder and shimmer, offset with rippling PVC panpipes, chimes, and gentle webs of delay.   The tracks are titled according to their sample source, designated with one of three words that are same in French and English: horizon, mirage, and distance. Martin speaks of these pieces as conjuring “landscapes with almost no human traces,” and his criterion for completion is simple: “When I feel like I’m losing the perception of time while listening.” Nine new divinations by one of today’s most attuned waking dreamers.   Mastered by Alex Nagle. Design by Dieter Durinck.

Marble

Diego

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Fourth world fusion voyager Anton Glebov’s latest full-length of chimeric environmental music, Diego, emerged from field recordings he conducted on a recent trek through Georgia: gurgling waters of Narzan springs in the Caucasus Mountains, serenading frogs late at night by a lake in Batumi, crickets and cicadas hissing in the fields. Returning home to St. Petersburg he layered them with meditations and melodies using balafon, flute, percussion, saxophone, and synths to create surreal, shape-shifting habitats. Though Mårble began in Siberia the project has always been rootless, a mercurial melting pot of scrambled electronics, tribalist rhythm, prismatic jazz, and ethnographic ambience, evoking illusions more than identities.   Glebov speaks of his music inducing “transcendental ideas and infinity,” hinted at in the lofty alien hymnals “Upanishad” and “Болото Релаксации” (Russian for “The Swamp Of Relaxation”). Elsewhere Glebov’s message is more garbled and miasmic, in keeping with the dizzying hybridity which could well serve as his artist’s statement: “Not belonging to any musical style creates an atmosphere of freedom, disengagement, and levity.” Guest sax and flute by Slavic Ipatov. Mastered by Alter Echo. Cover painting by Alisa Gvozdeva.

Severed + Said

Incorporeality

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The latest long-player by John Touchton’s eerie Everglades industrial enterprise Severed+Said is also his loftiest, equal parts synth-wave séance, abduction hallucination, and paranormal noir. Collaborating with the same recording engineer as 2015’s Occlusions, Jeremiah Johnson, but this time in a more equipped North Florida garage studio, the pair routed an array of synthesizers, drum machines, and guitars through speaker cabinets to achieve an impressively tactile, spacious mix. The 13 tracks of Incorporeality alternate between rhythmic, ravaged, and reflective, psychic and sinister, beyond the swamps and behind the eye. Speaking of his process, Touchton touches on the music’s dimensional aura: “Something omnipresent filters through me, into the sound – I feel a somewhat transcendent state.” Mastered by Alter Echo. Images by JT. Layout by Britt Brown.

Terlu

Big Bingo

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Unreleased archival collection of minimalist keyboard reveries by one of the Western States’ unsung tape hiss savants, Orvang aka Terlu. The bulk of Big Bingo was recorded late at night in the spring and summer of 2011 in a garage in Grass Valley, California using a medley of thrift shop Casios, Yamahas, and scavenged cassette recorders. Heavily inspired by Raymond Scott’s proto-ambient Soothing Sounds For Baby volumes and Mark Mothersbaugh’s playful mid-80’s synth sketches, Musik For Insomniaks, the songs share a similarly naïve, delirious spirit, woozy and wistful, cloudland loony tunes traced in joyous haze. He describes his original intention as evoking an imaginary kids show soundtrack, “but twisted.” The transistor fidelity and sun-warped melodies echo fellow fringe psychedelic innocents like Tracey Trance and Orphan Fairytale but Terlu also ventures more abstract, textural terrain. Closing cut “Corafax (Psyche Toner)” – a reference to a recurrent dream in an astral office space wherein he begins receiving a series of faxes from his future self – unfurls seven mesmerizing minutes of grainy, iridescent murk, a persuasive paean to the ageless pleasures of inner space. Mastered by Alter Echo. Design by Britt Brown.

Chikiss

New Season

Not Not Fun

Years ago, while on tour in Finland, Russian singer and musician Galina Ozeran lost her voice entirely for a full month. Initially she was devastated: she felt “like a zero, a ghost,” and stopped leaving the house. But gradually the enforced silence instilled her with a zen-like calm, “absolutely empty and weightless.” The experience inspired her to explore a more muted and shadowy form of electronic song-craft using only breath and synthesizers, evoking “the condition of a ghost.” New Season emerged from hermetic home sessions in St. Petersburg and Berlin across the past several years, composed in a mode of “free abstract deep fantasy.” The album’s ten songs swim through lulling nocturnal pools of cosmic drift, hallucinatory pulse, and sensual whisper, alternately emotive and elusive. Satellite ballads and solaris pop weave in and out of woozy spectral ambience, echoing her belief that “music comes from the subconscious, from sensations of the moment.” A veiled but vivid collection of inner space electronics and lucid dream melody by one of the east’s evolving talents. Mastered by Alex Nagle. Design by Britt Brown.

Filthy Huns

Forever Beast

Not Not Fun

Westward expansionist Nick Koenigs has been laying rusted highway scorpion riffs over ragged diesel chug since transplanting from Minneapolis to Echo Park in 2011 but Forever Beast is his first foray into Filthy Huns collaboration, enlisting Aaron Steinberg on burner synths and wind tunnel smoke. The extra presence revs the songs into deeper terrain, through shadowed canyons of shredded leather and bleached bones. Modes swerve between badlands raga (“Magick Tea”) and psychedelic ritual (“Class War”), cloaked in dub menace and pentagram fumes. This is the Huns at their headiest and heaviest, ripping ghost rider guitar and vortex keys from busted amps tied with chrome chains. The Beast rises. Mastered by Collin Gorman Weiland. Design by Britt Brown.

Swanox

Jokes About Rain

Not Not Fun

Bay Area psychic panhandler Anthony Boruch-Comstock Orion’s music loiters in a limbo between vision and vagrancy, open roads and empty pockets, dreams and dead ends. Across seven storied years the Swanox sound has distilled but not domesticated, winding through junky back streets of hitchhiker Americana, surrealist storytelling, dada piano, cosmic Casio tone, flophouse folk, and amnesiac ambience. Jokes About Rain reworks a selection of songs from his limited 2013 cassette on Bezoar Formations alongside an array of new and unreleased tracks for a fresh collage of coastal crossroads, sunken eyes, and West Coast wanderlust. Recorded from 2010 to 2015 in various apartments, bedrooms, and bunkers across San Francisco (with the exception of one Neil Young cover tracked in in Los Angeles), the album feels loose, lost, and liminal, a rambler’s lament for lives in the rearview. What falls but never gets hurt? Dedicated to “every guitar player I’ve played with, learned from, or been inspired by.” Additional instrumentation and mixing by Sam Rezendes. Mastered by Paul Oldham. Cover artwork by Sean Hewitt and AOBC.

Canada Effervescent

Crystalline

Not Not Fun

Discreet French synthesist Denis Tremblay’s latest offering, Crystalline, spirals further into the recesses of refracted relaxation music and interstitial new age which have come to define the sound of Canada Effervescent. Sun-bleached keys phase, dazzle, and decay against shimmering vistas of synthetic harp and piano, layered with raga drones, meditative mist, and field recordings of running water, wood chimes, and nocturnal insects. Inspired by the canonic healing music of Steven Halpern and David Naegele as well as “wood-and-carpet covered studios, forest moons, and humid love songs,” Tremblay’s touch is ambient but expansive, unspooling in fragile arcs of inner space reflection. An immersive and softly psychedelic sound spa of tonal voyaging by one of today’s more attuned Next Age conduits. Design by Donnie Ka.

Iguana Moonlight

Wild Palms

Not Not Fun

Unlikely desert island meditations beamed from the suburbs of Moscow courtesy of synthesizer imagineer Ilya Ryazantcev aka Iguana Moonlight. Inspired equally by a childhood fascination with tropical isolation and La Iguana, Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa’s novel about a disfigured 19th century harpooner shipwrecked on a remote island who “declares war on humanity,” Wild Palms sways through six pensive instrumentals of castaway electronics, quiet surf, and coastal birdsong. The simplicity of the songs suits their mood of solitude, combing the shoreline for signs of life, eyes weary from scanning the horizon. A unique suite of equatorial reveries by one of Russia’s rising bedroom voyagers. Recorded July-August, 2016, on a Tascam Portastudio. Mastered by Anton Korablev. Design by Britt Brown.

X.Y.R.

Labyrinth

Not Not Fun

St. Petersburg pathfinder Vladimir Karpov coaxes hushed auras of keys, metronomes, fog, and feeling to evoke hazed and isolated realms, traced in altered states. His latest collection—and vinyl debut—maps the maze at “the bottom of self,” subterranean consciousness manifested from decaying synthesizer and shadowed pulse: music for fading torchlight. Labyrinth leads through six misty, mystic chambers of dreams, drones, delirium, and phaser’d percussion, spiraling in slow, sacred arcs, in quest of “the inner world.” Tosya Chaikina’s ghost vocals on “False Angel Lullaby” and “Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors” bring a whispered hymnal mood, but otherwise the album is ambient and abandoned, obscure meditations along corridors of candlelit runes, “to find the right path, to find the true answer.”

X.Y.R.

Reflections

Not Not Fun

Adjacent assemblage to the Labyrinth LP, Reflections wanders six more forking paths of smeared Soviet synth, opiated percussion, and phaser fantasia across lost, liquid, looping landscapes. Here the X.Y.R. experience oozes illusion, the morass of memory, and spectral static, crescent tones glimmering against warm webs of echo and reverberated rhythm. The dark is depth; the flame flickers; continue. Mastered by Alex Nagel. Art and design by Dieter Durinck.

Video Salon

S/t

Not Not Fun

The transcontinental collaboration of Arcata shoegaze abstractionist Brian Pyle and spectral Russian songstress Galya Chikiss began in Berlin, where the former was on tour and crashing with the latter, then finished in Northern California. Despite such distance, the duo’s debut feels symbiotic and seductive, shimmering nocturnal mirages of devotional drone and processional dub. Named after the site of certain of Chikiss’ formative teenage experiences (“trashy rooms with old anonymous TV sets and video recorders, a zone of freedom and new information”), Video Salon conjure a ghostly, glassy-eyed mood, low-lidded metronomes layered in haze, whispers, and dazed fluorescent static. Sung in Russian, the lyrics cast an ominous spell: “I turn around and see the door / the lock moves in my hand like a cold grey snake / your sharp talons tear apart my shadow.” An eerie and entrancing suite of electronic incantations by a complementary pair of exploratory expressionists. Mastered by Brian Pyle. Artwork by Britt Brown.