Billy Strings – Lucid Daydream
This is a long way from from the music I usually gravitate towards, but I find it incredibly hypnotic. Billy String is, I’m reliably told, a leading figure in the modern bluegrass revival, pushing the genre into wider territory by combining traditional flatpicking and Appalachian roots music with psychedelia, rock, country and the extended improvisation…
Carmen Villain – Blue
Carmen Villain’s new album Memoria is built around the idea of sound as memory, with old recordings pulled apart, processed and folded back into new ones. The result sits somewhere between dub, ambient music, free jazz and there’s loads to get lost in across the record, but Blue is the one I keep coming back…
Windy & Carl, Optigan Conservatory – Timelines
Windy and Carl join fellow Michigan duo Optigan Conservatory for an album of blurry guitars, electric piano and synths, recorded with very little planning and, seemingly, a few sounds nobody remembers actually making. ‘Timelines’ is a lovely little stretch of deep-space drift, with soft chords slowly folding into one another and the whole thing hovering…
L’Rain – elmyra
L’Rain’s fourth album fata morgana is described in the press notes as “a fearless reckoning with self-doubt and the mirages of belonging and alienation that shape Taja Cheek’s lived experience”, and by me as “something I haven’t had the chance to listen to in full yet”, but based on the strength of the phenomenal lead…
John Beltran – Artful Echo
John Beltran released one of the years best album’s back in February, Canada, and has another, Sunrise and the Life We Live, due in October for Music For Dreams. If that’s still not enough dreamy electronics for you, yesterday From Detroit From Love reissued his 2020 EP, from which this arpeggiated delight is taken.
Sleep D & Mosam Howieson – Inertia
Sleep D and Mosam Howieson join forces for an EP that sits between peak-time bangers and deep hypnotic terrain, with Intetia my pick of the bunch thanks to its Barker-esque melodic synthline and the fact that the breakdown reminds me of 00s prog. https://buttersessions.bandcamp.com/album/syphon-filter
The Predatory Wasp 