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In 2019, Lightning Dust broke up. Not the band, but Amber Webber and Joshua Wells-the couple at the core of it-ended their longtime relationship. In the wake of the split, the two musicians realized that Lightning Dust was still important to them and decided to stay together as an artistic partnership. The experience made them think about nostalgia as a concept and how this sort of longing for the past can be destructive, cancerous, useless. Webber and Wells reconvened virtually in mid-2020 to work together again as creative comrades, sharing some new ideas by correspondence, stitching together their song fragments into the dramatic arrangements now heard across Lightning Dust's forthcoming new album, Nostalgia Killer. The album title couldn't set a more perfect expectation for what the album holds. Hearing those words together, one might anticipate something harder, more chilly and severe. But what happens is quite the opposite: listeners find themselves wandering into someplace warm, guided by familiar sounds and voices. Little do they know they'll soon be flung into a climate unknown. Throw away the old coat-these songs signal a new season. This is a winding and moving album. Sensual, confessional, and free of fences. Each song builds with inexorable force, often pulling back to a whisper before washing over the listener completely. With their wealth of new imagery and the most incandescent flights, Lightning Dust sweeps you away from wherever you happen to be. Across Nostalgia Killer, Lighting Dust introduces a sound that feels vaguely familiar while forming a mythology all of their own. Although this exact work may not have been created if it wasn't for the duo's separation, it would be wrong to simply call it a break-up album. The songs here don't merely travel that well-trod landscape, they reinvent the scene altogether; after all, sometimes love needs reinventing. Nostalgia Killer is about something that affects us all, which is how we make sense of the world and each other over time and across borders. And far out as always, Lightning Dust is reinvented here magnificently.

Hello! Tim here. My band is called Strand of Oaks. This is my eighth record andit's called Miracle Focus.I spent over three years building Miracle Focus. In the midst of writing, Ibecame a painter and spent two seasons acting on a television show (MayansMC). The dichotomy of painting for days in my garage and then flying out to LAto play a villainous biker on TV was one of the most thrilling experiences of mylife.The idea of Miracle Focus was born out of one simple concept: to make peoplefeel good. Throw in a healthy mix of Ram Dass, yoga, Freddie Mercury, AliceColtrane, and Beastie Boys, plus over a year of writing and building theextremely dense architecture of the songs, and Miracle Focus was born. Theresult is FUN, wild, rhythmic music filled with synth layering and mantra-likelyrics intended to upli and hopefully bring some light to whoever listens.In many ways, this record is a love letter to bliss. Through meditation, I found away to connect with something greater, a positive force that allowed me towrite music as a manual towards a more love-focused life. And the miracles Irefer to aren't asking the universe for anything; it's just acknowledging andcelebrating this complex beautiful moment that we all get to share. It will begone, it will re-emerge as something new, that will be gone, repeat....repeat...repeat_this eternal cycle. My most sincere hope is that whoever listensmight through sonic osmosis experience a similar joy.Sending peace and love. Thank you for your time.-Tim

Hello! Tim here. My band is called Strand of Oaks. This is my eighth record and it's called Miracle Focus. I spent over three years building Miracle Focus. In the midst of writing, I became a painter and spent two seasons acting on a television show (Mayans MC). The dichotomy of painting for days in my garage and then flying out to LA to play a villainous biker on TV was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. The idea of Miracle Focus was born out of one simple concept: to make people feel good. Throw in a healthy mix of Ram Dass, yoga, Freddie Mercury, Alice Coltrane, and Beastie Boys, plus over a year of writing and building the extremely dense architecture of the songs, and Miracle Focus was born. The result is FUN, wild, rhythmic music filled with synth layering and mantra-like lyrics intended to uplifting and hopefully bring some light to whoever listens. In many ways, this record is a love letter to bliss. Through meditation, I found a way to connect with something greater, a positive force that allowed me to write music as a manual towards a more love-focused life. And the miracles I refer to aren't asking the universe for anything; it's just acknowledging and celebrating this complex beautiful moment that we all get to share. It will be gone, it will re-emerge as something new, that will be gone, repeat....repeat... repeat - this eternal cycle. My most sincere hope is that whoever listens might through sonic osmosis experience a similar joy. Sending peace and love. Thank you for your time. - Tim

On Labyrinth, Heather Woods Broderick serves as our reflective host, subverting expectations of conventional songcraft with impressionistic language and quietly relentless explorations of the human experience that's at once light and dark, more circular and less linear. "Many of us yearn for stillness and peace, as an escape from the movement all around us," she explains when asked about the themes of the album. "Yet movement is perpetual, happening all the time on some level. It's as wild as the wind, yet eternally predictable in its inevitability. It is linear in part, but infinite in its circuitry. Our lives just punctuate it." Broderick began crafting Labyrinth in March 2020, when most forms of move- ment were brought to a screeching halt. The Maine-born, Los Angeles-based songwriter _ who, in addition to her work as a solo musician, built a life playing and touring with acts such as Sharon Van Etten, Beth Orton, Damien Jurado, and Efterklang _ was suddenly forced off the road for the first time in her career. She used this disruption as an opportunity to pare down her creation process and construct the scaffolding for Labyrinth in her apartment. Employing only the most crucial tools at her disposal, Broderick found herself opening different artistic doors as she focused on sharpening her recording skills, capturing the majority of the album on her own before finishing the remainder with co-producer D. James Goodwin. For all of Broderick's sage lyricism and vocal authority, Labyrinth never provides the listener with any easy answers. If the image of the labyrinth represents the enormity of modern life and the difficulty of navigating it, Heather Woods Broder- ick provides a guide to its endless kinetic wonders _ of being present, aware, and connected despite its disconnects. She describes the texture of its walls, its indifferent rhythms, and the inherent poeticism of feeling lost amid the dead-ends and unexpected turns. At this point in our history, perhaps that's all we need to keep moving.

Heather Woods Broderick's new album Invitation is about rediscovering the everyday magic and healing potential found in nature. It's also about recognizing that even though it's not easy, we can shift our perspectives on our lives when our circumstances seem bleak. Ultimately it's about accepting the myriad little invitations the universe sends us to keep moving forward, and in so doing, redefining one's self-perception, in order to establish a new sense of equilibrium and inner peace. HWB's last album Glider was called "ethereal and perfect" by NPR, "exquisitely beautiful" by Mojo, and "Stunning" by The Sunday Times. Since its release she has toured with Alela Diane, and Lisa Hanigan, and has done one-off shows with The War on Drugs, Laura Gibson, and others, in addition to continuing her role in Sharon Van Etten's band.

Voids employs the vocal talents of Bill Callahan, Emily Cross, Adam Torres, and Julia Holter across twelve genre-fluid, yet impressively cohesive tracks that span baroque dream-pop, filmic ambient, raga-like drones, avant-country, and even spiritual jazz, all imbued with poetic heft and seared by the West Texas sun. It was beneath this same sun that Lapham lost both of his parents, mourned a withering relationship, and shouldered the fallout of the pandemic, turning his life into the rusted-out scraps he then used to build Voids from the ground up. There is no better narrator for Lapham's story than fellow Texas resident Bill Callahan, whose iconic delivery perfectly personifies the core themes of Voids. By the time Callahan appears, he does so over a saw-blade drone that sounds like machinery echoing off the corrugated steel walls of a nearby workshop, which then breaks open into a loose yet pained confluence of violin and upright bass that recalls Joe Henderson's 1974 spiritual jazz album The Elements. On "Dreamless" the album crystallizes into its most straight-ahead moment as Lapham trains his compositional lens on a brilliant piece of pop songwriting. Featured vocalist Adam Torres soars over John Mark's punctual arrangement of stomping drums and rapturous string-work to anthemic, and gently psychedelic consequence. Voids concludes with the pleasant clatter of "Circles" wherein Lapham throws all his ingredients into a pot of celebratory catharsis. Drum sets collide with one another gleefully, and harmonized textures scatter and roll about the floor like a dropped bucket of ornate marbles. Lapham's collage-work, which up to this point has been smartly restrained, comes unglued as he transmutes grief into relief within a moment-of-death montage of aural imagery. Across Voids, that same awareness of tragedy and loneliness is made palatable by the album's exciting and varied topography, which stands insubordinately against Lapham's real-life surroundings. The settlers who established West Texas towns like the one he calls home must have done so with a sense of hope despite the hostility of their surroundings, however inevitable the withering. Similar spirits speak through John Mark Lapham's work, and he welcomes them as fascinating old friends. "That more than anything inspired a lot of what I try to express through Old Fire, faded memories, former glories, places lost in time," he discloses. "Whatever I was trying to express with Old Fire wasn't finished with the first album, like a story that was only half-read. It seemed like that was only the beginning, and there was a lot more ground to cover." If there is ground still uncovered for Old Fire after Voids, it's sure to be lush in spite of - or perhaps because of - the dusty soil beneath it.

There is a moment on Sides, the new album from Richmond, Virginia-based duo Lean Year, in which a hospital room floor is filled with white chrysanthemums. This imagery, based on an opiate-induced hallucination experienced by vocalist Emilie Rex's mother as she recovered from surgery, is a perfect encapsulation of the band's second album: dreamlike and beautiful, yet burdened with cold, stark reality. Sides is a harrowing journey through realms of grief and memory, a meditation woven into a tapestry of synth pads, woodwinds, and Rex's instantly recognizable voice.The duo of Rex and Rick Alverson - who also works as a film director (The Mountain, Entertainment, The Comedy) - originally set out to write an album about conflict, but during the writing and recording process, they were confronted with a number of personal tragedies. Alverson lost both of his parents in rapid succession, Rex's mother received a cancer diagnosis, and the couple's beloved family dog, Orca, died. Theseevents transformed the album into an exploration of loss - an attempt at processing the painful, complex, and private emotions that bubble to the surface when confronted withdeath. "We thought we'd do a concept album called Sides where we could reflect on all of the division in the world, and some in our own families, but then COVID transformed everything / everyone, and we suffered our own specific losses. The record became about loss and grief," Rex explains. "In this way, the title Sides was still appropriate: our individual grief and collective grief, the margins of before and after, the act and feeling of during and enduring. It felt like straddling a threshold between two opposing sides - the moment before conflict and the moment after it passes, life and death, the act of living and the memory of the act. Grief feels like a contention between what you knew and what you now know, and often both feel real and unreal at once."Sides - produced by Alverson alongside Erik Hall (In Tall Buildings) and featuring contributions from...

Transparent dark blue vinyl. Market is the songwriting project of Nate Mendelsohn, a Brooklyn based multi-instrumentalist. He has played live as a member of Sam Evian, Katie Von Schleicher, Emily Reo, and Lina Tullgren's bands, and has worked in the studio as an engineer and musician with Frankie Cosmos, Yaeji, and Wendy Eisenberg. Absorbing all of this music and supporting his musical community has been Mendelsohn's focus of the last few years, but with this record he steps out on his own with a clear identity and deep understanding of songcraft. After some cult internet following through early Market experimentations, The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gong, produced by Katie Von Schleicher and recorded with a band of Brooklyn indie regulars, is a leap forwards in all categories, led by intimate open-book lyrics about family tree revelations and mental health struggles, with a slight edge and a sense of humour.

Director David Lynch once said "I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream. I always say getting inspiration is like fishing. If you're quiet and sitting there and you have the right bait, you're going to catch a fish eventually. Ideas are sort of like that. You never know when they're going to hit you." Inspired by this quote in both name and spirit, Hollie Kenniff's The Quiet Drift is an ambient gallery of cloudlike synths, seraphic strings, echoing guitars, and other celestial textures guided to cohesion by Hollie's own wordless singing. Though the album certainly creates (and originates from) the kind of space where Lynch's proverbial "fish" can be caught, The Quiet Drift is a fitting title for Hollie's own history, both recent and distant. During the course of the album's creation, Hollie and her family moved cross-country from an island in Washington state, to an island in Maine before ultimately relocating to Canada. "As a child I visited Ontario year-round," she explains in her own words. She continues "More than any other landscape, I think the lake, rivers, and woods there left the most enduring impression on me. The landscape and pace of life of these places will always stay with me." But the reverberant spaces Hollie crafts need no physical headquarters. Instead of conjuring views of nature at the ground level, her sound more readily evokes a top-down perspective, with the distinct features of the land shrinking underfoot as the listener becomes untethered from geography altogether. The Quiet Drift belongs more to the liminal spaces between life and afterlife, memory and fantasy, landscape and dreamscape, than any mappable locale. Describing her formative years, Hollie says "As a dual US/Canadian citizen who spent my childhood in a rural town-- one that I haven't returned to in many years - I have a sense of not entirely belonging anywhere. When I was a teenager my close friends were male musicians, so I was also an outsider to the degree that they were wild and anarchic in a way that I wasn't. I was a quiet book reader and avid music listener who enjoyed being around a creative group. I was also a radio DJ for alternative and punk music throughout high school." In this light, The Quiet Drift attests that creativity is placeless, and calls into question the stereotype of artists as scene-centric city dwellers. Having come of age in the absence of metropolitan sensory overload, Hollie learned to spot the muse in nature, and within herself, instead of the echo chamber of a frenzied peer group. On The Quiet Drift Hollie Kenniff wholly escapes from such pop-culture feedback loops into transcendent, shimmering realms, and she brings the listener along with her. In this age in which we have all been called to reevaluate our relationship to indoor spaces, and seek refuge in the great outdoors, The Quiet Drift provides an apt soundtrack for such rebalancing.

Created Slowly Over A Years-Long Span That Encompassed The Recording Of 2019's Stray Fantasies, Wife And Husband Duo Hollie And Keith Kenniff Deliver In A Deep And Dreamless Sleep, A Distinctly Hazier Chapter Of Their Technicolor Pop Venturemint Julep. Where The Former Album Bore A Crystalline Latticework Of...

Art Feynman (aka accomplished recording artist and producer Luke Temple) stitches art pop, Nigerian highlife, worldbeat, and other lesser-known genres into a musical quilt that displays his unmistakable guile and eccentric songcraft. On his sophomore album Half Price at 3:30 he delivers songs that side-smile while pointing out the emotional sinkholes that whirl beneath the most overlooked, seemingly commonplace scenarios. As effortlessly as he inhabits his Art Feynman character he also slips into the lives of other personalities, both living and fictional. Where previous entries in the Luke Temple discography -- including his well-liked former group Here We Go Magic -- have utilized organic timbres even while sailing far from the guitar-and-drums shore, Half Price sees him employing drum machines, slightly glossier production, and even autotune with a tasteful balance that suggests these tools have been in his kit all along. The result affectionately evokes guerrilla recording predecessors like Francis Bebey, Arthur Russell, and Haruomi Hosono in musicological detail, yet it's Temple's hard-won creative voice that resounds over top of it all facing Half Price forward instead of nostalgically backward.

Limited edition for Record Store Day 2018!

Composer, performer, and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's new album EARS is an immersive listening experience in which dizzying swirls of organic and synthesized sounds work together to create a sense of three-dimensional space and propulsion. Dense and carefully crafted, each of the songs on EARS unfolds with a fluid elegance, while maintaining a spontaneous energy, and a sprightly sense of discovery. Listeners familiar with her previous album Euclid (an album that prompted Dazed to call her “…one of the most pioneering musicians in the world.”) will no doubt notice her heavier use of vocals on EARS. On all but one song, her gently ecstatic swells of vocals emerge to soar over a dense jungle of synths and woodwinds.
Much of the album's warmth and energy stems from Smith's use of the versatile analog synthesizer, the Buchla Music Easel. According to Smith, “…nothing compares to the sound of a Buchla. In my mind a Buchla synthesizer has the most human sound in it. I wanted to show the Easel’s versatility and range of motion within a live set. I also wanted to spend as little time as possible in front of the computer during the creation.” After initially composing on the Buchla, she wrote arrangements for a woodwind quintet, added vocals, and further refined the pieces with granular synthesis techniques she developed in her sound design work (she contributed sound design to Panda Bear's “Boys Latin” video, and handled sound design and original compositions for Brasilia co-written by and starring Reggie Watts).
Though the pallet of sounds Smith employs on EARS is darker than the ebullient tenor we heard on Euclid, she's careful to let in just enough light to covey a feeling of cosmic bliss and transcendence. Kinetic arpeggios of synths pulse, often buoying her graceful vocal mantras, while woodwinds breathe and flutter, emulating the wildlife Smith observed while growing up on the West Coast (she even studied recordings of slowed down bird calls prior to composing these pieces). Though some of her gestures echo the musical tropes used by early minimalist composers, the world she creates on EARS is uniquely hypnotic and full of life, not unlike Miyzaki's film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which she cites as an inspiration.
EARS is a masterful articulation of Smith's vision, which she achieved in part by spending time preparing her mind prior to composing the album. As she explains, “I am very intentional about the months leading up to when I am going to compose something new. I really trust the subconscious and try and feed it only information I want it to feed back to me. I make playlists that I listen to nonstop, or have images I look at daily, or I go to places I want to be inspired by…I do all this prep work and then try and forget it when I am writing.” Listening to EARS, it's clear that her approach paid off, and that the seeds she planted within have born a vibrant and hyper-natural world that's as joyful to experience as the flora and fauna that inspired it.

Ex-Here We Go Magic frontman Luke Temple emerges with a new project, LukeTemple and The Cascading Moms. Debut album, Certain Limitations.Lauded for his contributions to Here We Go Magic and Art Feynman, Luke Templebrings his signature off-kilter grooves and melodies to his new project's debutalbum Certain Limitations. The trio's sound takes influence from the likes of DireStraits and The Velvet Underground, weaving together intricate guitar work, and apropulsive rhythm section, with a touch of jazz sensibility that recalls the ECMcatalog.A product of serendipity, The Cascading Moms were formed when in need of aband for an upcoming show, Temple brought together Kosta Galanopolous, acollaborator from his Art Feynman project, and Stuart, a musician he already knewin LA. When these three came together to rehearse, a spark ignited, revealing acreative connection that transcended that first show that brought them together.The album's lead single, "I Can Dream," originally appeared on Art Feynman's HalfPrice At 3:30. However, aer reworking it with the Cascading Moms, the songtook on a new life. This reinvention exemplifies Certain Limitations' core concept:a collection of songs honed and reshaped through the improvisations and collaborativespirit of three musicians creating and exploring a new sonic world.

Gabriel Birnbaum cuts straight to the spiritual essence of the charactershe inhabits, painting affecting and lovingly drawn scenes bolstered bycathartic hooks. Like one of his own espoused patron saints, Paul Simon,Birnbaum sets new challenges for himself with each recording, honingthe nuts and bolts of his songcra and pinpointing unexpected newaesthetic contexts for it. The lush and psychedelic folk-rock songs on hisnew album Patron Saint of Tireless Losers confidently cut to the essenceof his artistry, highlighting a mature narrative voice, and a consistentlysurprising musical syntax. As much as anything Birmbaum has put intothe world, it's a tour de force that thrives on both self-assuredness andrestlessness_marks of a crucial and constantly evolving artist whosework it's impossible to turn away from once you tap into its frequency.

One of the most in-demand producers in indie rock, and one half of Foxygen,Jonathan Rado's recordings for The Killers, Father John Misty, The Lemon Twigs,Whitney, and Weyes Blood devour the canon, and return something distinctlymodern. On For Who The Bell Tolls For, Rado's first solo release in ten years, theproducer unveils a refined version of his signature sound, intricately sculpted byanthemic maximalism and good old-fashioned studio magic.The album is an exercise in mournful maximalism, transforming the mythos of Americanpop music into a vibrant meditation on death. The spirit of late producerRichard Swift _ Rado's friend and mentor _ can be found across the collection, imbuingtracks like "Easier" with a tangible sense of loss, and Swift-ian turns of phrase. Onother songs, such as the addictive "Don't Wait Too Long," Rado paints anarena-ready production with streaks of longing and hopelessness. In many ways, ForWho The Bell Tolls For is a musical ode to Swift, nodding to the late producer'slegacy with homespun epics that straddle the line between joy and grief.Recorded at Electric Lady Studios, New York and Sonora Recorders and DreamstarII, Los Angeles, the album features appearances by Rado's frequent collaborators,including The Lemon Twigs, Brad Oberhofer, Andrew Sarlo, Jackie Cohen, and KaneRitchotte. Despite this esteemed lineup and the gargantuan sound of the record, ForWho The Bell Tolls For is a solo album at heart. Rado plays the studio like an instrument,his distinct voice present in every nook and cranny of the structure. Thispresence can be easily detected in every project that the artist touches, but it's neversounded so honest, so shimmering, or so Rado as it does here.

In 2019, Stephen Steinbrink discovered a short YouTube video of a street magician who approaches a highschooler walking home in Barstow, California. "Here, let me show you my idea," he says, as he places a quarter on the kid's hand. The magicianperforms some relaxed flourishes, and the coin vanishes. In silence, the kid stares at his hand at the nothing where there once, indisputably, was something, until his wonder finds a single word: "Cool." The title of Disappearing Coin, the new album from Oakland songwriter Stephen Steinbrink, comes from this short clip. "When I look at it now," he says, "I relate to the kid, who's obviously uneasy in his body, and going through the experience of being a teenager in the early 2000s growing up in a bleak desert town like I did. I also relate to the coin, an inanimate disc of possibility. And I relate to the magician, an absurd facilitator of sending what is tactile and concrete into the wispy conceptual realm." "I've watched it probably a hundred times," he says. "It cracked me up but also blew my mind open_ thefeeling of wonder I experienced watching this video became a guide as I navigated new ways of staying in the realm of what's both real and magical."Following the 2018 release of Utopia Teased, Steinbrink completed an apprenticeship in the nearly-lost art of Stained Glass, becoming a glazier at a studio thatover three years, fully restored the enormous 90-year-old windows in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. He committed to his Buddhist study, beginning lay monastictraining before the process was thwarted by the pandemic. He dove deeper into music production for other artists, engineering two albums by Boy Scouts releasedon Anti- Records in 2018 and 2021. Steinbrink delighted in the way these pursuits pulled at the thread of ego's tapestry and decentralized him from his craft, allowing him to embody a new role as a creative caretaker engaging in practices thatfelt communal and restorative."As I slowly began writing for myself again, I tried to imbue m...