The project of Gothenburg-based musician, producer and visual artist Lela Amparo, Amparo is an outlet for atmospheric and cinematic music that blends electronic, ambient and folk. Taken from new album Day and Night, out now on Bikiniwax Records, latest single ‘After Ours’ is a great example. Drawing on the likes of Bonobo and The Cinematic Orchestra, the song builds from simple guitar and plaintive strings into a rich, jazz-inflected track that’s thick with a sense of late-night drama and emotion. ‘After Ours’ is “inspired by a night spent in Paris before changing the course of my life,” Amparo explains. “It’s about being in the moment and knowing nothing will ever be the same.”

 Getdown Services – Cream Of The Crop

If John Cooper Clarke’s ‘Evidently Chickentown’ conjured the end days through pictures of a tedious, ruined Britain, then ‘Cream of the Crop’ by Bristol’s Getdown Services offers a new vision of the non-future. A world polished to within an inch of its life and then polished a bit harder. A stage of capitalism so late they’ve stopped updating the time on the board. Think branded boozers and no-change-from-a-tenner street food cuisine. The milieu is brought to life by shiny disco beats, though it is the conversational snark of vocalist Josh Law the grabs the attention. A figure who finds himself in a place so soulless he’s not sure whether to self-immolate or burst out laughing. Either way, he’s stuck there and so are you. Roll up everybody, Chickentown’s had a fresh coat of paint.

Jeffrey Silverstein – Cowboy Grass

Later this spring, Jeffrey Silverstein will release Western Sky Music, his second LP for Arrowhawk Records and first full-length since 2020’s You Become the Mountain. Promising an evolution of Silverstein’s cosmic brand of country, the album again features contributions from Barry Walker Jr (pedal steel) and Alex Chapman (bass), and also adds Akron/Family’s Dana Buoy on drums, as well as guest appearances from William Tyler and VSF fav Karima Walker. Lead single ‘Cowboy Grass’ is our first taste, a song with a little more dust and dirt and barroom boogie than anything Silverstein has made to date. Watch the video, directed by Austin Abbott and starring Eric DuRant, below:

Western Sky Music releases via Arrowhawk Records on 12th May. Pre-order a copy now from the Jeffrey Silverstein Bandcamp page.

Melati ESP – BAHASA BARU

With LP hipernatural coming soon on Carpark Records, Indonesian-American experimental pop artist Melati ESP has unveiled new single, ‘BAHASA BARU’. The record is notable in the way it draws on the breadth of Melati’s cultural influences to achieve its vivid sound (Javanese radio Dangdut, gamelan cassettes, Moving Shadow-era liquid jungle and Japanese chill-out are all listed as inspirations), and the new single serves as the ideal introduction to a style which exists outside of the usual categorization of genre or geography. “It’s a personal statement of intent,” Melati explains, “being comfortable in occupying the third space, and creating new ways of communicating that are tethered to intuition, empathy and understanding.” The song comes complete with a video, directed by Melati’s sister Kathleen Malay, which celebrates this embrace of otherness despite, as Melati puts it, “mostly feeling like a baby alien while growing up in Jakarta, always between two worlds.”

hipernatural is out on the 28th April via Carpark Records.

The Saxophones – Desert Flower

Released to announce their third album, coming early this summer on Full Time Hobby, ‘Desert Flower’ is the new single from The Saxophones. For the uninitiated, The Saxophones is the project of married duo Alexi Erenkov and Alison Alderdice, who make slinky Lynchian lounge music that’s dark and velvety, confronting existential concerns with a smoky sophistication. What Erenkov describes as “about avoidance and fear impeding personal growth and the deepening of relationships,” ‘Desert Flower’ is no different. Creeping and cryptic, it blends the material and the mystical, eventually swelling to emotive peaks as Erenkov’s croon gives way to radiant sax. It’s an intriguing glimpse of what promises to be a strange and sublime record.

There are symbols everywhere
signs that even I can’t deny.
Only if they aligned,
I could lift away the veil.

To Be a Cloud will be released via Full Time Hobby on 2^nd June. Pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Strange Ranger – Rain So Hard

Strange Ranger are a band who have been defined by a sense of self-reinvention. Winning initial acclaim within the spheres of indie rock, 2019’s Remember The Rockets saw the first shoots of shoegaze and pop influences breaking the surface, and by No Light in Heaven the following year they were entirely rebranded as an experimental electronic outfit. New single ‘Rain So Hard’, out via Fire Talk Records, emerges from this electro ground, its lush and layered sound playing as some nameless immensity above the vocals, be it a looming cityscape or wide open sky. This overwhelming scale registers as a kind of melancholy, the vocals adrift within something to large for them to navigate or control. “How do I get out of this movie now?” asks the repeated refrain, hoping for nothing more than another person to cling onto for the ride. Watch the video directed by Ben Turok below:

‘Rain So Hard’ is out now via Fire Talk Records.

Women Tied to Railroad Tracks – Fake Tans

Back in 2019 we wrote about Women Tied to the Railroad Tracks, describing the sound of their album And Levitating as “indie pop that sits in a strange space between mundane reality and freaky dreams.” With their debut record on the horizon with Anxiety Blanket Records, the LA outfit have shared the brand new single, ‘Fake Tans’. A bright summertime track loosely based on Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, where the protagonist speaks of an encounter with a man with a crack in his personality: “like a gap in a dam, and through that gap the future might pour in a different shape—terrible perhaps, or marvelous, but something new.”

Yael S. Copeland – Pool

Having made a name fronting Borito, Tel Aviv’s Yael S. Copeland is setting out alone for her first solo release. If the Borito sound occupied a colourful, retro bracket of the dream pop/rock genre, then Copeland’s solo work turns more toward the intimate and lo-fi, having more in common with Alex G and Elliott Smith. With an album set for release later this month, latest single ‘Pool’ shows how this stripped back style is no less immersive or heartfelt, the lyrics playing like something between a daydream and a poem in their gentle reflection, the sound still managing to envelop the listener in its lush layers.

big sky
like a big pool
blue and clear
but I can’t see my
reflection when I look down here

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Earlier this month, Jeffrey Silverstein returned with a new EP, Torii Gates, again released with Arrowhawk. Named after the structures in Shinto shrines which mark the boundary between the earthly and the sacred, the EP follows its predecessors in treading the line between the natural and the supernatural. In this manner, it itself becomes a gateway between the knowable world we inhabit and the one beyond the physical realm.

As if to reinforce this point, opener ‘Caught Behind the Hours’ begins with a recording about out-of-body experiences. “Well, what happens is that you as an individual suddenly find yourself for one reason or another apart from your physical body,” the narrator says, a clear indication Torii Gates has no intention of remaining tethered to the corporeal. “And yet you can think, you can be, you can act. But your physical body is in some other location—it may be only two inches away or 2,000 miles away.”

Though released under his own name, the EP follows previous Jeffrey Silverstein records in being far from a solo venture. Joined once more by Barry Walker Jr. on pedal-steel, Alex Chapman on bass and Ryan Oxford on production, Silverstein is able to craft rich and enveloping soundscapes that offer space for contemplation and capture big feelings with relatively few words. He describes the record as “a celebration of the unknown, small joys and learning to be comfortable with transition,” and a gentle joyousness threads through the probing prismed guitars and warm tape hiss, the soft sunbeam glow of Walker Jr.’s pedal steel.

The first track to feature vocals, ‘River Running By’ is inspired by the concept of ‘blue mind’. Coined by marine biologist Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, the term refers to the soothing meditative state experienced when on or near water. A sense of perspective and clarity in opposition to the ‘red mind’ of overstimulation and anxiety of much of contemporary life. In an essay for Talkhouse, Silverstein describes how he set out to capture in song the feeling of long slow days spent on the banks of the Washougal, Lewis and Columbia rivers. “I had nowhere to be, nothing to do, so I just sat,” he explains. “Despite the world around me feeling paused, I found immense comfort in the steady movement and momentum of the water.”

I was a river, running by
Living life, in four-four time
So many things, I couldn’t know
Caught a fish, but I let it go

This sentiment feels like a mission statement for much of Silverstein’s music. It’s a haven, a balm, both deeply inquisitive and reassuringly comforting. A lesson in quietening one’s movements in order to appreciate the worlds that surround us. Stillness need not necessarily equate to stagnation. There is confidence and calm to be found in the motion all around.

Torii Gates is out now via Arrowhawk Records. Get it on cassette and digitally from the Jeffrey Silverstein Bandcamp page.

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The songs of Jeffrey Silverstein weave together the threads of his life. He is inspired by his work as a special education teacher, his interest in long-distance running and the blue-green colour palette of the Pacific Northwest. Each of these threads carries its own mindful, unhurried dimension, and You Become the Mountain is a tapestry that simultaneously focuses the mind and lets it wander.

The album opens with ambient sounds of kids playing, naturalistic percussion heralding the first taste of Silverstein’s serene cirrostratus guitar. The result is subtly rousing, like warm and hazy images of a summer afternoon film-grained by nostalgia. There are no conventional vocals, a theme across an album that seamlessly blends instrumental and lyric-based compositions, but the track closes with a clip from a Jon Kabat-Zinn meditation tape (which is also where the album gets it’s title) that somehow captures Silverstein’s intentions better than his actual voice. Because if there’s one word that describes You Become the Mountain, it’s meditative.

Silverstein is joined by Barry Walker Jr. on pedal steel and Alex Chapman on bass who, along with the production skills of Ryan Oxford, add to the dreaminess with painterly strokes and subtle melodies. Listening back to the original mixes of the songs, Silverstein found himself simultaneously laughing in delight and overcome by emotion. “I have immense gratitude for Ryan, Barry, and Alex for helping actualize this record,” he writes in the album’s notes. “It was the closest I had come in years to being able to translate ideas and emotion into sound.”

‘Easy Rider’, which we first featured in its live form last year, is a great example of how this small team came together to create something that sounds almost celestial. Guitar and pedal steel streak across vast negative space in slow arcs, all dusted in the powdery light of a sunset, before gentle beats and Chapman’s bass add a little more dynamism. Thematically, the song has a sense of mellow abandon that is captured in the simple repeated lyric “ride on, easy rider / it’s what you do.” Silverstein previously elaborated on these themes, saying the song is “about making sure you’re finding joy in your work for yourself first and worrying less about what others make of it […] just trying to stay present and let not let future or past thoughts get in the way.”

This is another feeling that runs across the album. The idea of not being afraid of doing things your own way, of celebrating differences, of accepting and embracing yourself and your circumstances. “Perhaps your mountain has snow at the top, and trees on the lower slopes,” As Kabat-Zinn puts it in his monologue. “Perhaps it has one prominent peak, perhaps a series of peaks or a high plateau.”

This concept of self-peace is intertwined with the idea of harmony with our landscape. Long, verbose verses are not the Jeffrey Silverstein way, but even so the presence of the natural world is ever-present. Like on the slow-bloom folk song ‘Return to Roses’, one of the record’s most minimalist moments, as Silverstein sings “The distant drone of a hummingbird, and enough light for everyone.” Of course, natural imagery is conjured as much by the instrumentation as language. There’s something meteorological about ‘Antelope Canyon’; the slightly fuzzed-out guitar, the pattering percussion, the rounded pulse of bass, while the easy sway of ‘Bernard’ takes you to the breezy mountainside before any lyrics appear.

The most impressive thing about You Become the Mountain is its clarity of vision, the way it comes together holistically. It is a record that captures boundless spaces that could be out there in the physical world or right here within ourselves. Perhaps to achieve true peace one must find it both inwardly and outwardly, an equilibrium that removes the illusion of a barrier between us and our environment. To return one last time to Kabat-Zinn:

and when you feel ready to
seeing if you can bring the mountain into your own body
so that your body sitting here and the mountain in your mind’s eye become one
so that as you sit here you share in the massiveness and the stillness and the majesty of the mountain
you become the mountain

You Become the Mountain is out now via Arrowhawk Records and you can get it from the Jeffrey Silverstein Bandcamp page.

Photo credit Shade Standard

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