The meditative, welcoming style of debut Airport People record From Nine Mornings taps into this state of mind. Out later this summer on Whited Sepulchre Records, the album offers a neo-classical sound marked by its modest tones and easy space, inviting the listener to step out of the perpetual movement of their day if only for a short while. The result is not only comforting, offering the sedate pace and order of the airport as a balm against hectic life, but also deceptively rebellious in nature. Standing in opposition to the accepted modes of existence. When so much contemporary wisdom relies on clear plans and paths of progression, on being productive and racing from A to B, then embracing the slack rhythms of the in-between becomes an act of defiance. Why race to flee the liminal spaces, Johnson asks, when they might hold our only chance of peace?

The idea extends to the very creation of the record. After losing his job and moving home, Johnson used the freedom of the in-between to work on a new melody each morning, soon building up a collection which would eventually be curated and edited to leave the nine mornings of the album. Melodies supported and developed by arrangements of piano, violin, upright bass, guitar, drums, field recordings and manipulated orchestral samples, elements all handled with characteristic precision which to craft a sound both bright and careful.

Take single ‘from morning no. 2’. Textures of gentle rainfall draw the listener in before the piano emerges, fond and vibrant and coloured by just the smallest shade of sadness, as all fond things must be. But Airport People does not present its moods clearly, instead working to accentuate whatever the listener might be feeling. A personal soundtrack open to interpretation, crafted to fit any listener’s surroundings.

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The record’s title, translated by Thiam into four languages on the cover (Siftorde, Fateliku, Souvenir, Remember), references both these facts. The album is an act of remembrance of otherwise ephemeral moments, capturing not just Thiam’s guitar but also the warm hum of a thousand sibilant crickets, thus eternalizing a small moment in the warm dark of the Senegalese night. This sense of place is hugely important, and sets the guitar as just one small part of a wider ecosystem.

But the title refers also to a remembrance of older methods and styles. Thiam plays and updates these songs so that they may be remembered, using his guitar to reinterpret melodies traditionally played on the hoddu, some of which date back to the seventeenth century when Senegal was part of the Mali Empire. It’s here his knowledge as a folklorist, skill as a musician and curiosity as a listener combine, resulting in a sound that is part homage, part singular vision.

While Siftorde is a showcase of Thiam’s skill and dexterity as a guitarist, it’s the emotional core that glows through brightest. From the stark honesty of the no-frills setup to the meditative melodies that unfurl and repeat, the album holds a sense of pensive serenity that is impossible to capture with words. Accentuating this are small moments of what can only be described as transcendence. Take for example the faint murmur of vocals on ‘Dannibe,’ which bubble softly to the surface like an audible memory, only to dissipate in seconds, leaving you wondering if you ever heard them at all.

Siftorde is out now via Sahel Sounds and you can get the LP or digital download from the Tidiane Thiam Bandcamp page.

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Speaking of language, every track on the debut Or Sobre Blau album, The Piri Piri Samplers, is named after a Portuguese phrase with a strong Catholic theme. The album was recorded in a studio in Alto São João, Lisbon, which just so happened to be opposite a large graveyard. “They remind me of the bleakness in that cemetery,” Leonard tells The Line of Best Fit of the songs’ titles, “the weird perseverance of its dark, devout language over people that are dead and structures that are in ruin.”

That thought serves as a good introduction to the record. These instrumentals are more akin to something put out by Lost Tribe Sound than the usual Memorials of Distinction fare, abstract soundscapes that crawl with claustrophobic drones and wiry guitars that come skewering to the fore from amidst a sense of atmosphere and tension. It’s like the soundtrack to some Euro acid western, playing against a backdrop of stoic hawks wheeling above the baked Iberian earth.

There’s a depth to ‘Do Menino Deus’, a kind of stereoscopic experimental track that pairs landscape-wide ruminations with picked guitar that feels a lot closer, like unseen creatures scuttling in the nearby scrub. The whole album continues like this, Serra and Leonard using their guitars to probe and search, creating something that’s unique in the way it combines the tense and the explorative, the ominous and the beautiful.

There’s wonder too in how the tracks are constructed, seemingly clashing guitars coming together in waves of constructive interference, creating a swirling whole that feels a lot more than the sum of its parts. Guitar is used as an atmospheric foil (‘Da Madalena’), as small blipped flourishes (‘De Passeio Pelo Alto De São João’), and even as pseudo percussion (‘Da Nossa Senhora Da Conceição’). ‘Mártires’ brings all this together in the album’s uneasy masterpiece, guitar as both taut mosquito-whir and deep moaning calls, evoking the feeling of watching strange lights flitting between moon-lit tombs, perhaps remnants of the martyrs of the title.

The Piri Piri Samplers is an impressive album, and one guaranteed to sound unlike anything else you’ll hear this year. Serra and Leonard make an odd couple, but as Or Sobre Blau proves, that can make for great music. “What do you find in the middle of noise and harmony?” asks label Memorials of Distinction. “A very old question, really. We know that the answer is usually endearing and a little tragic, like a bad translation.”

You can get The Piri Piri Samplers on cassette tape or name-your-price download from the Memorials of Distinction Bandcamp page.

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Now Tucker Theodore is back with a new album, LSG, a collection of ten “movements” organised into two 25 minute tracks. The record sees Theodore continue to push the boundaries of what he can do with his music, ranging from lonely lo-fi guitar to pummelling post-rock. As label Antiquated Future Records describe, “it’s wild and unruly and impossible to put in any box.”

LSG is its own world, segueing from shimmering crystalline electronic effects and moments of ethereal grace, to muscular and mean rock songs. The first track, ‘Movements 1-6’ gathers from a swirling murk, secluded guitar winding across a landscape of distorted drums and otherworldly atmospherics. The rest of the movements ebb and flow in tidal tempo—at times relatively calm and enveloping, and others roaring with nature’s full fury—but infused with a kind of patient, elemental rhythm regardless.

‘Movements 7-10’ begins with just over seven minutes of elegiac guitar and burbling effects. Ruminative, repetitive and truly affecting, the song is a great example of the quieter moments on LSG. Perhaps even more illustrative is the transition into the next movement, which is equally affecting but in a different way, sky-wide guitar slashing across a dark landscape like cracks of electric light. The effortless move from intimate and insular to wide-screen epic somehow works perfectly, a feat that Tucker Theodore repeats across LSG as a whole. It’s brave and bold and quite unlike anything else you’ll hear this year.

LSG is out now and you can get it via Antiquated Future Records.

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The recording moniker of Weber’s solo work, REW<< has itself been the vehicle for a number of styles and sounds, with Weber’s solo visions as experimental and ambitious as any of his partnerships. Recorded in a series of hotel rooms across much of Asia, Departeures offered a subtropical and reflective slice of dream pop, while 2015’s Olive Skinned, Silver Tongued Sirens Sing Swan Songs pushed into neo-classical territory. Still, the latter employed pop sensibilities to counter the classical vibe, making for a record that blurred the distinction between avant garde experimentalism and accessible pop.

New album Les Racines Parmi Les Sabots Des Chevaux is another direction for the REW<< sound, with Weber shedding the pop aspects in favour of a pure neo-classical aesthetic. Centring the piano as the driving force, the record is a lesson in minimalism, at least when contrasted with REW<<‘s previous releases, dropping much of the dressing in favour of stark emotion. This is typified in the album’s opener ‘Victoire Impossible,’ the tone somewhere between pensive and sparkling, or perhaps both at once—concerned with the quiet beauty of things, and the process of elevating such appreciation into our everyday lives.

The joyous finale of the opener sets the tone for the record, with tracks such as ‘Ralentissement Debout’, ‘Monde Magique et Solitaire’ and ‘Attraper un Aperçu de la Femme de la Peinture’ all finding different ways to bloom into deeper life from their minimal beginnings. Which is not to say that Weber is not equally adept at pure restraint, as highlighted by the sombre tones of ‘Équilibre’ and field recording textures of ‘Volière d’Oiseaux Sans Vol,’ but it’s clear that his tendency with this record leans toward the transcendent climax.

Les Racines Parmi Les Sabots Des Chevaux is out now and you can get it from the REW<< Bandcamp page.

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[Docks create] something at once grand and languid, the guitars weaving a wide ocean over which we float and bob in somnambulant motion, while also conjuring a sense of the size and depth, as though that around and beneath us is worthy of respect and awe.

The band are back with a brand new release, Ballast EP, which sees Docks undergoing subtle change and evolution. Things kick off with ‘Œuvres vives’, a taut, lean song that threatens to expand into heavy territory yet never quite does, and ‘Kiosk’ follows in a similar manner, the foreboding of the opening never quite precipitating into the storm it promises.

This is something of a theme on the record, though that’s not to say the tone remains entirely understated. The subversive, noir-ish tone of ‘Œuvres mortes’ certainly pushes into dark territory, while the slow tick of ‘Nafarros’ does swell across its smouldering length, though again the songs stop short of the post rock depth of previous releases. Even ‘Motorhome’, with its mean, electrically-charged air, does not allow the reverb to take over, and indeed it is absent from ‘Pan Bleu’, which heralds a return to the even tone of the opening.

In this way, the songs feel more mature and confident, relying on the implied and withheld to convey atmosphere rather than merely burying us in noise. Think the centre of a venn diagram between Mogwai’s Les Revenants soundtrack and Yo La Tengo’s for Old Joy—a simplicity that belies its own nature, born as it is from a struggle between melancholic beauty and needling dread.

Ballast EP is out now via Youth Riot Records! and you can get it from the Docks Bandcamp page.

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The unconventional use of pedal steel is the album’s central pillar. As Lobby Art describe, “[Post Moves] stretches the confines of the pedal steel guitar to suss out the more textural & tonal elements of the instrument; it’s restorative and transfixing, putting the work more in the camp of ambient than anything else.” Feeling a sense of dissatisfaction with the conventional uses of the instrumental, Post Moves do not give up or move on, instead expanding and repurposing to find unexplored areas with the pedal steel range, utilising imagination and ambition to pull new value from what we already have.

From opener ‘The Arc of Life’, it’s clear that Wenc isn’t satisfied with traditional song structures either, abandoning any sense of verse and chorus for something altogether more patient and evocative. The track sounds deep and textured, the background atmospherics laying a gauzy, film-grained foundation upon which pedal steel winds and floats. It’s a sound that wouldn’t be out of place on Lily Tapes and Discs, possessing that same strangely meditative vibe that somehow gets to the heart of things, delving into moods and feelings that are otherwise incommunicable.

The other touchstone is Lejsovka & Freund, with whom Post Moves share a deviation to the fusion of old and new, re-utilising traditional instruments in strange and inventive ways. Like on ‘The Country Yields the City’, its pedal steel as nostalgically American as buffalo, buttes and prairie grass, before the whole thing disintegrates into snowflake synths and digital feedback. Welcome to the 21st century it seems to say. Things are weird.

There’s a certain duality between nature and simulation at work on Unison of Motion, though one which is collapsing in the contemporary moment. Post Moves conjure that enduring sense of the vast American landscape, the sense of promise and nostalgia rolled into one, though this classic dream is shaped and distorted by technology to form a hyperreal present. In the words of Lobby Art, “Post Moves make Americana about an America that makes no sense; pastoral, shambling and strange.”

This is made clear on ‘Manco Capac 648’, the ambience conjuring time as a slow, grand thing, though synths emerge to disfigure this old comfort, impinging on the sentimental view. Similarly, ‘Chigagou’ glitters uneasily, a dusky arboreal soundscape of lightning bugs and long shadows that might be just rendered digitally, while ‘The Geography of Capital’ bristles with static, again the sweeping timelessness undercut by electronic undertones. There’s always been something mournful in such music, but Post Moves adds a layer of confusion and dread, as though the loss has bite beyond the passing of time.

Closer ‘What Happens to the People’ is as patient and strangely sad as a star-strewn sky, like standing in an abandoned lot at midnight and looking upwards as the breeze blows trash around your feet and the weeds whisper against chainlink fences, neon blinking from every angle and darkness seeping between the beat, the universe as near and as far as the lives that surround you, the distant purr of vehicles, the occasional laugh or yell.

Today we are very excited to share the whole album a little while before release. It is the type of record that rewards complete listens, so put on a pair of headphones and immerse yourself.

Cover photo by Ximena Bedoya

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However, the relatively simplicity of the arrangement says nothing of the detail and scope of the music, as though in this genre there is an inverse relationship between number of instruments and level of detail. Indeed, as his bio states, Atalay’s music “varies in structure and character, ranging from long-form compositions to brief impressionistic explorations of a theme,” and thus through guitar alone he is equally capable of evoking moments in time as he is entire landscapes.

Teaming up with the good folks at Dust Etc. to put out what will be the first album that he has not released himself, this month sees the release of the latest Kerem Atalay, Summer Winter. Performing something of a balancing act between the poles of long form and vignette, the album draws its atmospheric core from the equally antithetical seasons of the title. The good folks at Post-Trash featured lead single ‘Summer 1’ a few weeks ago, a track they described as “warm and vibrant, beaming down like the hot sun and entrenched in long day vibes and late nights […] creep[ing] forward with a winding arpeggiated melody, bright and beautiful, with a sense of wonder.”

We’re super pleased to be able to share ‘Winter 2’, a brand new track from the thematic flip-side of the album. But that’s not to say Kerem Atalay moves away from a sense of wonder. The duality between summer and winter is not easily partitioned into a happy/sad divide, and ‘Winter 2’ could be said to match or even trump the brightness of ‘Summer 1’. This is a track representing early January mornings where the sun stretches shadows and shimmers layers of frost, life emerging from the night before, red cheeked and speckled with an icy light.

Summer Winter will be released on the 22nd June via Dust Etc. and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Tape design and photographs by Mindy Burgess and Caleb Kong

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Millpond Way is a three-song EP, again released by the fine folks at Other Songs Music Co. The record feels very much a natural progression from Still Lifes and debut Field Notes, melding their acoustic and electric styles into an atmospheric blend of old and new. We described how M. Grig’s previous releases were “rooted in memories and the natural world,” and while it appears a failure of the imagination to offer the same thoughts again, there is something uniquely anchored about this music.

Grigoni carves out a space to consider the things that might otherwise pass us by, or fade into the background of our experiences. Here our surroundings are brought into stark relief, an environment wrought by the constant passing of time, and as such shapes not only our memories but our very identity too. And while it’s easy to forget such things in the day-to-day trenches of life, Millpond Way suggests the value in stepping back, in contemplating where we are and were, and how that forms who we are.

Millpond Way is out on the 27th April and you can pre-order it now from the Other Songs Bandcamp page.

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Opener ‘Sharalee’ sets the tone, emerging from a foggy haze in its wistful majesty. As with the entire record, the overall mood is sad but not in the traditional sense, more that kind of mindful, resigned melancholy that accompanies viewing scenes much bigger or older than yourself. Isaak states the purpose of the EP is relaxation, and this plays into it too, the idea of shedding ones fleeting worries in the face of things more permanent.

‘Upstairs’ in shorter but no less moving, possessing a slightly more insular edge, as though positioned within a refuge as the rain falls, your elbows on the windowsill. ‘Wind’ is more patient still, the deep yet quiet notes cycling in imperfect repetitions, each one different from the last yet part of the same eternal force, and ‘More’ rises from this, resonating a sense of peace. Again, the track imparts the sense of wonder; the realisation of one’s size within the world. Though, instead of desolation or despondency, the impermanence and relative irrelevance are liberating and comforting, a context so grand and beautiful that all else pales into insignificance. What’s more, each time the frame of mind arises, it seems ridiculous that we ever felt any differently, though of course it will soon become obscured once again.

The mountains and forests of British Columbia act as representations of this, ever-present yet often shrouded in mist, a wider perspective that never leaves but is rarely noticed, until one takes the time to look up. With EP1, Isaak works to carve out a moment in your day where you can raise your head and, no matter how foggy the peaks, appreciate the fact that they are present, and will be tomorrow, too.

EP1 is out now via Jamison Isaak’s own label, FLORA, and you can get it from Bandcamp.

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