The product of Principato’s residency with the National Park Service on the titular island, forthcoming album On Fire Island offers another vivid example of this style. Layers of field recordings anchor the sound within the locale, with particular attention paid to the elemental forces of wind and waves which have long shaped the environment. But ever perceptive to the subtleties of a place, the Saapato sound captures the full spectrum of moods present within such phenomena. And, together with conscientious ambient arrangements, manages to evoke both the raw power and tender beauty of which such forces are capable.

But there’s another, deeper duality at the heart of On Fire Island. One perhaps inherent within any piece of art which attempts to explore the natural world in the contemporary age. Because while the release is an overt celebration of the landscape and the life which inhabits it, there is a sense of lamentation to the sound too. As though, in the years we are living through, to recognise the beauty of any environment is to mourn its ongoing and escalating loss. To understand how humanity is slowly decimating everything it should hold dear.

Thus for all of its meditative birdsong and amphibian calls, tracks like lead single ‘Morning Swale Song’ are underpinned by a certain urgency. A slow-moving feeling which creeps up from inside the spacious arrangements, something bound up within both melancholy and joy. A sensation subtle until the moment it suddenly isn’t, and you realise that we are responsible for much of the fragility around us. That we must act if we wish to preserve all this intricate detail, this beauty, this life.

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‘Berlin’, the second single from Brooklyn-based artist AUDG on Paper Moon Records, is a song which exists in the gap in every relationship between perception and reality. With a guest appearance from Molly Albert, the track evokes the particular loneliness of realising another person is not the one you have conjured in your head. Morose and vulnerable indie pop, searching for a way forward when the trap door has opened beneath your feet.

‘Berlin’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Elora – Hazard Lights

‘Hazard Lights’ is the latest single from Brooklyn singer-songwriter Elora. What label Paper Moon Records call “a living breathing manifestation of reclaiming control and jumpstarting a new perspective,” the song draws on the styles of 70s pop and contemporary acts like Weyes Blood to create a buoyant sound at once fresh and timeless. “It takes strength to know when you’re down, to grab the wheel and pull yourself out,” as Elora says, and as the track builds into its sunny swagger, that’s exactly the impression it sets.

‘Hazard Lights’ is out now via Paper Moon Records. Find Elora at all the usual places.

Laura Misch – Light Years

Laura Misch is a multidisciplinary artist and producer based in London. But her new album Sample the Sky exists within the liminal space between the city and the natural world beyond its limits. With a layered sound consisting of saxophone, vocals, field recordings and electronics, Misch probes in this border between the urban and the organic to trace often forgotten connections between humanity and the wider web of existence. Previous single ‘Portals’ did this through the lens of her grandfather’s passing, while new track ‘Light Years’ offers a moodier sound but one no less insistent in the way it suggests an overarching interconnection between all forms of life.

The Planes – First Breath After Mask

Rising from the opening stages of the pandemic but coming to represent a more generalised anxiety and the subsequent efforts of relief, ‘First Breath After Mask’ by The Planes is a song at once depressed and affirming. As though from with its own inertia stirs some last attempt at catharsis. The track is indicative of the outfit’s latest album Dark Matter Recycling Co., out now via Safe Suburban Home Records and Totally Real Records, which offers sounds from across the alt rock spectrum without ever fully letting go of The Planes’ indie pop past.

Saapato – Somewhere Else

The music of Saapato, AKA Philadelphia-based ambient musician Brendan Principato, is always firmly rooted within a specific place. Be it a local wildlife sanctuary or his childhood home, Principato employs what he calls “textural soundscape creation and sound bath performance” to capture his surroundings as sound. Latest album Somewhere Else, set for release next month with Aural Canyon Music, is a little different in that the space is not as physical as previous releases, though no less real and familiar. “An exploration of places inside our heads that we lose and find over and over again,” as he explains. “Dynamic, intangible and intimately personal psychic states that are the emotional amalgam of an individual life full of experiences, memories, mis-rememberings, dreams, seasons, surprises, and routines.” Listen to the title track now for a first taste of this liminal space between the inside and outside of our heads.

Salt Cathedral – Complacent

“Don’t stay motionless / by the side of the road, / don’t suspend joy / or love halfheartedly / don’t save yourself / now / or ever.” These words from the poem ‘No Te Salves’ (‘Don’t Save Yourself’) by Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti form the basis of Salt Cathedral’s new single, ‘Complacent’. Hailing from Colombia and now based in Brooklyn, the duo (Juliana Ronderos & Nicolas Losada) won attention in 2020 with album CARISMA, offering a pop style that’s simultaneously sleek, sincere and surreal. The new single builds upon these foundations to form a sound as experimental as it is urgent, leading the listener into the world of Salt Cathedral and demanding they live life to the full. “This is my ode to [Benedetti’s] poem,” as they explain, “my own cry in the battle with mediocrity.”

The track also comes with a video created by Ronderos along with Alex Fischman Cardenas, which you can watch below:

‘Complacent’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Tar Of – Ey Vaay

The project of New York‘s Ariyan Basu and Ramin Rahni, Tar Of make art pop of the avant garde variety. Later this month they will release new album Confidence Freaks Me Out,  a 24-track epic that the duo describe as “an exercise in patiently constructed joyous absurdity.” Latest single ‘Ey Vaay’ is a good example, composed of duelling sax and guitar riffs which egg each other on towards a hyperactive rhythm. The only lyric is a Farsi phrase repeated over and over, bending its meaning until it is no longer recognisable and all that remains is the runaway energy accelerating into absurdity.

Wish Queen – Grievances

With album Saturnalia looming on the horizon, Cleveland-based singer/songwriter Grace Sullivan, AKA Wish Queen, has unveiled new single, ‘Grievances’. The track is the ideal entry point of a record which combines alt-pop confidence with confessional intimacy. Wish Queen is something of an alter-ego, allowing Sullivan to transcend the various anxieties and frustrations of contemporary living, and the single serves as a list of grievances from which the project might free her. As though, in offering them up via song, some form of exorcism occurs, and Wish Queen is thus free to soar above the melancholy and the sound.

Wishy – Donut

The new project led by Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites, Wishy are preparing to release their debut EP Paradise via Winspear later this year, and lead single ‘Donut’ serves as their opening salvo. It’s a song which embraces alt rock energy and grungy weight alongside a gauzy shoegaze texture, making for something both propulsive and transportive. Pitchkites’s vocals slice through the haze with real clarity, a thread the listener follows into the sound and holds on to through the enveloping experience.

I’ll leave the keys on the table
Believe me when I say I’m not coming back

Don’t follow me
I’m vibrating ecstasy
Want it to take hold of me
Don’t follow me
I’m fine but
I’m driving on a donut

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