Album Reviews
There's an imaginary dial beneath this record, and it doesn't tell the hour one would expect from Ruth Garbus. Profound lives at noon, not the late-afternoon melancholy of her past — the record in which she stops casting long shadows, and sings her ageing as vegetal ornament.
Essays
Vicarious Nostalgia isn't a vaporwave aesthetic: saudade, mono no aware, viraha, huaigu. The words each culture gave to the nostalgia for what one hasn't lived.
Album Reviews
Girls Blue by Cher1tide: guitar and voice from Tokyo, lo-fi dream folk that holds its focus instead of blurring. A serene pastoral haunted like early Grouper.
Essays
Sonorizzazioni from the Seventies. Library cues made to order, shelved and forgotten, now playing again across a schedule that no longer exists.
Album Reviews
There is a river Andy Cartwright crosses every week, always the same mountain path in the French Alps where he has lived since the late twenty-tens, and every time it is a different river.
Album Reviews
Where Perhacs found the uncanny in stillness, Lindfors finds it in rupture — Slow Magic is less a record about wonder than about the wonder wearing thin at three in the morning.
Album Reviews
Born from a long-distance correspondence between Scotland's Euan Millar-McMeeken and Japan's Satomimagae, Gloaming turns distance into fertile ground — folk and ambient, piano and deteriorated tape, two sensibilities reshaping one another across a shared twilight.
Essays
There's a drawer somewhere, and inside it a tape. It happened to Linda Perhacs and to Parallelograms — and to a whole lineage of women the world missed the first time. A map of how a certain light keeps switching back on, three times, in three different ways.
Album Reviews
Andrew Wasylyk opens his orchestrated art-folk to the human voice for the first time: six singers gathered remotely and drawn as six songbirds by Frances Castle. From Kathryn Joseph's dark to the Amber Room's cinematic ache, a record about what cannot be put back together.
Film Reviews
A sergeant lands on a pagan Scottish island and finds himself not the investigator but the sacrifice. The Wicker Man assembles its folklore from Frazer and Pinner — a film about a body given to the fire that legend says ends buried under a motorway.
Film Reviews
Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971) films the Australian outback as a score — every rustle composed, not captured — until the desert becomes a voice. But the land it hands us is beautiful because it's been emptied: the same erasure as colonial landscape painting. Gift and trap in one gesture.
Album Reviews
Reissued into a lost classic, Parallelograms is usually sold as ahead-of-its-time psych-folk. The real key: Linda Perhacs has synaesthesia. She sees sound as moving shapes and colour, and her 1970 album is her attempt to notate it — a three-dimensional sound sculpture.