Not Not Fun

Barbier, Marc Antoine

Musée Des Espèces

Not Not Fun

The ‘soundscape ecologies’ of Montreal composer Marc-Antoine Barbier first emerged from late-night home studio improvisations triangulating Hassel, Krause, and sleep deprivation. Gradually, granular tapestries took shape, weaving modal electronics with percussion, sax, flute, and DX7. The result is a low-lit patchwork of dream and delirium, fractal ambient and fifth-world freefall: Musée Des Espèces [‘Museum of Species’].Barbier’s background in new wave world-building and synth-patch sculpting fuses here to full effect. The songs are alternately soothing and serpentine, swaying with smoke, rhythm, color, and ceremony. It’s album-as-environment, a harmony of spheres and vertical terrain, swiftly tilting through a tunnel of sky, sea, and circuitry.“I wanted to create something between chaos and harmony – a naturalistic dialogue.”

Metra.Vestlud

Ashes That Made the Shape of My Dreams

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he latest by Russian sound chemist Artem Dultsev aka Metra.Vestlud began in a “collective hallucination” induced by early parenthood. Disorienting tides of dramatic change were channeled via extended synthesis sessions centered on timbre and simplicity, joy and tears, “fires lit in a space for the new.” The results are dimensional – precision renderings of remote longing, adrift in the smoke of a second life. Ashes That Made the Shape of My Dreams extends and obscures the Atlantean 4th world fusions of his 2021 infinity symbol tape on Kofla. Pairing an Arturia MicroFreak with Wavetable, the album’s 10 tracks triangulate warmth, melancholy, and an intimate inner cosmos. Solar wind sung songs heard from a past life only now remembered. Dedicated to Lyuba and Miron.

Secret Places Of The Lion

High Gardens

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The wooded stargate of Western Massachusetts can lay claim to one of modern times’ premiere “deep zones” dispensaries: Secret Places of the Lion. Via their Saturn Fern HQ, they’ve issued three full-lengths plus some scattered private documents. The Lion’s latest continues the project’s legacy of regal arcana: High Gardens. Mirage synths and oracle organ lockstep with bronze clanking and MIDI percussion across six (plus a digi-only bonus) marbled hall pageants of arch templar simulacrum. Cryptic psychedelia from a mystery school at the threshold of ascendant cyber-Babylon. The Secret is Kept. The Places Unnamed. High Gardens for a Low and Barren Age. Mastered by Jared Carrigan.

Spectral Fields

IV

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The fourth offering by L.A. mirage duo Spectral Fields (aka Jason Simon of Dead Meadow and Caleb Dravier of Jungle Gym Records) is a slow-burn trip of outer desert improv, tracked live to reel-to-reel for maximum resinous depth. Both sides of IV capture the project’s mantric landscape of long shadows, distant smoke, and embers in the fog. Organs and hand drums float in spirals between flickers of fried, spidery guitar and processional dirge. Time dissipation via entwined ritual: the Fields sing Spectral.

Shine Grooves

Sequences For Fluttering

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The latest by Yekaterinburg producer Andrey Kurokhtin aka Shine Grooves offers an expansive panorama of the project’s arrhythmic depths and ambient outer limits, beyond the skillful dub techno for which he’s best known. Sequences For Fluttering collects 14 tracks across nearly a decade of home recordings, threading a 54-minute voyage through synthetic woodwinds, cosmic electronica, ASMR breakbeat, new age glitch, and glassy orchestral abstractions. Taken as a whole, the album effectively demonstrates the subcurrents of the SG soundworld: flickering texture, fractal kinetics, strange yearning, sun-flared haze. An immersive suite of oblique energies and melodies, untethered to notions of dance floor intentionality, let loose to unspool, take flight, and flutter.

Marsh, Alex

Trellis

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After almost a decade of exploratory ambient activity under other aliases, Australia-based musician Alex Marsh presents their first eponymous work: Trellis. The title refers to the music’s “triple-woven” palette of autoharp, upright piano and an old Yamaha keyboard, arranged in diffuse configurations of fragrant smoke and sunlit dust. Accented with clarinet, chimes, bells, and cymbals, the pieces breathe more than build, pooling and dispersing in what Marsh describes as “horizontal ecosystems of sound.” The album’s mode of improvisation feels uniquely open and indeterminate, guided by a careful alchemy of tonal color and the resonance of interacting sound layers. Wisps of keys bloom and bend in the mist; strings thrum and glow; hushed vibrations stretch like clouds in a quiet sky. In both muse and method, Trellis embraces blurred boundaries and unseen forces, tracing small sonic moments into a yearning mosaic of suspended animation

Torn Hawk

Watching Heat On Mute

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Valcrond Videographer Luke Wyatt is a versatile figure in the fields of art and experimental entertainment, with a body of work spanning mulched techno, hypnagogic rock, spoken word, and avant stand-up. His latest, Watching Heat On Mute, marks a return to the tape-hazed instrumental “smear style” showcased on Torn Hawk’s 2014’s classic Through Force Of Will, which Wyatt describes as a mix of “bleeding guitars, harsh-beautiful watercolor landscapes, songs about movies, soundtracks by cops.” Years of artistic exploration have honed the Hawk’s chops and sharpened its vision, culminating in a ten-track hit parade of hooks, heroics, and poetic shredding, riffed and spliced over broken baggy beats. Swooning downtempo guitar fugues (“Two Footprints and a Pillar of Flame”) and triumphant VHS heartbreak anthems (“Her Blur”) slipstream into kaleidoscopic amplifier worship (“A Burnt Map”) and out-of-body slacker shoegaze reveries (“The Fly With Jeff Goldblum”). Like city sunsets shot on recycled camcorder tape, this is grainy, gritty, handheld music, bleached but true, flickering with static and cinematic emotion.

Vengeance Des Fleurs

s/t

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Russian ex-pats Vengeance des Fleurs launched last year in Tbilisi via a Telegram chat with a vision of fusing flutes and synths in the spirit of traffic cone-era Kraftwerk. Following a successful rehearsal, synthesist Vladimir L. and flautist Anastasia Mikhaleva reconvened at a studio in the Georgian port city of Batumi and improvised a series of arrangements. Titled in French as tribute to Jean Marie Pelt’s formative pop-science program (and electronic music gateway drug) L'Aventure des Plantes, the duo’s self-titled debut weaves serpentine synths, high winds, and altered states across four freeform analog tapestries in the lineage of early Tangerine Dream and Emerald Web. “We wanted to make music that sounded like an early electronic roots record. Music seeking the peace and resolution we lacked when recording. This is an escapist album.”

Voyage Futur

Inverted Land

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Viennese ambient voyager Wolfgang Lehmann returns with a lush, hushed, electro-acoustic suite of fantastical landscapes: Inverted Land. Crafted in collaboration with his partner Beate, and heavily inspired by a recently acquired marimba, the album unfolds in tactile, time-lapse panoramas of gradient color, spatial illusion, and changing light.The arrangements echo the cosmic vistas of Lehmann’s debut, Secret Earth, but the interplay of VF in duo mode skews more veiled and telekinetic. Twilit silhouettes ebb and flow from a delicate palette of resonance and shadow, attuned to the subcurrents of remote utopias long since reclaimed by nature’s undertow.

Voyage Futur

Unseen Portal

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Wolfgang Lehmann’s second album of VF’s latest creative cycle leans further into the project’s eclectic acoustic inclinations, arriving at a sound between balearic and kaleidoscopic, progressive and primordial: enter the Unseen Portal. Contributions from his partner Beate Lehmann and brass multi-instrumentalist Alex Kranabetter expand the album’s textural and emotional range, venturing through jazzy lunar fusion (“Moonrise”), 4th world frontiers (“Ancient Treescape”), northern lights new age (“Lost Memory”), and cloud forest downtempo (“Topographic Change”). Like the title makes clear, this is elusive, transportive music, 10 shimmering gateways to hybrid habitats of rhythm, reverie, and refracted magic.

Sip

Leos Ultras

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A full four years after Chicago organ maestro Jimmy Lacy’s legendary maiden voyage as SiP, Leos Naturals, he returns with its lush, layered, long-awaited sequel: Leos Ultras. Conceived and recorded in a corner of a large floorplan warehouse-turned-sound lab called Homan Gardens, the album radiates a rare joy and color, projected through a technicolor slideshow of cosmic keys, clarinet, kalimba, sax, melodica, flute, tambourine, and drumbox. The songs feel warm and weathered, like familiar garments treasured through passing seasons. Many seasons did pass while these songs took shape, spiked with seismic changes – Lacy’s first daughter was born, followed 17 months by a second. Daily routines grew denser, but he never lost faith in the melodies simmering in the periphery of his thoughts: “I knew the music would be there whenever I had the time. It felt good to stay calm about it.” Patience paid off; Leos Ultras is indeed the ultimate SiP statement to date, rich with detail, discovery, beauty, lofted improvisation, and shades of spiritual jazz. It’s music both casual and cosmic, playful and poignant, channeled from long shadows and wordless hours in celebration of life, love, and Leo.

White Poppy

Paradise Regained

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Crystal Dorval’s dream-pop journey as White Poppy spans over a decade, the last half of which has centered on a song-writing cycle called ‘Paradise Gardens,’ documented across a trilogy of LPs: Paradise Gardens (2020), Sound Of Blue (2023), and Ataraxia (2024). Its muse is a fusion of bedroom shoegaze and bleached bossa nova, with shades of new age, private press pop, and outsider tropicalia. Paradise Regained collects 11 outtakes, B-sides, and alternate mixes from the ‘Paradise Gardens’ vaults to showcase the flux and exploration of Dorval’s process. Melodies simmer and resurface in different windswept moods, changing with the seasons. Each song lives a small lifetime between conception and final arrangement, billowing and shapeshifting like threads of dreams still unwoven.

Severed+Said

End Time Loop

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Floridian synthesist John Touchton aka Severed+Said returns with his most cinematic suite yet of witching hour electronics, spidery rhythm, and macabre clockwork: End Time Loop. A 10-track panorama of “paradise and devastation,” the music moves between sinkholes of low-end, darkened room drones, and strobing percussion, tracing shadows of swamps and derelict blocks. Inspired by the possibilities of a newly acquired hardware sequencer, and composing on headphones, Touchton atomized and re-assembled each song until an “absolute form” revealed itself. His tunnel focus recording method gives the pieces a hermetic precision, mutating and rippling across grid-mapped webs of smoke, mirror, and mirage. Touchton’s youth in a Pentecostal church informs the album’s conflicted themes, a crossroads of “atrocities and kindness,” reckonings and rapture, vestigial dread born of crosses covered in dust. What lurks is what lasts, looping beneath the surface, as unseen as an ill wind. All End Times have their beginning.

Tegu

Owl Island

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The second outing by Hunter Thompson’s tribalist dub alias Tegu skews more spectral and simmering, a canopy of cascading keys, hand percussion, and swells of everglades bass: Owl Island. Recorded in early 2024 on the banks of a Floridian canal, the album’s 11 tracks roll in like shifting fog over an ancient marsh, swaying with low end and loops of humid synths. Across 53 minutes, the music moves between séance and visitation, alternately transient and expectant, bathed in a sheen of starlight and streetlights. Fellow voyagers Wave Temples and X.Y.R. join for a pair of smoky, cosmic cameos, but otherwise this is a solitary affair – locked in, looking up, mapping new constellations in the expanding void.

Frunk29

Drifting Horses

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Marat Shainsky aka Frunk29’s third album of cyclical six-string fugues for NNF further threads his needle of treated guitar, metronomic rhythm, and slipstream electronics into a 12-track suite inspired by “the free energy of nature:” Drifting Horses. Recorded across 2023 at home, the songs conjure moods of open plains, big skies, and endless journeys, plucked and strummed through webs of kaleidoscopic FX. Patterns ripple and reverberate, lifting into liberated wind swells of melody, gold dust, and drift. There’s an unhurried ease to Shainsky’s style, born of discovery and daily playing, limber navigations with familiar tools, echoing in his head on long forest walks with his dog. Music of vignettes and vistas, glimpses and memories, spilling from the source to somewhere beyond tomorrow.

V/a

Alley Of The Sun

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Although many a vibe has shifted since the days of dubbing NNF001 one at a time on the floor of a Koreatown bachelor apartment in February of 2004, using stolen photocopies and tie-dyeing J-cards with wine, the label’s essential premise has not. Then, as now, the vision was to elevate and enshrine outsiders, foragers, hidden gems, and hybrid sounds on cheap tapes or affordable records, to be savored and shared in the here and now. 399 catalog titles later, the center still holds. To toast the label’s 20th anniversary and 400th release, we commissioned a gold roll call of alumni and affiliates: Alley Of The Sun. Named in homage to the Malibu mystic music fountainhead, skewed through a smoggy sideways lens, the 16-song, 90-minute, double LP suite spans every shade of NNF’s Pacific palette: rainforest ceremony, skyway motorik, Tascam rapture, silhouette shoegaze, basement vapor, astral ascension, jazz shadows, 5th world tropics, lucid dream drone, desert quests, prophecy electronics, ritual wreckage. Equal parts snapshot, tapestry, and time capsule, the compilation reflects the breadth of NNF’s two-decade exploration and evolution, from simple soil to a sea of dunes. True undergrounds have no set sound or fixed polarity, only flashes of transient magic and forking paths, to be cherished and championed for as long as the candle lasts.

White Poppy

Ataraxia

Not Not Fun

The concept for and palette of Crystal Dorval aka White Poppy’s ‘Paradise Gardens’ trilogy first germinated in 2016 as a notion of “paradise music” combining new age, bedroom shoegaze, and bossa nova into “transcendental Tropicalia.” As she filled tapes of recordings exploring the idea, many of the songs gradually gravitated towards the hermetic dream pop her project is best known for, becoming the albums Paradise Gardens (2020) and Sound Of Blue (2023). Dorval describes these collections as a sort of “emotional purging or shadow work,” before arriving at “the state of inner paradise:” Ataraxia. As the third, final, and most purist realization of the original ‘Paradise Gardens’ vision, Ataraxia delivers. Nine instrumentals of nimble guitar, elevated bass, clean rhythm, and clear light, gliding like swans on a shimmering pond. There’s a sense throughout of playful tranquility, of serenades at sunset, of kisses of blissful Muzak wafting along a boardwalk. But behind the music is a patience, grace, and levity born of Dorval’s personal journey with spiritual healing that paralleled the trilogy. A process of transmuting pain into beauty, day by day, melody by melody, cleaving the darkness from the soul and re-entering one’s rightful home in the Garden.

Multi-Surface

NAP

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Ambient craftsman Tomokazu Fujimoto aka Multi-Surface describes the 11 pieces of his 2nd album for NNF as “nap-like” – fleeting vignettes of FM synths and fragmented melody, looping and smeared across lost hours of the afternoon. Recorded over a year of sessions at his home studio in the Japanese countryside, the music moves in soft-focus swells and glistening arcs, gently swaying like paper lanterns. A few outliers expand the palette – kosmische percussion voyager “I'll float a boat on those clouds,” churning lo-fi whirlpool “Through the forest,” jittery gamelan edit “One rat” – but otherwise the mood skews opaque and oblique, chiming hazes half-heard on the breeze. Fujimoto’s muse is inward but infinite, reflecting on “the paths one has taken” and, in brief dreams, “visiting those places again.”

Unknown Me

Bitokagaku

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The second LP by Tokyo ambient conceptualists UNKNOWN ME began as a commission for historic Japanese cosmetic conglomerate Shiseido, conjuring audio approximations of seasons and scents, but soon flowered into its own refracted and rarefied environment: Bitokagaku. Translated as “beauty and science,” the album is the foursome’s first composed solely with software, reflecting the collection’s utopian, laboratorial muse. From levitational electronica (“A Rainbow in Meditative Air”) and vaporous downtempo (“Dancing Leaves”) to planetarium reverie (“Kitsune No Yomeiri”) and AI IDM (“Retreat Beats”), the music moves like weather patterns in a bio-dome: dazzling, microcosmic, and delicately calibrated. Percolating synths crossfade with field recordings from Shiseido’s research division; the sound of streams and distant birds blur into a processed haze; clinical voices read lists of precious stones. It’s a vision of new age as soft robotics, of serenity streamlined by sentient systems. UM’s team of engineers (Yakenohara, P-RUFF, H. Takahashi, and Osawa Yudai) cite an eclectic swath of inspirations behind Bitokagaku – molecules, stars, Kenji Miyazawa, Akira Kurosawa, even “the sparkle of rainbows” – but their guiding artistic principle is as ancient as it is eternal: “beauty.”

2Muchachos

Natura: 2009-2012

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When Russian musicians Vladimir Karpov (X.Y.R.) and Dmitriy Borodin began making hushed, liminal, ASMRbient dream pop together in the late 2000’s, the underground landscape was thick with artists using mystical monikers, so they chose to troll in the opposite direction: 2muchachos. Although the original intent was to filter out listeners “who judge by name or cover,” they were soon joined by Aleksandra Evseeva (aka Andra Ljos), rendering their banner even more incongruous and comical. Titles aside, the collaboration was fruitful, spanning nearly half a decade of steadily refined activity. Natura 2009-2012 collects 76 minutes of the trio’s most cloaked and bewitched recordings, evolving from the “northern environmental folktronica” of their early years through to the whispered fairytale ambient voyaging of 2012’s haunted swansong, Forest Is Not What It Seems. The tracks are sourced from an array of digital singles, compilations, and self-released CD-Rs, mapping a non-chronological odyssey of the group’s skeletal, subliminal songcraft. Karpov’s signature Soviet Formanta synth weaves within windswept guitar, fragile percussion, and field recordings of forest birds and endless steppes, occasionally accented with Andra’s glimmering, ghostly voice. It’s music of isolation and introspection, poetic and remote, murmuring through mists and long winters, flickering with the color of springs yet to bloom.

Rosnet, Jean-Emmanuel

Les Alentours

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French constructionist Jean-Emmanuel Rosnet describes his latest suite of sound collages as “improvised landscapes and odes to everyday moments,” woven from a patchwork of modular synthesis, tape techniques, resampling, and digital processing. Les Alentours evokes overlapping dimensions of its creator’s ‘surroundings’ – physical, metaphysical, sonic, psychic. Flickering electronics and hymnal hazes murmur within a web of restless ASMRbient dissociatives: crackling, pitter patter, plucked strings, smeared horns. Recorded both before and during a relocation from Lyon to the rolling hills and glacial valleys of the Livradois-Forez natural park two hours west, the album’s nine pieces capture a mood of whispered transience and unfamiliar thresholds, crafted from vignettes of “poetic intimacy in which to become lost and disappear.

Shakali

Rihmastossa

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Based in the South Moravian city of Brno, Finnish multi-instrumentalist Simo Hakalisto aka Shakali crafts surreal terrariums of strings, synthetics, wood, and wind, teeming with bio-electronic synchronicities. Rihmastossa further finesses the project’s eclectic lexicon of electro-acoustic world-building, utilizing a gallery of instruments both ancient and advanced: solar-powered sine wave generators, singing bowls, metallophones, microtonal synths wired into tree slabs, lap harps, amplified found objects, percussion filters, flutes. This is world music in the most naturalistic sense – subtle spatial ecosystems of climate, vibration, landscape, and species, as alluded to in the track titles about fungal colonies, extinct birds, rare worms, and pine forests. Hakalisto’s work in various exploratory duos (Gnäw, Lunar Horns, Thistle) has honed his instincts for atmospheric improvisation, but when alone he embeds even deeper into the terrain, acting as conduit as much as creator. Across seven free-flowing fugue states of texture and resonance, his touch simmers beneath the surface, guided by shifting light and hidden hands.

Yayoba

A Maze Of Glass

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4th-world fusion trio Yayoba triangulate warped constellations of electronics, woodwinds, hand percussion, and field recordings via their respective bases in Brighton (UK), Turku (FIN), and Wiesbaden (DE), coaxing a sound they describe as “like a beam of light passing through translucent glass walls in a labyrinth.” Comprised of legacy experimentalists Paul Wilson (F. Ampism), Jani Hirvonen (Uton), and Johannes Schebler (Baldruin) – the latter two of whom also moonlight in “crypto-botanical” electro-acoustic unit Grykë Pyje – the group operate spontaneously and post-geographically, file-sharing sketches, textures, and FX until an alien synergy takes hold. A Maze Of Glass collects 16 of the project’s headiest and most hyper-sensory improvisations into a 47-minute microcosmic odyssey of fractal, radiophonic exotica. Circuit-bent devotionals dovetail into pixelated mists; diaphanous lifeforms lurch through psychoactive caverns; cybernetic miasmas dance and dissipate. It’s music both placeless and perplexing, undulating and uncanny, hieroglyphic transmissions echoing from the depths.

New Mexican Stargazers

CASINO 2223

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New 90-minute brainbath by rogue cosmic bookie New Mexican Stargazers takes as its muse a surreal, smoke-soaked gambler’s paradise two centuries in the future: Casino 2223. Part soundtrack and part summoning, the collection sprawls and stumbles through sparkling caverns of slots, neon, video portals, and tape hiss, alternately devotional and desolate. Cracked astral keys slipstream over cheap metronomes, zoned voids, and decayed haze, disappearing into outer reaches, backrooms, and nights that never end. NNF’S expanded edition also includes five outtakes from the C2223 sessions (originally digitally self-released in 2023), capturing NMS at their most sublime and subliminal, away from the noise, tracing ancient dunes lit by spheres and pyramids beaming columns of light straight into the stars.

New Mexican Stargazers

CASINO OUTTAKES

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Companion suite to the new New Mexican Stargazers odyssey Casino 2223 unspools five long-form desert parking lot outtakes sourced from the same sessions. Capturing the project at its most sublime and subliminal, this is music for ancient dunes lit by LED spheres and pyramids beaming columns of light straight into the stars.

Swanox

Rhodyrunner

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West coast riddler Anthony Boruch-Comstock aka Swanox has laid low in recent years but his cracked, contemplative vision of Golden State malaise has only refined in the interim. Rhodyrunner unspools a five-song cycle of heavenly dirge, outer sunset guitar, skeletal slow-core, Pacific lullaby, and glacial roadhouse psych. Assisted by Texan riffer Joe Knight aka Rangers on bass, synth, and extra guitar, plus Sam Rezendes on “Wrong Jury,” the tracks trace a twilit road trip through Bay Area badlands and gentrified future ruins. It’s music of reflective private depths, swirling beneath rusted bridges spanning old worlds and new truths.

Torn Hawk

Through Force Of Will [2024 Edition]

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New York musician Luke Wyatt describes his instrumental hypnagogic guitar guise Torn Hawk as “music of a noble fabric whose weave is flawed and frayed.” With a decade of hindsight, the looping beats, smeared synths, and grainy hooks of 2014’s Through Force Of Will have taken on a richer cast, like closing credits anthems to heroic 80’s films long since forgotten. From widescreen new wave (“I Am Returning”) and baggy psychedelia (“Palace Racket”) to shredded New Romanticism (“Streets On Fire”) and glassy shoegaze (“Blindsided”), the songs fuse victory and vulnerability, soaring solos and tape hiss. Wyatt characterizes the songs’ low fidelities and “distressed edges” as “intentional lace,” smudging outlines and degrading surfaces to carve out “more room to dream.” This 2024 memorial edition adds 25 minutes of unreleased vintage bonus material, expanding Torn Hawk's vision of “error and compression” across echo-soaked riffs, smoky synth fugues, and blazing technoid rock. Throughout, the music surges, yearns, and burns, unrestrained and undefeated, forever in pursuit of Wyatt’s mission to lift the listener from “the cave of loneliness to the amphitheater of self-love.”

Frunk29

Sequentia

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Paradisal axe master Marat Shainsky returns with a fresh 13-song suite of mantric jangle and coastal guitar instrumentals ripe for a world in need of cool breeze: Sequentia. Bleached bedroom cruisers, faded synth skylines, city pop miniatures, stereo organ bops, and sparkling ambient percolations weave in wide arcs across 53-minutes of refined remote dreaming. Whether wielding electric strings, sequential circuits, or skeletal rhythm boxes, Shainsky’s touch skews effortless and elevated, poised for escape to brighter shores. These are themes of leaving and leisure, of warmer climes and worlds away, suffused with haze, hope, and the great rose-colored unknown.

Geraldi, Phil

AM/FM USA

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Itinerant journeyman Phil Geraldi has hitched and hustled from Humboldt Bay to Brooklyn to Portlandia and beyond, working in a variety of guises both artistic (cathode noise project Mystics In Bali, farmhouse show coordinator at Arcata’s Mex N’ Wow, mystic mixtape maker) and survivalist (bike courier, sex shop custodian, apartment photographer, pool boy). These years of bicoastal interstate migrations seeded the vision of AM/FM USA, his latest and loftiest solo creation. Two side-long collages of radio static, pedal steel, crickets, and great plains haze, the music moves between lost highway melancholia and truck stop concrète. Shades of The KLF’s meta-twang opus Chill Out echo in the ether, but overall Geraldi’s heartland mythos is grainier and more interstitial, scrambled by ancient airwaves across the big sky voids of North America.

Tegu

Forest Hills

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Rogue Florida entity Tegu debuts with 12-track nocturnal dub fever dream, Forest Hills. Field recordings, tape loops, vocal haze, FX, and thrifted Yamaha keys coalesce and dissipate on narcoleptic night walks past palm-shaded ponds, orange orchards, and fluorescent swamps murmuring with birds, frogs, and insects. Recorded largely in a single 24-hour block of attuned lo-fi improv, this is music of peripheries and private spheres, traced in faint horizons of hanging moss, water, and moonlight. Lost tropics for liquid memories, treading shrouded pathways of constant change.

Acid Twilight

Shadow Wrangler

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Argentine modal master Acid Twilight’s third raga saga maps a dusty plain of tumbleweeds, circling vultures, and bleached bones, across which rides a nameless stranger: Shadow Wrangler. Inspired by visions of high noon dread and the textures of psychedelic twang, they turned westward, layering shakers, synths, spurs, and six-string navigations into 12 crooked canyon instrumentals. Shades of spaghetti western, Spacemen 3, and outlaw country whisper in the wind, but ultimately AT’s mode is more silhouette than song, at the axis of campfire jam and commune improv. Loping and loose, windswept and waterless, blowing over the sand of trails long since vanished. Another smoke signal rises in the distance; another scorpion sunset begins to dim. The Wrangler rides on.

Hugh B

Live From The Gonsch

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Live From The Gonsch showcases Sydney head (and O.T.I.S. label boss) Hugh Burridge aka Hugh B’s lesser known domestic dub mode, low-slung and low volume, tracked on headphones during hidden hours, often with his daughter strapped to his chest. The album’s eight cuts are built from rhythmic modular loops layered with snaky bass, swampy guitar, and occasional hazed vocals, dub-mixed to 2-track cassette through hand-built FX (Burridge runs a boutique delay pedal business). The mood throughout is loose, soupy, and slippery, shaded in echo and spring reverb, glimpsed through tall grass. The title alludes to Burridge’s recently retired Skylab radio show, “Mornings From The Gonsch,” which repped a spectrum of home recorded modes, from bedroom dub to hybrid new age to lost synth songcraft. Here he blends these muses into a woozy fusion all his own, dub-adjacent daydreams of time, money, stasis, and absence, hummed and half-heard beneath a bleached blue sky.

White Poppy

Sound Of Blue

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From the grey-skied isles and horse farms of British Columbia comes the second volume of Crystal Dorval aka White Poppy’s “Paradise Gardens” trilogy: Sound Of Blue. Originally conceived back in 2016, the album was then recorded, finessed, abandoned, resurrected, overdubbed, and finally mixed into nine refinements of daydream shoegaze and therapeutic pop, born from bedroom epiphanies and long winters of the heart. From slowdive reverie (“Apathy,” “Melancholic Serenity”) and color wheel psychedelia (“Time”) to spiral chorale (“Happy”) and finger-picked drift (“Wiser”), Dorval’s songcraft moves between escape and acceptance, tracing delicate melodies from undercurrents of loss, light, and solitude. It’s music for memory gardens and pastel horizons, dreaming of bliss and distance, but bound to the here and now: “Thinking about leaving here forever / thinking about leaving here for good / but I keep holding on for something / hoping that it could get better than this / what’s one more night?”

X.Y.R.

Memory Tapes

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Vladimir Karpov’s latest X.Y.R. saga frames its gaze on the rose-colored remembrance of things past: lost summers, starlit swims, young love, distant dreams. Memory Tapes acts as both soundtrack and ceremony, spun from soft-focus synths, muted metronomes, and flickering amber light. Originally issued by Russian hub Fuselab, the NNF edition includes a track not on the Russian physical edition (“Rybinsk Lake Shelter”), a track ONLY on the physical edition (“Surf’s Up”), plus an extended mix of “Happy Thoughts,” along with a revised j-card design. Another wispy, whispered vision of veiled realms and reveries by one of the 21st century’s supreme summoners.

Andra Ljos

Megalithic Statues of Vishapakar

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The fourth album by Vilnius-based composer Aleksandra Evseeva aka Andra Ljos is as runic and ritualistic as the Bronze Age monoliths for which it’s named: Megalithic Statues of Vishapakar. Found mainly in the Armenian Highlands, vishaps are cigar-shaped slabs of stone carved with fish heads or snakes, depicting a sacred serpent of Armenian folklore thought to protect sources of water from drought and ruin. The music evokes a similarly arcane and devotional air, between raga, séance, and 4th world hallucination. The track titles allude to significant vishap discovery sites, spanning lakes, bays, mountains, and temples. Wood block percussion wobbles beneath lattices of looped keys, golden organ, synthetic strings and flutes, distant birds, muffled voices, and the soft wash of restless waters. Evseeva’s muse may be mined from her Armenian heritage but the songs conjure a mood more elusive and expansive – pensive pastorals for a land of long shadows and ancient fears, strewn with cryptic relics swiftly dissipating into myth.

Drapizdat

Myth

Not Not Fun

Drapizdat is the umbrella banner for Russian producer Vladislav Godzevich’s rogue gallery of musical identities. Its name derives from a fusion of samizdat (illegally reproduced publications of censored materials within repressive regimes) and drap (slang for marijuana; an early beat music alias was Papa Drap), which aptly evokes his ethos of covert altered state transmissions. МИФ presents a constellation of tracks spanning five projects, four years, and 73-minutes; taken together it fully delivers on the hidden acronym of its title: M = music, И = elected, Ф = fragments [combined = ‘Myth’]. Each entity spelunks its own vibrant catacomb: Сам Себе Па (“tropical industrial 5th world dada”), Ито Кумаре (“metaphysical ambient music”), Jeans Escape (rhythmic liberations from reality), Reather Weport (“free form music of the spheres, vibrations beyond the universal caves”), Drapula (“black moon feasts on the blood of soul and funk”), Клаксон Гансон (“psychedelic ethno-mutant punk”). Godzevich describes his process as a metamorphosis, created at night, “with minimal light.” Percolating loops of percussion, texture, and melody, summoned into warped trances of alien grace. Elements align and obscure like celestial phenomena half-glimpsed, half-dreamed: “I plunge deeper and deeper to gather golden sand from the bottom of time and show it to the world, building islands in this dilapidated world.”

Alvarez, Lorena & Alejandro Palacios

Paisajes Para Torcer al Reloj

Not Not Fun

Paisajes Para Torcer al Reloj (“landscapes for bending the clock”) is a collection of six collaborative improvisations between keyboardist / DJ Lorena Álvarez and multi-instrumentalist Alejandro Palacios recorded at the Nieve & Smog arts residency in Santiago, Chile in the spring of 2022. Theirs is a wispy, whispered chemistry, softly thrumming Rhodes laced with trumpet, guitar, and golden dust. The pieces unspool with a daydream logic of “hazy clocks and floating doors,” inspired by the holy trinity of Hassell, Riley, and Cherry. Both Álvarez and Palacios have carved eclectic bodies of work – the former as part of minimalist dance trios Cuerpo Docente and Los Bárbara Blade, the latter via psychedelic lounge-dub suites for Nonlocal Research. Yet Paisajes finds their common ground in more hushed, hidden terrain. Lulling, electro-acoustic landscapes of texture and resonance, shaded in wood, brass, and batteries, flowering at late hours in dimly lit rooms.

Fratila, Stefana

I want to leave this Earth behind

Not Not Fun

Between December 2018 and 2019, Canadian composer Stefana Fratila went on a series of research trips throughout North America – including to NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre – to meet with astronomers and scientists to answer a complex question: “If each planet in our solar system were a room, what would each room sound like?” Her findings culminated in Sononaut, a collection of open-source VST plug-ins for digital audio workstations emulating each astral body’s atmospheric conditions. (Artist Jen Kutler collaborated on the project as well, using calculations by NASA astronomer and planetary scientist Dr. Conor Nixon). During a residency at CMMAS (Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras) in Morelia, Mexico, Fratila began writing the album on an octophonic sound system, then added additional synthesizer, finalized arrangements, and incorporated Sononaut at her home studio in Toronto. The results are surreal, expansive, multi-colored, and mesmerizing. I want to leave this Earth behind is an odyssey of cosmic voyaging and technological innovation, fusing science, sound design, and stargazer reverie into eight cosmic portraits of our vast galactic family.

Voyage Futur

In Constant Change

Not Not Fun

Voyage Futur’s second collection of 2023 broadcasts its muse of eternal flux in the title: In Constant Change. A shape-shifting suite of glitches, loops, vignettes, and visions, the pieces diverge and converge in hybrid states of open horizon drift, memory synth, and oblique exotica. Relaxed but restless, idyllic yet immaterial, it’s the sound of kaleidoscopic hearts and lingering dreams, glimpsed against a backdrop of deepening blue.

Voyage Futur

Wellen

Not Not Fun

The past works of Viennese world-builder Voyage Futur have mapped places (Secret Earth), spaces (Inner Sphere), and phenomenon (Virtual Moonlight), but their latest zooms out and up for a sky’s eye view of planetary fantasy: Wellen. German for ‘waves,’ the album’s 12 tracks ebb and flow in cinematic tides of mandala electronics, utopian fusion, and elevated ambience, shaded in gradients of DX7. Voices, mallets, strings, and bass slide and stretch like liquid plastics, tracing liminal landscapes of sunset shores under pixelated stars. It’s music both lush and lost in time, remote but rapturous, lit by the warmth of futures passed.