CORSICA ANNEX “Doors Outside” C30 (Ingrown Records)

Corsica Annex’s looooooong awaited follow up (to a goddamn brilliant debut, also in Ingrown!) is a jam-packed half hour’s worth of slow-motion power-scubaing through shimmering coral reefs of sunny synthesizer washes, needling guitar plucks, woozy tape manipulations, & a warm undercurrent of mixing wizardry that’s sure to sweep one’s mind off its root-system. 

All elements swagger and sway into the periphery of our aural tunnel vision and out, as if to signal to our short-sighted minds which current to ride next; staccato attack or droning retreat? Whichever way the ear takes, we find ourselves lazily led into ever cascading permutations, strolling onward and upward, into permanent sunrise. 

Beatific study/power-napping music for the eager mind and heart!

https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/doors-outside

and/or

https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/fluid-electric

—Jacob An Kittenplan

MIL KDU DES “GXH” C32 (Ingrown Records)

Mil Kdu Des’ “GXH" is a sprawling beast that vacillates between minimalist cosmic post-freakout comedowns and maximalist tribal funk jamz. The spaciousness is all but tangible throughout, each synthesizer, percussive agent, and deep bass pulse playfully interweaving a devotional call & response from across some vague canyon of distance, the air between said agents steamed and chilled, steamed and chilled into a saucy hurricane of bombastic dance and water-break recovery.  

Get this on the dance floor NOW!

https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/gxh

and/or

https://milkdudes.bandcamp.com/

—Jacob An Kittenplan

X.Y.R. “Tourist” C40 (Ingrown Records)

Hazily plucked from underside the many islands floating over Russia’s tropical moonscapes, X.Y.R. share with us a blissed-out blend of New Age synth tones/drones/arpeggios, Afro-Cuban grooves, Gamelan-esque, hypnotic counterpoints, and a relentlessly pleasant vibe camping out between ambient, upbeat, and entrancing. The consonance sparkles non-stop, the interlocking rhythms and transient, textural glares waft in & out, the sense of serenity practically glowing in one's ear canals.

It’s a tall order to create something as equally dance-able as it is nap-able, but this set of jamz does the trick every single time!

https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/tourist-2

and/or

https://xyrmusic.bandcamp.com/

—Jacob An Kittenplan

J HAMILTON ISAACS “Circumzenithal Arc” C24 (Ingrown Records)

This is a serious ear-brain workout for the power-walker and napper alike, and is not recommended for intake whilst operating heavy machinery.

JHI’s “Circumzenithal Arc” is a jam-packed, New-Age-gone-Reichian-polyrhythmic journey that roams center-less, pulseless, and nonetheless driving and sprawling, all of this, Insistently. This li’l beast camps just consonant enough to skip the Harsh Noise Wall-partitioning of coming off tonally entropic, yet is still buckshot with enough dissonant flourish to appeal to the dark-ambient loving heart, it’s hosting equal parts Nodalongable-to and Nodoffalongable-through blends of hypnotic drone and crisp, staccato attack; it's a pretty sweet trick to behold, & JHI has it tamped down tight!

https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/circumzenithal-arc

and/or

https://jhamiltonisaacs.tumblr.com/

—Jacob An Kittenplan

GUT FAUNA “Magicicada” C26 (Ingrown Records)

Gut Fauna’s "Magicicada" is a brilliantly creative and equally charming debut album that’s as adventurous and playful as it is pop-accessible/sway-alongable. In each song, this Baltimore duet manages to evoke all the trance-like qualities of old world devotional folk dances, ballads, and hymnals while still somehow keeping their pop-repetition to its bare minimum, favoring an ever-evolving cast of psychedelic canons, choirs, & calls & responses, these each working in concert with -and sometimes juxtaposed against- trippy tribal percussions, bad-ass flute licks, funky bass & steel string guitar lines & minimal organ/synth back ups, all these just dialed in snugly to tug us along somethin' fierce!

Listen to at the responsible maximum volume and just imagine how magical their shows must get!

https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/magicicada

and/or

https://gutfauna.bandcamp.com/

—Jacob An Kittenplan

OARIANA “A Pear on the Wind” C36 (Ingrown Records)

This tape feels like a pop-ambient panic attack. Without ever repeating a single measure -and arguably without measure at all- Oariana’s “Pear on the Wind” flows onward & glistening, ceaselessly permutating consonant arpeggiations with every passing pulse, staying forever unhummable-yet-catchy in its movement and momentum. The panning and mixing alone is a work of art, so be sure to wear great headphones & keep eyes closed to farm up some serious visuals. What a trip!

https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/a-pear-on-the-wind

and/or

https://oariana.bandcamp.com/

—Jacob An Kittenplan

MAGIC FROM SPACE “4 HSP c ASMR Vol. 2” C31 (Ingrown Records)

Woe be the fool’s-errand-runner that's e'r tasked with categorizing and/or filing away this Magic From Space album by genre; there currently ain’t no “Avant Synth-Funk” or “Dark/Smooth-New-Age-Electro-Jazz” sections out there, right? Thing is, beneath the face of “4 HSP c ASMR Vol. 2” ’s untamed wildernesses lies a meticulously curated allusion to a gyrating scaffold that your ear cannot help but exhaustively chase*, to no avail.

Is this all just forward thinking, subconscious-appealing, next level, kitchen-sink electronica, or a distilled, hand-spun sound-collage of dance music tropes woven seamlessly into a dizzying quilt of groovy awesomeness? Think Orange Milk/Euglossine, but trading that heady, academic buzz for a slightly more playful warmth and you’ll be on the right track.

Listen to this whole thing from start to finish for best results, as there’s a gradual stylistic metamorphosis happening that’s well worth taking notes on. 

File under: Siiiiiiiiick

https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/4-hsp-asmr-vol-2

and/or

https://magicfromspace.bandcamp.com/

—Jacob An Kittenplan

*once the first track/red herring is overtaken, that is

PALM ERA “Suculenta” C31 (Ingrown Records)

Chilean electronica artist, Claudio Cisterna, pounds out some loosey-goosey (almost jammy) electro-funk beats on his kit, and then colors their edges in with groovy bass lines and keyboard preset tones straight oughta old school 8-bit video games. The feel is jagged, raw, minimal, bewildering; with no more than four separate tracks competing for your attention at any given time, each one tugs just slightly off from the other, filling in an otherwise airy warehouse party vibe, or maybe some neon-clad 80s detective show in Florida or something.  At times angular and loopy, at others, meandering and sprawled out, “Suculenta" plays like a throwback dreamt up Noir soundtrack to a bygone memory, hazily self-erasing. 

https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/suculenta

— Jacob An Kittenplan

ALOES “I” C39 (Ingrown Records)

Through stilted, minimalist drum machine spats and repetitions of contrapuntal synth syncopations, “I" proves to be a non-stop shake-it-fest, where each limb and vertebrae can pick and choose a slippery accent of their own to gyrate along with, independent of others. Upbeat and disorienting (and not just great for dancing but one hell of a companion for walking around town!), Reid Wagner (Athens, GA) takes 4/4 and fills it to the brim with polyrhythmic wile, like something fierce!

https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/i-2

and/or

https://aloes.bandcamp.com/releases

— Jacob An Kittenplan

ODD PERSON “Flowers of Arcadia” C30 (Ingrown Records)

August Traeger has been a sound-sculpting force-to-be-kept-tabs-upon for the better part of the last decade, each of his projects/labels exploring a plethora of electronic niches, making (and breaking) waves in all of them (see also: Bicephalic Records, Somnaphon/Phlimm, Nipple Stools, Secant, et cetera), and this release as Odd Person, is every bit as mesmerizing and transportive as any. Here AT (as OP) curates an eerie, between-the-worlds/alternate dimension amidst tropical rainforest layers’ inhabitants’ songs’ desperations, all flora, fauna, fungi & gaseous molecule a-quaking and trembling in their yearnings for deeper communions between them.

It is through painstakingly nuanced, plaintive* synthscape accompaniments and somehow-non-robotic drum machine sputterings that AT/OP’s field recordings are stirred and syrup-cemented together to form a hallucinatory other realm, its fevered humidity translating to sweat-upon-the-brow and dew-accumulation in the conches of your ear, by the end of the tape. Give this a meditated listen in good headphones and come out the other side slightly shaken, but no worse for the wear. 

Ingrown Records may be calling it quits in the next year, but they’re not going down without a blaze of glory!

*when not anxiously overwhelming, that is

https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/the-flowers-of-arcadia

and/or

http://www.augusttraeger.com/

— Jacob An Kittenplan

HEALERS "i" (Ingrown Records)

1st track sounds like a small plane has landed and the engine is cooling down. Second track is somewhere in between 60s British folk psych and Boston's Pendulum Floors.  Fitting as this duo hails from Boston.  Is that an optigan organ I hear?  With track 3 we go a little further out sounding like Kim Gordon singing falsetto over an indie drone ensemble.   On side A the tracks aren't too long, leaving you wanting more and do not make one question pressing the eject or ff buttons.  Nice editing job. Side B brings an interpretation of another fine Boston band, Sunburned Hand of the Man, in their signature fn-with-the-listener style.  For the second B side excursion, we board the Mars Rocket-1 and lumber through some turbulence, sometimes sounding like a bustling open air market in some foreign land.  The track title is 'Washing Machine' so maybe the trip wasn't so exotic, perhaps its the spin cycle through some electronics; but as the listener, it took me there.  Solid tape.  If you find yourself in Boston, maybe see what the Healers guys are doing, should be weird.

https://healerscompany.bandcamp.com/album/i

--T Penn

CORSICA ANNEX "Fluid Electric" C40 (Ingrown Records)

Ambient-Electronica sound-collagist Andrew Dickey’s newest endeavor (as Corsica Annex) picks up where his former projects, Lent and Eigenface (and a whole host of others, really), left off, but this time, with a finely-honed focus on subtle transitions and mixing, eschewing all rhythmic energies for more minute, atonal texture metamorphosii and sleight-of-hand mood shifts. Which is to say, AD has upped the ambient stream-of-conscious editing game Big Time here. The hallucinatory result plays like a repetition-less Chad VanGaalen animation, where a simple walk in the woods incrementally involves daydreamy vignettes of visiting all our neighboring planets’ equivalents of tree-lined bogs. Perfect zone-out soundtrack on the stereo, but truly mesmerizing when played loud, through good headphones! More please!

https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/fluid-electric
and/or
https://lent.bandcamp.com/

--Jacob An Kittenplan