A surfacing, a foreword: the prescience of an ache. Texture rolls off the tongue like velvet. Lurch and buckle.

Names emulsifying, but not really pellucid. Glaring lacquer, agog. Nil, but no, not ex nihilo: nugatory alluvium like the woolliness of a dog’s breath or the fever of its bark. Not lacking for luster, just gumption. The knurl in the lathe that the nerves don’t catch.

More about: Kristoffer Raastad, Ragnhild May

By the time I was a kid, “jazz” equated to the trappings of A/C radio, a “punchy funk,” maybe, with spicy Mediterranean colors, a couple “ooh-la-las” thrown in like sweet barbs; Chrysalis Records, etc. It was a bloated, overproduced, objectively ugly sound. But I came to love it with all my heart. And so I’ll never forget the first time I heard “Rainforest.”

More about: FCS North

Static’s always just around the corner. What reliably comes clear is that humans are deeply faulty organisms. Even the most seemingly balanced among us are subject to all manner of destabilizing existential menace. In this light, there is a sort of relief that the machine-learning software that has formed this release didn’t improve upon Emptyset’s superb discography (plus 10 hrs of wood, metal, and drum skins that this reviewer can’t speak to). Seems our massive advances are dwarfed by our inherent ability to get in our way.

More about: Emptyset

Symrun’s mixtape Care Work is a 10-track, 14-minute ode to a bedroom millennial generation, chockablock with cultural references but down on socio-political optimism. Sulphur-drenched streets, typified in the music videos for “Where I’ve Been” and “Betablockers,” linger for an out into the world, a disembodied practice lurching from the dark.

More about: Symrun

Move out or earn it; don’t just live there. Arguing about nothing around 10:14 PM waiting for your clothes to dry. Street lit outside and ya hear from a car window, “an’ you tell Aunt Ke’Lie to get the fuck out the bathroom.” e​-​Motion Picture I surrounds you in a-bag-of-trick feels, dry and creased but easily smoothed. Moisturizing and “What are y’all doing without moisturizing in this weather?” The streets sound tighter at night, and hollow. The Nativist continues adapting to their surroundings.

More about: The Nativist