Monolith Cocktail Blog

A world of sonic/musical discoveries reviewed by Dominic Valvona. All entries are in alphabetical order.

Geologist ‘Can I Get A Pack Of Camel Lights?’
(Drag City) 30^th January 2026

Owing to their inarguable influence and impact on the American and international indie and underground scenes of the noughties, any release from a member of the Animal Collective fraternity is news. No less a debut solo, the inaugural album from the collective’s original founding member Brian Weitz, under the Geologist nickname that stuck since collage (apparently a friend misheard his major, but it also refers to the headlamp he wears to see his electronic apparatus during live shows) proves transitional; a step away almost entirely for the material he’s known for with his foils David Portner (better known as Avey Tare) and Noah Lennox (Panda Bear).

Incidentally, and still working in one way of another with his former band mates, Portner, another piler of the long since hibernated Animal Collective, pops up on bass alongside a host of contributions and help from Adam McDonald, Emma Garau, Alianna Kalalal, Ryan Oslance, Shane McCord, Micky Powers and Adam Lion. There’s also an intergenerational appearance from Wietz’s son Merrick on acoustic guitar, playing something resembling an indie-grunge rhythm on the strange bird hooting and whirly ‘Government Job’.

Under a throwaway entitled line, used repeatedly over time as a kind of in-joke, a winking aphorism, Weitz instrumentally and sound wise soundtracks his observations, traverses, reflections, the places he recalls and moments of both retrospection and introspection. But musically, this album is very different, taking as it does inspiration from the noted inventive guitarists Bill Orcutt and Susan Alcorn – though both artists, musicians’ talents extend beyond just that instrument. The steel pedal-like atmospheric and more wiry freeform Americana playing of these influences can be heard throughout, coupled also with Bill’s more gnarly free-post-punk-blues-jazz contortions and distortions (a touch of Bill Frith too for that matter). The second main influence is that of the hurdy-gurdy, its droning windups more in line with Ethan James’ reimagined Medieval tapestries and ceremonies, and Dorothy Carter, Le Tene, and GOAT. Its signature conjures up all sorts of imaginary landscapes, plateaus and scenes; from Tibet and the Himalayan holy valleys to the mirage arid dry lands of the America’s West and a dreamt-up revision of olde pastoral Europe.   

With variations on each track, the mood and direction changes often: even if it inhabits an overall thematic musical world of drones, frequencies, circular blows, Chris Corsano-like free drums, the electrified, walking basslines, the hypnotic and near mystical. Period pieces via the Velvet Underground, Matthias Loibner and Emmanuelle Parrenia sit or run into wrangled post-punk post-rock tracks that sound more like a toss-up between PiL and Tortoise, and soundscape scores that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Daniel Lanois production. And then there’s the near native dances of tracks like glittery dusted, hurdy-gurdy wound, and padded foot stomping drummed ‘Pumpkin Festival’, and despite its title, ‘Not Trad’.

From highway oracles to dust bowls and soundtracks paid to the late repeated Altman player and Kubrick whipping girl ‘Shelly Duvall’ and the final desert peregrination turn splashing cymbal dusted and electric band motivated moving ‘Sonora’, the Can I Get A Pack Of Camel Lights? album is an open-ended enquiry of moods and memories; of exploration and the time spent in various places, landscapes. An interesting turn from the member of a band I once called a postmodernist noughties Beach Boys. A very different, unique direction indeed.

Clémentine March ‘Powder Keg’
(PRAH Recordings) 9^th January 2026

The French-British chanteuse Clémentine March effortlessly swoons, coos, waltzes, saunters and hovers between the French and South American art pop decades with a multilingual ease on her latest, and third, album. And although its title, Powder Keg, was taken from a lyric out of Bonnie Tyler’s 80s power ballad, a ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, the inspiration and music sounds less sentimental big hair belter and more like a freed-up chamber-pop, alt-folk, country waned and glitterball hybrid of gathered thoughts, romantic encounters and introspections voiced by Brigitte Fontaine, Cate Le Bon and Gina Birch.

But that’s only really one part of this album’s scope, with the repertoire and influences opening up even more once March’s cast of friends and foils alike is brought in. Take the former Goat Girl band member turn solo folk singer Naima Bock, who March supported on a tour of the UK. Taking in some of Bock’s shared Greek-Brazilian heritage and folk signature March pays a bit of a homage on the opening song, ‘After The Solstice’; though to my ears, I’m picking up hints of John Cale, Aldous Harding and Dana Gavanski – it’s one of my favourites by the way. The latter of those names on this feathered country art-folk number, Gavanksi, is actually present as one of the many congruous ensemble members of March’s expanding circle. March is flanked throughout by Ollie Chapman on bass and Sophie Lowe on drums, but at any one time you’ll hear pop up a famous artist or musician across this songbook of the heart-pranged, fun, wistful and more driven. For after also paying a tribute of a kind to the Os Mutantes turn three-decade solo Brazilian icon Rita Lee on the suitably South American lilted ‘Lixo Sentimental’, March duets, in a style, with Evelyn Gray on the disco-indie spun ‘Fireworks’. Gray seems the ideal vocal partner on a more upbeat dizzy turn under the glitterball whilst alluding to “romantic encounters” at the Green Man Festival. The song takes in a Come Dancing Blancmange, Postcard Records, Lizzy Mercier Descloux Mambo Nassau and Hercules & The Love Affair.

The title-track itself sounds like a missing McCartneys family song whipped up by the SFA and Stereolab, and ‘Honestly’ sounds like Susana Vega borrowing an old Neil Young number. Little touches cause the ear to wander: the sax on ‘The Power Of Your Dreams’ reminded me of Don Weller’s sessions with 80s Bowie, and the faint Appalachian/bayou stirs of maverick bluegrass and Cajun ‘You Are Everything’ conjured up images of Isabelle Pierre or Karen Dalton fronting The Band. And then you get the more fuzzed-toned and powered-up indie-rock blast of ‘Upheaval’, which sounds like a cross between Husker Du and The Misfits.

As open as always, imbued by but never quite adopting the aloof coolness of the French new wave and its art pop existential chanteuses, March finds a personal, less cloying way of navigating sentiment, romance, the passing of time and how we measure it, the recall of memories and joy. A unique voice, constantly expanding and trying things out, March’s latest magical tour de force is both escapism and a dance around issues that both plague and enrich her life. Already one of my favourite albums of 2026.

Foster Neville ‘Through Lands Of Ghosts’
(Subexotic) 16^th January 2026

Imbued by the late travel writer progenitor H.V. Morton and his quest to unearth, contextualise and celebrate the “mythical soul of England” from the 1920s to the 1940s, experimental musician (also the role of sound editor for the digital copy of the Trebuchet contemporary arts magazine) Foster Neville navigates his own sound map of these islands; atmospherically and unnervingly crossing national borders by starting his journey in Scotland before moving south throughout Northern England and the Southwest.

Morton’s never-out-of-print series of guides, written and often an accumulation of his columns for the Daily Express newspaper, have arguably influenced generations. Responsible for around forty such books, the topics covering not only England and Scotland but his numerous journeys throughout the Holy Land, Morton’s idiosyncratic English manners (often travelling in his typically unfussy and understated English motor, a bull-nosed Morris) and vignettes style embodied a near spiritual but difficult to encapsulate essence that bonded old England and its people. His reputational stock has however taken a severe knock ever since the publication of Michael Bartholomew’s biography. Through old dairy entries and letters Morton’s more distasteful and outright disgustingly racist prejudices came to light, most notably his Anti-Semitism but also slights on democracy (not a fan) and various other nationalities – he once described the US, dismissively, as “that craven of Jews and foreigners”. The famed journalist scooper, there at both the famous and infamous opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, held not just questionable views but unfortunately seemed to flirt with fascism in the run up to the war, declaring that he found many of Hitler’s ideas appealing.

Parking that controversy aside, Foster is personally interested in Morton’s most famous totem, and much lauded In Search Of England, which could be said to lay some of the groundwork for the future study of “psychogeography”. A problematic term that now connects with Foster’s latest work, and pretty much one that is now dismissed by those who are said to embody it, the leading light of such dense readings and speculation of the land, or specific sites and communities (in this case, the Eastend of London) is the rightfully hailed Iain Sinclair. Preferring such terms as “deep topography” (as coined by the “London perambulator”, Nick Papadimitriou), detaching himself from an overused tag, one made almost redundant and often out of context, Sinclair’s own works merge old ghosts with history through the ages, the occult and multiple layers of cultural text. It’s why he was asked to pen an “appreciation” of Foster’s album, or rather the limited-edition vinyl version of Through Lands Of Ghosts – I’ve not had access to this by the way. 

Tying together such esteemed authors, Foster’s album carries some weight; a touch of the studied even. And, despite the dismissal by some, uses the psychogeography description in the label’s press briefing; although they also use the more appropriate term of “hauntology” to describe this mystical ghostly and whispered, wisped and Kosmische-style take on the lie of the land.

Foster now builds his own picture; one steeped in the supernatural, of the memories and tracings and scars of locations marked by either death or the movements of time. These places seem empty of everything except its apparitions, its left recordings of voices and the sound and apparatus of subtle atmospheric and ambient equipment. A presence exists throughout; the haunted visitations that occupy a liminal space between the paranormal and more settled visions of an intriguing past and its elementals; of how it speaks to us now.

Sonically capturing something throughout this circumnavigation that seems to wander from the antler framed Highlands of Scotland and its most southern point on the Mull of Galloway and across the border to the site of a rail accident in Derbyshire, a nameless abandoned village and the neolithic chambered tombs of West Kennet’s famous long barrow excavations. Somewhere between the near sci-fi, séance, ambient music and Vangelis Olympian, new agism and apparitional vocals, Fowler engineers an often-veiled mystery of forgotten time and chapters from a both atavistic and more present age: The haunted “residue” of the Chapel-en-le-Firth freight train wreck tragedy, immortalised by Ewan McCall and Peggy Seegar in ‘The Ballad of John Axon’, the train driver who gave his life to avert an even greater disaster (posthumously awarded the George Cross for his actions) is invoked through the spectre aria shoos and coos and movements of sounds and what could be the environment around it.      

From observing the dying flickers of lives once lived in the rural villages of WWI England and the absorption of an unseen ancient people who once roamed and buried their dead into the barrow mounds of that same countryside more than three millennia before, Foster connects various epochs, various events and the ebb and flow of time to conjure a 21^st century quest to unearth the soul of the UK. I’d recommend this album to attentive listeners with an ear for the works of Oliver Cherer, Cold Hands Warm Heart, Ancient Plastix, Pye Corner Audio, Bagski and Tangerine Dream. A most successful, and I’m going to say it despite myself, psychgeography experience that could well lead to further exploration and investigation of the subject matter and locations mapped out sonically.

Sarah/Shaun ‘In Silence Love Speaks Loudest (EP)’
(Hobbes Music) Digitally Released December 2025/Physical Release 30^th January 2026

The Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra of synthesized dream-pop, the Edinburgh wife and husband team of Sarah and Shaun McLachlan finish of an 18-month triptych run of EPS with this year’s simultaneously optimistic but ached and plaintive In Silence Love Speaks Loudest. Like a space-chartered St. Etienne, the couple’s latest four track showcase for the Scottish capital’s leading leftfield electronic and dance label Hobbes Music is another celestial bound flight of diaphanous pop and trip-hop break-like and trance-y electronica: stepping out on to the neon lit dancefloors on occasion too.

Making their debut in 2024 with the highly rated It’s True What They Say? (see my review of the stargazing EP), followed up by last year’s Someone’s Ghost, the duo has been busy on the live circuit making new allies and fans. And now ahead of the debut album, promised sometime this year, they’ve released this stardust sprinkled songbook of both heartache and romantic reassurances.

You might well recognize Shaun from his previous band, Delta Mainline. Coupling up with the missus, and most wooing of vocalist’s, Sarah, Shaun has concentrated all his efforts on expanding those musical horizons further.  When we reviewed his band in the past, we compared them to an angelic Jesus And Mary Chain, OMD, Wilco and Spiritualized. And as it turns out the latter of those references now pops up here, with the group’s Tony ‘Doggen’ Foster adding some subtle sentimental rainbow arcs and bendy guitar/slide guitar to the dry-ice trapped-in-a-French-noir-movie-like floated ‘Desperation Looks Ill (From The Other Side)’.  Appearing alongside Foster on that same track is Bruce Michie on Eno/Hansa Studio type romantically alluding saxophone duties and supplying the introductory French wafts of dialect Rebecca Growse.

As always there’s an extended cast number of foils ready to join the ranks, with both serial offenders Jaguar Eyes (a band mate of Shaun’s in Delta Mainline, contributing guitars and synths and arranging strings, programming drums and on engineering duties as well as co-producing the last three records by the coupling), and Darren Coghill (of Neon Waltz fame, providing some percussion, drums and effects) both cropping up. But also, this time around the addition of Roy Molloy (the Alex Cameron mucker appears with a soft toned saxophone sentiment on the finale, ‘Who Just Wants To Survive?’) and Exterior (a fellow Hobbes Music signing adding synths to ‘Heart Started Beating (Backwards)’).

As I’ve said before, the couple have an affinity for the ending of the Star Man movie, and its romantic allusions, but in particular the film’s score, twinned with, to my ears, the sound of dream pop, of waned country music, 80s electro-pop and Sarah Records. With songs that stretch right back to the Covid pandemic (the reassuring, despite the travails, ‘When We Dance’), or at least their inception, to songs written during the most tumultuous of periods, as the world falls apart around us, this third EP in the beautiful cosmic saga recalls hints of Air, The Tara Clerkin Trio, Beach House, The Sundays and the Cocteau Twins.

Tethered to the Earthly pains of the heart but looking towards the stars and the escape hatch, both co-writers, multi-instrumentalists and vocalists draw emotions of desperation and love from an understated but no less ambitious and anthemic production. The mood music of which varies between the near melancholic to the airy and wisped; the sad and more wistfully dreaming. Keeping up the quality, a congruous bookend to the series, In Silence Love Speaks Loudest further expands the sound and scope; an indicator perhaps of what to expect with that near future album.

Sis and the Lower Wisdom ‘Saints and Aliens’
(Native Cat) 9^th January 2026

Disarmingly enchanting with the healing balm, the pliable near weightless songstress and multi-instrumentalist Jenny Gillespie Mason once more inhabits the role of generous light-bringing sister or Sis on a most beautiful album of hippy pop excellence.

Surrounded once more with a friendly circle of artis/musicians (named the Lower Wisdom) – you can hear the reassuring thumbs up from the recording studio sound desk on a couple of tunes, but feel a general support system of musical encouragement throughout -, Jenny weaves Alice Coltrane vibes with Fleetwood Mac and Alabaster DePlume to create a sort of jazz-pop-light magic version of new age 70s/80s songwriting.  

Alighting the celestial staircase into a yoga retreat of snuggled and drifty serenaded and wafted saxophone, airy mystique and mirages, Saints and Aliens is a poetically descriptive album of both moods and songs. Bringing visitors from the stars to a world imbued by Jenny’s spiritual studies, the philosophical teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Sanskrit language are called upon once more: or at least referenced on tracks like the near ethereal floaty jazzy calling ‘Yasholipsa’ – which translates into the desire for glory, the aspiration for fame, victory and power, and a spiritual striving for achievement and deep yearning for renown or divine accomplishment.

Away from the Gaia, the Indian divinities and the Gnosticism there’s a lovely blooming of soulful pop free-flowing singles like ‘Luce’ and the almost trippy and poetic opener ‘Crocus Man’: a sample of which is, “Quicksilver clown, you’ve been through hell”.  

As diaphanous as it all is, there’s an undulating tone of travail; the lyrics often referring to overcoming various obstacles and finding a way out, the air to breath once more or height to elevate towards: Salvation awaits once you learn that the key is inside all of us.

The Sis alias delivers once more with a near faultless album of dipsy, sprite-like free pop and spiritual altruism. A great start album to start of the new year with.

Wilson Tanner Smith ‘Perpetual Guest’
(Sawyer Editions) 13^th January 2026

Tying together the omnipresence, both in the past and in the now, of conflict, the Helsinki-based composer, improvisor/artist Wilson Tanner Smith uses site-specific performance art and music to evoke an essence of what was contained within the walls of the long since disused Kreenholm Textile Factory in Estonia’s Narva region. To be exact, located on an island in the middle of the river that gives its name to the city, slap bang in the middle too of the border with a threatening, overreaching expansionist Russia.

A flashpoint in what’s described as NATO’s most eastern flank, it has been breached in recent months by Russian soldiers – possibly testing reaction and defences. Narva has the largest Russian-speaking population, proportionally, in the EU at 97% (its total population is around 60,000). This is down to a legacy of historical invasions and the transporting of thousands of workers from Russia to work in its factories over time. Sitting across from its Russian counterpart of Ivangorod, the city is fatefully targeted as one of the starting points, if it ever comes, for WWIII: Putin has already mused in that sly threatening way he has that Narva was historically part of Russia and would be “taken back”.  The city was of course under Czarist rule for a time until the revolution and Estonia’s fight for independence between 1918 and 1920.

Fast forward a generation and Soviet Russia invaded Estonia at the start of WWII. They lost it to Nazi Germany a short time later, before once more taking it back behind the Iron Curtain after Hitler’s catastrophic failure to invade and knock Russia out of the war. This situation remained right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union’s collapse at the start of the 1990s. For a long time after that period, Russians and Estonians moved freely between the two borders; the influx of Russian workers, as I mentioned earlier, living in a now industrialised Estonian city would frequently hop over that same border for shopping trips to St. Petersburg and the like. 

With the heinous invasion of Ukraine in the last four years, and ramped-up – despite the talks of bring the conflict to an end – rhetoric of Putin and his expansionist plans to march right into Europe, that all came to a divisive halt. An uneasy situation prevails, with Estonia distancing itself from Russia – Estonia’s first female prime minister Kaja Kallas has been on the front-foot in supplying weaponry to Ukraine and fought to implement sanctions on Russia whilst also offering asylum to Russians escaping conscription. Kallas was at one point, put forward as a possible candidate to lead NATO; an organisation that Smith’s adopted country of Finland joined in 2023 following a rapid policy shift from military non-alignment to alliance membership in response to Russia’s aggression. Finland, which until that point had never countenanced joining, has prior aggrievances with Russia of course: a history that goes back to the Finnish War of 1808-1809, when Alexander’s Imperial Russia, allied with Napoleon, invaded and conquered Finland from Sweden, turning it into the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, and much later when fighting off Russia during both the Winter War of 1939 and 1940, and the Continuation War of 1941-44. Despite being heavily outnumbered on all fronts, the Finns managed to fight them off, albeit with a loss of some land. Their example may prove an omen, as Russia have likewise failed to steamroll the Ukrainians; the initial invasion planned to take months if not weeks to fully capture the country and force it back into Russian hands.  

Before this becomes a geopolitical, military essay on the state of Eastern Europe and Russia, I should really focus now on Smith’s project; a series of performances created using both instruments brought to the space and the dust, the accumulation of memories of the environment itself. The prompts, the reference points as such or indicators and sparks for creativity reference the various scrapes of signage and other detritus found lying around, or reference and tie together both a shared bond between Finland and Estonia; the closing performance of ‘Läksin minä kesäyönä käymään’ (which can be translated into English as “I went out into the groove on a summer’s night”) is a kosmische-style beamed cathedral wonder of magic that features a melody borrowed from an obscure suite on Finnish Themes by the Russian composer and pianist Dmitri Shostakovich. Embarrassingly for the Soviets, it was meant to be played in Helsinki once it had been conquered during the first of those wars between the two countries. It never happened of course, and now acts in a manner as a reminder of overreached aggression and expansionism coming unstuck.

In this theatre, Smith performs a number of pieces of conceptual and environmental imbued and motivated musical and atonal art. Seeming to speak much of the times, and yet evoke a history of Eastern European malady, toil and travail.

Smith has connected the space and columns that hold it up the factory’s huge celling’s with rope and string, which he pulls on at points in this performance; dragging lightly, fragments of glass or what looks like metal along the floor to elicit a serial percussive sound. At other times, Smith is part of an avant-garde chamber trio of strings and woodwind and apparition vocalist calls from the ancestors; drawing on the labour, the emotive pulls of those that once worked this factory, whilst also referencing the geographical and looming presence of its neighbouring behemoth, Russia. But primarily, Smith is seated in front of the album’s most permeating instrument, a well-used antique harmonium that he found and repaired on site; and itself, handed and passed down from a church to a school, a living room and basement. It’s used to produce some of the most venerable of bathed pastoral drones, resonated chords, concertinaed waves and evocative reverberations. But its frame and lid is used too; the picking up of the hands as they press on the keys, or the foot pedal pump. And yet there’s also passages in which those bellowed-like breaths and airs, beds of layered tones, produce vibrations that are more unsettling (not quite Krzysztof Penderecki-like but getting there), and at other times, closer to psychedelic-folk.

Fluctuating at a slow pace between suggestions of the neo-classical, the work of Cage, Cale and Conrad, and brought forward into to the realms of Colin Stetson, Alison Cotton and Jeff Bird (I’m thinking of his more recent Cottage Bell Peace album), all the instruments and apparatus involved are simultaneously as harmonic as they are expressive in describing the abstract psychogeography of the factory, a location now standing on the edge of potential conflict; perhaps, but lets hope not, about to once more witness Russian expansionism.

Strangebird–Sounds ‘Minerals From The Crust’
(Audiobulb Records) 16^th January 2026

Inspired by the natural jewels and gem-like minerals that lie beneath the Earth’s crust, the Belgium experimental composer Gregory Geerts, under the Strangebird–Sounds guise, transforms those crystallised forms into a most pleasant, subtle ambient-techno soundtrack and set of movements.

Materialising, metamorphosing and breathing each track is built around sonically capturing the abstract colourisation, the way the light plays, reflects or gleams on each chosen subject; add to that the soft use of environmental field recordings, the enervated veils of the surroundings and the just as subtle use of the everyday world in the form of various undulating captured voices, of play and people going about their business.

From the more commonly found Calcite to the rare quartz of Ametrine found almost exclusively centuries ago in just one mine in Bolivia, Geerts amplifies a sense of allure and mystery; but also feeds into the marvel of each element as it glistens and grows; pulses and vibrates. In doing so he opens up to the etymology and history, covering a millennia of usage: The atavistic Egyptians used to carve Calcite, relating it to their goddess Bast – hence part of the origins of the word alabaster -, and Ametrine, though long discovered by the native peoples of what would later become Bolivia, was, it’s been documented and said, to have made its way to Europe as part of the dowry between a local Ayoreo princess and Spanish conquistador in the 1600s. Sometimes these references are mythological: see the silicate mineral Neptunite, which is named after the Roman god of the sea of course, though because of its origins and locality of discovery is associated with the Scandinavian god of the sea, Ægir.   

With the innovative use, we’re told, of a Eurorack modular apparatus our sound geologist presents an often lush, semi-tropical world of exotic birds, botanical foliage and replenishing life-giving waters. The underground is brought to the surface you could say, out into the open as it meets with the celestial and radiating. This is a subterranean world brough to life.

Both arpeggiator and freed-up notes bobble and bounce, or float like bulb-shaped and translucent particles and gentle specks against the biosphere; the synthesized; the occasional paddled tubular rhythms (on one occasion, almost like a Jeff Mills minimalist techno samba). The sounds of techno at its most sophisticated and ambient music, polygons and crystals, needles and sulphites all merge wonderfully to draw comparisons with the work of Xqui, Boards of Canada and Japanese environment music. Audiobulb continues to release some of the best work in this field, under the radar, out on the peripheral. Geerts Strangebird-Sounds vehicle is no exception; experimental without losing the listener; finding a most pleasant, inviting but also intriguing method, from the ground to the orbital, of giving sound to geological abstracts. ` 

Leo Wolf ‘Veiled In Light’
(The Oldest River) 13^th January 2026

Link to Bandcamp page

Following up on last year’s excellent I Saw Your Shadow On The Wall, North Carolina artist/musician Leo Wolf once more captures the abstract through the use of ambient, atmospheric and filmic granular processes, sampled material from classical records and field recordings and acoustic instruments; this time focusing on bringing the light in a range of descriptive, atonal and evocative ways.

Secular and venerated, stained glass anointed, veiled light sources cast circular-like beams and impressions on suitably invocative surfaces, columns and precious objects to capture a scenic and textural form of sonic and cinematic mysticism. Like longform and short form scores, a gradual slow movement of whispered and wispy disembodied and scaly voices, tubular machines, generators, apparitions and aliens, the sounds of hive-like buzzes and flies are echoed and reverberated to great descriptive effect. It reminded me in part of Ambient Works Aphex Twin, but also His Name Is Alive and Laraaji’s Baptismal collaboration with Kramer. And on a couple of occasions, when oscillating to an unsettling otherworldly vision of supernatural sci-fi György Ligeti.

Titles give some reference point; although I’m not sure if on the briefly gothic-like announcer’s tone narrated ‘Blood Meets The Iris’ if it is a reference to the revered Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle, which mentions some of the descriptive language of the track; especially the ritual part. They could be used of course just to set in motion an idea, theme or initial spark before opening up to be interpreted by the listener.   

In ecclesiastical settings, in wet subterrains, from the centre of divination and various rituals, and out on cerebral planes of contemplated life and death cycles, I love how Wolf builds such plays between the venerated and unknown. Ebbing away or in constant motioned waves, the veiled presence and concrete inspirations are exaggerated or made new on an album that challenges as much as envelopes. Is something reaching out to us from the gauze, the soft and wispy shrouds? Only you can work that out. Another sophisticated and immersive ambient score from a deeply engaging composer.  

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