Rachika Nayar OUR HANDS AGAINST THE DUSK (2021)

I really dig the liminal zone where ambient and instrumental/post-rock music wash against each other. Ms. Nayar carves out a welcome space for the waters to pool, deepen, reverberate.  Steph and I visited one of the largest (inactive) lead mines in the world in the limestone of southern Missouri.  It was an immense cavern, like the Vatican inverted, with crystal clear waters that scuba divers used in order to be certified.  This album reminds me of the calmness there, the serenity, 98% maternal security, like an enormous womb, 1% eerie lack of men, machines and mules, and 1% fear that the New Madrid fault would crush us, buried for the bipedal dolphins and aliens to find.

The godfathers of this genre IMO are 1 Mile North, who had a great album last year that I didn't get around to posting:

The Weather Station IGNORANCE (2021)

RIYL Big Thief and jazzy little jewel heists, songs for cars without microchips, cruising shirtless with coffee and a wish for a cigarette

                            ↑↑↑↑My politics in two images ↓↓↓↓

Mark McGuire OUR FAMILY (2021)

my man makes the most uplifting good morning Sunday morning jams, just full-hearted, wise and uplifting odes to a brief life lived well

Floating Points/Pharoah Sanders/The London Symphony Orchestra PROMISES (2021)

Les anges reviendront, et quand vous verrez celui qui est censé vous aider, vous pleurerez de joie

Quand les anges

Jonathan Hultén CHANTS FROM ANOTHER PLACE (2020)

This is some otherworldly stuff.  Hultén is a guitarist for Tribulation, which is by all accounts one of the best European metal bands, but I have enough trouble trying to keep up with PNW metal.  This is extreme in the other end, soft as anything Trees or The Roches put out, but adorned with bones and ash--to me it sounds like Celtic private mourning music, grief ethered into the constellations, spinning madly, dutifully above us.

stay for the guitar solo and then vaya con Dios