Music for Closed Spaces

For those who are not ready for summer.

For the past few weeks, the sun has been shining like crazy here in Copenhagen. The days are long, so long that it's getting increasingly difficult to get any real sleep. But hey, at least it's nice all the time, and that calls for some bright music to listen to with friends, perhaps somewhere by the sea... Right? Right? Wrong. Most of my favorite recent records are best experienced as focused listening, in solitude, and if you have access to some darkness, that might be good, too.

Giuseppe Ielasi's latest, Down on Darkened Meetings, offers a perfect escape (and/or recuperation) from the joyous outside hustle and bustle of summer's arrival. Featuring seven intricate looped guitar explorations, the album makes for a deeply immersive listen, the warm guitar licks building a safe sense of comfort. Who says abstract music can't be accessible and experimental music can't be emotionally charged?

Italians really do it better, it seems. Last month, renowned producer, mixer, and engineer Marta Salogni released the collaborative album she recorded with her late partner Tom Relleen of Tomaga fame. Music for Open Spaces collects material recorded in a variety of geographic locations, from London to the Cornish coast to the desert landscapes of Joshua Tree. (For a more detailed background story on the release, I recommend reading the heartbreaking interview Salogni gave to The Quietus). The record feels like a little world of its own, balancing drone tracks with dazzling instrumentals such as "pING poNGS," which brings to mind the sound of Colleen's 2015 stunner Captain of None.

Dog Dreams is one of those records that I put on my playlist, forget about, and then every time it comes on I find myself going, “Wait, what is this?” And the answer is always, ahh, it's the same thing I loved and wondered about the last time I listened to it. Lucy Liyou's second full-length explores the dream world and sounds very much like it. The album consists of three long Lynchian lullabies that flow freely between the intimate and the alien, between spoken word samples, ASMR and field recordings, and jazzy piano and vocals. While a lot of records get described as “dreamy” or something along those lines, few are as dedicated to their world-building as Dog Dreams.

Should I do exactly what I said is often done wrong and call this next one “dreamy”? Nah. I mean, maybe, if your dreams are extremely melodramatic. The tracks on Romance's Fade into You are all richly textured, “epic, but make it under four minutes.” To top it off, it references the cult classic lesbian melodrama ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant’, one of my favorite Rainer Werner Fassbinder films. The record builds up a dramatic tension that culminates in the closing track “Prelude to a Kiss”, suggesting that nothing romantic really happened all this time, it was all just a romantic fantasy.

Serious question: how is Maxine Funke not huge? (Beyond her New Zealand scene, I guess.) Album after album, she proves herself to be one of the most consistent contemporary folk figures. River Said is no exception – these are all JAMS... Little pop gems disguised as spare, light acoustic folk. Funke herself kind of resists being pigeonholed when she moves into electronic territory towards the end of the album, following a series of acoustic hits with a pair of longer drone tracks that are no less intricate and beautiful than the rest of River Said.

Okay, now here's a spring friendly one. Good Morning Tapes has released a few gems over the past few months, such as X or Size’s Aether Ore and this one, Intrapersonal Experience by Saphileaum. The latest album from Georgian artist Andro Gogibedashvili under his Saphileaum moniker picks up where last year’s Not Not Fun release Ganbana left off – somewhere in the bright new age haze of downtempo electronica. There you go, this is one you can actually play in the company of other people or on the beach or wherever.