I, for one, did not have “krautrock-psych banjo record” on my bingo list this year. Nor did I expect such a record to be one of the best records I’ve heard in 2026 so far.
Allison de Groot (an award-winning clawhammer banjo player) and Rich Ruth’s (a. multi-instrumentalist and producer of minimalist, ambient, and synthwave) self-titled album is lovely, trippy, and mesmerizing. As the story goes, Ruth was going to produce a solo album for de Groot, but the two of them began composing together not long after the recording process started.
Lead single and track “Nervion” immediately lets you know this won’t be a folk record or a bluegrass record. It’s something otherworldly. Heck, “New Intervention” could be an alien transmission for all I know. de Groot’s banjo often sounds like a harp while Ruth creates soundscapes around her like what a robot farmer might listen to upon booting up and drinking a hot cup of machine oil before tending to the chickens. “Bass Crust” and “10-14” have some traditional banjo work in them, but also lots of weird synth sounds and motorik beats (and screams?) to increase the fascination.
Birdsong blends with banjo on “Distance from Then” for the first minute or so and then the tracks expands (blooms?) into a floating, sometimes playful ambient track that shifts your perception. “Sorgin” is straight-up synthwave, and I’m all here for it. You’ll hear de Groot “shredding” on “Rocks from the Moon” as he puts down a hypnotic rhythm and Ruth’s synths and guitar become swirling mist around her.
The closing track, “A Wizard and a Stork,” not only has the coolest name of all the tracks (It sounds like something The Sword might have come up with one night while playing D&D.), it also has the most expansive sound on the album. It grows with each chord, emerging like a sunrise.
It’s a fascinating record and one that I’ll probably give to at least a couple people for Christmas this year. Don’t miss it.
As the story goes, Ed O’Brien had just released his first solo album, Earth, in 2020 and then the world shut down. He was barely able to promote it and then, like all of us, had to enter a period of isolation. Having that time alone, even while with his family, gave him time to brood, which led to a dark depression and a cataloguing of ideas that he kept for four years until he was able to take time away from being Radiohead‘s guitarist to write and record his excellent second solo album – Blue Morpho.
The album is named after a butterfly, and O’Brien does indeed spread his wings and transform across the album’s length. “Incantation” starts off the record with psychedelic folk flavor with O’Brien’s guitar sounding like it’s melting at one point. The title track unfurls like the titular butterfly enjoying the sun for the first time, and O’Brien did find a reconnection with nature while writing the album in Wales and spending a lot of time in the woods. The soft vocals of “Sweet Spot” reveal O’Brien’s vulnerability as he felt the world shifting around him (and the rest of us) and wasn’t sure what, if anything, to do about it.
The groove of “Teachers” is outstanding, reminding me a bit of Boz Scaggs‘ stuff. O’Brien has acknowledged that he wasn’t so much interested in rock on Blue Morpho as he was jazz and trip-hop. “Midway through life, I just lost my way,” he admits. Dude, been there. Also, O’Brien’s solo absolutely shreds on this track.
“Solfeggio” is an instrumental drone track that makes me think O’Brien was trying to capture the fuzz in his mind as he tried to wrangle all the thoughts he was putting to paper, and “Thin Places” is another instrumental that’s calmer and meditative…as if O’Brien found that the best way to wrangle all those thoughts was to set them free to land where they wanted and not grasp them so hard (if at all).
The album ends with the nearly ten-minute “Obrigado.” “Sunny days are awaiting me,” O’Brien sings, and you believe him. We can all have those sunny days where “every day’s a symphony” if we allow them to happen. The song is bright, lush, and brilliant.
Today we’re excited to announce the 50th anniversary celebration of Mort Garson’s beloved cult classic Mother Earth’s Plantasia, with Sacred Bones presenting the first-ever authorised eco-friendly reissue of the highly sought-after record. Originally released in 1976, the record was created for the listening attention of house plants and was one of the first ever to use a Moog. It’s available digitally now with the anniversary edition set for physical release on Sept 4th.
To coincide with the anniversary Sacred Bones have also announced two very special Plantasia events in Chicago and Kingston, NY.
The long-running celebration of ambient and electronic music returns at Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago on September 10th and 11th, taking place over two beautiful days at the end of summer across the entire conservatory nature campus, including a new expanded outdoor stage. Brought to you by Sacred Bones, Empty Bottle Presents and Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance, this year’s event features Helado Negro & Reyna Tropical, james k, Makaya McCraven, Flore Laurentine, and many more unmissable acts.
At Seed Song Farm in Kingston, NY on September 19th and 20th Sacred Bones will celebrate for a weekend of music, botanical arts and crafts, workshops, a curated market, plant sales, alongside performances by Gigi Masin, SPELLLING, Mary Lattimore, Green-House, Alabaster DePlume and more. This event is on sale now, grab your ticket while they last.
Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Mort Garson wrote lounge hits, scored the 1969 moon-landing and plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix.
In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn’t The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell-bottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. The work of occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the book shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon.
Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls, lording over bookshelves, and basking on sunny window ledges. The science behind Secret Life was specious: plants can hear our prayers, they’re lie detectors, they’re telepathic, able to predict natural disasters and receive signals from distant galaxies. But that didn’t stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants.
Perhaps the craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for them. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog.
Plants date back from the dawn of time, but apparently they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson. Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result.
The album gained an enormous cult following decades after its release. Sacred Bones’ 2019 reissue helped introduce Plantasia to a wider global audience, sparking a remarkable second life for Garson’s unlikely masterpiece. What was once a strange artifact of 1970s plant-mania has become a beloved evergreen, rediscovered and re-embraced by a new generation of listeners and flourishing far beyond its original moment.
Now, 50 years after its original release, Mother Earth’s Plantasia marks a major anniversary moment. To honor Mother Earth, Sacred Bones is releasing the first authorised eco-friendly reissue of Plantasia, pressed on 100% recycled eco-green vinyl and printed on 100% recycled paper. It is housed in a 100% recycled jacket, wrapped in bio-based shrinkwrap, and includes the original Mother Earth’s Indoor Plant Care Booklet alongside a digital download presented on a real seed-paper card.
Half a century on, Plantasia continues to resonate – an enduring reminder of Mort Garson’s ability to make the synthetic feel strangely alive and the whimsical feel oddly profound.
What if you made something for absolutely nobody? This is the question Fling ii asked before making their newest album, 3. They, like all of us, were exhausted by every click, view, and preference being commodified and resold to us and the world at large. Could they make an album that offered nothing to anyone? What could an album that, according to the press release I received, was inspired by “the vastness of parking lots, the prismatic strangeness of online advertisements for walking tai chi, and the passive performance of a basket of fruit sitting in a gas station” have to offer the band or anyone else?
As it turns out, a pretty cool record of krautrock / no wave electronica that borders on New Age music and vaporwave. Opening track “lau” pops and bubbles like the sound of a robot’s Zen alarm clock. “inke” drifts like a leaf on a stream that has no particular place to go and no timeline to get anywhere.
“bant” sounds like the opening to a weird VHS home course on meditation or computer science. “beem” takes on a slight country twang with its guitar tones but doesn’t lose the motorik beats or 32-bit synths. The electric piano takes the lead on “ilia,” creating a sound like an android’s morning commute radio station broadcast.
The album ends with “mago,” a trippy electro / krautrock cut that stretches to nearly sixteen minutes and takes you out of your current headspace and into some sort of forest that you’d find in the world of Tron.
This album immediately intrigues you and is the kind of record that will reveal something different every time you hear it…or maybe it won’t. After all, it was made to present you with nothing in particular. Again, from the press release, the band even states the album was “made especially for us and not for you, with all the gear we could get our paws on.” and that it “…stands as a quiet argument for surprise, accident, and the possibility of making something simply because it felt worth making.”
That’s accurate. Not everything has to be catered to your likes. Discovery, and being able to sit content with a discovery instead of seeking instant pleasure from the “next thing” is a lost passion. 3 proves this in every track.
Keep your mind open.
[You can subscribe. Or not. This blog is here for you if you want it, but no stress if you don’t.]
New York producer, vocalist, and DJ Vitesse X shares her take on Filter’s late-’90s alt-rock classic “Take A Picture,” out today via Music Website. The track follows her recent single “Memori,” her first new music since the release of her acclaimed second album This Infinite.
On her version of “Take A Picture,” Vitesse X pulls the song out of its post-grunge radio-rock context and into something hazier and more suspended. Built around trip-hop-leaning drums, atmospheric production, and the song’s unmistakable melodic center, the cover draws out the melancholy beneath the original’s sense of escape while bringing it into Vitesse X’s own dream-pop world.
Of the track, Vitesse X says, “I was listening to ‘Take a Picture’ in the car in the winter, deep in some heavy emotions. I was feeling really detached from the current state of music and exhausted by the demands of the modern world. When the song came on, I was immediately transported back to a feeling I had completely forgotten existed. A time where life felt tangible and simple and pure. It was honestly transcendental. I opened up my phone notes to remind myself to make a cover, and a month later it came to fruition.”
Vitesse X has spent the last several years shaping a sound that sits between dream pop, breakbeats, club music, and alternative electronic production, becoming a quiet reference point for listeners drawn to shoegaze-adjacent electronic music, soft-club nostalgia, and left-field pop. Her 2024 album This Infinite expanded that world further, with KEXP calling it “a fantastic set of glistening synth-pop” and Pitchfork previously describing her debut Us Ephemeral as “transportive” and “engineered with precision.” She has since continued to connect across indie and electronic audiences through touring, collaborations, and a growing visual world.
Check out “Take A Picture” and stay tuned for more music from Vitesse X coming soon.
Today, Cornelius announces his new album ‘REFRACTIONS’, the forthcoming full-length from Japanese musician, producer and composer Keigo Oyamada. The album is to be released on August 19th on Eat Your Own Ears Recordings and marks a new collaborative chapter in his work. Along with the album announcement, he has also announced a Japanese tour as well as a show at London’s Barbican.
For more than three decades, Cornelius has occupied a singular space in contemporary music, transforming everyday sound into intricate rhythmic systems and immersive, cinematic soundscapes. ‘REFRACTIONS’ continues this trajectory while marking a subtle but important shift outward. Where previous Cornelius records often leaned toward introspection, this new work is shaped more explicitly through collaboration and exchange. A sentiment illustrated with the album’s lead single “Aeons”, featuring Sean Ono Lennon. The track sees Lennon contribute vocals and lyrics, bringing his distinctive melodic sensibility and lyrical voice into Cornelius’ ever-shifting sonic world.
The creative relationship between Kiego and Sean stretches back to the late 1990s, when Cornelius first encountered Sean’s work and was struck by its unusual harmonic language, melodic openness and experimental pop sensibility. Across the years, their exchanges have continued to evolve through shared projects and long-standing artistic trust, with Sean inviting Cornelius be part of Yoko Ono’s re-formed Plastic Ono Band, doing performances is LA, NY, and London.
“Aeons” represents one of their most direct collaborations to date. Speaking about the collaboration, Cornelius says: “As the world and my surroundings changed at an intense speed, I think all of that inevitably shaped this work. Rather than expressing these ideas directly, I approached them structurally – exploring continuity, transformation, and multiple coexisting states within a single, uninterrupted flow of time.”
That same sense of shifting perception runs through “Aeons,” a track built around fluid forms and subtle instability, where melody and texture appear, fracture and reassemble in constantly evolving configurations.
Sean Ono Lennon reflects on the collaboration: “I’m always honoured to work with Keigo, he’s one of my favourite humans on the Earth Planet!”
Emerging in the early 1990s after the dissolution of Tokyo pop group Flipper’s Guitar, Keigo Oyamada quickly developed a reputation as a meticulous sonic architect, building dense, playful and highly detailed musical worlds that dissolve genre boundaries entirely.
International breakthrough album ‘Fantasma’ (1997) established Cornelius on a global stage and is widely regarded as a landmark in experimental pop. Its collage-like approach to production drew comparisons to The Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, Beck and The Beastie Boys, while helping define a new international appetite for adventurous Japanese music. Nearly three decades later, the album continues to resonate with new generations of listeners, with b-side “Typewrite Lesson” recently unexpectedly finding renewed life in a viral moment on TikTok and support from artists such as Rosalía.
“This time, instead of turning inward, I wanted to open the work through interaction with others,” says Cornelius of his new work. “I’ve come to feel more strongly that reality is not something completed within oneself, but something shaped through relationships and exchanges.”
That philosophy runs through the fabric of ‘REFRACTIONS’, which also features contributions from Arto Lindsay, Bid, and longtime collaborator Shintaro Sakamoto.
Across ‘REFRACTIONS’, Cornelius continues to explore shifting perception, memory and interconnected consciousness, not through narrative but through sound itself. Tracks behave less like fixed compositions and more like living systems: ideas branch, overlap and mutate, forming an evolving sonic landscape where multiple states coexist at once.
Despite its conceptual framework, the record remains deeply human in tone. There is a familiar warmth and playfulness embedded within its intricate construction, a sense of curiosity that has long defined Cornelius’ work. Drawing from psychedelic pop, ambient music, Brazilian tropicália, kosmische experimentation and minimalist composition, ‘Refractions’ ultimately resists categorisation, existing instead within its own internal logic.
For new listeners, ‘REFRACTIONS’ offers a gateway into one of contemporary music’s most quietly influential catalogues. For long-time followers, it reveals an artist still expanding and reshaping his language after more than three decades.
What emerges is not a fixed statement, but something constantly in motion: music that refracts, reshapes and reorients itself as it unfolds. ‘REFRACTIONS’ marks the beginning of a new chapter for Cornelius, an artist who remains entirely singular in the landscape of modern music.
Cornelius live dates: 10 Sep – Yokohama, JP – KT Zepp Yokohama 12 Sep – Tokyo, JP – CLUB QUATTRO 13 Sep – Fukuoka, JP – Zepp Fukuoka 19 Sep – Sapporo, JP – Zepp Sapporo 22 Sep – Nagoya, JP – Zepp Nagoya 23 Sep – Osaka, JP – Zepp Namba 26 Sep – Sendai, JP – Sendai PIT 2 Oct – Tokyo, JP – Zepp Haneda 3 Oct – Tokyo, JP – Zepp Haneda 6 Oct – Tokyo, JP – Zepp Shinjuku (TOKYO) 19 Jun, 2027 – London, UK – Barbican
Keep your mind open.
[It feels like aeons since you’ve thought about subscribing.]
Lara Somogyi announces her second album, a [time] patterned, out August 28th via Mercury KX, and shares the lead single/video, “sojourn.” A work rooted in contemporary classical yet reaching far beyond it, a [time] patterned is an intensely human document that reframes time not as a linear experience but as an emotional landscape.
A Juno nominee and artist who pushes the boundaries of her instrument, Somogyi approaches the harp as a vehicle for exploration rather than tradition. Having classical roots from the Royal Academy of Music and awarded an honorary Associate (ARAM) for her innovations in her field, she transverses sonic worlds. Her work spans film, television and collaborative composition, including collaborations with Bonobo, Ólafur Arnalds, the London Symphony Orchestra, and Bat For Lashes, and credits on Spike Lee’s Oscar-nominated Da 5 Bloods, Hans Zimmer’sBlue Planet II featuring Radiohead, and Ari Aster’sEddington for A24.
Where her debut album established a distinct voice through the harp alone, a [time] patterned begins there but moves outward. Written with producer Cyrus Reynolds, the album was shaped through tape loops, delay and repetition to explore how patterns emerge, dissolve and reform. The process became both technical and deeply personal after the loss of her father, an attempt to examine how time is felt rather than measured: joy is rhythmic, grief has structure, and healing forms patterns.
The first single to be revealed from the album, “sojourn” offers the perfect entry point to the record’s world. Written for harp, strings and electronics, it opens with an extended pedal technique blurring tonality and allowing texture to lead. A melodic thread gradually emerges as the track unfolds, while granular processing fractures and reconfigures time around it, creating a sense of motion that feels fluid and alive. Beneath it, strings provide a subtle architecture, grounding the piece as it shifts from introspection toward something more open and expansive.
Reflecting on the single, Somogyi says, “sojourn opens in the in-between; in that first step forward, tracing a quiet shift toward something open and free,” Somogyi says. “It’s not a beginning, even though it was the first piece I wrote for the record. To me, it feels like an opening to the next chapter.”
Across eleven compositions, a [time] patterned unfolds as a series of sonic environments, described by Somogyi as “rooms” the listener can move through. Field recordings, including birdsong from her birthplace of Kauai, sit alongside string arrangements and textural experimentation, featuring artists Rob Moose (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens) and Clarice Jensen (Max Richter). Influenced in part by architectural theory and the idea of pattern as structure, each piece becomes less a narrative than a form: joy, grief, and growth expressed as evolving systems of sound.
a [time] patterned is a work of curiosity and openness, an exploration of how experience leaves its imprint, and how music can hold and reshape it. The harp remains central, but continually reimagined: stretched through pedals, prepared with objects, and layered into shifting, immersive forms. With this latest release, Somogyi expands her work into new territory, creating a record that is as much about feeling as it is about form, and one that invites the listener to inhabit time on their own terms.
Lara Somogyi will play three headline shows this August and September in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Brooklyn.
Lara Somogyi Live: Sat. Aug. 29 – Los Angeles, CA @ Live at Glass Hill Wed. Sept. 9 – Chicago, IL @ Constellation Fri. Sept. 11 – Brooklyn, NY @ National Sawdust
Today, Cornelius returns with his first new music in years, opening a long-awaited new chapter on Eat Your Own Ears Recordings. His new single, a cover of “Yumenemi,” was originally released in 1989 by one of Japan’s most iconic singer-songwriters, Yosui Inoue, and remains a cult Balearic classic.
Reimagined through Cornelius’s singular lens, the track marries his signature collage-like production, intricate rhythmic detail and soft-focus electronics with a lilting tropicalia inflection, for a swirling, heady track befitting of it’s title, which roughly translates to “dreaming”.
The new track arrives following a recent resurgence of interest in his work, including a viral TikTok moment and a nod from Rosalía, who featured “Typewrite Lesson”, originally a b-side from Cornelius’s iconic 1997 album ‘Fantasma’, in her Met Gala–themed Vogue playlist of all-time favourites.
Cornelius is the musical project of Japanese multi-instrumentalist Keigo Oyamada, who began his career in his teens and launched the Cornelius name in the early 1990s after his band Flipper’s Guitar. The project takes its name from Planet of the Apes.
He broke internationally with 1997’s Fantasma, a genre-blurring album of cut-and-paste production that drew comparisons to Beck and The Beastie Boys and was released worldwide by Matador Records. Often dubbed a “modern-day Brian Wilson,” Oyamada became a sought-after producer and remixer, a “musician’s musician”, collaborating with artists including Blur, Beck, Sean Ono Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band, Haruomi Hosono, James Brown and many others.
With 2002’s Point, Cornelius shifted toward intricate loops of organic sound sources, from water droplets to vocoder-heavy reinterpretations, pushing his meticulous sound design further on 2007’s Sensuous. His live shows are renowned for precision-synced visuals, custom lighting, and immersive, band-led performances that treat the stage as a fully integrated audio-visual system.
The companion release Sensurround + B Sides was nominated for Best Surround Sound Album at the 2009 Grammy Awards.
“Yumenemi” marks the start of a long-awaited new body of work, set to unfold over the coming months.
We’ve reached the top 15 of albums I reviewed (not released) over the last five years. Read on to see who made the list!
#15: Maquina – Prata (2024)
That cover image pretty much sums up the sound of this wild post-punk / noise rock / dance rock album. It’s a stunning record, and I’m happy to report they’re close to releasing a new one.
#14: Lair – Ngélar (2024)
Indonesian psych-rock? Yes, please. Funky, groovy, weird, and playful. This is a delight from start to finish.
#13: Sextile – yes, please. (2025)
Possibly the best dance-punk album of 2025. This record slams non-stop and gets you moving whether you want to or not.
#12: Ki Oni – A Leisurely Swim to Everlasting Life (2023)
A beautiful album about grief, our continued, changed existence after death, and a salute to Ki Oni’s late grandmother all wrapped up in lush ambient music.
#11: No Joy – Bugland (2025)
A brilliant return for No Joy and their shoegaze rock. This album sprinted into the top ten of 2025 for me the first time I heard it.
Speaking of the top ten, come back tomorrow to see who’s in the top ten of the last five years!
Hailing from Jakarta, Indonesia Strange Fruit have been playing synth / motorik / krautrock / electro music for over a decade and have now released a wonderfully trippy new record – Drips.
Beginning with the bouncy, blissful “Pouvoir Moteur,” Dino Kristianto‘s repetitive, robotic beats instantly get your head and feet bouncing and the synth work by Baldi Calvianca and Irza Aryadiaz and Nabil Favian‘s bass line locks in the groove. John Tampubolon‘s guitar chords drift in and out of the track like a groovy ghost.
“Iridescent” is like a haunting goth synth track you once heard in a car ride one night and have been searching for ever since. The lyrics allude to how light and color can cause euphoric bliss under the right circumstances…and so can the entire track.
Calvianca’s vocals on “Monopolar” sound like transmissions from orbit, and the rest of the track is something you’d want while doing a space walk to gather ore samples on an asteroid, or while drifting in a boat on an Indonesian river, or while making out at an afterparty…with an android.
The title track closes the EP and appropriately has Tampubolon’s guitar sounding like its melting like a slow-burning candle As if these four tracks weren’t cool enough, the EP includes the Jonathan Kusuma “Hypnodubmix” of “Iridescent” and four different versions of “Monopolar”: remixes by Tom Furse and Hardway Bros and then two live dub mixes (one with and one without vocals) by Hardway Bros. The Furse mix is especially good and makes the track even more psychedelic.
This is the kind of EP that makes you want to track down everything else a band has to offer.
