Sferic

Delphine Dora is a prolific composer, improviser and musician who has released on a plethora of labels including Recital, Morc, Sloow Tapes, Feeding Tube, Okraïna and more, and ‘Le Grand Passage’ is her Modern Love debut, a stunning set of songs for piano and voice, recorded in one take without overdubs or edits. We don’t think theres much, if anything, quite like it, but if you’ve been snagged by transcendent, advanced and amateur music by Andrew Chalk, Virginia Astley, Dominique Lawalrée, or Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, we think this one might just be for you. In an act of pure expression, Delphine Dora recorded the 8 songs of ‘The Great Passage’ in a single take, succumbing to a whirlwind of inspiration that transported her beyond the material world. Baroque paradigms bleed into fragile, introspective mantras, expressed through a made up language of existential yearning and channeled through piano and voice. It’s music that caresses the sublime, made without any premeditation. Delphine was nearing the end of a three-day prepared piano residency when an technician stepped in to tune her grand piano for her final performance. He removed the objects from the strings and fixed the pitch, leaving Dora with a freshly tuned instrument. Mesmerised by its new sound, she proceeded to switch on her recorder and pour out her soul, channeling, in her own words, "something greater than myself". The result is some of the most unusual but elevated material the prolific composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist has ever recorded, rooted in a deep understanding of European musical history but willing to push at its boundaries, questioning the earthly logic of life and death, asceticism and impiety. Glistening imperfections lash 'The Great Passage' to the physical world, but Dora - seemingly possessed as she quivers in a fictional dialect - lets her fantasies intensify her spirit, lifting the music towards the heavens. It's not sacred music, per se, but it is unashamedly mystical. On the luxurious, languid opening, Dora dissolves eerily familiar romantic piano motifs into an attentive ceremony, singing with charged emotion. Her words aren't really decipherable, but their resonance vibrates beyond language; it's striking to hear how confident she is in vulnerability. She lets the piano wrap into her voice, connecting us directly to a unique mode of emotional expression by urging us - the listener - to project our own meaning onto her abstracted words. Dora refers to the act of improvisation itself as a way to indicate "the fragility of being”, and as her words blur in and out of focus, dipping from a hoarse croak to a choking wail, she places herself at the very edge of musical formality, questioning strictures put in place to suffocate self-expression. Her music has often been labeled "outsider", but here she sounds intimate and interconnected, more self-consciously candid than anything traditional might have allowed. She conjures affecting, plainspoken poetry, like a bedside diary written in a hypnagogic, delirious state: a stream-of-unconsciousness, channelling the beyond. The album title connects to a book dedicated to French philosopher and activist Simone Weil, who famously pored over global religions to ascertain spiritual truths. To Weil, meditation was a passage to access mystical experience, or a bridge between humanity and divinity. In Dora's hands, this idea is a corridor between herself and the listener, a liminal place where she's able to address feelings without making anything explicit. The title, of course, also refers to life, its impermanence, finitude, and fragility, presenting the complex, multi-dimensionality of being through one of the most undiluted, unbridled set of songs imaginable.

Jake Muir's latest set of soft-focus, sensual electro-concrète, dissolves X-rated gay sleaze flick soundtracks into a shimmering suite of subdued orchestral flourishes and surreal cosmic psychedelia. Back in 2020, Muir put together a 90-minute mix for Honey Soundsystem, blending tracks from Kelman Duran, DJ Olive, Daniel Lanois and Terre Thaemlitz with obliquely camp dialog samples from vintage gay porn. The idea was to represent queer sexuality in a looser, more experimental manner, grazing the super-sensory pleasure of the bathhouse experience and the illicit joy of cruising without getting too self-serious while doing it. The mix was so popular that Muir followed it up with a weightless sequel two years later, and began developing the concept into a proper album, using more samples of music and dialogue, eventually performing the piece at the esteemed GRM as part of their FOCUS #4 concerts alongside work by Eliane Radigue, Folke Rabe and Chris Watson. The album is split into two side-long pieces that wash and ripple with nervous tension and discreet salaciousness. Opening with a familiar, bombastic theater sting, there are echoes of kosmische music and antique experimental electronics on 'Cruisin' 87', that Muir fashions into ASMR-rich puddles of syrupy, back-room ambience. Occasionally we hear lascivious words thru the fog, men mumbling to each other and giggling before the inevitable occurs. That's beautiful," a voice mutters over a dusky cricket chirp on 'Pipe Dream'. "It is," another replies. Muir's sonic response is suitably explicit, like a 1950s Hollywood jump-cut to a train going into a tunnel; the Berlin-via-Los Angeles sound artist takes the whole-body, mutual release of queer sex and interprets it with heady gestures, peppering jazzy rhythmic frostings into basins of skewered drone and gurgling synth. Muir's sound is colored by the pleasure of physical touch, a mussy flux of high frequency scrapes and caresses juxtaposed with woozy, dubbed-out fondles and thrusts. Who said the GRM was buttoned up?

Jake Muir’s by-now classic debut for sferic is a thing of spectral wonder; a luxurious set of gently phased and looped edits and field recordings based around gutted Beach Boys samples cast adrift in a sea of atmospheric shimmers. Followers of work by Jan Jelinek, Pinkcourtesyphone, Andrew Pekler or even Rhythm & Sound should be all over this one - a highly immersive exercise in blissed worlbuilding.

sferic cruise the best coast with Jake Muir, an artist and field recordist hailing from Los Angeles, California, who has quietly become one of the more interesting operators in this crowded field. His conceptual approach to sampling follows a lineage of artists at the very top of the game - from Fennesz’s re-imagined cover-versioning on his pioneering ‘Plays’ (also using the Beach Boys as source material), to DJ Olive’s quietly radical Illbient movements in the mid 90’s, to Jan Jelinek’s loop-finding heyday a decade or so later. Muir isn't so much interested in making sounds for mindless zoning-out, but instead evaluates the very essence of sound itself, in a way that feels like a microscopic view of the very fibre of popular music.

On ‘Lady’s Mantle’ Muir combines these elements with aqueous field recordings made everywhere from Iceland to the beaches of California with results that limn a wide but smudged sense of space and place. With fading harmonic auroras and glinting, half-heard surf rock melodies, the album is rendered in an abstract impressionist manner that suggests a fine tracing of in-between-spaces, perhaps describing the metropolitan sprawl giving way to vast mountain ranges and oceanic scales.

In effect the album recalls the intoxicated airs of Pinkcourtesyphone (a.k.a L.A. resident Richard Chartier) and Andrew Pekler’s sensorial soundscapes and even the plangent production techniques of Phil Spector and the subby sublime of Rhythm & Sound. For all its implied sense of space, there’s a paradoxically close intimacy to 'Lady’s Mantle’ which feels like you’re the passenger in Muir’s ride, and he patently knows the scenic route...

(Boomkat) 

French photographer, musician, and lifeguard Romeo Poirier is also known for his cult favorite "Plage Arrière," a meditative deep sea ambient cassette released on Kit Records. A long-awaited repress of this popular work, originally released in 2020! Is this truly a miraculous fusion of Andrew Pekler and Biosphere? Mastered at Schwebung by Stephan Mathieu. If you like Jelinek or Boards Of Canada, you will love this. Limited edition clear vinyl.

Unavailable for several years and highly sought-after​, Space Afrika’s excellent, career-establishing sophomore album ‘Somewhere Decent To Live’ encapsulates a singular, nocturnal mood that’s still the most distinctive thing in their catalogue. A stunning arrangement of mutable ambient frameworks, it lingers in the air like a stubborn waft of smoke, acting as a clarion call for a bunch of likeminded spirits that up until that moment had been lurking in the manchester undergrowth. What seems like forever ago, way back in 2018, Space Afrika presented a bird’s eye view of the city at night with ‘Somewhere Decent To Live’; their first and only album for the sferic label. Unshackled from the requirements of the dancefloor, but still inspired and feeding off its spirit and romance, the pair acknowledged undercurrents of jungle, dubstep, ambient techno and deep house which fed into their home city’s late night economy for decades, dowsing their tributaries back to dub and rendering the findings as shimmering ambient vapour. Forming cloud-like shapes illuminated by slow pulsing strobes, the vibe is precise but elusive. The pair’s dancefloor urges become completely dissolved in favour of more suggestive downstrokes, underpinned by thick and gloopy subs, leaving the kicks in the club while they float overhead like the dead kid embarking his Bardo in Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void, evoking the neon romance of a classic Michael Mann night drive. The album weaves through eight interlinked scenes, drifting like spectral flanneurs from the Diversions-like opener uwëm/creãtiõn to intercept telepathic thoughts from Teutonic friends in the percolated and drizzly ambient clag of sd/tl, before arriving at the album’s most arresting moment on the widescreen yet immersive bly and its sublimely smeared timbral thizz… A modern classic.

Jonas Wiese’s TIBSLC (standing for The International Billionaire’s Secret Love Child) presents its second album on the sferic label. ‘Hypertranslucent’ derives from the same recording sessions as 2021’s sprawling ‘Decisive Tongue Shifts - Situation Based Compositions’ double LP, with late Nineties ambient music being used as a particular source of inspiration to create evocations of massive cityscapes at night. and , after the post-industrial / deconstructed club. A work that integrates the Ethereal sound design of Mastering is also great with Stephan Mathieu! Limited to 500 copies.

An astonishing debut album of ambient rap that stretches saturated 808 kicks over dissociated AutoTuned vocals and glyding, amniotic bass. Every track is rolled out in regular, fast, and slurred versions, slanted and enchanted to enhance a sense of sensual, blunted delirium that comes highly recommended if yr into Future, Young Thug, Lee Gamble’s new one, Lil B, Iceboy Violet, DJ Screw. It was only a matter of time before rap and ambient merged into a full syrup, something that’s been on the cards since Lil B appeared in 2010 on DIY label Weird Forest (home to Emeralds, Hair Police and Yellow Swans) with a truly eccentric braindump of stream-of-consciousness raps laced over totally anomalous ambient pads. Iceboy Violet took it further with 'Drown To Float' in 2020, granulating the edges of tracks from Lil Durk, Thugger and Gunna, and now Yungwebster propels the sound further into the blissed abyss, and in the process provides the Sferic label with its most essential release since Space Afrika’s ‘Somewhere Decent To Live’ album in 2018. Yungwebster’s debut sweeps up tracks recorded over the last couple of years, taking the signature crawl of Southern rap that guided cloud rap's first steps (look up Viper and thank us later), and dissolving it with Ambient froth, lean-hued ATL melancholy and YouTube/TikTok micro-clique self-expression. Yungwebster is here joined by Cali producers astarii, Tavo and 6rantt, Rxmer from the Netherlands, Alabama's Sasmochi, Chicago's Dielauryn, Smooks, Cominalone, Star, local rappers Agxny and Tnotsobad, and NY producers Kacie Free and Sonofadm, all of whom contribute to the album's waved atmosphere. Each track is deployed at diff speeds, often melting into a slowed-down redux, giving a nod to DJ Screw and acknowledging the Houston original's overwhelming influence on contemporary ambient-experimental styles. He speeds things up on 'Stay FOCUSSSS', paying attention to Florida's quicker pulse, heard in music from artists like Ski Mask the Slump God and Smokepurpp, before he fades into a regular-speed coda. Through each track, Webster works like a musicologist, presenting a wide-angled view of rap that's both nostalgic and forward facing. When he references Future's most inward material (think the soul-piercing 'Monster' finale 'Codeine Crazy'), he inevitably juxtaposes those feels with euphoric risers and psychedelic pads. On 'pull it to the side' he raps over asymmetrically Eno-esque waves and delicate, skeletal 808 Mafia-inspired rhythms. Even the commanding power of Imogen Heap (not only was she sampled on Lil B and Clams Casino's 'I'm God', but Lil B's The Pack bandmate Young L made an entire album from her voice in 2011 with 'As I Float') is referenced on the record's closer 'Coraline'. Circled by ethereal chorals, Yungwebster sings to the heavens, leaving trilling hi-hats to whirr into the clouds. Real mesmerising gear, a proper AOTY contender.