Frida NOVA’s REBIRTH plays like a transmission from parallel timelines—each track tuning into a different frequency of her artistic identity. The Swedish artist’s self-produced album spans soul, electropop, club rhythms, ambient drift, jazz, and folk, creating a shape-shifting collage that feels both intimate and unbound. It’s a deliberate tilt toward pop, but one that refuses to sacrifice nuance or emotional depth for immediacy. Rather than chase cohesion, NOVA leans into multiplicity—crafting a record that doesn't settle into one genre. It finds new ways to move between them.

“Lifetime” sets the pulse early with crisp electronic percussion and bright guitar stabs, launching into an uptempo club groove that’s tightly constructed but leaves room for her vocal presence to breathe. NOVA’s voice sits confidently above the shimmer, not overpowering the production but guiding it with poise. Then comes “Base Camp,” a full stylistic pivot—grounded in live bass, keys, and guitar, it strips away the digital gloss in favor of something more tactile and organic. Two tracks in, and REBIRTH has already dismantled any expectation of predictability.

From there, the album moves like weather through moods and styles. “The Healing Mountain” leans into New Age atmospherics with airy synths and layered arpeggios that carry both sorrow and uplift. “Still Believers” channels a kind of 1970s folk nostalgia, all dusky warmth and wistful melodic turns, while “Rainbow” pulses back into club-pop with renewed energy and a buoyant sense of rhythm. “Syzygy” injects the album with jazz horns and Latin percussion, giving it a vibrant, festival-like energy. “Unexpected” dials things down with moonlit restraint—what you might call lounge jazz on an alien planet.

“Lyfja” occupies a liminal space where pop structure intersects with jazz harmony, nodding to NOVA’s more experimental instincts without losing its accessibility. The closer, “Away From Darkness,” lands gently but with purpose—a silken, R&B-tinged farewell that’s as lush as it is emotionally resonant.

REBIRTH's refusal to commit to a single musical identity is impressive. The album often feels like a museum of selves, each track inhabiting its own distinct wing. But there’s a quiet thrill in that variety. NOVA builds a world where genre isn’t a boundary but a palette. REBIRTH might not leave you with a single defining sound, but it leaves you with plenty to return to—each listen revealing new corners, new textures, new echoes of a voice still in bloom.

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​Farbod’s “Brother” begins in near-solitude—just a few piano chords and his baritone voice, which carries the weight of restraint like a man standing in the eye of a storm. It’s a deceptively simple introduction, almost monastic in its minimalism, but there’s an undercurrent of something much larger stirring beneath the surface.

Based in San Francisco but drawing from a wide-ranging palette—think the spiritual grit of Hozier, the earth-rooted mysticism of Xavier Rudd, and the melodic sensitivity of Chopin—Farbod threads together organic and electronic textures with remarkable control. When the beat arrives—a steady, pulsing 4/4—it doesn’t disrupt the atmosphere so much as deepen it. Guitar lines curl like smoke, while orchestral strings creep in with a cinematic, almost haunted elegance.

The track’s midpoint is where things rupture. A brief breakdown gives way to a more expansive second act—Farbod’s voice climbs an octave, the percussion grows insistent, and the previously restrained arrangement begins to swell with choral firepower courtesy of a Gospel Choir from London. By the final stretch, “Brother” becomes something sprawling and elemental. It doesn’t just build; it ascends, pushing its own emotional threshold until it reaches a kind of sacred fever pitch.  

It’s a song about connection, yes, but also about reckoning—spiritual, personal, ancestral. In “Brother,” Farbod blurs the line between the intimate and the mythic, and the result feels like a hymn for something long lost and suddenly remembered.

Jenny Maybee’s “Love Let Me In” opens like a slow sunrise—reverb-soaked guitar and softly struck keys stretch out beneath a steady, understated rhythm, laying the groundwork for something more devotional than simply romantic. Maybee channels the sacred and the secular in equal measure, drawing on the gospel tradition not just as an aesthetic choice but as emotional scaffolding. You can hear the ghosts of Aretha and Whitney in her delivery, not in imitation but in reverence.  

The song builds patiently, almost cautiously, before swelling into a full-bodied declaration. Maybee’s voice—clear, aching, and unafraid—cuts through the arrangement like a flare. Her collaborators, including Isha The Mad Scientist, Nick Carico, and Larry Batiste, flesh out the production with a rich choir that doesn’t just support her but lifts her up. The choral section, pure gospel in spirit, feels like a cathartic release: a moment of transcendence that’s less about spectacle and more about spiritual exhale.  

“Love Let Me In” is a song about surrender—not to doctrine, but to feeling. It flirts with the language of worship but keeps its feet planted firmly in the terrain of human longing. It’s a love song, yes, but in Maybee’s hands, it becomes something bigger: a plea, a prayer, a quietly thunderous affirmation that some kinds of devotion don’t need to be explained.

​Ooberfuse's “We Will Overcome” arrives not just as a song, but as a direct response to a political rupture with devastating human consequences. After the Trump administration gutted key USAID programs—many of which supported efforts to rescue and rehabilitate children exploited by traffickers, abusive families, and even U.S. servicemen—British-Filipino duo Ooberfuse partnered with the People’s Recovery, Empowerment and Development Assistance Foundation (PREDA) in the Philippines. The result is a music project that functions less as protest anthem and more as a global call to attention, built in collaboration with PREDA founder and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Father Shay Cullen.

Musically, “We Will Overcome” floats along on a breezy reggae pulse, with breathy vocals and a gentle optimism that recalls the socially conscious lightness of mid-era Bob Marley or even early-'70s Lennon.

​The lyrics are uncomplicated, almost mantra-like in their clarity—there’s no metaphor to decode, no irony to wade through. It’s a straightforward expression of resilience and collective strength, the kind of message that’s been repurposed across decades but still holds weight in the right context.

The video leans into the communal spirit, showcasing a range of voices and faces that bring the message into sharper focus. Toward the end, a spoken-word appearance by Father Cullen grounds the track in its true purpose: raising awareness for the children and communities PREDA serves. “We Will Overcome” may not be sonically groundbreaking, but that’s beside the point. It’s a vessel—one that carries the weight of real lives, real urgency, and a quiet kind of hope.

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Over the past decade, Georgian composer Tornike Tabatadze—who records under the name Sizmara—has quietly carved out a niche at the intersection of ambient minimalism and classical introspection.

​A self-taught musician with a reverence for the quiet grandeur of nature, Sizmara builds his pieces with the patience of someone who’s learned to find resonance in stillness. His latest offering, “Mimosa,” is no exception: a weightless, gently glowing track that opens like a curtain drawn slowly to let in morning light.

“Mimosa” begins with a sustained ambient drone that hovers in the air like mist. Each piano note arrives like a soft footstep in freshly fallen snow—measured, warm, and unhurried. But it's not just the notes themselves that matter; it’s the space around them. The silences are charged, like the brief pause between inhaling and exhaling. When paired with the delicate undercurrent of synth pads and faint strings, the effect is something close to emotional hydrotherapy: calming, cleansing, and necessary.

Sizmara isn’t interested in crescendos or catharsis. “Mimosa” is more like a long exhale, a meditative drift into someplace untouched by urgency. If you find yourself looking for salvation —something to listen to when the world feels too much—this is it.

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I’ve been a fan of composer-instrumentalist Edward Givens for quite some time: arguably since his early days as an Oregon Shakespeare minstrel, but most definitely these past couple years and over multiple releases. As it was for many artists, Covid was an unexpected blessing for Givens. Moving away from being a composer-for-hire in theater, dance and video, he instead began recording and releasing his own full-length “concept albums.” A recent example is the excellent Terra. 

Givens has an amazing ability to create music that sounds both like a full-sized scoring stage and a remote mountaintop village. I rarely play his albums through speakers, as his stereo effects can be both subtle and stunningly direct. At different times (or often simultaneously) his music can sound ancient, modern or space-age. Perhaps confirming this, Givens calls this album’s style “Future Primitive.” Givens’ instrumental palette is seemingly infinite: “Micro-tuned zithers and flutes traveling through ever-evolving polyrhythms made of wood and skin…everything from telemetry to voices to tumbling stones… harps from Ghana to whole string sections of erhu/zhonghu from China.” Givens has been inspired by commercial artists like Jon Hassell, Jade Warrior, Tangerine Dream and Dead Can Dance, as well as minimalist composers like Phillip Glass and Terry Riley.

Givens performs all recording and mixing at home using Reaper, which is astonishing since it sounds like a location recording in someone’s dream: at no time do I suspect The Man Behind The Curtain. This all makes sense, as Givens is hoping to impart a magic or mystical experience through his blissful, peaceful melodies “with a slightly edgy, psychedelic undercurrent.” Honestly a lot of what Givens does is over my head, but I’ll stumble blindly forward!


In small waves, “Somber Meditation” immediately establishes the Givens sound: woodwind textures, strings, electronic pads and unique percussive sounds. There’s a high-pitched stringed instrument I can’t place, but it’s similar to the Japanese koto on David Bowie’s “Moss Garden.” All these elements undergo incremental changes, sometimes slurring in pitch, while engaged in a slow (you might say meditative) dialogue with each other. The energy and intensity slowly rise, while always allowing room for the percussive elements (including water droplets) to shine through.

“Rapid Eye Movement - a Dance” features a very distinctive woodwind sound, apparently processed through some kind of harmonizer. It’s the kind of sound only Givens seems to come up with, and suggests a locomotive horn on the Astral Plane. The “dance” section features deep skins playing rhythmic patterns of a time signature I can’t decipher, while still drawing in the listener and causing us to boogie. The main attraction here is the beat, with melodies carried by the woodwinds atop magical pads of unknown origin. Occasionally I hear an acoustic guitar with a cassette-like audio downgrade, which is thrilling in context. “The Void” evokes the tonality of Tuvan throat singers, followed by samples of female vocalists alongside Theremin trills (giving this track a dreamy retro vibe) followed by a spooky Sgt. Pepper orchestral rise. Breaking free of the Earth’s atmosphere (I’ve been imagining a rocket launch all this time!) the music thrills in the sudden freedom from gravity and the beauty of endless space and time.

“Terra Cotta” has a specifically Asian vibe at the start, with tuned bells and occasionally wet-sounding percussion. Givens’ woodwind sounds are back, possibly joined by a trumpet. Whether live or sampled, these organic-electronic sounds are again very much a Givens trademark. The foreground melodic dialogue is entrancing, but I find myself drawn to the drum rhythms that continue along at whim, seemingly in a universe of their own. “Hidden Well” follows the previous tropes but with a dramatic arrangement that would fit well as a Western (or Eastern!) movie soundtrack. “Arbos et Orbis” has an achingly beautiful backing chorus as compelling as the foreground winds. “The Impossible Honey Tree” features a flute-like dialogue which settles into a playful percussive scheme, with some sounds suggesting a cartoon clock. There’s a subtle time signature change halfway through, heralding samples of Asian vocalists that help ground the music, with stunning rushes of vocal choruses marking time throughout.

There’s so many individual parts carefully stitched within any Givens track, that when the album starts playing over from the start, I assume I’m hearing yet another amazing composition! I mean to say that this is the kind of music that’s instantly enjoyable but also rewards careful attention. Though I’d recommend any Givens album, this is a great place to start!

Vadim Militsin’s LOGICA ABSTRACTA returns with Amber, a four-track EP that continues to probe the meditative edges of ambient music while sidestepping the genre’s more passive tendencies. Though rooted in the language of stillness and texture, Amber doesn’t simply drift—it hums with friction, transformation, and the quiet tension of systems evolving in real time.

The titular track, “Amber,” opens like the first signal from a long-dormant satellite. Celestial swells stretch across a bed of tremolo, digital decay, and subtle interference. Militsin evokes stasis not as a lack of motion, but as a sustained emotional field. The composition never announces its shifts, yet you feel them—like cloud cover slowly revealing stars. There’s a sci-fi dimension to the track that doesn’t lean into cliché; it’s not referencing Blade Runner, but it shares its sense of awe in the face of the unknown.

“Different Lizard” filters that same curiosity through a more volatile lens. A pulsing sine wave snakes through layers of glitch and haze, suggesting both precision and disorder. There’s something molecular about it, like watching synthetic life take shape under a microscope. Out of that complexity, melodic fragments begin to shimmer—ghostly choral tones that feel half-sampled, half-summoned. The track moves like consciousness flickering between states, lucid and abstract at once.

With “Ecoton,” Militsin allows rhythm to surface—not in any traditional sense, but in the way sounds stack and interact with deliberate propulsion. Low-end arpeggios form a kind of unstable scaffolding, while sharper, crystalline textures slice through with clarity. There’s momentum here, but also restraint. It feels cinematic without gesturing toward soundtrack tropes—more subterranean labyrinth than widescreen spectacle.

“White Conjuring” closes the EP on a warmer, more organic note. Fragmented vocal textures hover at the edges, not quite intelligible, but unmistakably human. Militsin builds a cocoon of sound that flickers and breathes, inviting the listener into something tender and temporal. It’s a quiet high point, a closing gesture that feels less like an ending and more like a soft release of pressure.

Across these four pieces, Militsin doesn’t drastically shift his sounds and textures but his control of tone and pacing keeps Amber from ever settling into predictability. There’s coherence without sameness, variation without fragmentation. It’s ambient music built not just for atmosphere, but for attention—designed to be felt, studied, and inhabited. Recommended.

Fundamental Shift build music the way some people build fires—slow, deliberate, and with just enough chaos to keep things alive. The Adelaide duo of Andrew Muecke and Andy Rasheed approach sound with an openness that feels almost meditative. Their latest album, Incandescent Grace, isn’t interested in genre boundaries or neat conclusions; it’s exploratory by design, a collection of evolving moods and sharp turns that reward close attention.

The title track opens the album with a steady, groove-driven pulse. Bass and drums lay the groundwork while spoken word slips through the cracks, untethered and incantatory. Psychedelic textures swirl in and out, and the track simmers rather than explodes. It’s the kind of opener that doesn’t announce itself—it just begins, and you’re in it before you realize.

“You Know Better Now” moves in a different direction, quieter and more inward-facing. The guitars echo into open space, and the percussion is sparse, bordering on minimal. Reverb acts as a co-writer here, stretching every note into something elongated and ghostly. There’s a stillness to it that doesn’t feel stagnant—more like a deep breath being held.

Then comes “The Crux of Potential,” which doesn’t so much start as it lunges forward. A brief a cappella intro drops into a thick, gritty groove. The vocal performance is raw and elastic, tugging at its own boundaries in a way that feels improvised but intentional. A mid-song breakdown pulls the floor out before the rhythm returns with surgical precision, joined by the unexpected shimmer of a singing bowl. It’s a standout—unpredictable, alive, and completely locked in.

“I Really Should Do More Dishes” plays with texture and time. Warped guitar lines, reversed effects, and a loose vocal delivery give it the feel of a found tape from a parallel 1967. It’s playful without being messy, psychedelic without feeling nostalgic.

“Just These Crumbs” pushes into more volatile territory. It’s jagged and immersive, driven by forceful drums and vocals that seem to scrape against the edges of the mix. Pads stretch and shift underneath, giving the song a fluid, underwater weight. There’s a tension in the way it deconstructs and rebuilds itself, constantly pulling between chaos and control.

“Broken from the Inside” is sparse and strange, leaving space for the voice to twist and hang. It floats in and out of structure, half-formed and haunting. “Pack for Mars” slides back into rhythmic focus, while “Phantasmagoria” explores fractured melodies and experimental sound design with a sharp ear for detail.

“From the Dream to Here” turns toward the celestial, full of swirling ambiance and suspended motion. The closer, “The Dream Is a River,” stretches across thirteen minutes without ever losing momentum. It moves like a long thought: shifting, revising, expanding, disappearing.

Incandescent Grace isn’t an album that lays its cards on the table. It’s ambitious without being showy, strange without being alienating, and full of moments that feel discovered rather than planned. It takes time—but it’s worth it.

Harpa’s latest single, "The End," straddles the line between pop anthem and rock ballad, but sidesteps easy categorization. It’s built on familiar architecture—verse, chorus, lift—but delivered with enough emotional conviction to feel like something more than just formula. The song opens with a tight guitar lick that leans slightly funky, paired with Harpa’s crisp vocal delivery that lands somewhere between yearning and resolve. As the arrangement fills in with keys and drums, the track begins to unfurl.

The chorus arrives quickly, bright and unabashedly motivational—less an emotional gut punch than a raised fist in the mirror. It’s the kind of soaring pop moment engineered to feel cathartic, even if you're not quite sure why. And yet, it works. Harpa leans into it without irony, and that sincerity gives the track its weight.

Rather than settling into a rinse-and-repeat structure, the second half of the song builds with intent. The piano takes a more central role, and subtle vocal harmonies start to flicker around the edges, adding texture without overcrowding the mix. By the final chorus, the full band is reaching for something grandiose, and Harpa belts out “the end of everything” like it’s both a warning and a liberation.

"The End" thrives on its dynamics—there’s a sense of motion and climax that makes it feel engineered for the stage. You can hear the light cues, the swelling crowd, the hands raised in a dimly lit room. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but it turns it with style.

Leeds-based trio Tillerman—anchored by brothers Jon and Tom Kulczycki, with longtime collaborator Shaun Mallia—operate like a band that never had to learn how to speak the same language. With over 20 years of shared musical shorthand, their work feels less constructed than remembered, as if each song had been waiting quietly to be found again. They pull from the warm hues of '60s and '70s rock, brush against the lacquered cool of Britpop, and carry the gentle ache of UK indie—but never with the posture of revivalists. Their music seems to breathe in its own time.

"Room to Breathe," their latest single, is aptly named—a slow, deliberate exhale that’s been a decade in the making. Written, shelved, revisited, and finally released, it plays like a reverie stitched together from faded memories of adolescence, love, and the blurry space in between. The structure resists pop convention: no clean-cut chorus, no dramatic hook, just a patient build that leans into feeling over form. It opens with a fleeting sample of children singing—gone in seconds, like a half-remembered dream—before sliding into dusky guitars and ambient pads.

There’s a subtle elegance to the arrangement. The guitar strumming pairs with vocals that echo early Pink Floyd at their most meditative, all quiet melancholy and soft glow. The rhythm section doesn’t clamor for attention—it simply holds the ground while the song stretches upward. There’s a slow intensification, a long crescendo that never quite peaks, just rises and expands, like watching the light change in a room.

The accompanying video mirrors the song’s ethos: performance footage interwoven with grainy, nostalgic clips that feel pulled from someone’s attic—scratched home movies, filtered memories, the kind of images that hit harder because they’re imperfect. It’s a gentle but affecting release from a band that knows the power of subtlety, of leaving space for the listener to fill in the blanks.

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