On RASA, Vineetha Menon inhabits a musical landscape. The singer and yoga teacher reaches into the devotional well of her lineage and pulls out something that feels simultaneously ancient and startlingly present. These are not updated chants or spiritual-lite reworks for a Western yoga playlist. They are transmissions, handed down through memory, family, and faith. Listening to RASA, I felt  like I was being invited into a private ritual.

The album draws from the Srimad Bhagavatam, specifically the tale of the Rasa Lila, the cosmic dance between Krishna and the Gopis. Menon uses this narrative as a spine, but what she builds around it is richly textural and emotionally generous. What stood out to me was how naturally traditional Indian ragas flow into Western harmonic structures. It is not an attempt to blend cultures for the sake of fusion. It feels more like the songs are expanding, making space for every possible feeling, every flicker of longing and surrender.

The album begins with “Interlude: The Gopis Pray to Divine Mother,” a short, meditative piece that sets the tone with a kind of hushed reverence. “Aganitha Tara (Divine Mother’s Cosmic Dance)” follows, and it is massive in scope, almost eight minutes of Eastern percussion, layered drones, and sweeping melodic gestures. It feels vast, nearly cinematic. I was pulled in by “Vanamali Vasudeva,” which has a more playful tone, lighter on its feet and worldly in the best sense. Later tracks like “Krishna Gopal” dial into intimacy, with warm guitar tones framing Menon’s vocals in soft focus. “Govinda Giridhari” brings a swirl of flute and cascading harmonies that reminded me of a temple procession, full of color and movement.

One of the most powerful things about RASA is how it treats time. Nothing is rushed. A note will hang in the air longer than expected. A phrase will repeat just enough to feel eternal. The production stays out of the way, giving Menon’s voice the space it needs to breathe and hover. Her delivery does not push. It flows, calm, clear, and quietly unwavering.

​RASA is a great listen. To me it felt like she is trying to preserve something sacred and pass it forward. Listening felt like being folded into a tradition much older than myself, one that still pulses with love, mystery, and devotion.

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Maddy Carty has always had a voice that draws you in without raising its volume. On Otherhood, her latest collaboration with producer Alex Bayly, that quiet pull becomes even more intimate. The EP leans into restraint, not as an aesthetic choice but as an emotional necessity. Every pause, every space between words, feels carefully considered. It is the kind of songwriting that trusts you to listen closely.

“Dark Circles” stands at the heart of the project. Just piano and voice, nothing more. I was struck by how unadorned it is, and how much weight that simplicity carries. The lyrics confront postpartum depression without melodrama or spectacle. Instead, it feels like a hand gently placed on your shoulder. Carty’s voice is warm but tired, honest in a way that does not ask for pity. The piano doesn’t compete for attention. It moves around her vocals like a supportive presence, never too much, never too little.

The track passes quickly, but its impression lingers. To me, it felt like the kind of song that closes a set with the kind of emotional clarity that makes an audience go still. It is a small song in scale, but not in impact. Otherhood may be understated, but if “Dark Circles” is any indication, Carty is saying more with less than most do with a full band and a string section.

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Katy Jarzebowski’s FEATHERS doesn’t just blur the line between composition and sound design. It treats that division like a suggestion, then quietly ignores it. Rooted in her ballet collaboration The Thing with Feathers with choreographer Emily Adams, the album feels like the natural result of someone who’s just as comfortable on a Hollywood scoring stage as in a rehearsal room full of motion. Born from the strange stasis of the pandemic, this music doesn’t just reflect isolation. It animates it, giving breath and texture to the quiet spaces we usually ignore.

The opening track, “Feathers,” orients itself more through atmosphere than melody. It sounds like sound itself trying to decide where to land. There is a liminal tension in it, something suspended between sleep and waking, real and imagined. “Flocks” takes that ambiguity and spins it into something more animated, like a surreal orchestral chase sequence that left me on edge in the best way. By the time I got to “Beaks,” I felt like I was being tugged in a dozen directions, with textures clashing and coexisting like a conversation that might tip into argument at any second.

“Bones” was a highlight for me. It leans into the uncanny, metallic and rhythmic, as if the instruments had been repurposed into machines running on memory and muscle. “Songs” dials things back but does not lose its sharpness. It is minimalist, yes, but not sparse. There is tension beneath the restraint, and the strings feel like they are holding something in. The closing track, “Strings,” is a fitting resolution, less a conclusion and more a moment of stillness, like finally catching your breath after being swept through some strange weather system of sound.

​FEATHERS is dense, intricate, and emotionally volatile in quiet ways. It does not chase hooks or climaxes. It is more interested in building a language out of subtle movements and unlikely textures. There is a lot happening beneath the surface here, and I found myself going back just to hear how it all holds together.

TRALALAS, the dark pop project helmed by Danish musician Morten Alsinger, makes its first statement with "Winter on the Vine", a debut single that feels haunting and gives me a similar feeling when listening to Swans. The song moves with the quiet confidence of something that already knows how it ends. It meditates on cycles—of seasons, of loss, of surrender—and invites the listener not to decode it, but to sit with it.

From the first few bars, I was struck by the groove. It’s subtle, almost reluctant, like it knows too much to rush. The analog textures and stripped-back arrangement lend the track a warmth that runs counter to its title. I found myself pulled into the baritone vocals, which hover somewhere between Leonard Cohen’s worn sincerity and the restrained gloom of late-era Scott Walker. But even with those reference points, "Winter on the Vine"doesn’t feel like pastiche. It’s more like a transmission from a place just slightly out of phase with our own.

The production is sparse but purposeful. Every drum hit, every swell of guitar, feels carefully placed—like someone arranging relics in a museum of fading memories. Heidi Lindahl’s guest vocals drift in like fog across a frozen field, never dominating the track but coloring its edges with melancholy. There’s a dreamy quality to the whole thing, but not in a sweet or sentimental way. It felt to me more like a liminal space, the kind you might pass through in sleep without ever remembering.

"Winter on the Vine" doesn’t chase catharsis or crescendo. It prefers stillness, subtle shifts, the kind of movement you only notice when you look back. If this is the opening note of the forthcoming album, then I’m curious to see just how deep into the frost Alsinger is willing to go.

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On My Alma Latina, San Francisco-based artist Michellar opens a window into something sacred and deeply personal. It is a debut EP that moves like a conversation with ancestry, faith, and rhythm, equal parts reflection and celebration. I came in expecting a blend of Latin influences, but what I found was more intimate, more deliberate. The record does not just honor her Spanish and Filipino roots. It channels them, letting tradition pulse through acoustic textures and prayerful melodies with a clarity that feels unforced.

“California Fields” begins the EP with a sense of calm that caught me off guard. The instrumentation feels untouched by digital sheen, earthy, acoustic, and full of air. There is a meditative stillness in the way the song moves. Nothing feels rushed, and Michellar’s vocals, rich and steady, carry a kind of quiet assurance. Then comes “Ave Maria” featuring producer Lloyd Miller, and suddenly the room changes. The percussion pops, the strings lift, and the whole track dances without losing its devotional edge. I found myself focusing in on the percussion especially. It is intricate but never showy.

“If It’s Only for One Night,” also with Miller, leans more inward. There is something hushed and almost sensual about it. The tempo slows and the arrangement feels sparse, like the song is exhaling. With “The Deep,” featuring Christina Rntd, the EP shifts again. The mood here felt more atmospheric and vaguely new age, like something you might hear drifting through a quiet gallery space. I appreciated the contrast in vocal tone and phrasing. It gave the EP another shade of emotional color.

The closer, “Samba With Me Tonight,” brings everything full circle. Michellar sounds loose and open here. The cascading vocal layers and lilting groove give the track a sense of closeness, like it is inviting you in rather than performing for you. It is an understated but confident way to end, and it left me feeling like the EP had told a complete story without overstating anything.

​Recorded between San Francisco, Austin, and London, the project spans geography but feels grounded in something unmistakably personal. Lloyd Miller’s production glues everything together, offering consistency without sanding down the rawness. What struck me most was the sincerity behind it all. My Alma Latina does not treat heritage like a theme. It treats it like breath, something vital, lived, and passed on. Michellar is not just looking back. She is making space for memory, spirituality, and rhythm to live in the present tense.

Underneath the soft crackle of static and the suggestion of distant thunder, Max Season lets “Spring 2025” bloom like a memory you are not sure actually happened. It does not begin so much as it emerges, halfway between a soundscape and a sigh. There is no hook, no urgency, no attempt to stake a claim. It is a quiet, measured release that feels more like the residue of a season than its soundtrack. As the first piece in the Cycles project, it positions itself as a postscript to spring, arriving just as summer begins, when everything fresh already feels faded.

At just over two minutes, the track feels more like a fragment than a full statement. It opens with brooding synth tones and faint storm sounds, setting a dusky, reflective tone. The bass loops between two notes while a beat flickers in and out of the mix, never fully committing to a rhythm. It reminded me a little of early Jon Hopkins, not in its complexity but in the way it builds emotion from restraint.

There is a cinematic quality to the arrangement, a sense that it is sketching out a much larger emotional landscape with just a few carefully chosen brushstrokes. Even in its brevity, “Spring 2025” suggests that Max Season is going to release emotionally resonant song and am excited to experience the next season.

I didn’t know this, but the term “Silent Spike” refers to the Chinese workers who built the first transcontinental railroads in Oregon, California and Washington (also known as “Railroad Chinese”). The new album from Ken Woods and The Old Blue Gang titled Silent Spike is a conceptual work “tracing their historic arc from the journey to America, the building of the railroad and the brutal backlash that followed.” Musically the band sees it as “an epic compendium of the breadth of American music,” though it sounds mostly like rock to me!

Bandleader Ken Woods wrote the lyrics and the music, turning several years of historical research into seven poems which meditate on key moments of this story. Among them: the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Massacre at Dead Line Creek, the Sundown Towns and the expulsion of the entire Chinese community from La Grande, Oregon. Woods explains: “Most of these songs are about confronting what white America did to the Railroad Chinese and trying to understand how our acts might have affected them as fellow human beings. It’s about accountability and compassion. This story resounds powerfully with the conflicts, challenges and madness of our own times.”

The band members are Ken Woods (vocals/guitars/keyboards/cellos), Joe Hoskin (bass), Steve Roberts (drums/percussion), Sam Woods (backing vocals) and Suzanne Casey (violin/viola). Recorded took place at Fieldgate Studios in Penarth, Wales.

“The Voyage” wastes no time getting started, as the band weaves a sound collage of guitar tones, backward sounds and tumbling drums seemingly waking up from a deep and troubled sleep. This track alone runs almost 17 minutes so there’s an investment required (the full album is over an hour). After a while you really do feel like you’re on a ship sailing away from home. The song proper begins at four minutes, a kind of muted rock with heartfelt but rough vocals in the classic indie rock tradition. The first lead guitar break is bathed in reverb and is an exciting taste of the solos and improvisations still to come. The middle section features an eerie, authoritative narrative voice with sounds of a creaking ship and crying seagulls, all created with band instruments. 

“Steel Stretcher” features a metallic slashing sound that I believe represents the carving of mountains and rocks to clear a path for the train tracks. “Stone breaker, ditch digger /
Through walls of stone and snow / Gonna build the iron road.” This is a much shorter and more traditional rocker, with a sharp syncopated beat and vocals similar to the indie band Black Creek Rock.

“Dead Line Creek” is the 22-minute centerpiece of the album, named for the site of the worst atrocity committed against the Chinese. Woods mentions that this track is partly  “a cowboy music homage to Jimi Hendrix’s Machine Gun” which also includes “epic passages of collective improvisation.” I can vouch for this as there’s videos of the band performing this song live, each one a new creation it its own right. Woods means to use improvisation to help propel the narrative forward, while the narrative elevates the improvs with “drama, purpose and direction.” The effect on the listener is similar to playing a side-long jam by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, or the epic Hendrix track “Voodoo Chile.”

“Sundown Town” is a term I first encountered in the movie “Green Book” referring to towns so hostile to African Americans that they could be killed after sundown, and I had no idea that Chinese Americans faced the same horrors. After the long previous track, this is another short workout with a 60’s roots-rock swagger and nice chorus harmonies, topped with wailing melodic fuzz leads. The last three tracks all run about five minutes and provide the closing chapters: “Lily White” is a frightening rumination on a mine collapse; “Ride The Rails” ends the story in 1893 with torch-waving mobs and wailing train horns as the Chinese are forced to escape; “Gather The Ghosts and Bones” returns decades later with sweet birds and gentle acoustics as the Chinese remains are moved from Oregon to China.

This is an epic album in every way, and I’ve only been able to scratch the surface. Brace yourself for a dark but fulfilling journey.

After a 15-year silence, instrumental guitarist Shouse returns with Jaded, a bold and tightly constructed album that channels both personal upheaval and pure technical firepower. I have always had a soft spot for this kind of guitar-driven intensity, and this record scratches that itch with precision and purpose.

Based in Jackson, Kentucky, Shouse enlists a lineup that reads like a shredder's dream. Michael Angelo Batio, Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal, and Tony MacAlpine each deliver blistering guest solos, while Charlie Zeleny’s drums and James Amhelio Pulli’s bass provide a rhythm section that is every bit as locked in as the lead work is frenetic. The whole thing is glued together by Billy Decker’s mix, which gives the album a polished, massive sound without sanding off its edges.

What gives Jaded its weight is not just the playing. It is the backstory. A house fire, a breakup, the isolation of the pandemic. Shouse took those losses and turned them into sketches, riffs, and voice memos that eventually became the backbone of the album. There is a sense of rebuilding here, of crafting something durable from the fallout.

The opener “Prelude” sets the tone with sweeping cinematic rock opera energy. It is dramatic and full of anticipation, leading straight into “Romeo Is Gone,” a full-force onslaught of drums and distortion that barely takes a breath. “A Bitter Cold” feels like a clinic in technique but still manages to resonate emotionally. One of my favorites was “Let’s Go” with its jagged time signatures and bursts of melodic clarity. It never quite settles and that instability makes it feel alive. The shouted “Let’s go” is a perfect release valve.

“Smiley Faced Emoji” reminded me of Joe Satriani in the way it balances flash and melody. “Buckets of Bolts” ventures into more synthetic territory with metallic riffs and hints of sci-fi, like a machine trying to dance. The title track dips into 90s alt-rock tones before “Memoriam” brings things inward with a slower and more reflective mood. “Upon Looking Back” closes the album with a surge of energy and a kind of open-road feeling that sticks.
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I am pretty sure Shouse grew up steeped in this kind of music and it shows. Listening to Jaded brought me back to an era when instrumental rock felt bigger than life, when every solo had something to prove. This album does not feel stuck in the past. It feels personal, worked over, and deeply considered.

On “Dark Side of My Heart,” Iyla Elise leans into something slicker, shinier, and more accessible than I’ve heard from her before. I’ve followed her past work, which often feels rooted in folk, jazz, blues and more, but this one veers toward pop without losing the tension or texture that makes her interesting.

It opens with a warm, almost disarming piano line, but that moment doesn't linger. She pivots quickly to acoustic guitars and close-mic’d vocals, and from there, the track becomes a balancing act between intimacy and release, softness and bite.

Distorted guitars enter at just the right moments while the tom-heavy drums give it a pulse that never feels overproduced. Each section resets itself with purpose. Elise strips things down only to rebuild with new weight and new angles. Even a mid-track bass and drum breakdown feels deliberate rather than obligatory.

​What struck me most was how confidently she navigates the changes in mood and texture. It feels like she’s carving out space for experimentation without losing clarity. “Dark Side of My Heart” doesn’t abandon what she’s done before. It stretches the frame and reveals new dimensions to her songwriting. It is a reminder that evolution does not have to mean erasure. Sometimes it just means turning the lights up in a room you have only seen by candlelight.

Ambient Music is a tough genre to review, because if you’re doing it right, the logical side of you brain switches off and the invisible core of your being floats away from your body, far from the computer keypad! But I’ll take my best shot with Disassembly Language: Ambient Music for Deprogramming Vol. 3 by 8 Bit Weapon.

8 Bit Weapon is an electronic music band from Southern California that creates original music using vintage video game consoles, computers and arcade machines, including the Commodore 64, Game Boy and Apple II. Aside from albums, they’ve scored music for TV and video games, and been featured in Wired, NPR and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s “The Art of Video Games” exhibition. If they make music from old games that gets used in new games, that’s quite a full circle!

The group has a fully-packed page of Bandcamp releases, but as the title indicates, this album is Volume 3 of a series featuring music created from the Commodore 64. There was a time when home computers were a brand new thing, and the Commodore 64 was an affordable AND highly-rated unit among the Apples and IBM’s. The fact that these artists have a Commodore system that still works (!) and can get music out of it totally blows my circuits; however, this time around they’ve added a Moog synth to the chain for additional filters and effects.

The band explains: “These Ambient Commodore 64 music releases are crafted to help you shed stress and facilitate relaxation. Enjoy well over an hour of mind-debugging tones to optimize your neural network. All tones have been digitally processed for maximum smoothness and optimum ambiance.” They add that no AI was used at any stage! Recording took place at Chiptopia Studios in Los Angeles, California. The album consists of four tracks, each one progressively longer (track three is 20 minutes, while the final composition clocks in at a half hour and change!). 

“Retrieval” consists of long, slow, circular synth patterns alternating between a few chords bathed in phasing, atop which keyboard-like notes play modest, repeating-note melodies, one for each “beat.” As the piece moves forward, bass elements are introduced to add some drama, perfect for a game background or sci-fi movie. I find it interesting that playing at low volume feels relaxing, while turning up the sound on speakers reveals a wealth of detail. That might explain why I didn’t notice at first what sounds like a robot conversation or battle right in the middle of the track! Toward the conclusion the melodies from the opening have returned for a more forceful curtain call.

“Preparation” starts with a chain of low synth arpeggios slowly rising up the scale, gradually joined by futuristic string-like pads. The overall effect is similar to track one, though more muted and insinuating. The later melodies recall futuristic movie communication signals, as Moog synths kinda do in general! For relaxation I much prefer this track to the opener. I love the middle section where it basically reverts to “only pads.”

“Interpretation” immediately struck me as a Kraftwerk-style composition, though with maybe a bit more gentility and humanity. If anything it gets even more spacey and dreamlike (with a hint of a nightmare) as it moves along. The concluding thirty-minute epic “Render” feels like walking into a church service or memorial early, where there’s just a few parishioners in the pews as the organist sets the tone. Given the length, the band takes its time adding tiny grace notes that evoke distant wolves or coyotes. 

This is the second old computer game-adjacent music project I’ve encountered recently and I find them exceedingly cool. You just might agree!

8bitweapon.com