I Kill Spiders by Libby Embers is a quiet, close-up listen — the kind that feels like you’ve been let in on something personal. Libby Ember writes with an intimacy that never overshares, leaving emotional breadcrumbs instead of explanations. Her songs are built from authentic moments, small observations, and unguarded feelings that linger long after the last note fades. This is indie music that whispers rather than declares — and trusts you to lean in.
Tag: 2025
-
Topi Reta – Experimental Sessions #1 EP (Digital, 2025, Krnet083)
Topi Reta’s Experimental Sessions #1 is a tightly focused EP of three almost six-minute explorations, each one navigating the borderlands between noise, ambience, and electro-acoustic space. The tracks are stripped of conventional melody or rhythm, instead tracing arcs of sound — phenomena unfolding in real time.
The opening piece sets the tone with short feedback loops pinging across a deep, reverberant chamber. There’s a chill in the air here. Percussive bursts interrupt the void, while metallic hums seem to vibrate against unseen walls. It’s minimal yet alive, carried forward by the unstable energy of resonance itself. There are three parts offset with shimmering drone interludes.
The second track continues the exploration. Here the electronics stretch out, buzzing and hovering in layers that overlap like sheets of fog. The spaces between the sounds feel deliberate—silences charged with tension, as if waiting for the next scrape or pulse to enter. It’s a captivating exercise in how much presence can be conjured out of sparse materials and subtle shifts.
The final piece introduces tonality, and with it, human presence. Amid the electronics and echoes appear fragments of found voices, disembodied. At first, they seem frightened within the context of sound. Trapped within it. Caught accidentally in the magnetic field of the composition. The effect is both eerie and strangely intimate—but this gives way to a knock and the noise of a crowd. It’s a relief. Was this a performance?
Experimental Sessions #1 doesn’t seek to comfort, but it does invite deep listening. Topi Reta takes familiar experimental tropes—feedback, percussive accents, metallic drones—and arranges them into compact, immersive environments. Each track is a small experiment in sound physics, yet the results are emotionally evocative, balancing coldness with an undercurrent of human trace.
This EP feels like the beginning of a series worth following. If these are sessions, then they’re laboratories of sound, where accidents and controlled gestures coexist. For those drawn to the edges of ambience and noise, Topi Reta offers a concise but rewarding listen—chilling, cavernous, and quietly compelling.
-
Avi C Engel – Mote
Avi C Engel’s Mote is a record that feels less like a collection of songs and more like a continuous act of invocation. Their voice, layered in close harmonies, often approaches chant—woven patterns that circle back on themselves, as if tracing sacred symbols in sound.
Though the instrumentation is rooted in acoustic guitar and the bowed timbre of gudok, the effect is expansive, elemental, looping and evolving into uncommon harmonic structures, refracting and reforming like light through shifting water. The result is music that resists the familiar scaffolding of verses and choruses, instead flowing in poetic stanzas—each phrase a breath, each repetition a meditation.
There’s a deep sense of nature embedded here: not as landscape or backdrop, but as presence. The way Avi plays feels connected to cycles—day and night, tide and moon, pulse and exhale. It’s captivating, the kind of sound-world that stills time for its duration and invites the listener to be fully absorbed.
The cover art, Engel’s digitally altered photograph of a nebula-like creature, mirrors this ambiguity. Celestial yet aquatic, warm yet unearthly, it provides a luminous visual echo of the music’s organic surrealism.
While many records built on voice and acoustic guitar fall under the “singer-songwriter” label, Mote resists categorization. Engel’s songs don’t seek to magnify the self but to dissolve it into something larger. It’s music as ritual—meditative, transcendent, and achingly present.
Available at fennycompton.bandcamp.com.
Find more at https://aviengel.bandcamp.com
Interview in progress at Creative Arts Hub
-
Melancholy Club – thank god for you (Digital, 2025)
GAJOOB Review by Bryan Baker:
“Crash” doesn’t open this album so much as detonate it.
From the first second, Melancholy Club make it clear that thank god for you isn’t playing coy with your feelings—it’s pulling them out by the collar, shouting them into a sky of fuzzed-out guitars, and dancing in the wreckage. You think you know what you’re in for, and then the band careens sideways with that particular kind of youthful force that’s raw and intentional all at once.
It’s emo, sure—but it’s also something fuzzier and sharper: equal parts punk’s spit, shoegaze shimmer, hardcore urgency, and the sandpaper soul of grunge. And what ties it all together is how alive it sounds. The whole thing feels like it was played in a sweat-drenched room full of friends and ghosts.
Rex Blair’s guitar work twists through the mix like a serpent with a heart—melodic, sneering, and alive to every moment. His lead lines on “galaxy” are pure gravitational pull. Zane Dees on drums flirts constantly with chaos, threatening to spill off the rails in a way that actually drives the band forward. Noah Shelton’s bass is the anchor—solid, warm, felt more than heard but absolutely essential—and Tanner Padbury’s vocals bring the ache. He doesn’t just sing these songs—he lets them out. And by the time you’ve heard “cedar,” you’re listening differently.
That’s the trick here. Melancholy Club might hit you first with volume and velocity, but the substance sinks in. The lyrics are journal entries, existential footnotes, and mantras for late-night drives and early-morning breakdowns. Consider this from “cedar”:
> “I’m starting to feel like I might not be all that important.
> It seems so relieving to not have a place I should be.
> It feels like a blessing to know that you’re actually no one.
> The future is bleak but it’s also never felt so free…”It’s lines like that which make you realize how rare it is to find a band that balances this much noise with this much clarity.
thank god for you doesn’t try to reinvent a genre. It just plays it like it matters. And it does.
Media: Digital.
-
Matthew Lehmann – Spring Reveals (Digital, 2025)
GAJOOB Review by Bryan Baker:
Matthew Lehmann’s “Spring Reveals” is the second chapter in his Season Quadrology, and it lands with the soft, renewing touch its title suggests. From the very first moments, this digital release spills like sunlight through gauze—warm synth pads bloom slowly, syncopated pulses flicker like dew catching early light, and subtle improvisational flourishes give each track the feeling of breathing.
If winter was still lingering in your bones, this is the sound that helps you thaw.
This isn’t the clamor of spring arriving with fanfare. It’s the hush before the first birdcall, the quiet celebration of buds pushing through soil, and the shimmering possibility of a new beginning. There’s a certain morning ritual quality here—you could put this on at sunrise with a cup of something warm and feel completely aligned with the earth spinning toward light.
Lehmann guides us through an elemental cycle, not just sonically but thematically. On Spring Reveals, we’re invited into a world where “fox and hare say good night,” and the Green Man returns, not as myth but as gentle energy moving through trees, meadows, and the flowing stream called Deilbach. The sounds are never hurried. They evolve like the season itself—curious, soft-footed, and pulsing with unseen intention.
There’s a sincerity here that sidesteps new age tropes and instead embraces a kind of earnest ambient improv electronica. The production is clear and tactile, yet leaves plenty of space for the listener to drift and interpret. This is music that invites—not commands—your attention.
In a musical world often saturated with overstimulation, Spring Reveals is a refreshing wash. It feels like sunlight on closed eyelids, the kind of album you play not just to listen but to feel. Lehmann gives us a sonic place to breathe, stretch, and return—just like spring itself.
Media: Digital.
Bandcamp URL: https://matthiaslehmann.bandcamp.com/album/spring-reveals-album
-
Belinda Campbell – Sons secs, mouchoir (Cassette, 2025)
GAJOOB Review by Bryan Baker:
If you love sound as sound—the raw material of noise, tone, and texture—and are thrilled when it evolves, clashes, or gently harmonizes into surprising happenstance, then Belinda Campbell’s “Sons secs, mouchoir” will be an exciting discovery. This is not an album that asks you to follow a traditional melody or lyric; instead, it invites you to step into a playful and dazzling world where piano, electronics, vocals, and found sounds swirl together like a sonic collage.
At the core of the album is the piano—not just as an instrument of keys and hammers, but as an object of exploration. Campbell lifts the lid and plays with its full potential: dampened strings, percussive taps, overtones that shimmer unexpectedly. Around this piano core, she weaves manipulated voices, snipped and reassembled sounds, paper rustles, and electronic textures that dart between chaos and calm.
The result is a listening experience that feels both intimate and expansive. There’s a kitchen sink spirit here—everything seems fair game—but it never collapses into clutter. Instead, Campbell’s gift is in making the small feel monumental: fleeting gestures and delicate sonic fragments are arranged with care, creating moments where you sense you’ve stumbled into something rare and luminous.
The artist herself frames the process beautifully: “From these recordings, I set out in search of small miracles, rare moments where surprising effects emerged… sometimes infinitely small, so brief that I had the impression of assembling sound particules.” That sense of wonder permeates the album, making it feel like a living, breathing organism rather than a fixed set of compositions.
Credit is due not just to Campbell’s deft hand in recording and mixing but also to Zachary Scholes on mastering, Guylaine Séguin’s evocative photography, and Soledad Coyoli’s sharp graphic design—all helping to shape “Sons secs, mouchoir” as both a sonic and visual object.
Released on Small Scale Music, you can explore this gem at smallscalemusic.bandcamp.com.
In short: “Sons secs, mouchoir” is a joyful exploration of sound for sound’s sake—playful, curious, and filled with shimmering detail. For those willing to wander off the beaten path, it’s an album that rewards with every listen.
Media: Cassette.
Bandcamp URL: https://smallscalemusic.bandcamp.com/album/sons-secs-mouchoir
-
KUUNATIC – Wheels of Ömon (Digital, 2025)
From the opening seconds of Wheels of Ömon, Japanese trio KUUNATIC swing a hypnotic pendulum — a raw, buzzing riff cuts through like a ritual saw, while modal harmonies of layered grrl-chant swirl overhead in a trance-dance invocation. It’s both grounded and celestial, immediately otherworldly but unmistakably alive. The trio’s sound is mythological rock theatre: equal parts thunderous, meditative, and totally sui generis.
Across eight tracks, KUUNATIC transport listeners deep into their fantasy mythos — the imagined planetary orbit of Ömon, Kuurandia, and Klüna — with each piece mapped to a distinct ritual moment within a fictional 45-hour celestial cycle. Where prog, psych, and world-building converge, KUUNATIC light their own cosmic bonfire.
The Sound of Folk Time-Space Travel
There’s something ancient stitched into these frequencies. While grounded in tribal drums and fuzzed-out bass grooves, Wheels of Ömon integrates an evocative arsenal of traditional Japanese instruments: the shrill keening of the sho, the flickering of sasara, the pulse of ougidaiko, and the breath of ancient flutes like ryuteki and kagurabue. But this isn’t a reverent throwback to court music — it’s genre alchemy. The result sounds like a festival for gods who haven’t yet been invented.
“Yellow Serpent” exemplifies this fusion: a softly plucked string motif rides in, joined by a serene chant that slowly folds in tribal percussion, lo-fi keyboard stabs, and a counter-melody that could only come from a toy sampler possessed by spirits. There’s a layered honesty here — part analog ceremony, part digital dream.
World-Building with Prophets and Mountains
KUUNATIC’s strength lies not only in their sound but in their vision. This album doesn’t merely contain myth — it is myth. Like Magma’s invented language and planet, KUUNATIC’s cosmos is complete, yet open-ended, rooted in fantasy yet inspired by history. They speak of the Alps and the Rhône as much as fictional lakes of healing on distant moons. That mix — of vast imagination and grounded anthropology — gives Wheels of Ömon its psychic depth.
“Kuuminyo” stands out not just for its haunting rhythm, but for featuring Rekpo, an Ainu singer whose presence infuses the song with real-world cultural gravitas. Her performance of the traditional song “Hanro” adds a piercingly human edge — a chant across time and space, echoing both forgotten rituals and future ceremonies.
If Gate of Klüna (2021) was KUUNATIC’s bold thesis — a “hello world” from beyond the veil — then Wheels of Ömon is their manifesto. It’s denser, more nuanced, and infinitely more ambitious. Yet it never drowns in its own lore. These songs breathe. They pulsate. They move.
You don’t need to understand the Ömon system to feel the gravity. You just need ears open to wonder.
This one’s for the listeners who miss the way music used to transport you — not just emotionally, but cosmically. KUUNATIC doesn’t offer escapism. They offer world-building as resistance. And joy.
Discover Sounds reviews sound recordings we find worthy of discovery. It’s published by Briyan Frederick Baker of GAJOOB (that’s me). Send bandcamp download codes, tapes, CDs, vinyl and other things. Read more…