Eric Kinlaw (Vocals/Guitar/Bass/Sound Design) and Marcus Barfield (Production/Sound Design) are forceghost, an electronic psych duo based out of Augusta, GA. Both members sport a long list of previous bands and projects, but are elated to be bringing forceghost into its fullest realization. After their initial formation in 2019, time and circumstance have led to the reshaping of the band into its current form. forceghost is the product of impromptu jam sessions, free form experimentation, and friendship. Many years of musical evolution and collaboration between the duo have culminated into a sound both piercingly focused, and kaleidoscopic in scope and texture. Creamy guitars, soaring synths, sharp drums, and hauntingly beautiful vocals will leave the listener enveloped in a radiant afterglow. All previous recordings have fallen by the wayside. Their debut EP, unknowing the known, is outnow and it is the definitive starting point for forceghost: the band hopes listeners find themselves enriched by its listening.

A bit more than a decade ago, Josephine McRobbie and Joseph O’Connell met in Bloomington, Indiana. McRobbie played in a host of local bands and O’Connell had released many albums of exploratory folk as Elephant Micah. When the mood struck them, they recorded music together. Spacious, patient, and strange music, to be sure–drawing a line, as the crow flies, between the high lonesome cowboy-folk of the American west and the whisper-soft Welsh post-punk of Young Marble Giants…or, perhaps, a bit of Nancy and Lee and a dash of Ira and Georgia. Gibson & Toutant isn’t just a musical project, but an attempt to document the interstices of Josephine and Joe’s life together–starting as a home recording and voice memo project for their own amusement. Their songs emerge quickly, from a collaborative process in which one of them literally finishes the other’s thoughts. As they traveled and established a new home base in Durham, North Carolina, their music rooted them. Gibson & Toutant was derived from McRobbie and O’Connell’s mothers’ maiden names, and they titled the songs on their debut EP after the rockabilly lyrics of McRobbie’s late uncle. Gibson & Toutant is DIY roots music, if, along with the more tangled and earthen variety, we acknowledge that fiber optic cables pulse with life deep under the soil, and they get twisted into one another if kept in close proximity for too long. At times, a dusky Lynchian surrealism surfaces in Gibson & Toutant’s music, as if those omnipresent electric hums surrounding modern humans are transmissions from another dimension, waiting to be harnessed. At others, G&T simply evoke dozing off with the calm drone of broadcast snow emanating from a Motel 6 TV. Perhaps what we’re hearing in this music is the sound of the roots that have grown between two humans who live and work in the same physical space, grasping at the ubiquitous electronic pulses surrounding them, waiting to be heard.

Since its debut in 2019, mòs ensemble has turned into an eight-piece band guided by a collective vision, with a preference for areas where genres overlap or cease to matter, where rich arrangements of voices and other instruments become fully realized. The band members are active with an impressive list of bands and projects – in pop, jazz and remote areas -, and relinquish this broad-mindedness with a self-evident love for adventure and exciting interaction. The result is a collective in continual transformation, maintaining a balancing act between wonder and determination. Their latest album Pets & Therapy is the sound of a band still honing its sound, refusing to settle for a formula. Not because they’re trying to adapt to the whims of the day, but because their inner urges compel them to. It’s spellbinding to witness how this octet has managed to refine its art while keeping that sense of unpredictable discovery intact. If anything, the ongoing tension between apparent contradictions is what makes their third album such a winner. By now, labels like pop, jazz and chamber music hardly matter anymore. mòs ensemble became a band that swiftly switches from light-footed energy to dense drama, from dreamy fragility to punkish power, from melancholia to euphoria, and from the direct to the whimsical. Recorded in the spring and fall of 2022 in Ghent and Milan, Pets & Therapy boasts eleven songs. It is at once more compact and nimble then its predecessors Limbs (2019) and Behind The Marble (2022). As well as more elaborate and ingenious, the separate parts of the bands merging more fluently while keeping their distinctive individual identities intact.

Brooklyn singer-songwriter Jackie West’s songs follow her protagonists across city blocks, into and out of different rented rooms, and down farflung highways that form backdrops for liminal moments in her life. But even when she describes feeling lost -whether in someone else or in the world- West never sounds less than certain of her capacity to navigate the situation, singing in a voice that seems to be able to phrase any thought indelibly. More than two years after her first EP (Find Indigo), out in 2022, her debut album, Close to the Mystery (out May 10th via Ruination Records Co.), threads together moments of searching and reaching out from a variety of relationships and settings. Its masterful baroque-pop songs form abstract scenes in a larger story about a self and worldview taking shape. The varied musical treatments mimic her changes in setting and vantage. She breaks up sophisticated harmonies recalling bossa nova and classic R&B with cycling chord progressions influenced by folk (Tiny Flowers ii), progressive pop, and shoegaze (Snow Amplified). Led by producer/mixer/multi-instrumentalist Sarah Pedinotti (Lip Talk, Kalbells), West’s team of crack musicians accommodate these intrepid shifts, including Shahzad Ismaily, guitarist Adam Brisbin, Nico Osborne (Nicomo), singer-songwriter Katy Pinke, and more. Recorded live with the band, West’s alluring, jazz-inflected vocals sit commandingly at the center of the mix, bringing a diverse collection of classic singers—Sibylle Baier, Vashti Bunyan, Hope Sandoval, Peggy Lee.