15 songs, 51 minutes. One of our favorite compilations of the past few years, Skygirl was originally conceived via French record collectors DJ Sundae and Julien Dechery as “a deeply melancholic and sentimental journey through folk-pop, new wave and art music micro presses that span 1961-1991.” Reissued via the Australian label Efficient Space.

Latest compilation via Light In The Attic as part of their ongoing Japanese Archival Series. This collection looks at this substrata of Japanese music, born out of a growing interest in new computer and synthesizer technology, and, in part, conceived as a reaction to a craze for the piano music of Erik Satie following a series of concerts that took place in 1975.

On All My Relations, Cochemea Gastelum’s second solo album and first for Daptone Records, the saxophonist offers up a globetrotting swath of sounds, soul music of varying genres. Funk, R&B, Latin jazz, Indigenous chants and stomps, Morrocan Gnawa, cosmic jazz—leading his combo of Daptone stalwarts, Gastelum melds together elements of each to form a multi-faceted, spiritually cohesive tapestry. “Living in this plane, ceremony keeps me in tune with our actual world, where we come from,” Gastelum says from his place in upstate New York. “This record is a reflection of that.”

Roberto Carlos Lange, the mind behind Helado Negro, feels like music’s eternal optimist. “Brown won’t go / Brown just glows,” he sings on “Please Won’t Please,” the opener to This Is How You Smile, his new album which first saw daylight last week via Brooklyn’s RVNG Intl. If not the one we deserve, Lange is definitely the hero we need. His music unfolds with a patient grace and an absolutely sublime beauty; his cooing vocals floating gently across electronic atmospheres, radiantly beaming about Latin pride, family, friendship, and love.

The contemporary UK jazz scene has been especially potent of late, mutating and redefining various sub-stratas of the genre and its expanding tendrils. Enter: Moses Boyd. This is Displaced Diaspora.

Jessica Pratt doesn’t have many contemporaries. Her nylon-string reveries exist in a precarious space between the then and now. Quiet Signs, her latest, is a winter album and is more haunting than anything she’s put out before. It’s less immediate than On Your Own Love Again, her 2015 arrival, but once the melodies work themselves into you, they’re impossible to wash out. You won’t want to, anyway. 

Working with producer James Elkington and longtime Bob Dylan bassist Tony Garnier, Gunn presents some of his most affecting songs yet. Stepping forward with brilliant confidence, it’s a shady record, concerned with the transparency of liminal spaces, steeped in the unknown, and a reckoning with the loss of his late father.

Originally released in 1994, and reissued last year via the Berlin-based Midgar Records, Acid Mt. Fuji marked the debut lp of the late Japanese producer Susumu Yokota. Atmospheric and awash in a myriad of electronic, ambient, textures, the record more than earns its title. Buoyed by an atypical amalgam of numinous field recordings, drones, drum machines, and samples, Fuji’s hour and 14 minute runtime is an indeed a trip. As a recording, its pulsating push, pull and ultimate flow were made for headphones.