MMNLS2E21.Feb
Jill Scott | Placid Angels John Beltran | Holsten, Grandma Love & Frank Silva | Richard Birkin | Luke Una | Dominique Fils-Aimé
March, catching up on February which Portland has decided to do grey and long and wet this year. A persistent quiet grey of a city. So we may be at the beginning of WWIII, secure Venezuela first, then go for the middle east, cool, cool. I have been reading more than usual about moving to Canada lately, which is partly why one album on this month’s list hit me kind of harder than it should.
And look it is well into March, gotta get better at landing in the actual month!
This experimental project will evolve over time. I will try some new tunes and rediscover old albums too. Maybe some themes. Definitely no requests.
Record Store of the Month
ok, so I didn’t get around to writing one of these this month.
In the mean time I will link to a few Portland smashers courtesy of KMHD here in Portland
Passenger Seat Records
Specks Records
Echoes in Space
I also built a little KMHD menu app to squirt jazz into your Mac OS if you want super top quality radio with one click each morning.
Anyway a few releases for February
7 releases for February
Jill Scott — To Whom This May Concern
Neo-Soul / Spoken Word / R&B / Philadelphia
Apple Music (not on bandcamp)
Jill Scott is one of the singers that reminds me of London with Emily, early 2000’s. Neo-soul, late nights in Stoke Newington in London, Marlboro lights, so chill.
I had forgotten what it felt like to hear her voice, a voice will fill every speaker no matter how large. Not big in the stadium rock sense, big in the way a room gets bigger when your right person walks into it. Jill Scott hasn’t released an album in over a decade and To Whom This May Concern arrives in early 2026 like a letter from my old self in london to remind me to slow down and listen to her voice and let the room get bigger. Her Philadelphia roots have always made her music feel anchored in something community, in a certain history, in a particular texture of Black American lived womanhood, and she carries all of that into this record without any of it feeling too heavy. The production is incredible it gives her voice the space it needs on the record. There are moments where she’s barely above a whisper. There are moments where the band opens up and you remember how good it feels to be inside music that believes in itself.
Get it at her own shop: shop.missjillscott.com
John Beltran & Placid Angles — Canada
Ambient Techno / Detroit / Melodic Electronic
Apple Music
Before I ramble, John did a great mix with Sam Valenti IV for Herb Sunday last week which was super weird timing. Read the interview too on Herb Sunday
John Beltran is from Detroit. You can see Windsor from Detroit. Canada is the view from the window, the other side of the river, the place that has always existed in the peripheral vision of Detroit, close enough to feel real, far enough to feel like something else entirely. The fact that this album exists right now, with this title, while a delusional American government spends its time making noises about annexation and sovereignty, is either a coincidence or it isn’t.
The supporting Herb Sunday piece was really lovely and the whole Detroit ambient lineage, the longing built into his music, the way Beltran has just kept going for thirty years without ever chasing the spotlight. Worth reading the Tone Glow interview too if you want to go deep. Valenti put it well when he talked about art careers being more Jiro Dreams of Sushi than The Eras Tour, an asymptote of deepening sensitivity.
Beltran’s been part of the Detroit electronic lineage since he debuted on Carl Craig’s label in 1991, and he carries that history without ever sounding nostalgic for it. There’s an open-heartedness to this record (like his classic Ten Days of Blue from ‘96) that feels strangely important today, a sentimentality. He’s a big feeler, unafraid of sampling whale sounds, trading in cute emotions when they go in and out of fashion. New Age peaceableness and Midwestern groundedness in equal measure.
Melodies come and go like a light flittering around on the other side of a massive iced over river. You don’t always know what you’re looking at, you’re just glad it’s boucing around there. A kind of record that makes Canada feel less like a place and maybe a state of mind, somewhere just out of reach you feel you know, or maybe you dont.
Holsten, Grandma Love & Frank Silva — Gilbert Road EP
Deep House / Organic Electronic / UK
Apple Music
Quick one - i fucking love this EP, and I dont remember how I found it, where it landed, but go listen. From Bristol x Birmingham, Northfield is the first release, a new label out of Bristol’s CORN nights. Three tracks from three producers, each one carved for a different hour of the same long night. Hand-stamped, 300 pressed, the whole DIY thing done properly.
Holsten opens with something half-time and heavy, stretched breakbeats with a euphoric edge that stays just the right side of paranoid. Forward momentum, classic feel. Then Grandma Love (a UVB-76 affiliate, excellent alias) takes it deeper, snare workouts and rattling subs dissolving into fully ethereal pads. Proper late night trip-bliss, the kind of thing you put on at 4am when the room has thinned out and the people left are the ones who actually want to be there.
But the Frank Silva closer is the one that got me. Fifteen-plus minutes of undulating guitar and shimmering feedback drone, minimal and meditative, carrying just enough of the dread from the earlier tracks to keep you honest. It unfolds like coming down in the best possible way, everything slowing and opening up.
RJ Birkin — Vigils (10th Anniversary Remastered)
Ambient / Drone / Electronic / UK
Ten years is long enough for an album to shed whatever context it arrived in and become something else. I have to note I love Richard, and have everything he has produced - he is the UK’s Nils Frahm and then some. Vigils came out in 2016 and I remember it landing in the way his usually do quietly, without fanfare, and refusing to leave. The remaster gives it a bit more air, and gave me a reason to go back and spend time with it again. Turns out 2026 is a very different year to listen in than 2016 was.
Richard’s work has always sat at the edge of things, too ambient for the techno crowd, too structural for the “ambient” crowd, exactly the right record for anyone who doesn’t want to sit in either camp. Vigils in particular has this quality of being about waiting, which given everything currently happening, felt very much of a moment when I went back to it this month.
Luke Una — Worldwide FM
Eclectic / Balearic / Deep / Manchester
https://www.mixcloud.com/worldwidefm/luke-una-26-02-26
Astral, Move it on Louie Vitton. There are DJs who play records and there are DJs who make the playing of records feel like an argument for something, for a particular way of being in the world, for joy as a political act, for the idea that eclecticism is a form of love rather than indecision. That is Luke.
His Manchester roots run through everything he does and the Worldwide FM show has become one of my regular reliefs from the algorithm. I can’t give you a Bandcamp link for this one. I can give you the URL and tell you to set aside two hours and let him take you somewhere. He’ll go from something deep and dubby to something that sounds like 1991 Ibiza to something that sounds like nowhere you’ve ever been, and it will all make sense because he makes it make sense.
Dominique Fils-Aimé — My World Is The Sun
Soul / Jazz / Voice-led / Montreal / Haiti
Apple Music
Oh look more Canada!
Dominique Fils-Aimé is a Montreal singer of Haitian descent and her previous trilogy, Stay Tuned!, Three Little Words, Our Roots Go Deep, traced a kind of archaeology of Black music, going back through the history to find where the roots are. My World Is The Sun feels like the first record after that project, the first one not built around a thesis, the first one that just lives on its own. It opens with her mother’s voice on a cassette from the seventies, a recording Dominique found in the family home, had no idea her mum could sing like that. She closes the album by recording her own version of the same song. 😢
The whole thing was recorded live, long-form takes, improvisation left in, breaths and giggles and all of it. “Rhythm of Nature” runs close to nine minutes and builds like a prayer getting louder, spiritual momentum gathering in real time. “Freedom Become” is written directly to people in pain, may you meet it with tenderness, may freedom become you, inseparable. There’s a rawness to capturing a flow state that you can’t get back in a second take, and Dominique knows this, lets the imperfection be the point. The voice is molten, one Bandcamp commenter called it molten lava and honestly that’s closer than anything I could write.
There’s a line of Montreal soul musicians that includes her and Kaytranada and a handful of others who seem to make records specifically for the period between winter and spring, for the moment when the light changes but the cold hasn’t quite left. This album fits that perfectly. Good February listening.
2026 H1 Project Updates
MMLL (the bigger publishing project) is still stuck in major de-prioritization. I’m still looking for angels and investors to support independent music publishing, looking for someone to pay advances for issue 1 of a thing, so please do get in touch.
MMR is in full flow, a new side business with physical products. Artisanal incense is handmade and paired with classic albums. Music rituals for deep listening.
MMDI went on Instagram to post some stores from my recent Toronto trip. Starting something new this year: featuring a record shop each month.
MMhealing sounds might be back on, new location, in talks. This particular experimental project will evolve over time. I will try some new tunes, play with formats, and rediscover old albums too. I may also try some themes and specific vibes, but definitely no requests.
Peace, more soon.
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Thanks to Sam at Herb Sundays / Ghostly,
From
John Beltran: “Anticipation”
I'm now 43. I'm lucky to have a life where I get to basically play around in the sandbox of music every day. I have no complaints on that level, but there's certain unavoidable spiritual things that kick in for everybody. That's why they call it a midlife crisis.
Rippling right off of “After Ventus,” I got into a period of critical thinking about techno that I'm still totally immersed in. Over the past few years, no single genre has been more important to me. It's what I listen to every chance I get, particularly a lot of mid-'90s, early 2000s stuff. I could have easily picked Jan Jelinek’s [Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records] or Carl Craig's More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art for this. But I had to go with John Beltran. He has this acutely jazzy and melancholy compositional style that's reflected through all the stuff I've been talking about. It's so rare that a person who's making techno records has such a strong melodic point of view. And this piece of music, it's only a couple components, but they're so strong together. It's like this one layer of field recording and this Pachelbel-like baseline that cycles eternally and is suspended. It never resolves completely.
I don't know what it means—and I don't even know if I care what it means—but the song definitely feels like being in your 40s. You're in the weird, middle valley of your life. It's all anticipation and no revelation. You finally figured out you're not going to figure it out, and you are just finally, in a way, present. You're right there watching every moment happen. You've given up on certain kinds of dreams, and finding out that's not necessarily a bad thing. Or at least I have. All I know is I feel very close to the source when I listen to this. And if that's not a forty-something thing to prioritize, I don't know what is."
Before he was weaving spare effects into intricate, unpredictable compositions, Daniel Lopatin—the electronic artist, producer, and composer better known as Oneohtrix Point Never—was a latchkey kid wandering through Winthrop, a small Boston suburb made up of blue-collar workers, rocky beaches, and various pizza parlors. The son of Soviet immigrants, Lopatin loved to explore his surroundings on his bike, particularly the nearby shores of the Atlantic, where he could almost touch the airplanes taking off from Logan Airport. “I figured out later you could fucking swim there,” he says.
But Lopatin took a more urgent interest in what was waiting for him at home: an extensive collection of his parents’ music and the Roland JUNO-60 synthesizer his father played in bar-band gigs. “He didn't know the power of this thing,” says Lopatin. “He just wanted it for its accordion sounds.” Still, the instrument fascinated the burgeoning musician, and by the time he was five, he had stumbled on an old VHS concert doc that showed him the real power of analog machinery. “I was completely consumed by the mystery of how these things were being made” he says. “It occurred to me that it might be something my nerdy ass would like to do.”
https://pitchfork.com/features/oneohtrix-point-never-on-the-music-that-made-him/