MMNLS2E7: Apr 2025
DeRand Land | Groverider | Jefre Cantu-Ledesma | Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes, Josh Jonston, Sam Wilkes | Van Morrison | Whatever the weather
March seemed to go on forever, Portland was due a storm with tornados, hail the size of tennis balls, and wind to pull off grooves, that turned into nothing. Life in the Barnes house has been a little similar, at times it felt like the sky would fall on us, families would be pulled apart, and darkness would seep in under the door and suffocate us at night.
It has been a good reminder that fear, and anxiety is a matter of perspective. I’ve been discovering and re-understanding the futility of exploring zen paradoxes. Tiny acts of rebellion in the world we live in, mostly involving not playing a part in the drama of the US - pulling further back from news consumption, social media, and exploiting creation and creativity as zen practices.
I have found more community in Portland, in music publishing, and in the creation of places that look at music, not as background noise, 24/7 endless entertainment, but hand crafted and soulful art.
Probably a longer newsletter than usual but a range of albums, tracks, and releases that have acted as practices, meditations, uplifters, and soul-connectors.
This experimental project will evolve over time. I will try some new tunes and rediscover old albums, too. I may also try some themes and specific vibes, but definitely no requests.
X releases for April
DaRand Land
Wanderbeing
Deep4Life, November 2024
DaRand Land’s Wander Being isn’t just deep house—it’s a deep life affirming groove. The Buffalo producer, best known for his work with the label Deep4Life, returns with an album that channels a submersible, introspective energy. Released via the ever wonderful Scissor and Thread, Wander Being is a masterclass in restraint and minimal house, rich with lush pads, rolling bass, and percussion touches. The album moves with intention. The title track sets the mood with a nod to Detroit minimalism and the soulful end of techno.
DaRand describes Wander Being as a return to the essence of his early Deep4Life material—hardware-driven, minimal yet immersive, every element chosen with a “mind’s eye” approach. The standout track for me, The Nature of Reality, suspends time, layering swirling pads against vocal echoes and a bassline that hums in the dark. It’s a fitting centerpiece for an album that isn’t just about dance floors, but about where your mind goes when you give in. So much giving in to things this month.
A thoughtful, expansive, and deeply felt record—Wander Being is the kind of house music that doesn’t play in the headphones it lives on and sits in your nervous system.
Grooverider
Mysteries of funk
1998
I grew up on Fabio & Grooverider, after years of warehouses, Club UK deep, hard, crunchy cutting drum n bass. I wasn’t sure I would ever listen to anymore pure DND let alone Fabio & Grooverider’s releases. Grooverider released his Mysteries of Funk album in ‘98, I didn’t listen to it at the time - I think I was starting to fall out of love with drum n base, it was all going a little Pendulum. A lot of the old headz were all making bank, trying new things like tours with nu metal bands, or headlining festivals in former Russian countries, anyways, I’m wandering off the topic. So, as I said, I missed this album when it was released, and I never really gave it space or energy.
But now, in March 2025 it somehow popped into my consciousness, and it is a killer. A lot of Star Trek next gen samples, jazzy interludes, and breaks that feel sparse, fresh and restrained. I have a boxed set from a seller in Germany sat in my Discogs cart, and the digital has been on the stereo/headphones all month. It’s the sound of an old underground cracking open, cybernetic paranoia, sci-fi cityscapes, and breakbeats that hit like concrete slabs. By ’98, jungle had mutated. Raw, rave-scorched chaos of the early ’90s had given way to techstep’s chrome-plated menace.
With Optical on co-production, there doesn’t seem to be any club bangers but pure world building. Tracks like Rainbows of Colour and Cybernetic Jazz create atmospheric structures, synths drenched in neon glow, and 560° and Time & Space plunge into steely, rolling dread.
Grooverider was already a legend by the time this dropped, Mysteries of Funk proves he was more than just a DJ. It still sounds like a city at night, moving at 170 BPM, with the rain hitting sodium-lit streets. Well worthy of a re-spin.
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Gift Songs
Shining Skull, 2025
In a totally different space, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s Gift Songs is a slow dissolve, a collection of fragmented memories captured in sound— old VHS left in the sun, tape edges curling, colors fading into warm, indistinct hues. It’s a continuation of a deeply personal, textural world built since Love Is A Stream (2010), but where that album was a bath of distortion and noise, Gift Songs is quieter, introspective, embracing decay.
Cantu-Ledesma weaves together washes of guitar, layers of reverb and delay, alongside delicate tones, tape loops, and field recordings that drift in from another world. Compositions unfold half-formed, slipping through fingers before they can be held. Ode to Elkin and Three Gifts recall the gauzy warmth of In Summer (2016), but with an even softer focus— plowed with nostalgia but never too obvious.
There’s a beauty to the way Gift Songs degrades and erodes, as it is gently disappearing as you listen. Tape hiss, vinyl crackle, and field noise become something in the mix, reinforcing the idea that these aren’t just songs but moments, glimpses of something slipping away. It’s a release that rewards deep listening, let it wash over you, and find something in the space between.
Drawing its title from Cantu-Ledesma’s belief that music is a gift, a form of magic, born from specific conditions, rather than a singular conception, and as a nod to Shaker “gift drawings,” regarded as gifts from God to maker, the slow emergence of Gift Songs provoked in the artist how one might sculpt instrumentation and arrangements to invoke experiences in the natural world: “being amongst running waters, hearing wind through trees, or the rhythm of hiking to a vista with friends at twilight.”
The resulting sound, subtly influenced by Cantu-Ledesma's parallel practices as a Zen priest and a hospice worker, provokes a deep resonance with the landscape and rhythm of the seasons of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where he settled with his family four years prior, around the release of his last album Tracing Back the Radiance, each movement, shift, and transition built from evolutions of microscopic change.
Gregory Uhlmann, Josh Johnson, Sam Wilkes
Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes,
International Anthem Recordings, 2025
Now, International Anthem has steadily risen to one of my top 10 record labels, it has helped birth my new found love of Jazz, and creates a space of craft, spiritualism in music, and community that has been the hole I didn’t know I had.
This new album has been on the record player every Sunday morning and refuses to shift on to the shelves. The debut album from Gregory Uhlmann (SML, Anna Butterss, Duffy x Uhlmann, Perfume Genius), Josh Johnson (SML, Jeff Parker ETA IVtet & New Breed, Meshell Ndegeocello, Anna Butterss, Leon Bridges), and Sam Wilkes (Sam Gendel, Louis Cole, Chaka Khan).
The three improviser/arranger/producers’ impressive individual credits encompass such a wide stylistic pendulum swing that a collection of group music from the trio could mine any number of musical territories with masterful results. In these 11 instrumental songs, the trio explores a spacious lyrical curiosity that could be described as a jazz-informed take on progressive electro-acoustic chamber music.
Conceived during two live shows at ETA and a session at Uhlmann’s house in Los Angeles, the album maintains a focus on beauty, melody, and movement as the pieces unfold, with the trio pushing their instruments and highly-dialed effects to sculpt otherworldly sounds with the collective sensibility of a rhythm section.
Uhlmann and Johnson have known each other since their formative days as teenagers studying jazz. Shortly after first meeting in an educational setting, they would connect for nascent musical probing via low-stakes get-togethers back home in Chicago. They didn’t even know at the time that they had both taken lessons from a mutual guiding light – legendary guitarist/composer Jeff Parker.
After high school, they headed in separate directions – Johnson to Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana; Uhlmann to Cal Arts in Santa Clarita, California – but reconnected quickly upon migrating to LA, where shared opportunities for studio work as well as revolving-cast free improvisation at small clubs around the city naturally cemented their loose partnership. Uhlmann was both playing and programming, creating platforms for collaboration at the Bootleg Theater, while Johnson’s transition from student-of to collaborator-with Jeff Parker was well underway via their weekly gig at Highland Park’s ETA. In the immediate periphery of all of this was bassist Sam Wilkes, a serial collaborator well known in the LA creative music scene’s cross-pollination trenches.
In 2021, even before Uhlmann and Johnson began working on what would become SML, Wilkes and Uhlmann played together on an album by Miya Folick, which left them feeling like there was more music to be made together. Uhlmann suggested booking a live date as a trio with Johnson at ETA. With engineer Bryce Gonzales at the controls, the group worked through a short list of prepared material, augmented with passages of improvisation. “We all agreed that it was important to have a nice melodic repertoire to use as a starting point to freely improvise,” says Wilkes. “Landing zones, essentially, while we’re out in the field.”
'Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes' is a beautiful snapshot of three endlessly interesting players at the top of their game, rendered in such a skilled manner that its inherent mastery flows effortlessly, making passive atmospheric immersion as pleasant and stimulating as deep focused listening.
“Marvis” by Josh Johnson; “Unsure” by Sam Wilkes; “Arpy” by Gregory Uhlmann; “The Fool on the Hill” by Paul McCartney and John Lennon; all other songs by Josh Johnson, Sam Wilkes, and Gregory Uhlmann. “Frica” and “Rewinded” arranged by Josh Johnson; “Hoedown” arranged by Sam Wilkes
Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11 engineered by Bryce Gonzalez at ETA (10/25/21 and 3/6/23), Tracks 5, 6, 7, 9 engineered by Gregory Uhlmann (9/12/23 and 9/13/23)
Not an album, not new, not even a genre you might expect but a weird track in the middle of the month I couldn’t stop playing and would love to recommend.
Van Morrison
You don’t pull no punches, but you don’t push the river
1974
Some obvious notes - It hits my psyche/acid period right in the feels, it is 9 minutes long, Balearic perhaps. I heard this once at a night that Damian Harris, from Skint played at, I think it was his last song, and it has stayed in my collection ever since. I stumbled on it again recently and it has soundtracked my long walks in these misty forests.
A sprawling, epics where Van Morrison fully leans into a poet-shaman, half seer, half barroom philosopher, wrapped in a loose, jazzy grooves that seems to hover over the ground.
The Veedon Fleece era of Van is a particular flavor of wild. The post-Astral Weeks work, trades in high-energy stomping of Moondance for weightier, more abstract pieces. A warm, freeform looseness, flute lines curl around his singing like smoke, and strings rise up pushing the whole thing. It’s jazzy, but not in a academic way, more like a séance held in an Irish pub where everyone’s lost track of the time.
Any way I love it.
Last up this for the regular month are 2 connected releases.
Whatever the weather
Whatever the weather I & II
2022, 2025
The latest album from Whatever the Weather came out last month, but also reminded me to re-listen to the first album. The ambient-minded alias of Loraine James.
London’s Loraine James has established and identity through a blend of composition, experimentation, and intricate electronic programming. While titles released under her given name on the esteemed label Hyperdub tend toward IDM-influenced, vocal-heavy collaborations, James reserves her alias, Whatever The Weather, for a more impressionistic, inward gaze. On Whatever The Weather II, rich worlds of layered textures flow seamlessly from hypnotic ambience, to mottled rhythms, to cut-up collages of diaristic field recordings. The result is a uniquely fractured beauty, born from a compelling union of organic and human elements, processed through a variety of digital and analogue methods.
James titled Whatever The Weather pieces based on an innate sense of their “emotional temperature” at the time of recording, but she notes that often, upon revisiting them, they will feel somewhere else entirely on the thermometer; such are the whims of the environment. Compared to the album’s predecessor and its Antarctic imagery, though, Whatever The Weather II is a warmer outing, as signaled by the desert clime of its cover photo which is once again shot by Collin Hughes, and the package designed by Justin Hunt Sloane. Also common to both albums is the mastering work of friend and collaborator Josh Eustis (aka Telefon Tel Aviv), who lends his keen ear to James’ complexities, to craft a strikingly three-dimensional sonic experience.
In discussing this project, James notes that the first Whatever The Weather LP (Ghostly, 2022) was created concurrently with Reflection (Hyperdub, 2021), and that there was some degree of stylistic cross-pollination between her two musical frames of mind. This go around, she dedicated several months of focused energy to the alias, and to the development of its distinctions: no collaborators, fewer beats, and a process based primarily on instinct and improvisation.
The album’s singular sound arises from James’ favoring of hardware over software, as her battery of synths is modulated, transformed, and reassembled through an array of pedals with few or no overdubs, effectively anchoring each arrangement to its precise moment of creation. The greatest effort in post-production was given to sequencing, on which the artist places the utmost importance; taken as a whole, the suite ebbs and flows with a fitting sense of seasonal flux and naturalistic grace.
The final act of Whatever The Weather II offers some of its most affecting moments, beginning with “9°C”, where the haunting echoes of children on a Tokyo playground break through intermittent bursts of static, steeped in a bath of off-kilter, bubbling tones. Here, James displays one of her many strengths: a fearless approach to sonic collage, elevated by ambitious experimentation and pacing that manages plenty of surprises. Never content to remain in the same sonic space for too long, “15°C” follows with soft pads and glistening countermelodies, abruptly joined by a jarring, cyclical rhythm that mimics a loose part inside a whirring machine. Like much of James’ work, it bears an internal logic that only makes sense in her hands.
Closing track, “12°C”, drifts from bustling human spaces into a concrete groove, weaving melody and texture into a truly unusual, soul-stirring fullness.
Peace, more soon.