American Dre

Shovel Dance Collective: The Shovel Dance [Vinyl LP]

Though synthesizers are the backbone of Shen's music, while performing live, she plays self-made synths, invented instruments, and even acoustic objects like a bull whip. Her live show vacillates between moments of restraint and swells of frenetic and confrontational movement. Her sound is dynamic with a sensitivity to texture and structure throughout. This sensitivity is maintained in her debut LP Hair Birth, the result of several weekends locked in a studio creating cacophonous, wondrous synth noise with Harvard's Buchla 100 and Serge modular systems. She tracked hours of stems before cloistering herself in a painstaking editing process. Songs like "Under The Stall Door" sound like a cybernetic rollercoaster with rumbles and shrieks that hurtle the listener through virtual space. Others, like "Bolete," are tense, dense mood pieces that move from the queasy to the tranquil to the surreal.

Pale Spring: Cygnus [Vinyl LP]

Rolin Matthew J: Passing [Vinyl LP]

Murder In The Temple is both a continuation and departure from Zohra's past. The fourth daughter of a family of Afghan refugees, Zohra proudly sings and speaks her history, her family's Muslim heritage, her own black-clad weirdo-ness, and unashamed Stevie-esque, shawl-spinning femininity (after all, one person's Stevie-esque shawl is another's chador). She dives deep into the kinds of dark pop and synth that she's explored in Azar Swan, flowing seamlessly from bubblegum radio to batcave goth club, while at the same time, the South Asian/Middle Eastern melodies, modal tones and harmonies in her bones emerge. With a like-minded openness to chaos provided by producer Ben Greenberg, Zohra takes the sort of off-kilter chances that can only come when one has nothing left to lose.

Liyou Lucy: Dog Dreams [Vinyl LP]

Lebrecht Natalie Rose: Holy Prana Open Game [Vinyl LP]