Talisman

Taking cues from doom metal, smoky ECM avant-jazz plates, dreampop and disorienting GRM classics, Jake Muir and LA psych-sludge mainstay Evan Caminiti join hands on "Talisman", a blacklight-doused set of grim, beatless shimmers that push back on contemporary ambient logic. RIYL Terje Rydpal, Earth, Cocteau Twins or Les Disques Du Crépuscule.

Muir and Caminiti are sick and tired of ambient music's bizarre entanglement with the wellness industrial complex. You know what we're on about here: healing sounds and soothing balms for well-heeled adult babies to jam on Instagram, supported by their aesthetic collection of verdant succulants (modular synth not essential, but preferred). And yeh we fully realize that the world's going to shit, but we're also pretty sure that a guided meditation isn't gonna lead us to salvation, especially when it's accompanied by music that's at best a poor approximation of private press biz that came out four decades ago. Growing up in California, Muir and Caminiti quickly developed a deep suspicion of this kinda snake oil peddling and on "Talisman" fabricate a charm to ward off fakers - a subtly fanged ambient-not-ambient dedication to desert doom, mountain jazz and lysergic experimental forms.