AvantRoots Vinyl & CDs

Review: The sea has always been integral to Japanese culture and is regarded as symbolising sustenance and spiritual depth. In this Deep Diver album, Charles A.D. draws on ancient diving and fishing traditions to create aquatic soundscapes that blend 90s house, Detroit techno, Japanese minimalism, New Age and Pacific jazz into something sublimely absorbing. The album ebbs and flows like the tides soon after opening with the title track which captures the sensation of deep-sea propulsion through rhythmic bubbles and slow-moving chords. Subsequent tracks, like 'Underwater Ruins' and 'Bubble Ring', fuse ambient and techno and highlight Charles A.D.'s mastery of minimalism.

Review: In the wake of unprecedented flooding that devastated Rio Grande do Sul in May 2024 - claiming over 170 human lives and countless animals, and submerging entire cities -local artist Carlos Ferreira created Flux as a means to survive. Composed and recorded in just one week during the height of the crisis, the album began as a personal coping mechanism but soon evolved into something more: a sonic document of a region in trauma. Born of catastrophe, Flux manifests as a twinkling sonic blanket despite it, buoyed by dreams of alterity and belonging, its incredible Max granulations matching the pockets of hope implied therein. Stark, urgent textures mirror the patent despair of the moment, yet embedded within are quiet meditations on endurance, reflecting a labile openness to change from the guitarist-composer and longtime AvantRoots resident.

Review: Braulio Lam's latest record is a unique outing, spanning pensive ambient dub and trip-hop moods, and cherrying them with an added visual element in the form of a photography insert. Born on the border region of San Diego and Tijuana, Lam's repertoire works in an expressly brooding sound that threshes its inspirations from the close but separate apposition of these two cities. The sense of a polemic being is a central theme of Lam's work; this is not only evident in his practice, which drifts back and forth between music production and photography, but also in the sonic content of Close Up itself, which drifts between depth-scouring electronica and Pacific folk in quick step, revealing them to be dialectically adjoined. Our favourites here have to be 'Buena Vista Social Dub', a crystalline immersion in dub and vocal etherics, and 'Mirror', and 'Monika', which lends a seething tape hue to a slowly moving slice of Latin blues.