Felte US Vinyl & CDs

Review: The result of two creative brains formerly engrossed in other projects (Jonas Munk and Jason Kolb), Billow Observatory is a project fitted for every epic classicist and spaced-out dreamer - two categories of music listener we're always happy to cater to. Loosely touching on themes of rapture, gazing and cosmic amazement, 'Stareside' is a time-upending LP that "thread the needle between hope and hopelessness", via a purging, ambient wash of sound born from twin-flame guitar feedback and soaring synths.

Review: Billow Observatory is a collaborative project from Detroit-based Jason Kolb and Denmark's Jonas Munk which explores ambient with a certain post rock sensibility. Following gracefully on from 2022's Stareside album, this new LP in fact gathers together two separate EPs from the duo and presents them as one listening experience. There's a delicacy to tracks like 'Garden of Four Streams' which speaks to Japanese environmental music, but still the projects maintains its affinity for ethereal chambers of sound as much as fragile foreground sonic figures. This is a high-grade strain of ambient with a depth of sound which will capture your attention from the very start.

Review: Billow Observatory returns to the fully ambient realms of their 2012 debut with a deeply introspective, percussion-free release that drifts through spectral soundscapes. Created by Jason Kolb and Jonas Munk, the duo's transatlantic collaboration has matured across four full-length albums marked by precision and emotional depth. Here, abandoning traditional structure, the album instead looks to harness the power of chance and randomness with shimmering guitar textures that crackle and dissolve like dust in water. It evokes a world slightly out of sync that is brooding, haunting and beautifully immersive while underlining their place as masters of refined, atmospheric ambient music.

Review: The third full length from Hawaii-born, LA producer singer/producer Jess Labrador, operates in a sweet pot between the dreamy and the nightmarish, atmospheres shifting without warning and genres fused and abused, particularly focussing on joining the dots between between electronics and classic songwriting. Labrador's sonic skills - her day job is as a professional mastering engineer - is very much evidence on what is her first almost completely DIY production, with every note and frequency in its place for maximum devastation and emotional resonance.

Review: Matthew Doty cut his teeth as a member of early 00s post rockers Saxon Shore, but these days you'll find him flying solo as Deserta with a sound which carries through some of his roots while adding a dreamy, shoegaze-pop twist. In 2020 he released the first Deserta album, Black Aura My Sun, and now he's back with the follow-up. Leading with the tracks 'Lost In The Weight' and 'I'm So Tired', Doty wields a mammoth sound with towering guitars and vocals that swirl in an ocean of reverb. It's genuinely huge, marking a new progression for the artist and his project which should be a must for fans of My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and plenty more besides.

Review: Oakland, CA trio Houses Of Heaven draw on elements of industrial pop, post-punk, electro and experimental on their latest full-length Within/Without, their second LP for label Felte. Channelling the production prowess of Matia Simovich (INHALT) - and featuring top-of-their-game guest vocals from Douglas McCarthy (Nitzer Ebb) and Mariana SaldaNa (BOAN) - Within/Without marks a turn away from the dub-infused movements of their prior 2020 Silent Places, going full-on weighty and noir cyberpunk, but with an extra ear for texture that most other releases operating in said style cannot claim to match. Opener 'Strange Temptation' prefers its shutdown Reeses and crunching arp sequences, while mid-record peaktimer 'Deserve' proves itself unafraid of rapturous verbs and washes; the lust could go on, but all tracks here have a remarkable ability to both strike fear into the hearts of us puny humans and simultaneously make us prance.