Back catalogue: Rock (All)

Review: On her sixth full-length album, Tokyo's Satomimagae continues to refine her idiosyncratic fusion of folk, ambient and sound collage into something singular and quietly expansive. Hailing from Japan's acid-folk scene, Satomi's music often blurs the edges between the intimate and the cosmic, the rooted and the abstract. Taba floats beautifully in that liminal space. Rather than traditional song structures, she presents Taba as a series of open-ended vignettes, each radiating with a soft-focus clarity. The arrangements are centered around fingerpicked guitar, hushed vocals and ambient textures that are deceptively gentle. Closer listening reveals a rich interplay of glitchy electronics, subtle field recordings and haunted atmospheres. Tracks like 'Many' drift on echoing voices and vaporous folk melodies, while 'Tonbo' finds a summery sweetness in its fusion of pop and pastoral folk, complete with the sound of nature rustling at its back. 'Omajinai', perhaps the emotional core of the album, embraces traditional pop structure only to dissolve it into a haze of nostalgia and spectral warmth. Taba is not background music, it asks for deep listening, but rewards you with quiet truths and melancholic beauty.

Review: Deep Valley is a new collaborative work by Australian artists Seaworthy aka Cameron Webb and Matt Rosner and they came together for it during a week-long residency at Bundanon Art Museum in New South Wales. The property which was gifted to the Australian public by artists Arthur and Yvonne Boyd in the 1990s offers a unique landscape along the Shoalhaven River and is surrounded by sandstone cliffs and diverse wildlife. Drawing inspiration from Boyd's belief that "you can't own a landscape," Deep Valley combines the inspiration of that setting with environmental recordings, guitars, piano, and electronic processing all of which aim to highlight the transient nature of ecosystems and encourage you to reconnect with the sounds of nature.