Another late addition to the Recommended Albums party, but an addition nonetheless. 2024 is already shaping up to be a great year for music, as seen below with all these fantastic records. The Mk.gee one in particular I’ve been blasting for a while, along with the delirious Contrahouse.

Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer – The Closest Thing To Silence
[International Anthem]
Holding your breath in every day life like you would diving into a body of water, but with the same need for exploration, calmly spreads into your everyday life. Now everything will be a discovery.

The Body & Dis Fig – Orchards of a Futile Heaven [Thrill Jockey]
Someone dangles a cinderblock a few feet above your face, talking about the sounds your head will make as when splits open.

Contrahouse – Contrahouse [Ulyssa]
Emerging from a club after a long night of dancing and listening to records, you realize the club has drifted away with a cloud into the sky, so you just go back inside and keep dancing in the early morning light and wispy high-altitude clouds.

Ducks Ltd. – Harm’s Way [Carpark]
Frantically biking across town to catch your crush before they relocate to their family’s lakeside cabin for the summer, the sunset casting dramatic shadows on the romantic race against time.

Erika De Casier – Still [4AD]
After getting broken up with at school, you sit in the back of the school bus and listen to your entire CD wallet’s worth of albums from 2002-2007 on your CD walkman (with wraparound headphones), holding back tears, while the bus driver takes extra loops to let you get through the most recent Janet record.

Friko – Where we’ve been, Where we go from here [ATO]
That zip-up hoodie still fits, and it still smells like your old apartment and the people you knew.

Helado Negro – PHASOR [4AD]
Laying in a silk hammock suspended between two rock formations, watching bats flit in the cloudless moonlight.

Hurray for the Riff Raff – The Past Is Still Alive [Nonesuch]
Finding notes you’ve left yourself tucked in all the secret corners of places you visit across the world. Little transmissions from the past to comfort the present.

Itasca – Imitation of War [Paradise of Bachelors]
A large chunk of tarnished silver, like an accessory to some old world steam train, juts out of the soil of your great aunt’s untended garden. The matte metal glows with a warmth only shown with age.

Les Amazones d’Afrique – Musow Danse [Real World]
Vibrating at a personal frequency that dyes drab, colorless walls with deep, primary pigments just by walking by them.

Loving – Any Light [Last Gang]
Lakeside cabin window at sunrise flush with sunlight, warming the wooden floors. You’ve been awake for an hour before anyone else, swimming before dawn.

Mk.gee – Two Star & The Dream Police [R&R Digital]
Soft, smooth plastic delicately wraps around a railing leading from an emptying stripmall night club at the end of the night, a man sitting out front and wearing a torn up suit smoking a blue cigarette silently begs for the sun to rise. Glossy skyscrapers echo in the immediate distance, their curved reflections hinting at a granted wish.

Rafael Toral – Spectral Evolution [Drag City]
Casting a net of microscopic microphones across a field of wildflowers and synthesizing the energy that comes from a day cycle into pure sound.

GR8 TRACKS OF FEBRUARY 2024::

• The Body & Dis Fig – “Dissent, Shame”
• Contrahouse – “American Bottoms”
• Contrahouse – “Big Time Sensuality 2”
• Contrahouse – “Streetcorn”
• Ducks Ltd. – “The Main Thing”
• Ducks Ltd. – “On Our Way To The Rave”
• Erika De Casier – “Believe It”
• Erika De Casier – “Ice (feat. They Hate Change”
• Friko – “Chemical”
• Friko – “Get Numb To It!”
• Helado Negro – “Best For You And Me”
• Helado Negro – “I Just Want To Wake Up With You”
• Hurray for the Riff Raff – “Alibi”
• Hurray for the Riff Raff – “Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive)”
• Itasca – “Imitation of War”
• Les Amazones d’Afrique – “Amahoro (Don’t Get Angry) (feat. Alvie Bitemo)”
• Les Amazones d’Afrique – “Flaws (feat. Mamani Keïta & Fafa Rufino)”
• Lewis OfMan – “Get Fly (I Wanna) (feat. Gabriela Richardson)”
• Lewis OfMan – “Highway (feat. Empress Of)”
• Loving – “Blue”
• Loving – “Medicine”
• Loving – “No Mast”
• Loving – “To Turn”
• Mk.gee – “Alesis”
• Mk.gee – “Candy”
• Mk.gee – “I Want”
• Mk.gee – “Rylee & I”
• Nathalie Joachim – “Ki moun ou ye”
• Omni – “INTL Waters”
• Royel Otis – “Foam”
• Royel Otis – “Heading For The Door”
• Royel Otis – “Sonic Blue”
• serpentwithfeet – “Safe Word”