These are staggeringly meditative compositions. Each blurring the temporal boundaries between nature and humanity, expanding out through field recordings and careful brushstrokes of drones, manipulated notes, sounds and frequencies. Here thresholds fold in upon themselves and evaporate. Tellingly any comparisons with say, Kali Malone or Sarah Davachi are not imitative, but instead divergent, building upon the foundations laid by such peers to create vast and original soundscapes. Brilliant!

A stream of undulating waves gently swelling across time and space. Acoxaca deliver a sonorous meditation which bridges the seemingly vast gulf between the physical optics, both visible and obscured, of the atmosphere. These compositions are flooded with a gentle beauty, reflective of Earth’s encasing fragility, yet also wary of its sub-atomic turmoils.

Yet another stunning release. There is no other label I continually return to for such meditative alchemy.

I began listening to ‘The Sea Surrounding’ as I climbed through the Mourne Mountains. The compositions and field recordings seeming to follow my footsteps. Not only that, the music provided a canvas over which the grasses sloped up to the craggy crowns of the mountains. On top of Slieve Meelmore I listened to this majestic album again as a tide of sunlight swept over far shores of shadow and laced its golden fingers amongst tree and shrub. As this unfolded ‘Footsteps’ was beginning…

Narratives of erosion. A demise of forms cast against the abrasive metals of progress. Sombre drones rumble beneath clouds of dust and ruin. Amidst this desolation rise and fall the corrosive melodies of force against substance. Of expression suffocated by oppression.

These compositions, these recordings, by Imperial Valley hold the listener like the distant gazes of lives drowned in sepia, lost among discarded dreams. Here those lives are resurrected - excavated in sound - to live once more.