BERNICE

CRUISIN'

With Cruisin’, Toronto’s Bernice distils their playful sense of composition resulting in the most affecting collection of their young career.

Across fifteen tracks, a special kind of contemporary, jazz-inflected pop unfolds, miraculous for being both fun and musically adventurous, all in the name of emotional resonance.

UH HUH

UH HUH

Eight tracks of dub-damaged art rock which conjure a potent vision of spaced-out 1980s post-punks feeding their angular rhythms and bass-heavy grooves through layer upon layer of grime-spattered spring reverb.

There is a palpable sense of discovery and exploration throughout as elastic basslines and serpentine guitar phrases throb and glide, cutting through dubwise reverberations like hands moving through an opaque cloud of reefer smoke.

MASAHIRO TAKAHASHI

HUMID SUN

For the good part of the past decade, Japanese composer-musician Masahiro Takahashi has been crafting gently spellbinding pieces that simultaneously embrace electronic abstraction and a palpable, even brittle, humanity.

His delicate and evocative landscapes always seem to be illuminated in vibrant magic hour tones as golden synth lines emanate from between soft flickers of acoustic instrumentation.

Shirley Hurt

Shirley Hurt

Throughout the course of nine songs, Shirley Hurt traverses into the furthest corners of experimental indie folk, pop and country, alchemizing a singular sound that integrates elements of each with elegant unpredictability and ease.

Skeletal arrangements tastefully slink around Hurt's compelling voice, an instrument in its own right which brings to mind some of the great classically leftfield singers while retaining a distinctiveness that is increasingly rare in this era.