#mason lindahl

[adrianoesteves]

[welcometotheslipstream]

Dub's 2025 fav albums (part 1)

Oh hey, here we are again doing Dub's fav albums of the year of our lord 2025. Loads and loads of good stuff this past year, lettuce turnip the beet and get to it.

Side note: I've learned it is very hard to describe what something sounds like, and why you like it. Also I'm not a writer. Respeck for those who do this for a living.

18. Mason Lindahl - Joshua / Same Day Walking

This is a very unique and powerful brand of fingerstyle guitar. Stormy, moody flamenco-inflected playing that flares up with dramatic and lightning-fast right hand work. A stunner.

Genre: fingerstyle instrumental acoustic guitar

17. James K - Friend

A contemporary take on trip-hop in which 90s vibes and drums abound, but from a uniformly hazy, ethereal lens. It's been described as dreamlike, smooth, even frictionless, which makes it sound like muzak, which it is definitely not; those descriptors don't do justice to the excellent production and detailed songwriting nestled in the foam pit of this album. The vocals, tracing oft serpentine and non-obvious melodies, are a standout element.

Genre: trip-hop, updated perhaps by the Cocteau Twins and a dash of Imogen Heap lol

Featured track: Play is a late-album departure, kicking up the Garden State soundtrack energy but in a good way, Fatboy Slim drums, it could slot in on Magdalena Bay's last album.

*bonus listen-for: when the guitar comes in on the big 2nd chorus, it wrecks

16. Flur - Plunge

A jazz trio which prominently features the harp (such joy) and thus conjures and connotes its cosmic jazz and ambient forebears of the 70s for 2025's genre standout. Their bandcamp lists Alice Coltrane and Azimuth as influences, which yeah. If that speaks to you (it should!), it's very good. Though the tone sounds more 'atmospheric walk through a great city' (it's a London trio) than 'far-east sit-in'.

Genre: cosmic jazz

15. Ichiko Aoba - Luminescent Creatures

Ichiko does it again (check out also Windswept Adan), ushering the listener through underwater vistas off an idyllic Japanese island, her guitar and voice evoking the languid wonder of the ocean and coast. It's my year's most peaceful listen, but the instrumentation is nuanced and meticulous if you zoom in.

Genre: aquatic, well ornamented 70s ish chamber folk

14. Kieran Hebden & William Tyler - 41 Longfield Street Late '80s

The seminal electronic artist better known as Four Tet and the guitarist slash field recorder slash sound manipulator William Tyler meet up for a collaborative suite of pieces blending guitar and electronics.

Genre: acoustic, electronic, sound collage

Featured track: When the plangent guitar theme enters in opener If I Had a Boat, it is one of those simple, openhanded themes that forces you to pause and involuntarily reflect. The world recedes as the theme rises. Depending where you are at when this happens, you may cry. Go ahead, don't be afraid of a single tear (or more) sliding down your cheek as you take stock of everything you've lost and gained this year.

13. Barker - Stochastic Drift

There is an aleatoric feel to Barker's music, where the "mechanical instrumentation" feels engineered as a perpetual motion machine, or one of the old Windows screensavers where the geometric shapes bounce around the screen and change color, where notes and drum hits occur based on mathematical logic that once preset is just allowed to do its thing and whatever comes out, comes out. That's not what is happening, it's clear the tracks here are composed painstakingly, but that's how I explain why this music feels so crystalline, and alien, and yet organic.

Genre: organo-machine electronic

12. Oneohtrix Point Never - Tranquilizer

On an aptly named album the vaporwave standard bearer opens up an old closet and gets back to basics with a cache of 80s synths, nostalgic dial-up internet samples, and a whole lot of ideas. It's a step back and forward from the conceptual popera and symphonic gallery pieces of the last few years. I'm back in chrome country and loving it.

Genre: cinematic synth electronic

11. Water From Your Eyes - It's a Beautiful Place

Weedy mathy indie with one foot in Kim Gordon's gallery space and the other in the pit. More substantial and less slackerish than their debut, it feels like a major step forward for the duo.

Genre: mathy psych-indie (I'm sorry for using 'indie')

*bonus micro moment: the drop out at 2:32 of Life Signs majorly wrecks

Alas I am forbidden from including more than 10 embeds in a post; I'll see you in part 2 for our thrilling conclusion.

[dustedmagazine]

Mason Lindahl — Joshua/Same Day Walking (Mt. Brings Death)

Guitarist Mason Lindahl combines deft nylon-string fingerpicking with atmospheric synthesizers on two simultaneous releases, Joshua and Same Day Walking. He seems to have released only three other solo albums over a 20-year recording career, and the careful construction of the new batches of tunes offers an explanation for his relatively small catalog. His approach is distinctive, combining classical, minimalist, drone and some Takoma school elements into a tapestry that, while definitely all of a piece, offers plenty of variation and surprise to reward repeated listening.

The nylon-string guitar has often taken a backseat to its steel-string descendant when it comes to acoustic guitar-based music outside the classical, flamenco, and jazz traditions. Still, some experimental guitarists — does anybody remember Eric Carbonara? — have embraced nylon strings to great effect. Lindahl’s playing is also a bit reminiscent of James Blackshaw’s nylon work on Holly and even Julian Lage and Gyan Riley, but nobody sounds quite like him.

Lindahl seems to improvise a fair amount, or, at least, his compositions tend to be unpredictable. “Joshua Underwater,” Joshua’s opening track, for example, after five minutes of steady, stately picking, pauses and then, in an exciting about-face, erupts in a burst of rapid notes suggesting, perhaps, that Joshua is coming up for air. “Little Sister,” the single off of Same Day Walking, by contrast, builds steadily through pauses to increasingly frenetic picking swathed in synths to arrive at a meditative coda. The culmination of the pair of releases in the brief and aptly titled “At Peace” marks the completion of a kind of journey. Throughout, the synths complement the guitar without overpowering it, and atmospherics such as the physicality of fingertips on the strings contribute to the overall effect.

The 52 minutes of total running time could have been packaged as a single release, but the two sets of songs differ in terms of where they were recorded — Joshua in California and Same Day Walking in Iceland — and, at least according to the liner notes, in terms of feel, though the latter distinction is not immediately apparent apart from the more echoey sound of Joshua. In any case, Lindahl presents a remarkable achievement. This is not guitar music for wine-tasting or the soundtrack to some romantic movie but, rather, the work of a composer and instrumentalist who has chosen to express himself using an instrument often associated with “safe” music.

Jim Marks

[scripta21]

[scripta21]

Slow sun stops · Mason Lindahl · Angel Deradoorian · Chris McLaughlin

[adrianoesteves]

[maquina-semiotica]

Mason Lindahl, "Sky Breaking, Clouds Falling" #NowPlaying

[maquina-semiotica]

Mason Lindahl, "Sky Breaking, Clouds Falling" #NowPlaying