The boldly colored cover of Fantastic Thoughts features a sinewy band of horses heroically galloping out of the clouds above and into the foreground. Believe it or not, even that image might still be a little understated for the mood of the music.
Multi-instrumentalist Nate Mercereau is a prolific MVP of the L.A. post-jazz scene, frequently found in the company of similarly ubiquitous, outside-the-box musical thinkers like Carlos Niño and Josh Johnson on projects including 2025’s transcendent Openness Trio album and Andre 3000’s head-turning ambient-jazz solo debut. But while Mercereau’s solo sojourn shares a sense of spiritual uplift with those projects, it couldn’t be further from their quietly contemplative tone.
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01. Joy Division – Transmission (Live The Factory Manchester 13th July 1979)
A record inspired by the desolate brutalism of their native Manchester, art pop/new wave trio, 
Heptaméron is an unusually assured debut, one that embraces the vocabulary of progressive rock while refusing to remain within its boundaries. Built around a fantasy narrative structured by the symbolic recurrence of the number seven, the album unfolds like a journey across an imagined landscape of dungeons, mansions, abysses and forgotten kingdoms, each track functioning as a distinct location within a larger world. Rather than simply borrowing fantasy imagery, 
In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2021 film Memoria, Tilda Swinton’s protagonist awakens in the middle of the night to a loud, startling sound with no clear source. The sound seems to follow her around in the days after, repeating at random intervals, but only she can hear it — a mystery that sends her on a journey deep into the Colombian jungle for answers. What she hears, a single note, is jarring and strangely physical, a sort of sonorous thud. It’s also a little musical, like industrial equipment accidentally clanking out a chord, shaking everything around it at a resonant frequency that’s more intriguing than terrifying. Similarly disruptive bass notes are all over 
Since 2012, Sam Sodomsky has quietly released lyrically elegant, musically sophisticated albums under the moniker 
The hermetic boxes that tend to get erected around traditional music can become suffocating for the people inside, and at least since Bob Dylan’s “Judas!” moment, that friction has yielded a lot of gold. 
…includes the recently-shared “World’s Always Burning” featuring Mannequin Pussy along with previously unreleased songs “I’ve Said Too Much” featuring Dazy, “3 AM,” and “Thought You Were Waving [Anthony’s Version],” which is a cover by Anthony Green (Circa Survive, L.S. Dunes, Saosin).
Guitarist/composer 
In his 20s, when Nate Amos was uploading his every musical impulse to Bandcamp, he released a particularly out-there tranche of songs focused on “technology corrupting nature,” he told the Guardian recently. He soon came to understand this noisy spell as a symptom of anxiety and depression: “The beauty was in the unknown, because I was having such a hard time with the known.” The newer work that’s made his name as 
Chopping Mountain is the sixth long player from 
Remastered by Atsushi Izumi.
The expanded edition features the original 9 tracks alongside 4 brand-new songs recorded with producer John Congleton and 2 raw demos.
Musical Instrument Digital Interface (aka MIDI) has such a pervasive presence in the musical landscape that it’s easy to take it for granted. Yet, when it first appeared in the early 1980s, the standard felt miraculous. Back when technology was more meaningful, MIDI’s ability to bridge physical and digital domains meant that devices like synthesizers and keyboards were suddenly able to talk both to each other and to computer programs. The protocol has countless applications today, many of them purely software-based, but this particular facet remains its most fascinating, even serving as a core aesthetic principle for acts like Berlin’s