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Featured album: Kalbells, Ten Flowers

The solo debut from Brooklyn-based composer and visual artist Kalmia Traver is a celebration of self: finding the strength, time, and space to express freely and fully. She started writing Ten Flowers during a period of creative retreat, apart from Rubblebucket, her band of nearly a decade, and following a battle with ovarian cancer. Traver spent two wintry months in her childhood home of Taftsville, Vermont, and emerged with 27 demos. Ten of them bloom here in collaboration with fellow Vermonter Ryan Power. The record is colorful, cathartic, and beyond easy classification. Traver’s spirited vocals shine over a bed electronic production accented by whistles, woodwinds, percussion, and field recordings. It’s out on NNA Tapes.

Featured album: Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Diaspora

The music of virtuosic, social-political-minded trumpeter and composer Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah fuses past, present and future. He tells The New York Times, “if I can marry the sound, then it shows that really people are not just compatible, but we’re the same. Our heart is the same.” With Diaspora—the second album in his Centennial Trilogy marking the hundredth anniversary of the first commercial jazz recordings—Scott honors the sounds of his youth in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans, while pushing beyond contemporary boundaries, incorporating elements of post-bop, trap and electronics in a style he calls "stretch music.” It’s out on Ropeadope.

Premiere: Slow Dancer, In A Mood

Slow Dancer is the recording project of Melbourne’s Simon Okely, social worker by day, sensitive crooner by night. As circumstance would have it, Okely is primarily a nocturnal songwriter, and his sophomore LP, In A Mood, has that laid-back sense of someone getting lost in the after hours. Inspired by the ‘60s and 70’s rhythm and blues records his parents used to play, Okely sings in an earnest timbre, arranging songs that breezily flow between soft guitar strums and swells of organ, strings, and synthesizer. Nostalgic, wisftul, the album “seeps into your consciousness rather than grandstands,” says Noisey. It’s out on ATO Records.

Premiere: Sun Glitters, It Will Be Forever

Since arriving in 2011—at the crest of an era overflowing with blissful synth projects—Luxembourg-based producer Victor Ferreira (aka Sun Glitters) has earned a loyal following through consistent output, collaboration, and tours alongside the likes of Slow Magic, Son Lux and Gonjasufi. It Will Be Forever finds him channeling the neon-noir of the 1980s (à la Drive OST and the videos games of his youth), recasting retro-futurism under the ominous cloud of today’s digital age. With his trademark electronica—shimmering, bass-driven melodies and a few mindfully placed vocal samples—Ferreira conveys in album format the seven stages of grief. It’s an expansive and resplendent listen that ends on a high and hopeful note.