The last time I wrote one of these columns was back in March, but for some reason, it feels like March was six months ago. Time can be funny like that. Earlier in the year, I landed one of the great junkets and got to spend a weekend in Bali working on the latest edition of Resident Advisor's The Art Of Sound series, which you can read here. Today, I've got four short reviews of recent records by John Silas, Yu Su, Onra, and Aldous Harding to share. It's a funny old world.

Here's a name I haven't heard from in a while. Brooklyn, New York producer/DJ John Silas reemerges from the ether with a tidy, five-track jazzy house EP for Love Injection Records, "Water Sign". Born from a lifelong engagement with good music, the memory of watching Soul Train as a child, teenage sample spotting, MPC jam sessions, and years spent in record stores, the songs on here absolutely slap. 'Cyber Dreams' featuring Domenica Fossati opens with lush Rhodes chords, celestial flutes and a groove that absolutely keeps on giving. It's a late-night club track, but it's also pure ambience at the same damn time. Let it sneak up on you. 'Nasty' featuring Marquinn Mason gets it done as well, with delicate percussion, keys, and sax coalescing into something sophisticated, special, and soulful. It's pure skyline music. Get in.

After releasing her sensational debut album "Yellow River Blue" through bié Records/Music From Memory in 2021, and some killer singles with Pinchy & Friends and Short Span, the Chinese musician, DJ and creative chef Yu Su is back at it with her sophomore effort, "Foundry". Born from material written for a live performance at MUTEK in 2025, the eight-track record explores spaces in-between and features collaborations with Seefeel, Dip In The Pool, and Memotone. That's a hell of a character reference. If you've got Seefeel, Dip In The Pool, and Memotone on your album, you're doing something right. There are mysteries to explore in these songs-turned-worlds-of-their-own.

While we're on a nocturnal vibe, late last month, the longstanding French producer, DJ and general music head Onra slipped out a magical new record titled "After Dark." After coming to prominence in the late 2000s MPC/SP-404-driven beats scene, Onra has spent the last fifteen years carving his own pathway in music. There's a bunch of throughlines we could cite here: late-80s RnB/New Jack Swing, '90s smooth jazz, modern soul, city-pop, perhaps even some touches of g-funk. That said, on another level, the nine instrumentals on this record feel like beat tracks expanded into fully fleshed-out musical compositions. It makes sense, Onra's put the time in, and made the jump. I love how cinematic and neon-lit "After Dark" feels. Romanticize your life with this one.

Twelve years after Lyttleton Records released her self-titled gothic folk debut as a lathe cut LP, the New Zealand singer-songwriter Aldous Harding's fifth album, "Train On The Island", confirms her status as a genuine riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Across her fourth effort for 4AD, Harding, her longtime producer John Parish, and a cast of session musicians lean into the depths of imagination, non-linear thinking and pure fantasy, by way of psychedelic folk. Sometimes, I think "Train On The Island" is a memory maze of sorts, an out-of-sequence inventory of Harding's life & times. Other days, I start to observe an internal logic that feels just out of my grasp. Either way, I don't need a destination to enjoy this journey; not at all.