The sophomore offering by Moscow illusionist Ilya Ryazantcev aka Iguana Moonlight centers on a lost shaman's soul transmuted into a mythical jaguar lurking in the Amazonian unknown. As with his 2017 desert island debut, Wild Palms, the music acts as both score and summoning, remote dreaming a gradient of sights, sounds, and smells via synthesizers and field recordings.



The six songs of JAGUAR waver at the threshold of fantasy and hallucination, saturated and surreal, awash in colors not found in nature. It's a virtual reality jungle of smeared neon, steel drums, and deep bass, hyperreal fauna floating in fluorescent mist. Purist portal music at its most potent, born of and for black mirror séances past and present.

St. Petersburg seeker Vladimir Karpov coaxes hushed auras of keys, metronomes, fog, and feeling to evoke hazed and isolated realms, traced in altered states. His latest collection – and vinyl debut – maps the maze at “the bottom of the self,” subterranean consciousness manifested from decaying synthesizer and shadowed pulse: music for fading torchlight. Labyrinth leads through six misty, mystic chambers of dreams, drones, delirium, and phasered percussion, spiraling in slow, sacred arcs, in quest of “the inner world.” Tosya Chaikina’s ghost vocals on “False Angel Lullaby” and “Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors” bring a whispered hymnal mood but otherwise the LP is ambient and abandoned, obscure meditations along corridors of candlelit runes, “to find the right path, to find the true answer.”