Coral Club - Nowhere Island (2020)

Moscow electribalist Alexander Sirenko birthed Coral Club in 2016 but the bulk of his debut didn't emerge until 2019, in the wake of a particularly “depressive winter” when the solar thaw of spring struck “like a lifeboat.” Long forest walks sparked a multi-sensory reawakening of rainbow electronics, spiral melody, field recordings, and FX, wondrous but wobbly, like rhythms roused from heavy hibernation, blinking in the beautiful glare.

Tracked live in lengthy improvisational sessions, Nowhere Island's nine swirling songs span a spectrum of ecosystems and energies, from dense mystic rainforest to glittering psychedelic tide pools to dusk coastlines dotted with distant fires. In places the album evokes an explorer's audiobook, questing into alien terrain with multi-directional microphones, but elsewhere Sirenko scrambles any illusion, reveling in surges of tape hiss and synthetic noise, possessed by the joyous catharsis of burning maps to places that don't exist.