Church of Trance

For an artist long notable for the strong melodic undercurrents that lie at the core of his productions, Somna’s ‘Pathways’ album represents something more ambitious than a simple progression. It is the sound of an artist very definitively redrawing his own creative map. Across a triplet of EPs, released over the last twelve months, he’s stepped far beyond the harmonic sonics that brought him to prominence. In doing so, he began to explore the outer (and inner!) reaches of melodic bass and the fierier kinetics of hard dance, as well as the more progressive house and trance ethers. These stylistic outreaches aren’t detours, in so much as they’re branching-out ‘pathways’, albeit ones which will ultimately converge back to form a new, broader-spectrum artistic identity. No longer walking the line, on May 22 , with ‘Pathways’ , Somna delivers his most expansive LP statement yet. The first of those three creative avenues manifests with Somna’s contemporary spin on the melodic bass aesth...

THE FIRST ARTIST ALBUM FROM ONE OF JAPAN’S FOREMOST ELECTRONIC MUSIC TALENTS. FEATURING MUSICAL COLLABORATIONS WITH CHRISTINA NOVELLI, JULIE THOMPSON, LINNEA SCHOSSOW, CLARA YATES, CARI AND OTHERS From Tokyo’s high-rises to the farthest edges of sound, one figure has spent the last decade bending studio frequencies to her will. Over that time, she’s built nothing less than a sonic solar system, with  Rina   ‘Rinaly’   Noguchi  firmly at its core. ‘Ecliptica’ , her debut longform. takes its title cues from the passage of the sun — a rotation where shadow and luminosity are locked in a permanent state of pursuit. First track through last, that chase musically characterizes the album, cycling between mass and elevation, brightness to grit and synth glare to bass drive ...  ‘Ecliptica’ s opposing poles are formed by techno and trance, and the artistic yin-yang they develop is one Rinaly both identifies with and channels throughout. “ My life ha...