WHAT RULES WEDNESDAY

The expanding and contracting of the thinnest lung.

This is the sound of the flaws in an organism.

The restructuring of blood and bone with technology and metal.

There’s a through line in Josh Johnson’s work on this album that keeps the atmosphere consistent while the sounds and challenges flow like a river on a screensaver.

Saxophone ribboning over the quiet of sampled drums creating time in an otherwise openness. It’s the mystery of WHERE bluetooth or wifi exists, in an audible format.

The structures of planets being developed by the future, as the saxophone flutters and paws against the seemingly never ending changes to a developing existence.

“Who Happens If,” begins “Unusual Object,” as if an unintelligible voice is attempting to make contact in bursts of cloud cover. But Johnson doesn’t give much away initially. This first song as the album unveils deep work in the microscopic of beats and textures to compliment the shrieks and shutters of the horn.

“Telling You,” patterns layers of sampled vocals that don’t sing as much as they speak before the steadiness of the beat gives room for the saxophone to develop multiple terrains at once.

“Reddish,” warps like wings touching down in an empty fountain.

Following up the simplicity of those patterns, “Sterling,” complicates everything masses of tangles and challenging cliff sides that can’t be climbed, but have to be.

Josh Johnson brings sounds in a lifespan of 40 minutes that breathe like nothing else. Taking in chemicals and oxygen at once into a breath of something nothing else could breathe like.

(Northern Spy Records)

Long patches of desert without anything built. The only structure is the thunderheads looming atop the dried landscapes like whipped cream on an empty goblet.

It’s a complete picture of the heaviness of the windowless, clockless underbelly of casino lifestyle smashing against the harsh climate of the desert surrounding.

Unmoving mesas witnessing the supremacy of soundscapes of machines gutting people’s finances and sputtering coins on endless repeat.

It’s an impossible habitation between the overly air conditioned universe inside of glass and the never ending summer of sun shining even in the nighttime.

It’s sound that paints an open space in between your ears as you listen to the brushes paint the Venn diagram that cannot be reconciled.

FM Skyline has consistently been releasing great albums for a long time. With the patterns of a time and a place, the warped nostalgia of watches melting into the rain caught on a palm frond drips in exactness as the songs on “Images,” begin anew.

FM Skyline somehow creates within the confines of the sound and aesthetic that continually serves the singular place this music rests in, while allowing a fresh breeze to always blow through.

It’s the teal painted frame of a window that never gets closed to a city too fast and too confused in what year it really is to not keep sprinting along.

“Illuso,” shapes in polymer gasses like the reflection off of the thousands of windows on a stucco skyscraper.

“Museum,” claps along with the VHS footage of your parents carrying your birthday cake to you on a birthday you otherwise cannot remember.

That is the core of what FM Skyline does so well in these songs. It sounds like the filling in of memory that we’ll never get back to. The mass amounts of days and weeks we live and then never know about again.

It’s all soundtracked here.