This week’s Mixtape features several new artists who will be new to many of you. They include LA’s Sari Lightman, whom you may recall being one-half of weird-folk twin duo Tasseomancy. Here we’ve included two offerings from her full-length debut album The Way I Saw You: “These songs are my attempt to draw a silhouette — a figure of a person that feels momentary and intimate; a casual slice of life that my favourite songs are drawn from.” London-based folk singer/songwriter Charlie Franklin’s self-titled EP only dropped recently; produced by Natalie Wildgoose, it’s described as flush with romance, sincerity and bucolic embrace. Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Rowena Wise recently announced her second album, Bad Things Feel Good*, set for release on Friday 7th August 2026 via Beloved Records / Remote Control Records, and we’ve already shared Diamond in the Rough – Home in this World is her latest single.
We’ve also got music from:
Alabaster DePlume‘s EP Dear Children Of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue. He shares that “we created this EP in answer to the way the US audiences responded last year when we addressed the genocide.” DePlume recorded Dear Children during the middle of his March 2025 US tour, after weeks of playing shows with bassist Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Tcheser Holmes, performing music from his critically acclaimed album A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole (released March 2025).
Helen Svoboda has just released Headwater (Room40), which “weaves sixteen threads or ‘earworms’ built around two double basses, two voices, and electronics; heard as singular and combinatory bodies of material. The album forms an abstracted picture of self, rooted in a devolved song form. It can be experienced as a tapestry that blurs the edges of identity; strange, beautiful, evaporative, and fluid, like memory itself.”
US / Latin American duo Loma Suyo, the musical project of Liz Fullerton and Ish Quintero
— Liz raised in central Mexico, Ish in the Andes of Colombia. Their new album, Paloma (Earthly Measures), expands their sonic world, drawing on the rich musical traditions of world folklore and South America.
Booker Stardrum and Evan Shornstein, aka Photay, have also just released OOPS!, their first full-length album as a duo via LA label Sudden Quarterly (a new label launched by Zahn). The pair have played and recorded together for several years, splitting their time between Los Angeles and the Hudson Valley.
Glass, the stunning solo debut from Nora Stanley, is arriving July 31 and co-produced with Nate Mendelsohn (Frankie Cosmos, Dougie Poole). If Nora’s name sounds familiar, it may be from her work with artists like Cassandra Jenkins, The New Pornographers and Fred Frith, or from Distance of the Moon, her acclaimed 2023 collaboration with Benny Bock. We hope to be featuring more soon.
We’ve also got two tunes from Bor, the debut LP from London trio Fen, which was released last month via Slow Worm Records. Label founder Tom Moore (also a well-known fiddle player with Nick Hart – Moore Moss Rutter) shared that the album’s title, Bor, comes from the East Anglian dialect term for neighbour, representing the intimate conversation of the trio: Evie Hilyer-Ziegler (violin), Emma Barnaby (cello), and Francis Devine (modular synth). The record finds a unique space where archival string resonance meets volatile modular electronics, preserving the gritty, unpredictable dust of traditional folk lineages while completely reimagining the instrumentation. Like the albums featured here, you can find them all on Bandcamp (links are peppered throughout the text above).
Playlist
- 00:00 Charlie Franklin – Julius
- 03:20 Sari Lightman – Etty
- 07:07 Rowena Wise – Home In This World
- 10:03 Alabaster DePlume – Bringing Up The Nakba
- 15:32 Helen Svoboda – If
- 19:35 Loma Suyo – Gavilán
- 23:04 Booker Stardrum and Evan Shornstein – OOPS!
- 25:18 Nora Stanley – Noble Gas
- 30:10 Fen – Hold the Phone
- 33:07 Charlie Franklin – Take The Blame
- 36:35 Sari Lightman – Soon Came The Evening
- 40:06 Fen – The Song
- 48:10 Helen Svoboda – Child