This week’s guide is by CF Smith and contributors Words By Shoaib, Benny Thomas, Gavin Senaratne and Irfan Ayaan.
It’s Friday so it’s time once again for a new Between The Cracks! If you follow us regularly, you know there’s a whole world of releases quietly reshaping sound, waiting for curious ears to stumble upon them. So peep our latest finds, read the mini-reviews, listen to the music and, most importantly, hit the buy/share link. Happy listening, and have a lovely weekend
Albums
upsammy & Valentina Magaletti – Seismo
Seismo feels less like a traditional album and more like a space you step into, shifting, echoing, and constantly reconfiguring itself. Born from improvised recordings inside Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the record carries that sense of architecture in its bones, where every percussive hit and digital flicker reacts to an imagined room. What upsammy and Valentina Magaletti do here is quietly radical: they blur the line between acoustic and synthetic so completely that it stops mattering which is which. ‘Superimposed’ captures this best early on, threading restless, off-kilter rhythms through a mesh of mallet tones and clipped electronics that never quite settle. It’s precise but alive, like something breathing under glass. ‘Collide’, on the other hand, leans into motion, its fragmented beats snapping into brief moments of clarity before dissolving again into texture and space. The album ends with ‘Some Unimaginable World’, a soft, spacious breather built from hazy synth pads, grainy tape warmth, and drifting, pitched‑down vocals. Across the record, tension is the driving force: structure against collapse, detail against abstraction. Yet it never feels cold. There’s a strange warmth in how these sounds interact, as if the friction itself is the point. Seismo rewards patience, revealing more the deeper you listen. – WBS
Psyché – Psyché II
Psyché have resurfaced, and with their second album now released, it’s finally my moment to play catch-up. Thanks to Francesco Soragna at Jus Like Music Media, I’m happily exploring their music for the first time. And to my ears, it’s sounding pretty great. Following a near three-year hiatus, the quartet of Neapolitan veterans Marcello Giannini, Andrea De Fazio, Paolo Petrella, and Roberto Porzio reinvigorate and expands their singular blend of groove and psychedelia. Their native city of Naples functions as a cultural crossroads, with sounds from North Africa and the Middle East mingling with distant echoes from Brazil and Colombia seeping into their sound. There are some fine collaborations with Ziad Trabelsi, lending his voice to ‘Hurriya (We Must Resist)’, a hypnotic call to resilience, while Merve Daşdemir (ex‑Altın Gün) lights up ‘Yallah!’, a Turkish‑language track riding Arabic‑tinged rhythms. The album further unfolds with the cosmic funk and psychedelic textures of Yagé, and the near-6-minute exploration of dub and desert blues found on Cumana Dub is a masterpiece. Click, listen and enjoy! – CFS
Ben Seretan & John Thayer – Sunbeam of No Illusion
Sunbeam of No Illusion is described as postmodern pastoral, and that phrase fits. Ben Seretan and John Thayer blend ambient, glitch, and electronica into music that feels rooted in landscape and thought. + + (Double Positive) opens with glowing tones and small rhythmic flickers. It sounds like sunlight catching on moving water. Memory Garden deepens the mood and layers melodic fragments that flicker in and out like half-remembered scenes. Ink Dark and Late Harp introduce more texture and grain. Glitch elements rustle under long pads and gently detuned notes. The Hudson Valley inspiration is clear in the way the tracks move. They do not rush; instead, they expand and contract like weather systems. The title, taken from correspondence between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, points to the record’s reflective core. These pieces feel like philosophical letters written in sound. The album rewards both close listening and drifting in the background. – IA
Pan American – Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane
Mark Nelson’s new Pan American album is a meditative ten-track drift through journeys, both literal and internal. Recorded largely at home in Chicago, it feels close and unhurried. Silver Plane, Now Boarding introduces the tone with soft pulses and stretched chords that hint at movement without a clear destination. Subsequent tracks play like different legs of the same trip. Some focus on quiet rhythmic cycles that could be train tracks or waves. Others feel almost weightless, suspended in reverb and distant melody. The production stays very restrained. Small details, like a faint guitar line or a low synth, become anchors in the fog. The sense of travel is less about geography and more about states of mind. Titles and pacing push you to think about departures, waiting rooms, and the strange time of being in the air. It is a record you sink into rather than follow, and perfect for night listening. – IA
Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters – Nature Gurl
With their second studio album, ‘Nature Gurl’, Yolanda Wisher and The Afroeaters craft a vibrant work that blends spoken word, funk, soul, and Afrobeat into something both playful and politically grounded. Released on Earth Day, the album positions itself as an ecological and spiritual manifesto, but it never loses its sense of joy or whimsy. The band consists of Yolanda Wisher (vocals), Paul Giess (trumpet) and Mark Anthony Palacio (bass). The album opens with ‘Without a Name‘, which anchors the record’s thematic core with its vivid imagery of wildlife and the inclusion of animal calls alongside the vocals. ‘3 Owls Plus‘ is a showcase of Wisher’s evocative poetry and explores human relationships with the natural world. The title track, ‘Nature Gurl’, serves as the closer and the most musically impressive, thanks to an incredible solo by Kendrah Butler-Waters. With its spoken-word verses and infectious beat, this track ends the record with a celebration of wildness and selfhood. Nature Gurl feels like a communal experience as much as a record, thanks to The Afroeaters’ rich, organic backdrop and live instrumentation that feels loose yet intentional. Wisher’s voice moves freely between poetry reading, chant, and song, becoming an invitation to reconnect with the environment and with rhythm, language, and collective imagination. – GS
EP’s
DJ Nature – Mr Bongo Edits Volume 4
Another top record from Mr Bongo. DJ Nature digs into the Mr Bongo archive to pull four cuts whose club‑ready productions are just begging for an edit. He opens with an extended rework of P.J. City’s ultra‑rare 1986 Chicago modern soul/disco gem Straight Forward (Non‑Stop). Staying faithful to the source, he stretches and teases it out as if unearthing a longer take from the original session. Next comes a sublime flip of Grupo Los Yoyi’s 1977 Cuban burner Del Copacabana A 34. Nature leans into its driving, hypnotic, space‑leaning passages, looping and extending, letting the tension simmer until it boils over. Flip to the B‑side, and he revamps a sleeper from the Elite Records vault. Antoniou’s Andy Sojka‑produced 1982 electronic disco cut Sound On Sound becomes a peak‑time cosmic‑boogie whirlwind. Closing the EP, he turns to the enigmatic Marxist Love Disco Ensemble, reshaping Dust from their 2022 album MLDE into a sharper, more DJ‑friendly club track. Slip it on, your ears are in for a real treat… – BT
