“A Vessel in the Fog,” uploaded to the YouTube channel of the musician who goes by Orbital Patterns just this Monday, is a live ambient piece. Textures twist and turn like clouds of smoke, turning in the air before vaporizing and being replaced by something else, something similar and yet apart. There’s numerous such elements at any given time, packed like sediment in a vibrant terrarium: surface noise, and muffled chords, and crunchy percussives like fall leaves under foot, and what sounds like psychedelic guitar riffs going round and round. It’s a beautiful piece, gaining depth as it goes, a deep bass tone slowly making itself heard and lending a slow, thoughtful pace to what might otherwise be an understated roil. It is clearly, so to speak, the title vessel.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C43KlOhAdlc). More at [instagram.com/0rbitalpatterns](https://www.instagram.com/0rbitalpatterns/) and [twitter.com/orbitalpatterns](https://twitter.com/orbitalpatterns).

The Terry Riley force is strong with this new Yo La Tengo single. Bearing the title “James and Ira demonstrate mysticism and some confusion holds (Monday),” it’s the famed indie-rock band in full meditative mode. It’s a flowing drone that has the raga quality of early Riley. If you’d said this is something off [the new Laraaji album](https://disquiet.com/2020/06/16/laraaji-goes-home-again/), it’d make sense, what with the echoey, zithery goings-on — except of course, the new Laraaji record is solo piano. So while that early ambient musician is revisiting the purpose of songs, this song-making band is exploring spaciousness, formlessness, song-less-ness.

Well, not song-less, so much as pre-song, proto-song, nascent song. As member Ira Kaplan explains in an accompanying note on the track’s Bandcamp release page: “If you’ve spent any time hanging out with us at our rehearsal space in Hoboken — that pretty much covers none of you — you’ve heard us playing formlessly (he said, trying to sidestep the word ‘improvising’). Most of the songs we’ve written in the last 25 years have begun that way, but often we do it for no other reason than to push away the outside world.” So, what this is is the space in which a song might occur, the raw stuff from which a song might arise. Sidestepping the word “improvising” feels like a solid step. This doesn’t sound like improvising so much as it does like three people finding common tonal ground, and upon finding it, holding onto it for as long as feels right, and not a moment longer.

“James set up one microphone in the middle of the room in case we stumbled on something useful for the future,” writes Ira (the James is fellow member James McNew). “Instead we decided to release something we did right now.” This is the sound of right now. Or it was yesterday, when it came out. We’re not currently inhabiting a now worth celebrating, and yet yesterday’s now was splendid — is splendid. Here’s to more of such a now, while the broader, untenable now persists.

The song’s release coincided with the launch of Yo La Tengo’s Bandcamp page. Track originally posted at [yolatengo.bandcamp.com](https://yolatengo.bandcamp.com/track/james-and-ira-demonstrate-mysticism-and-some-confusion-holds-monday-1). More from Yo La Tengo at [yolatengo.com](http://yolatengo.com/).

Sofie Birch’s album *Hidden Terraces* describes itself in various ways. It is an “audible postcard produced in Colombia,” and it serves up “Remedial Sounds for a Forlorn Nation,” and it is part (volume two) of a series titled “Themes for a Better Tomorrow.” What it is is splendid, sometimes downtempo, often rhythm-less music that takes a very long time to arrive, and much of its pleasure is in the experience of that arrival: not where it starts or where it ends up so much as how it traverses the space, the continuum, in between. Those grooves, slowly and only in retrospect, appear out of an opening collage of field recordings, bits of spoken — mumbled, really — language, and tonal material that the ear might recognize as musical subconsciously before becoming aware. That’s “Morgenånder” (“Morning Spirits”), the first of the album’s two tracks (one is available for free-streaming, the other after purchase, at [vaagner.bandcamp.com](https://vaagner.bandcamp.com/album/themes-for-a-better-tomorrow-vol-ii-hidden-terraces)). The second is “Vidsyn” (“Broad Views”), which is more expressively amorphous, beginning with the rattle of a wooden instrument before delving into birdsong, drones, and chanting, often at the same time. The album should have strong appeal to listeners to Fourth World music. The material was collected during a trip that Birch, who is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, recorded in Colombia. Now that she has returned, it’s the listener’s turn to travel.

More from Sofie Birch at [birchis.com](https://www.birchis.com/).