Lusine Melting Days Limited Edition Vinyl

Retracing two decades with Seattle’s Jeff McIlwain, aka Lusine, reveals one of contemporary electronic and experimental music’s most enduring producers, understatedly consistent yet endlessly curious. His expansive catalog balances melodic structure with textural refinement, drifting into techno, avant-pop, and ambient lanes while never squarely in any one of them. Following 2023’s Long Light, among his most collaborative, song-forward albums to date, McIlwain returns to his minimalist roots for the towering 10th Lusine full-length, Melting Days. Ten songs in conversation with loss and transition, defined by elemental layers and ascending loops that engulf his signature rhythms and beat patterns in pure radiance. “When you’re moving through grief, it’s as if you’re watching your previous life get foggier and foggier,” says McIlwain. While he didn’t set out to make a journey record, Melting Days takes that feeling to its spiritual end, from catharsis to clarity.The closest precedent to Melting Days is Lusine’s 2007 ambient landmark, Language Barrier. Both projects emerged from film score work and operate primarily in tone and texture. Loraine James once told Wire that Language Barrier was her "favourite ambient album of all time.” Now Ghostly labelmates via James’ Whatever The Weather project, the two artists invite a similarly loose, old-school UK use of the “ambient” tag, something more akin to early Aphex Twin, Seefeel, and Lusine fave, Locust, where instead of a beatless canvas, the music remains active and fluid, far more in the foreground. While not an outright percussive album, Melting Days features sampled drum contributions from longtime collaborator Trent Moorman and renders a more rhythmic experience than sonic impressions might initially suggest. McIlwain also cites Susumu Yokota’s Sakura and the mid-2000s output of the Thrill Jockey duo Mountains as influences on the sound.The other input here is simply life. A particularly trying period for McIlwain, one that found him more reflective and solitary in his craft than in recent projects. He pieced together Melting Days intuitively, more like a film, attuned to the sequential arc and less concerned with outward gestures, vocal hooks, or otherwise. “I think this was a bit freeing for me, not needing to compromise on ideas,” he adds. The opening track, “Sightline”, and the final track, “Uncharted”, are linked by reverberant, Reich-like layers of saxophone, played by Bryan Manzo, giving the set its symmetrical frame through which McIlwain experiments from various perspectives, often gravitating toward terrestrial and nautical references. It’s easy to imagine the water, pockets of air rising to the surface, or sunlight cutting through the blues.“Bird’s Eye” surveys the past and present with a chord progression of pinwheeling bells. “Overlook” offers another panorama, this time with a hazy, hypnotic throb. “Intruder” zooms in to confront intrusive thoughts, featuring one of the album’s few traces of vocals. McIlwain calls “Apparition” a “happy accident,” the result of running a cello loop through dozens of filters until it became some other instrument altogether. Throughout, he deploys abstraction and erasure as a means of creation.Everything aligns in the album’s evocative centerpiece, “Pendulum”, which swings from muffled shimmers to pulsing, string-flute-static splendor. “Maybe it’s coming from a more beat-heavy world, but it's hard for me to let a track just sort of stay where it is,” he explains. “I want to build momentum.”Of the mournful, cinematic “These Walls”, McIlwain says he was trying to find a song within it. That sense of searching applies to Melting Days as a whole; micromovements of natural wonder and sadness coalesce in the undercurrents of Lusine’s music. Whether consciously or not, Melting Days is the sound of a pioneering artist processing immense weight, and ultimately letting go, reaching for beauty in a life, however flawed or in flux it may be.