It's a peaceful night. A thunderstorm passed about an hour ago and the streets are quiet and unburdened by traffic. A cat wanders out and on to the corner of an intersection by me, visible under the glow of a street lamp. She seems unhurried and calm. I can see her from my window and think of my own cats, snug and asleep on the couch cushions next to me. I've just sat down with a book so that I can unwind after a busy weekend. It's the perfect time to put on Milan, a collaboration between synthesizer pioneer Suzanne Ciani, pedal steel sage Greg Leisz and Detroit-based producer Alister Fawnwoda. Milan is highly engaging in its selection of sounds- simple and visual, organic and composed- it produces with its hyperreal whimsy a cascade of shifting, palpable forms within the mind's eye. The combination of airy, drifting vocal sighs, gripping basks of shimming, golden-hued synths, and the wistful, bending sway of the pedals arch are all intertwined in a way that you feel like you could thread your figures through, tie around your forearms, and let lift you into the air like a hot air balloon. Milan transporting and real, sensuously platonic, with dirt in its soles from many miles of uncontained wanderlust. It's the sound of a softer side to the world. A more forgiving America. One that feels foreign to us today but which we can come to know by believing it is the future we deserve and making room for harmony to saturate the fabric of our beings, like freshly fallen rainwater seeping into the soil.
