Josiah Steinbrick’s Liquid / Devotion & Tongue Street Blue, issued by Hands In the Dark, is an absolutely stunning, ambitious and visionary piece of work. Beautiful and immersive, while remarkably listenable and leaving you thirsting for more, it raised the bar on 2017’s critically heralded Meeting Of Waters.

Back in 2017, we caught wind of an album making a slow burn through the landscape of adventurous sound. The debut of a relative unknown, Josiah Steinbrick, issued by Leaving Records as a limited cassette, Meeting Of Waters continued to capture hearts and imaginations as time went on, reissued the following year in a widely pursued deluxe vinyl edition by the artist, and then again in 2019 by Hands In the Dark. A brilliantly organic and humanistic rethinking of approaches to electronic and ambient music, we’ve been anxiously awaiting a follow up ever since. His latest, Liquid / Devotion & Tongue Street Blue, issued by Hands In the Dark, has finally dropped, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Los Angeles based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and record producer, Josiah Steinbrick, is one of those rare artists who appears to stand entirely in the service of music. It’s an endeavor of devotion and love, somehow existing beyond himself. While Meeting Of Waters was his solo debut, only slightly preceded by a release by his BANANA Ensemble, Steinbrick has been bubbling below the surface for years, harnessing his talents behind acclaimed albums by Cate Le Bon, Devendra Banhart, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Rodrigo Amarante, Sam Gendel, and numerous others. His selfless tendencies don’t end there. Serious record collectors have been aware of Steinbrick for years, regarding him as a great fount of knowledge, always championing the overlooked and obscure, with a rare understanding of the history of music, democratically approached across a near countless number of discrete cultures and genres. It is this awareness, understanding, and approach to sound that arguably most informs his own work.

Liquid / Devotion & Tongue Street Blue, like its predecessor, is a conceptual hybrid, drawing on a vast range of reference points of ideas that take material form at the intersection of electronic and acoustic sound. Not unlike Hassell and Eno’s notion of Fourth World, or the approaches of numerous Italian minimalists like Walter Maioli, Roberto Musci, Francesco Paladino, Pier Luigi Andreoni, etc., it presents a far off image of democratic interaction through sound; music as a means through which, despite differences and distance - temporal as much as geographic and cultural - we can find common ground and speak. The world seen through sound as a cohesive, pluralistic whole, with the artist as a deeply personal lens.

Steinbrick’s reference points are vast, unfurling slowly across the album’s 12 works. Beginning with touchstones in folkloric rhythms of the African diaspora, ambient jazz, music for contemporary dance, and dub processing, he embarked on what he considered to be his most personal effort to date, channeling ontology, alienation, previous LSD experiences, impermanence, the price of love, and connections to the spirit world into tapestries of FM synthesis and percussion around serpentine bass lines, that appear before the ear like a rapturous dream. Hushed laments, ecstatic rhythms, and hypnotic arrangements provoke a state of reverie, where boundaries dissolve between fading memories, illusions, and the hyper-real, that offer new conceptualizations of music in its rawest and most primitive state, emerging in unfamiliar and technologically assisted forms.

Perhaps more than anything else, Liquid / Devotion & Tongue Street Blue is simply a beautiful immersive piece of work.