Portrait of an American in Copenhagen. Blue Lake is born out of this personal encounter in an originally unknown land, full of stimuli, memories and projections in an isolated house in the mountains. The restless spirit of multi-instrumentalist Jason Dungan leads him to imagine a bucolic and balsamic frequency that contaminates the latest album Sun Arcs. A brave disc of proposals that find a peculiar habitat between the most earthy folk and the free vibrations of jazz. It brings skewed melodies and seeks new directions to those we are already familiar with, recalling luminaries such as Jim O’Rourke, Penguin Café Orchestra, Jeff Parker or David Grubbs. Using a personalised forty-eight-string zither, guitar, percussion, clarinet and drum machine, Blue Lake’s hybrid body reveals the fleetingness of time and the fragility of this awareness. The richness of the landscapes created is as immense as possible and in an intoxicating quasi-meditative state. Despite his avant-garde approach, he maintains an immediate and harmonically seductive language in which improvisation finds a way.

Considered by many to be one of the surprises of the year, Sun Arcs offers delicate, non-conformist compositions that are so essential for taking a deep breath from the vertigo of the world. Isolation, silence and small epiphanies that make greater sense in the sensory listening provided by Dungan. An unmissable performance at the start of the year. NA

Ravenna Escaleira, an artist originally from Oporto but now based in Lisbon after spells in Brazil, Spain and Italy in what has been a process of self-discovery that is reflected in her music, presents a body of work that extends from music to poetry and the visual arts. Having explored electronics in a very particular and direct way, under the pseudonym RVN, with which she left a digital legacy and performances that were as much about raw noise as almost ambient textures, in recent years she has developed a language for the saxophone on the streets of various cities, an experience lived on the skin and blown with an expressive lyricism, close to the most painful ballad, and drawn by the acoustic space through which she sounds.