Eric Chenaux Slowly Paradise (2018)

Eric Chenaux is a Toronto-based guitarist, songwriter, and sound sculptor; he is a key figure in the city's improv and indie music scene. His music is a tricky thing to classify. His endlessly inventive balladry is informed by jazz, improv, and folk, and is played out via his idiosyncratic electrified acoustic guitar playing and clear vocals. Despite the preconception that experimental music can be trying and dark, it feels affectionate and lush in this instance.

Say Laura is the follow-up to Slowly Paradise (2018) which landed Chenaux on the cover of The Wire among other accolades. The new record by Eric Chenaux is his most immaculate and pristine. Say Laura perfectly incarnates the counter-intuitive interplay of instrument and voice that Chenaux has been revealing and revelling in throughout the past decade: his gently unhinged juxtaposition of resplendently smooth, seductively assured singing and puckish, frazzled, thoroughly destabilized guitar could come from no other musician.