Picnic

Picnic is the first full-length collaboration between Kansas City’s Ryan Loecker (aka mdo, co-founder of the C Minus label) and Melbourne, Australia’s Justin Cantrell (aka ju ca, founder of the Daisart label). Loecker came a little late to the Midwestern scene, releasing his first music in 2016 and forming C Minus in 2017. But the communal spirit of Secret Musik lives on in Picnic, which doubles as an international ambient summit welcoming Australia’s Daisart into the fold. Heavy on guest features, Picnic is a celebration of ambient music as a social phenomenon.
"Bunnyville" is built around what sounds like a bundle of necklaces being untangled, around which all manner of soupy effects slosh and swish. "Drops in the Water," a collaboration with Detroit artist Theodore Cale Schafer, is permeated with fiery crackles that emerge from a deep, droning house chord…

An ideal roll call of Ulla, Nadia Khan, Newworldaquarium, Ben Bondy, Mister Water Wet, NAP, JR Chaparro, Haji K., and many more, help tuck Picnic’s eponymous LP beauty to bed with a sublime suite of remixes and alternate versions.
One of 2021’s lushest ambient sides, ‘Picnic’ is a proper friends and family affair helmed by the duo’s mdo & Ju Ca, a pair of Melbourne-based souls who share that region’s prevailing grasp of ambient warmth and elemental utility. Where their debut LP, proper, also included guest spots from the likes of Huerco S., The Humble Bee, Dntel, and DJ Paradise, this new 'Bonus' follows suit to infuse the far flung yet mutual spirits of the modern ambient rhizome, dialling in subtle reflections on the originals, as well as new collaborations, that diffuse and extend its pleasures into the gauzy mid-distance…

Double-CD, career-spanning retrospective that offers little in the way of surprises: it's a tastefully selected overview of her career highlights, heaviest (and justifiably so) on her late '60s albums. There's the inevitable feeling of letdown as disc two progresses; her post-early '70s material is far less interesting than her earliest work, even if it's inoffensive. All of the first five albums (through 1971's Gonna Take a Miracle) are now on CD, so this is most suitable for the fan who isn't passionate enough to be a completist. Includes a couple of previously unreleased live tracks from the 1990s; the version of "Sweet Blindness," unfortunately, is not the original late-'60s recording, but from a late-'70s live album.