Future of What :: "The Rainbowed Air"

Vocalist Blair Gimma, having formerly released a brilliant LP as Blair, now carries her synthesizer project Future of What (a thee-piece featuring Sam Axelrod and Max Kotelchuck) toward the release of their own debut record, Pro Dreams. Debut single and first track, "The Rainbowed Air" represents an unmitigated slow-dance, Reading Rainbow-synthesizers working and resolving under Gimma's whispering vocal. You pull your significant other closer knowing intimacy is the play, even if the geography before you represents pure fantasy. Gimma sings, "Let's try to get it right," before later refining, "It's okay to care about something that isn't even there," one way of approaching the magical realism of the band's sound and a world of "The Rainbowed Air". In this sea of colors, Gimma and her band spin world where, "if we have something to love, then we have nothing to hide," a nice idea to hold more tightly.

Luke Reed :: "Rivers of Love"

Rooted in a Reading Rainbow synth-loop, Luke Reed builds latest single "Rivers of Love" like a dreamy ripple. The arrangement unfolds evenly, a measured and echoing world full of perfect and magical physics. Maybe a bit of form meeting function, Reed wades through the title lyric, "Rivers of love / I have swam through" at a pace that would even try the patience of a word like "languid". It's all beautiful, watery stuff, a group of shimmering forevers pushed out on the surface, floating into the distance on a narrow ribbon of liquid.

Challenger :: "Life In The Paint [Jesu remix]"

Challenger, creator of one of our favorite records of 2012, The World Is Too Much For Me, is hard at work on a yet untitled second LP. Having previewed the possible first single, sounding like a cross of Youth Lagoon's keyboard lushness and the throwback synths of the Reading Rainbow theme song, the second record stands to be as immense as the first. While awaiting new material, the band releases the Jesu remix of stand-out "Life In The Paint" with its glittering synths and spoken word sample, "Break up your fucking heart." Jesu removes the sample, turning up the bass and the moral victories on the buzzing re-imagining, isolating the guitar line in new, frigid relief. Like so much of the Challenger catalog, this aims somewhere back in our unremembered past, as singer John Ross invokes a seasonal reprise, "it's fall/it's fall again," before finally concluding, "this is fall/fall is here", the dying embers of a lost and complete world.