Jake Muir will release his second album, the hum of your veiled voice, on Sferic later this month.

Unlike many ambient music producers, American artist Muir wasn’t turned onto the sprawling genre by the work of Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, or The KLF. Rather, it was the dense, turntable manipulation of Philip Jeck, Janek Schaefer, and Marina Rosenfeld that piqued his interest.

Muir’s last album, 2018’s Lady’s Mantle—also on Sferic, based in Manchester, United Kingdom—cut samples from vintage American surf rock records and chiseled them into tactile time sculptures. On the hum of your veiled voice, he takes influential DJ Olive’s “sleeping pill” mixes (“Sleep,” “Buoy,” and “Triage”) as a starting point and constructs his “own ode to the endless night,” we’re told.

But instead of using ambient music as a sleep aid, Muir aims to arouse a different spectrum of emotions. The record, we understand, evokes a nighttime mood but is “wet with queer sexuality, shaped by gay bathhouses and spas, club back rooms, and decadent boudoirs.” Muir initially assembled it in Los Angeles, where he grew up, but completed it in Berlin, Germany where he relocated in 2019.

“I focused on abstracting a city environment,” he explains, “so most of the ephemeral sounds are voices, movements, and cars.”

And aside from a couple of personal field recordings, each sound was sourced from albums Muir has spent the last few years collecting. Dusty jazz loops, snippets of movie soundtracks, and elements from sound effects records were processed almost beyond recognition.

The result is a psychedelic treasure map of rattles, drones, and tones intended to “guide lips and fingertips in the dark,” the label adds. Each track “melts in and out of the night with the heaving intensity of an open window on a busy city street, lubricating familiar rumbles with sensual tones, mirroring the blurry high of a low-light encounter.”

In August, Sferic released Hotel Nota, a new album by Roméo Poirier.

Tracklisting

01. on occasions of this kind
02. fleeting touches
03. reservoir of memory
04. melting like the stars
05. red as the print of a kiss
06. the dimness of the sealed eye
07. like sweet thoughts in a dream
08. silent sailing

the hum of your veiled voice LP is scheduled for October 23 release. Clips and pre-order links will be added as they become available.