Miyaxx (album release) / Elizabeth Celeste

At dawn and at dusk, in the garden at night, in the rain among the stones, the duo Miyaxx wayfinds through the myths, an open-tuned guitar as their compass. This album is their walk.

Two musicians: Lea Thomas, a guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter whose excellent 2024 album Cosmos Forever took an expansive turn towards saturation and slowness, and John Thayer, a percussionist, audio engineer, and record producer with a 4th-world slant and an uncanny ability to fold digital manipulations into beautiful recordings of performances. Partnered in life, partnered in music, Hold Your Ego Out Like a Sun is a wonderful fusing, neither nor, both and, a heady third thing. The two of them are the sole musical contributors to this album; the resulting nighttime fuzz folk is very much a product of where their distinct approaches meet.

This album phases between possible worlds, crossfading between moments that feel like Thomas singing songs in a room and swirling constructions like "The Shape You Make Returning" that feel like a looming binary tidal wave, a bitcrushed, Loveless wall of noise, the vocals at the center of the mix wordless and tugging, like something Elizabeth Fraser or Liz Harris would sing.

But their world is never purely electronic wizardry and never pure acoustic duo. Amid automation and autotune, there is something human, and between the hits of a ride cymbal or the ringing out of a chord there is the crinkle of Thayer’s DAW maneuvers, a natural/digital agitation that brings Mount Eerie to mind. Lullaby melodies dance between steel-string harmonics, modular clicks and clacks like summer bugs and frogs, and the bracing cymbal explosions of a drumset enter suddenly. The album’s opener sounds at first like the most sublime moments in the Red House Painters catalog before cascading over a waterfall of distortion. The track "Go Easy" features a toe-tapping bassline that wouldn't feel out of place on a Broadcast or Massive Attack song. Listen for occasional field recordings delicately peppered in, towering overdriven flames that approach and consume the sonic space, the geologic rumbling of synthesized bass, and the singularly compelling presence of Lea Thomas’ voice, ebbing and flowing, advancing into our ears and receding out into echo.

Elizabeth Celeste is a musician and photographer in Catskill, NY. She plays in the band Camp Saint Helene. She is currently working on a solo record. ☾⋆｡𖦹 °✩⋆˙♡