Melting Days [Blue Marble], Lusine, Vinyl

Retracing two decades with Seattle’s Jeff McIlwain, aka Lusine, reveals one of contemporary electronic and experimental music’s most enduring producers, understatedly consistent yet endlessly curious. His expansive catalog balances melodic structure with textural refinement, drifting into techno, avant-pop, and ambient lanes while never squarely in any one of them. Following 2023’s Long Light, among his most collaborative, song-forward albums to date, McIlwain returns to his minimalist roots for the towering 10th Lusine full-length, Melting Days. Ten songs in conversation with loss and transition, defined by elemental layers and ascending loops that engulf his signature rhythms and beat patterns in pure radiance. “When you’re moving through grief, it’s as if you’re watching your previous life get foggier and foggier,” says McIlwain. While he didn’t set out to make a journey record, Melting Days takes that feeling to its spiritual end, from catharsis to clarity.