Melting Days

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.

The closest precedent to Melting Days is Lusine’s 2007 ambient landmark, Language Barrier. Both projects emerged from film score work and operate primarily in tone and texture. Loraine James once told Wire that Language Barrier was her "favourite ambient album of all time.” Now Ghostly labelmates via James’ Whatever The Weather project, the two artists invite a similarly loose, old-school UK use of the “ambient” tag, something more akin to early Aphex Twin, Seefeel, and Lusine fave, Locust, where instead of a beatless canvas, the music remains active and fluid, far more in the foreground. While not an outright percussive album, Melting Days features sampled drum contributions from longtime collaborator Trent Moorman and renders a more rhythmic experience than sonic impressions might initially suggest. McIlwain also cites Susumu Yokota’s Sakura and the mid-2000s output of the Thrill Jockey duo Mountains as influences on the sound.