Suzanne Kraft - What You Get for Being Young (2016) Hi-Res

With a title that uncomfortably lodges in the mind, What You Get For Being Young is a beautifully blue-tinged ambient meditation from L.A.’s Suzanne Kraft, notching up their 3rd vinyl for Jonny Nash’s excellent London-based label.

Like everything on the exquisite Melody As Truth label, What You Get For Being Young trades in a humbling and all-too-rare sort of ambient subtlety that’s practiced only by a blessed few nowadays.

With the deftest touch and appreciation of spatial nuance, Kraft’s seven compositions grow with a sincerely serene, night-blooming quality that’s really hard to ignore if you’re susceptible to such stuff.

Entering with what sounds like a valium-smudged Peter Zummo performance in the melted brass tones of Body Heat, the record drifts from the moth-on-bulb percussion and evaporating pads of Bank to what could almost be a super minimalist Detroit Escalator Company cut in One Amongst Others, to wilt like a late summer Japanese garden soundtracked by Morton Feldman with Zé, and loll out into the rolling curves of Scripted Space and Further’s strangely unsettling, palsied structure and anaesthetised atmosphere.