Around the Sun Pt.2

After a prolific outburst at the start of the new century, house music demiurge Larry Heard fell silent for the next thirteen years. Thankfully 2018 saw him return with the resplendent Cerebral Hemispheres and 2022’s Around The Sun Pt.1 hinted at more to follow.

But in his own low-key way, Mr. Fingers snuck out Around The Sun Pt.2 this month. And rather than scream summer blockbuster, it suggests something more diaristic. Like a sketchbook, the tracks come lose and fast, a master at work yet also at his leisure. Numbers like “A Country Rhodes” and “Rustling Leaves” are at once downtempo and impressionistic, as if capturing whatever was in the landscape that day. Buzzing saxophone mingles with pinging keys, updating the kind of smooth jazz amalgams he mastered in the early ’90s. “Love to You” finds him poignantly grappling with love and its loss once more. And “We’re Drowning” might be the man’s “What’s Going On,” a soulful meditation on ecological collapse.