Louis Gardner For The Open Room

London based songwriter Louis Gardner offers his first mixtape, released via Goldsmiths University imprint NX Records. On For The Open Room, Gardner spirals artfully through outsider jazz, pop, folk and noise, landing sprawled in a territory all his own.

Tangled riffs and strange structures form the terrain for intimate, un-rugged vocals to float above. Starting life like brisk journal entries or misshapen doodles in digital fuzz, Gardner's stories bloom with stop-start tension, oscillating between tender and guttural, crude and complex.

For The Open Room captures a flow state of ideas, traces and associations - from the bubbling jazz congruence of "It's Hard", to plucked maximalist fragility on "Ten Zithers". Wrapping up with "Body Left in the Snow", Louis reveals mightily undulating piano chops - leaving us to wonder what else is withheld, and what might appear next.

Recommended for fans of Jandek, Mount Eerie, Arthur Russell.