Audiopile Review: It’s been four years since Scott Gailey released his 2020 full length for the Mood Hut imprint, Obit For Sunshade, but it’s not like our man hasn’t kept busy with various other projects. He’s recently played in Yu Su’s live band, helping flesh out her magnificent AOTY Yellow River Blue album for the live setting, and he also recently collaborated with Mood Hut alum Hashman Deejay and former Vancouverite C3D-E on their zonked dub techno project 0, a frequent mention in our weekly email highlights. So it’s not like he’s completely dropped off the radar while we’ve quietly waited for the next solo release to appear. Well worth the wait, Apodelia continues to clarify his vision of the blissed nocturnal-dub previously explored on Obit For Sunshade, but Gailey now aims more purposefully towards an emotive core that was only hinted at before. Right out the gate you can hear the shift—album opener “Blood” places his vocals further up in the mix than before, his lethargic and poetic delivery floating on a bed of reverb-drenched guitar and the slow pulsing of bass, a featherlight puff of ambient-pop that sets the tone for the rest of LP. Perhaps taking a cue from the recent front-facing releases from Mood Hut mainstays Ian Wyatt and Jack J, the vocals of Gailey have given a bit of shape to his gaseous deployments, his outline beginning to appear through his shimmering walls of homespun ambiance. Though not as overtly focused on formal song structure like his label mates, Apodelia is dotted with moments like “Blood”. From the laconic trip-hop of “Fifty Summers” and the the spacey glide of “Day, Moment”, he interconnects these more playlist-ready tracks with interludes of crackled piano, lo-fi shoegaze drones and buoyant sketches of guitar, threading the album with a warm but ghostly touch. Apodelia is the sound of Gailey quietly closing his studio door to the noise of the world for a deep inward dive, resurfacing with a somnambulant album that captures a distinctly personalized snapshot of his findings, the edges blurred just enough to let our imagination fill the rest in. Highest recommendation.

‘Apodelia’ is Hotspring’s second solo release on Mood Hut, and is partly a further exploration of song forms, studio techniques and instrumentation explored on 2020’s ‘Obit for Sunshade’. ‘Apodelia’ explores lifting into revealing; scouring fidelities, playing with emotion, and improvising by night.