Audiopile Review: First brought to our attention way back in 2017 via PAN’s ambient compilation Mono No Aware—which featured fellow up and comers like Yves Tumor, Flora Yin-Wong, Kareem Lofty and James K—the French experimentalist Malibu has since maintained a bit of a low profile, quietly releasing Palaces Of Pity on CD and cassette via NYC imprint UNO back in 2022. Luckily, keen ears prevailed, and the album gets a wider dispatch. Advancing on her early work, Malibu shifts towards a filmic approach that overlaps her angelic wordless vocals with ebbing synths, whisps of guitar, and buried accents of cello (provided here by long-time collaborator Oliver Coates). It inhabits a world similar to that of Grouper’s vocal-hued shoegaze bliss, Stars of the Lid’s cinematic grandeur, hints of SAWII’s dream-state phases, and, honestly, it’s not too far removed from the vaporous new collaboration from Ulla & Perila, which also lands this week. Didn’t think we were even gonna get a grip of this one after a lightening quick sell out of the first pressing, but we’ve been blessed with this quick repress. Second edition of 300.

Malibu’s elegy to euphoric bliss comes to vinyl for the first time, expanded with a previously unreleased bonus track and resplendent with that supremely evocative cover image. It’s a slow crawl of low-lit ambience and cinematic stylings that are to 90’s trance what Burial is to garage and hardcore, all curled echoes of shared memories that have passed down the line, reduced to pure vapour.​

Opening with hazed vocals layered over submerged Café Del Mar guitar licks, Reese bass and dizzying, phased strings, Malibu adopts the weightless motion of Chicane or Banco de Gaia if their music was piped into an empty swimming pool and recorded to an iPhone – like some hazed memory of a hedonism zoomers were promised but never inherited.

Orbital’s early ’90s emosh classic ‘Halcyon’ looms large over proceedings; as if Kirsty Hawkshaw’s doe-eyed lalalalala’s were played at a 10th of their intended speed, draped over that TX81Z “lately” bassline like velvet. The original was written as a tribute to brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll’s mother, who was addicted to benzodiazepine derivative Halcion; and it feels fitting that the narcotic sound it inspired has become a defining marker of our age. In fact, there’s a melancholy, medicinal subtext throughout the album that’s hard to ignore; blind panic reduced to an emotional cinder, longing strings, soaring vocals and comedown vibes. Malibu makes music that tries to articulate a blurred emotion that’s almost impossible to define, and while so much Ambient numbs by design, here feelings are its defining feature.

With cello provided by Oliver Coates and Madelen Dressler-Vollsaeter, and guitar from Florian Le-Prisé, the album’s sense of intimacy assumes an almost impossibly grand sense of scale, as temporally liminal and neon-lit as Burial’s ‘In McDonalds’, made for a world that’s now completely out of reach.