Audiopile Review: Three new tapes from the Not Not Fun camp this week, though the highlight is surely the double cassette release from New Mexican Stargazers. Alongside one previous release on NNF, New Mexican Stargzers has been largely self releasing a continuous drip of tapes, very limited vinyl pressings and digital downloads over the past few years, as well as running the Retrac Recordings label. Very much in line with the NNF aesthetic, New Mexican Stargazers is a lo-fi trip through a digital desert that’s brimming with hissing drum machines, endless spacey synth-scaping, neon-lit jazz moves, and a hazy tonal ambience. Can we still call this hypnagogic? Either way, it sure is redolent of the classic Not Not Fun sound found on releases from Rangers, Matrix Metals or early Sun Araw. Expect us to carry more from the New Mexican Stargazer universe in the very near future, including some upcoming vinyl for those that haven’t made the leap to cassette.

New 90-minute brainbath by rogue cosmic bookie New Mexican Stargazers takes as its muse a surreal, smoke-soaked gambler’s paradise two centuries in the future: Casino 2223. Part soundtrack and part summoning, the collection sprawls and stumbles through sparkling caverns of slots, neon, video portals, and tape hiss, alternately devotional and desolate. Cracked astral keys slipstream over cheap metronomes, zoned voids, and decayed haze, disappearing into outer reaches, backrooms, and nights that never end.

NNF’S expanded edition also includes five outtakes from the C2223 sessions (originally digitally self-released in 2023), capturing NMS at their most sublime and subliminal, away from the noise, tracing ancient dunes lit by spheres and pyramids beaming columns of light straight into the stars.