James Irwin - "Face Value". When yr heart's so crowded; crowded with reflections and every reflection still separate, distinct. Minutes in an hour, faces in a crowd, motives like fish in deep currents. Whenever I am standing,, you think, standing at the bar, I am teetering. A tower on the verge of falling, all its rooms filled with scholars. A woman puts on a record, a shiny black piece of vinyl; you listen to it, teetering. Whole schools in yr heart, a hundred mirrors. The guide of a rhythm: a beat you can dance to, for a sec, making yr teetering seem graceful. A drumroll that tumbles like a falling moon. Guitars that ring like starlight. Synths all blurring, rain poured onto everything. And a voice, thank god for that voice, a guide through the empty night. Someone to murmur, like an arm around your chest, I am not becoming you / I am not becoming me. [website / soundcloud / previously / James Irwin is currently unsigned]

Luke James - "Love XYZ". A few minutes of arthouse R&B. akin to Miguel, Frank Ocean or Jessie Ware, but "Love XYZ" leans in instead of back - it's seduction as forward press, as push and push, skin on skin all asking. James craves his lover, goes to them, pleads. And yet he is undesperate. Ardour is around them like incense smoke. In the sonics of the song: distant schoolyard voices, hidden strings, dancing motorik. The hunger is layered overtop these subtleties - a chorus of calling; a voice that lands on its edge; rebounding beats that come & come & come again, undeterrable. You rarely hear a love-song that feels like a soft touch and also like a hard one. Here is one. [buy

(image is Patrick Henne's painting, "The Anatomy Lesson.")