With his sprawling album "Live, Learn, and Love Without Regets", Panamanian-born, longtime U.S. songwriter ErickOscar offers a candid, stylistically unruly chronicle of a life examined in full color. A bilingual acoustic guitarist and hands-on producer, he approaches music less like an industry strategist and more like a backyard philosopher assembling a family scrapbook from whatever materials happen to be within reach. https://open.spotify.com/album/77nWuQDCVqX4bJwqYf1yqs?si=k-3PZ7ZVRYuzhC4nj8uahg The collection refuses to...

I spent a solid hour this morning watching dust motes suspended in a single shaft of sunlight, my entire nervous system held absolutely captive by Magdi Aboul-Kheir and his devastatingly immersive new album, "Slow Heat". The Germany-based journalist and classically trained pianist usually writes across a massive spectrum of genres, pivoting wildly from trance to late romanticism. Today, he has dropped an ambient, contemporary...