From the Mailbox 53

Tone Ranger – Confluence Tone Ranger (Alex Simon) is an artist from Santa Fe, NM who’s current with a new album, Confluence. My sister lived for years in Taos, and this record does really crystalize many of my experiences out there. As Simon’s pseudonym reflects, it’s absolutely still the Wild West. And it’s not just the landscape; it’s impressively thin in terms of population density, and the stark divide between wealth and poverty reminds me of old Westerns where everyone in town is suffering except the evil Mayor/local oil baron. But northern New Mexico is also a place that inspires psychedelia in an almost primordial way. That is partly the landscape itself, and the people the high desert has attracted for generations. Simon’s music no doubt reflects this. Confluence is quintessential modern desert music; it’s mostly ambient and produced mostly electronically–but also feels authentic in its reverence of the region’s musical history. There’s a certain clear-eyed quality about most…