Today, Mauro Remiddi AKA: Porcelain Raft is streaming his forthcoming release Microclimate via NPR.

More on Microclimate…

“Over washes of pedal steel – which is all over the album, in fact, along with a rather fevered harmonica solo at one point – Remiddi sets the album’s tone with the opening “The Earth Before Us.” Its collision of acoustic textures and euphoric melodies somehow both grounds the song and shoots it straight into the stratosphere”.

Like a tiny whisper, like a distant shore
Coming out from nowhere, from millions years ago
I never felt like this before, sea lions under the sun
Shapes and colors from heaven, melting into one

“I wasn’t even afraid to be naïve about it,” Remiddi admits. “I think sometimes that’s the best way to approach something. Sometimes you just have to say things the way they are, and sometimes that means the simplest way to say it.”

On “Big Sur,” the album’s centerpiece (and his approximation of a Chris Isaak song, he jokes), Remiddi’s words tumble out like a freeform poem:

Burned leaves beneath the trees it’s getting dark my body spins
The breeze that pushes me down hill, the salty air it feels unreal
Orange flames up in the sky it brings me now

Remiddi shrugs at the suggestion that “Microclimate” burns with a warmer glow than his previous releases, mostly through its luminous instrumentation.

“I never think ahead about what I’m going to use. Never,” he says. “The way it works most of the time is this: If I make an album with certain instruments, I would sell them because I don’t want to make an album that sounds the same. If I have an aesthetic that connects my albums it’s that I use just what I have in front of me.”

His vocals, too, unearth different shadings of his voice, pitched somewhere between hushed and urgent, as heard on “Accelerating Curve.”

“I felt that I was singing as if I was tired, but on purpose. There was an exhaustion in the singing, but then suddenly I would wake myself up and something would come out very clear and loud,” he says. “Compared to my other albums, this one has more dynamics. You hear me half awake and then suddenly in your face.”

“I know it’s a common thing to say, but these albums are like pages in a diary,” Remiddi says. “In 20 years, I want to look back on my albums and say, ‘Yeah, that was me in that moment.’

Porcelain Raft
Microclimate
Tracklisting

1. The Earth Before Us
2. Distant Shore
3. Big Sur
4. Rolling Over
5. Rising
6. Kookaburra
7. The Greatest View
8. Bring Me To The River
9. Accelerating Curve
10. The Poets Were Right
11. Zero Frame Per Second