For about six years, the Boise space cadet Trevor Powers recorded ambitious and psychedelic indie rock under the name Youth Lagoon. In 2016, Powers retired the Youth Lagoon project. (You can’t really say Youth Lagoon broke up, since it was never really a band.) Soon afterward, Powers began putting out music under his own name. In 2018, Powers released Mulberry Violence, his first album under his own name. Today, without prior warning, Powers has released his second.

The new Powers album is an instrumental, meditative work called Capricorn, and Powers recorded it by himself in a cabin in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains while recovering from a bad panic attack. Powers worked with a piano, a computer, a bunch of different instruments, and field recordings that he made of the world around his cabin. The result is a dazed, wandering reverie that doesn’t really belong to any particular genre.

In a press release, Powers says:

The field recordings are mostly a patchwork of nature: wind, insects, rain, birds, frogs, streams, thunder but with their voices mangled and played with. I fell in love with the idea that everything has a voice. Combining those with piano melodies felt like some kind of Mister Rogers hallucination. I also created some crude digital instruments out of noise pollution, like planes and highways — but the most natural sounds were always the most alien. I wanted to make something that felt as peaceful as it was haunting. Anything that did that and served the music, I made use of.

Stream the album below.

Capricorn is out now, and you can get it at Bandcamp.