Zander Raymond - Secrets From A Squirrel

First new release from Ned Milligan's Florabelle imprint since M. Sage's excellent collaborative LP from 2021. Zander Raymond was one of the contributors to that record, providing synth for the bubbling and bucolic Of Transparent Air, a suggestive composition with a linear arc that seemed to flower to a gently triumphant conclusion (all things being relative). Now working alone, Secrets From A Squirrel feels more subtle, supple and probing, an exploration of a private universe that's charged with domestic intimacy. Found sound and field recordings interact with attenuated synth notes with a genuine fluidity, one part flowing into another as if the entire collection is one whole movement. Records such as this often sound diaristic, a series of ideas pressed together, but Secrets From A Squirrel plays more like a 'day in the life of', a personal treatise of sorts - the ambient shifts and pulses of Raymond's life. It reminds me a little of Robert Turman's mostly-peerless Flux, sans the academic rigour, a personalised, DIY expression of avant sensibilities, those overlays of field recordings providing a narrative guide. Or, as it were, confessing the secrets of the titular squirrel.