First Lady of Winds and Stars Samara Lubelski returns to her once and future label home for her sixth album, Wavelength, and the spheres harmonize at the news. Wavelength comprises a dozen new arrowed whispers, Samara's feathery touch on guitar and microphone now so at balance with the elements that the whole, her music and the air it enters, become inseparable. Don't be fooled by the persistent "psych-folk" labels she gets -- oh, they may be accurate as far as modern usage goes, and that scene is now as it was then, but Wavelength is an electric record through and through: Everything comes to life in light, the guitar speaking in radiant strums and felt-tip leads, her violin calling up everything that glows and grows in the dark. Funny how Nature always seemed to work everything out fine on Her own before we showed up, huh?

Wavelength features the playing of a number of Samara’s fellow travelers, from NYC to Degenfeld, Germany: Metal Mountains bandmates PG Six on guitars and Helen Rush on Casio; Steve Shelley on drums; Moritz Finkbeiner on keyboards; Thilo Kuhn on Mellotron and vibraphone; Werner Notzel on organ guitar; and Willie Lane and Brian Sullivan contributed guitar parts as well. Wavelength was engineered and recorded by Samara herself at Sumsilobatem in Germany, aside from the drums being set down by Aaron Mullan at Echo Canyon; Nicolas Vernhes mixed at Rare Book Room. While Wavelength arrives three years after her previous studio LP, Future Slip (Ecstatic Peace), trust that Samara's kept busy in the since, playing violin all over the map (and a fair ways off it) with Thurston Moore's band; sharing stages and an album, Sunday Night, Sunday Afternoon (on Graham Lambkin's Kye label), with Marcia Bassett; being one third of Metal Mountains; adding to Unrock's series of live CD-R's in 2010; and having hand and wand in countless engineering projects. Samara has been a quietly reliable presence in New York's underground realm for a good many years; if you're in music in NYC and haven't crossed paths with her, we think you might be doing it wrong. But a Wavelength is always there for you, all you need do is get on it.