Higher Hands – Due Dilla-gence
Le Loup – I Had a Dream I Died
Miyazaki – Apparition
Oddisee – Fievre
John Lanou – Blackbird with Landon Letzkus
Vandaveer – Ways & Means
South Rail – Wandering Soul
Dale Holmes – Summer Rain
Tom McBride – Cheap Thrill
PS Music Group – Waiting
Xamin – Humidity ft. Alex Leipold, Rebecca Schrader
Max D – Slick
Peanut Butter and Dave – Egon
Q and Not U – We Heart Our Hive
Shannon Gunn and the Bullettes Septet – Warm Woman Blues
Frau Eva – Interlude
RDGLDGRN – Hangout
Outputmessage – Goldilocks Zone (Julius Jetson Remix)
Language of Sleep – Epilogue
Lungfish – Constellations

TRU Band – Same Time Tomorrow
America Hearts – Race Car Driver
David Marc Alterman – Pavane for Double Reeds
Mbandi – Destiny
Reginald Cyntje – Awakening
Tom McBride – Candle Light the Way
Terracotta Blue – DreamVintage (part 1)
Brian Wilbur Grundstrom – For Whom the Bell Tolls Opera – Act 1 Scene 3
Foozle – Blue Sweatshirt
Lungfish – Black Helicopters
Joe Garner – Waiting
The Grudging Pumpkin – Pigcart Bump
AndrewN – Going Home
Dub City Renegades – High, High, High (dub)
Vandaveer – Beat, Beat, My Heart
Aaron Gage – Float
Scythian – Pluckett’s
Dmerit – Stuck On You
Flash Frequency – Time
The Cassettes – Oxford

Brian Wilbur Grundstrom – An Orchestral Journey
Jon Miller – Swimming
Mary Chapin Carpenter – Come On Come On
So Spirited – Lifted
Arlin Godwin – Bangkok Matinee
Vanessa Renee Williams – We’re Together
Cynthia Marie – Harbor
Ben Williams – Strength And Beauty
Olivia Neutron-John – 16 BEAT
Nitemoves – Port au Prism
Fellowcraft – Glass Houses
Foozle – Sofa Couch
The Jennifers – Christmas In Reverse – Instrumental
Mirror Factory – Sold
Fort Knox Five – Reach (Instrumental)
Fulton Lights – If You Can Make It Through the Dark
Fellow Creatures – Expectations
Sam Cooper & The Sleepwalkers – Worship
Lungfish – Necrophones
Big Moth – Dim

Logikbomb – The Heights (aka: Her Lips)
Suzanne Brindamour – The Arrival
Den-Mate – For Free
Lungfish – Constellations
Wye Oak – Dogs Eyes
Screen Vinyl Image – Edge of Forever
Jonny Grave – Afraid of the Dark
Brûlée – Driftin’
Fat Kneel – Solaris
Marvin Gaye – What’s Happening Brother
Oddisee – In Your Eyes
Sansyou – Best Ones Choose You
AXB – Flea Markets
The Sea Life – Prozac & Merlot
Lance Neptune – Umbrella Girl.
Beautiful Swimmers – The Zoo
G-Flux – Cumbia Cosmica
Bucky’s Fatal Mistake – Hello
Aaron Gage – Vinayaka
They’ll Have Dreams – Walk to Freedom

Jason A Mullinax – Next Time We Fly
Suzanne Brindamour – Pop’s Theme
Astronaut Jones – Keep It Down
Lungfish – Cut to Fit the Mouth
Young Rapids – Melt
RDGLDGRN – Hangout
Moonlight Mask – The Nightingale
TRU Band – Thelonius Funk
Aaron Abernathy – Faded Pictures
Jonny Grave – L’Enfant Promenade
Oddisee – When Everything Changed
Bunny Man Bridge – Shush Mutt
Nitemoves – Music Song
Miter – Young
Matt Chaconas – Goodnight
Technicians – Low Tide
Koshari – Into Shreds
We Were Pirates – A Boy & His Tiger
AndrewN – Night Falls
The Acorns – Oak Follies

Brian Settles – Understanding
Baby Bry Bry – Slumzzz
Sri Rama – The Dragon From Naples
Mathrat – Gravity Waves
Jan Knutson – Amsterdam
Infinite Adolescence – 80’s
The Acorns – X-Country Skier
Jason A Mullinax – Goodbye, Earth!
The Orchid – The Astronaut (Escape Velocity)
Sunwolf – Velvet
East Ghost – Architect
Decahedron – Movement A
The Rail Runners – Get Off the Tracks
Country Gentlemen – Have I Told You Lately That I Love You
Sonic Thee – Speaker
The Evens – Shelter Two
Suzanne Brindamour – Barnstormers Approach
Scythian – Last Days of Summer
Lungfish – Black Helicopters
Two Dragons and a Cheetah – Poetry and Light

Drop Electric – We Will Be Humans, Finally
Cigarbox Planetarium – Gothic Meth Lab Party
Anchor 3 – Left Fielder
John Battema – I Can’t See Home Anymore
Echo Broke Alone – Something Beautiful
The Moderate – Drugs/Young Men
Snail Mail – Thinning
Fellow Creatures – Seance (Shuka)
The Rail Runners – Crash Burn Learn
Mellow Diamond – Namesake
More Humans – Disaster
Logikbomb – Greenline to Ana
Sound of the City – Waiting (Sumthin 2 Ride 2)
Eva Cassidy – Ain’t No Sunshine
Jeff Cosgrove, Frank Kimbrough, and Martin Wind – The Owls
Lungfish – Necrophones
Grogan Social Scene – Mercury Is In Retrograde
Terracotta Blue – DreamVintage (part 1)
Luke Reddick – Can’t Be Bought
Screen Vinyl Image – I’m Not

He’s from Baltimore and is in his early 50s. She’s from Stockholm, Sweden, and is in her late 20s. For a long time, Zomes was his solo project. She first joined him on 2013’s Time Was, but looking back, that album was more a proof of concept — a long hello. This time around, they spent several weeks in the fall of 2014 working in a little studio in his home, melding his minimalist, electric-organ-based post-punk tracks with her well-schooled and frequently wordless melodies.

“We knew we wanted to make our own record this time, and there was no reason to do anything other than just what we wanted to do,” says Osborne, known as the guitarist for Baltimore legends Lungfish. He brings that band’s repetitive, almost meditative power into Zomes. “We felt no rush — we could have meals around recording, and step outside, and really use a clear-minded way to make music.”

The results can be instantly appealing (the odd, slightly bluesy sweetness of “Beckoning Breeze” and the more ethereal “General Wizard”), pleasantly puzzling (“Simian Mother,” where Olivegren’s vocals swerve into almost atonal improvisations) or coolly pastoral (pretty much anything she sings in Swedish). The album was released Tuesday via the duo’s Near Unison imprint, with distribution through Dischord Records. Engineer Craig Bowen helped them record it, and Heba Kedry mastered it.

Any rush to make Time Was stemmed from the way they first connected — during a chance encounter in 2012 at a music festival in Sweden — and their desire to quickly capitalize on their shared energy. For that record, she made a brief visit to the U.S.

“We talk about heavy issues, and we have things going on in our lives that are tough, but music is where there’s no reason for any strain.” —Asa Osborne of Zomes

For Near Unison, however, they were able to have far more conversations about craft and purpose. Olivegren, who studied at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, doesn’t let her academic musical training dominate the process, Osborne says.

“In my approach, I’m definitely unschooled, I can’t read music — wish I could — but just going on feeling, I think, is where we connect,” Osborne says. “Certainly you can be so trained that maybe your feeling is constricted or something, but I think with Hanna, she has so much emotion and power, and joy with life, that I learn from her energy more than her background and training.”

Olivegren says she instantly recognized that Osborne was a “pure spirit” after first meeting him during the Perspectives Festival in 2012. She’d never heard Zomes before; he invited her to his performance.

“I had to work that night, but I got my friend to take my shift so that I could go, and I didn’t know what it was going to be at all,” she says. “And I came in and I sat down on the floor, and he played, and I was just like, ‘Wow.'”

Osborne says he’s had some similarly frictionless experiences making music in the past, but it’s generally “more scattered and loaded when you’re working with four people, and everyone’s trying to always to understand each other and appreciate where each other is coming from.”

Zomes, as a duo, is on “another level,” Osborne says.

“I don’t think you need strife and confrontation to make good work, necessarily. I mean, in my life now, I’d much rather it be pleasant — and still deep,” Osborne says. “We talk about heavy issues, and we have things going on in our lives that are tough, but music is where there’s no reason for any strain. If there were strain, we wouldn’t do it.”

“I was standing at [Penn] Station in Baltimore, and I was like, ‘OK, I’m just going to make a record with this man I’ve met two times, in a city where I’ve never been before.” —Hanna Olivegren of Zomes

Getting to this point took a leap of faith on Olivegren’s part. She looks back on the trip to the U.S. to record Time Was, and she remembers being a little disoriented.

“I was standing at [Penn] Station in Baltimore, and I was like, ‘OK, I’m just going to like, make a record with this man I’ve met two times, in a city where I’ve never been before,'” she says.

But the Charm City is now a second home not only because of her friendship with Osborne — “it feels like we must have known each other for a long time in our past lives,” she says — but also for the way she’s connected with the city.

“Stockholm is great for music, but I just think that I found persons here to collaborate with in a way that I haven’t really found there,” she says. “So it just makes sense to be closer to this … and also I went to so many schools in Sweden, and maybe felt like I got stuck in a box of what to be or not to be. It felt pretty good to get away from that.”

Baltimore seems “really refreshing” for Olivegren, Osborne says. “She came here for us to make music, but it’s grown. She just resonates here. You either like a place or you don’t, and she likes it here.”

Despite Olivegren’s status as a foreigner, listeners shouldn’t read too far into the cover image for Near Unison, say both members of the band. The photo of a person in an alien mask under a heavy cloak was just the result of some improvising, they say.

“For awhile, we were just like, ‘Are we really gonna have this as the cover?’ It’s pretty, like … it’s intense,” Olivegren says. “And then we just couldn’t go with any other idea … because we also couldn’t stop looking at it.”

Zomes plays Union Arts in D.C. July 11.

Photo: Thrill Jockey