FAR EXP – Get On Your Grind [Ardamus, RNL, Fleetwood – prod. by Decompoze]
The Stick Mob – Sugarcane Road
Wild Flag – Racehorse
Iritis – Monster
We Were Pirates – Into Thin Air
Hailu Mergia – Ambasel
Be Still, Cody – Wrong Right
Philip Lassiter – Set You Free
Dirdy Redzz – Beat ya Feet
K-Murdock – Heartache
Sun Machines – Doom Street
Moss Of Aura – Wheels
Xamin – Humidity ft. Alex Leipold, Rebecca Schrader
AndrewN – Night Falls
Dark Narrows – This Altar
Wytold – Do You Know?
Wes Swing – Blood Branches
Broto Roy – Never Enough Cake
Lo-Fang – Silver
Dan Deacon – Wham City

The Maryland resident’s second album with D.C.-based collaborator J. Forté, Supersonic Sons, comes out Oct. 14, and the first song released — the bouncy, percussive “Cabin Fever” — is the perfect entry point for a concept album about an intergalactic explorer.

Not only does it tell the story of a bummed-out space traveler and fit within the album’s overall narrative, but it also has another meaning for the duo: Forté had been working from home at the time of writing lines like “The pressure’s building on the outside/The pressure’s building on the inside.”

“I thought he wrote the song about being trapped in his apartment, teleworking, and how he just wanted to not be teleworking,” Gendron says. It was unintentional, but Forté acknowledged later that the thematic overlap made sense, Gendron says.

In the same way that astronauts have to improvise to meet certain challenges, Sun Machines was the result of some adaptation. Gendron has been a rock drummer much of his musical life. But after resettling in Japan around 2010, that had to change.

“It was so silly — I brought my drums to Japan with me,” he says. “Like, in hindsight, like, what did I think I was gonna do with those drums?” The combination of paper-thin walls and the fear of disturbing neighbors severely limited his instrument options. So he started playing around with synths, guitar, bass and programmed drums.

He returned to the U.S. and formed Sun Machines — initially as a home-studio-only project — with Forté. They wanted to record something entirely on tape. And at first, they were swapping ideas via analog tapes. Eventually modern technology — iPads and the like — found its way into their arsenal.

The songs that Gendron had worked on while in Japan didn’t actually make it on the band’s first album, Human Subjects. They were set aside in favor of a slightly different path. But when it came time to make Supersonic Sons, he came to the table with loads of pre-formed ideas. All said, about half the tracks off Supersonic Sons are versions of what one could call Gendron’s “Japan songs.”

“It’s amazing that it’s all pretty cohesive,” Gendron says, reflecting on the gap between songs written in a foreign land, half a decade ago, and those written more recently.

Though living in Japan was really cool, Gendron says, it’s always a bit weird to start over somewhere else.

“I’m realizing that maybe, over there, I kinda felt like a space traveler or, you know, an alien,” he says.

Likewise, when explaining his time in the Navy — where actual astronauts remarked on how similar the submarine was to a spaceship — he notices the running thread.

“I don’t know if that also influenced my ideas — like getting in a capsule and kinda going and disappearing for extended periods of time,” he says. “I never even really gave that much thought, but I think that probably had something to do with it, too.”

Foozle –
The Internal Frontier – Gravity
Daniel Barbiero & Chris Lynn – …and the Trees As Gnomens On a Plane of Snow
Cynthia Marie – Song for the End
The Iris Bell – Globe
J.R. Flynn – Across the Campfire, Part I
Masego – Small Talk (TrapScat T0 Cali)
Rock Creek Jazz – Mojitos
The Black Sparks – Rocketbird
The Funk Ark – Doom Buggy
Matt Rippetoe – Green Apples
Beau Finley – The Sky Is Falling
Outputmessage – Lungs
B Side Shuffle – Tappy McFunkington
Sunwolf – Big Feelings (instrumental)
A Shrewdness of Apes – Summer Job
Birds and Buildings – The Dumb Fish
Sam Hesh – Shadows
Sun Machines – Mono Mind
Golden Looks – Hey Say

Oddisee – The Blooming
Studying – Because What Has Hardened Will Never Win
Zoe Ravenwood – The End of Something Beautiful
Jonathan Parker – CO86
Benjy Ferree – Leaving the Nest (It’s a Long Way Down)
Memphis Gold – Do You Still Want Me
Wes Swing – Blood Branches
Oooh Child Ensemble – Diko’s Groove
Sun Machines – Mare Island
Kev Brown – Always Instrumental
PLOY – XIX
igloo two – lokhu blues
Terracotta Blue – The Dust Settles
Luke Denton – Light & Happy
Girl Love Distortion – (You Don’t) Speak For Me
The Greatest Hoax – Opus no. 10
Derek Evry – Wake Me Up
Wild Flag – Racehorse
Zenon Slawinski – Sealed With a Kiss
Dan Deacon – Of the Mountains

Patuxent Partners – Washington County
ZOMES – Ruminants
Supper Club – Chambray
Fort Knox Five – Swinging On a Rhyme (Instrumental)
Tomás Pagán Motta – Love In Her Lies
Justin Jones – Miracles
Kev Brown – Always (Instrumental)
Be Still, Cody – Wrong Right
Buildings – Everything Is Possible
Lifted – Silver
Sun Machines – Mono Mind
Derek Evry – Wake Me Up
Iritis – Pedal
A Tale Of – Oh, We Owe This to Ourselves
Nitemoves – Ashe
The Petticoat Tearoom – Kundalini
Jonathan Parker – CO86
Girls Love Distortion – Sleepwalking
Dawit Eklund – Lies Are Chic
Masego – I Do Everything (More For Cruisin’)
Otis Infrastructure – Furniture
Oooh Child Ensemble – Diko’s Groove
Extra Golden – It’s Not Easy
Kev Brown – Party People Dedication (Instrumental)
Marian McLaughlin – Your Bower
The Greatest Hoax – Opus no. 28
Marvin Gaye – What’s Happening Brother
Aerialist – Naiad
Wanted Man – Interlude
Baby Bry Bry – Slumzzz
April + Vista – Theme In Adagio
Stranger In the Alps – Love/Afraid
Swings – New Year

Ocobaya – Messix
Matt Chaconas – AEIOU
Smoke Bellow – Conscious Heads
Sun Machines – Mare Island
Drop Electric – Santo Domingo
A Tale Of – 1976
Nitemoves – Grinder
Lo-Fang – Animal Urges
Maxine – Since I Lost You
Damu the Fudgemunk – 1993 Pete, 45 Mix
Mathugh – The Hitcher
Catscan! – Marine Biologist
Patuxent Partners – Victoria Waltz
Art Sorority For Girls – All Year Again (Yoko O.K.)
Buildings – For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
Opus Akoben – Ronin
SCANNERS – Petty Tragedy
Andrew Grossman – Death to Rockville Pike
Reginald Cyntje – Wind

“It’s kind of hard to play acoustic drums in my surroundings here,” says the 37-year-old Silver Spring resident, “let alone someplace with even more space [restrictions].”

When Gendron returned to the U.S., he immediately pulled out the instruments he hadn’t touched in a long time. “When I got back, I had started tinkering around with home recording some more, and I got all my stuff out of storage — a bunch of instruments and equipment that I hadn’t seen in years — and one of the items was my old Tascam 414 analog cassette tape recorder.”

Gendron — a big fan of tapes who had dabbled in home recording while in Japan — turned to longtime collaborator J. Forté (Lejeune, Secret Pop Band, Light Arms) for help. “I asked, ‘Are you interested in passing tapes back and forth?'” Gendron says. He recorded some drums, gave Forté the recording, then Forté put down bass, passed it back, and so on. Gradually, their recordings became a full-length, Human Subjects. Released in limited quantities on cassette, it marks the debut of Forté and Gendron’s duo, Sun Machines.

Originally, Sun Machines wanted Human Subjects to be built entirely on the idea of passing tapes back and forth. But Forté’s musical experiments with his iPad yielded a new approach: Side A for rock songs, and Side B for electronic songs.

“Mono Mind,” track No. 7 on Human Subjects, falls into the electronic category. “I got the drum loop and the synth part from [Forté], and I just put my headphones on and did that tribal thing with the toms and rolling around the kit,” Gendron says.

After several seconds of tumbling, polyrhythmic bliss, synth sounds envelop the listener, closing in ever-tighter circles. “The song itself is about anxiety,” Gendron says. “Just the two words ‘mono’ and ‘mind’ refer to tunnel vision — looped thoughts.”

“Mono Mind” also suits Human Subjects‘ overall themes of space, love and loneliness. The album’s story, Gendron says, concerns a guy who is recruited for a space mission and finds love. “By the time we get to ‘Mono Mind,’ the guy is already in space,” the musician says. But his protagonist’s voyage to the stars is a weighty one: He’s en route to the sun, tasked with sabotaging a mission. It’s enough to trigger the kind of anxiety that courses through “Mono Mind.”

But to Gendron, the song also comments on human nature — in all its foolishness. “It’s a bad idea for us to be traveling in space,” he says. “Humans belong on Earth. Like, what do we really want to know?”