Hot Liquor by Sakura Murakami

Now based in the hills of Southern Spain, the enigmatic project from Sakura Murakami was born during the height of the summer in 2020. Multi-instrumentalist Sakura Marukami draws on a multitude of influences from across the world, to create a tropical realm of sweltering, and almost meditative psychedelia for the mind, body and soul.

Debut single Cast Away’ itself is a heady vitamin-D inducing delight of a cocktail, delving into the exotic sounds of eastern psychedelic-funk, along with western surf-rock. The drooling sun-drenched balmy beach ballad - akin to modern-contemporaries Khurangbin, Tommy Guerrero and Yìn Yìn, is soothing instrumental groove-laden goodness to get lost to during the ice-cream melting summer days and nights. A wonderfully glorious heatwave anthem.

“All the tracks are felt out on the spot, in a sort of duel writing and recording process that runs side by side in the same moment until the song is finished. Each layer is being jammed out and recorded - then edited on the fly. The title of ‘Cast Away’ in this instance reflects the sound of the track as imagined by me. Like mini soundtracks almost”