Experiencing Slow Magic is like entering into another dimension. Here are songs that stare at the fire, linger in rainbows, fall in slow motion like comets. Their sounds summon up Bobbie Gentry’s country heat, Scott Walker’s gutsy spirit and Linda Perhacs’ uncanny beauty. Hazy woodwind, warm guitars and spacey electronics, fed into malfunctioning tape machines, weave together and glimmer. As they descend into layers of reverb, we're pulled into the whirlpool with them.

The lyrics of Jenny Lindfors, who records as Sailing Stones, also remind me of when time felt both stretched and condensed, fractured and endless, in those strange, distant years when my life had recently created new life. In recent years, there have been many other albums about matrescence – the physical, psychological and emotional transition a woman goes through when becoming a mother – but don’t dismiss this as a trend. This is more a communal recognition – at long last – of an experience that affects more than half of human beings in so many mercurial, mind-bending ways.

Lindfors had written music for years, but matrescence made her want to write about the way her emotions now crested and splintered, bubbled and softened, rallied then railed. “I remember telling my partner, I really want to write about this, but I'm too knackered, too sleep deprived.” She laughs. “I didn't know who I was anymore. But I wanted there to be a record that spoke to my joy and my pain and my thin-skinnedness like Joni Mitchell’s Blue spoke to female vulnerability around heartbreak. Not that I could write another Blue, but I knew I had to navigate the idea of writing about motherhood, especially as there's a lot of shame tied around it.”

On these twelve psychedelic, poetic, panoramic songs, Lindfors ascribes each song to a different colour - feeding in her experiences of joy, dissociation, loneliness, rapture, desire and desperation. She produced these songs herself, set against haunting arrangements by her partner, composer Dan Moore. Some songs were recorded at home, and others were given lush overdubs in a chapel-turned-studio in rural West Wales. 

She wanted their soundworld to echo her expansive, multi-faceted inner world, and to have an uncanny undercurrent of darkness. David Axelrod, The Electric Prunes and Jefferson Airplane were among her textural references. "I personally found the whole experience of early motherhood to be very psychedelic," she smiles.

This year, her gorgeous songs will be travelling out into the world, providing twelve kaleidoscopic windows into recognisable worlds. They take me to a relationship that began long ago, but my matrescence still stretches and pulses, shaping so much of who I am, so much of what I do. The slow magic of its wooziest moments still sings deeply in my gut, in my bones, soul – and Lindfors knows, just like me, that they always will.

Jude Rogers