“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.”