This is the first Spring in the new house, the first time we see how life around it actually looks. In the crystal skies we’ve had the last few days with warm Sun transforming the UK into its livelier April throes, the three trees out the front of my window have started to materialise. The white winter camellia continues its cycle of heavy petal shedding, meanwhile its pink neighbour has just begun to turn fully grown from its laden buds. Then next to the front door the cherry blossom has already powered through much of its lifecycle, cracking rapidly into bloom before splintering away in delicate pink shards.

A dusting of shed petals sprinkles the concrete, pooling up into the relative quiet confines of the porch. I notice the poetical ephemerality of the cherry blossoms every year and can’t help but remark on them: they just reflect so perfectly the fragile instantaneity of beauty, its brevity, its dissolution.

None of this floral reflection really has anything to do with Jeff McIlwain’s 21 year old record, Serial Hodgepodge, directly, a record I first heard a little over 13 years ago. And although I’ve covered a number of Lusine’s albums in this time (long time readers will know of the critical importance of his work to me personally), SH hasn’t been among them. Its own beauty however certainly does not feel ephemeral: indeed, recent re-listening has made me appreciate it only more as time’s gone by, and although it perhaps isn’t exactly a quintessential Spring album, its tone feels apt all the same.

Sometimes its the quiescent moments like “Still Frame” with its whisper soft record crackle tickling by in the backfield as the glassy synthetics arpeggiate over its surface like contrails splitting a twilight sky. Or in the rotating cyclicities of early “Drip” whose fragmentary piano flickers and stumbles over itself in the radiant facets of thousands of petalled bushes rustling in Spring wind and April showers.

Maybe its the lazy evocations of complacent “Auto Pilot” dribbling out its Ambient Techno surf, automatic reflexes in urbanity that manifest time and again at the flick of the switch or the fall of the Sun. The sound of the pump and drain of xylem and phloem moving to the vagaries of our orbit. Indeed, it finds something of a mirror for itself in interior highlight balearic “Everything Under The Sun”. It moves in decisive but care-free tidal washes of Microhouse and Techno texture, cultivating an easygoing air recently rediscovered in the defrosting daylight, a few delicate female coos and hums imparting a sort of feminine aura to divagate from the hard masculine punishment of Winter.

Other times its the staccato 2-Step adjacent sophomore “Slur”, all noir excitations and quick tics as its nervous energy jitters its way into life and freedom. Which exists somewhat as an outsider here actually, perhaps with the exception of penultimate favourite “Figment” with its bouncy yet cool beats and electronic strobing injections hanging in space like overhead power lines, slicing starkly and buzzing gently in the humid air.

There’s something to be said about this time of year when new life has the propensity to breathe, well, life back into things, encourage not just the exploration of the unheard but rediscover the qualities of the known as well. Despite my long running fascination with the impermanence of the beautiful, there’s certainly lots of places in life where this doesn’t seem to be the case.