It’s good to hear a lot of Southern California’s young music makers challenging the local scene that many of them are inextricably linked to, and doing so to a point where we music critics may have to ditch any comparisons to their hometown peers altogether. Laguna Beach-born Nicholas Morera (a.k.a. a. d. l. r.) eschews all ‘beat scene’ trademarks for a unique sound driven by atmosphere, experimentation, and, seemingly, randomness. His “Wisp” track, taken from the forthcoming Foam on the Waves of Space-Time… album (coming January 11 on Non Projects), sounds like Morera snagging a potpourri of disparate audio clips and letting them run wild through a gauntlet of effects and analog processing. The song is certainly ambient and gelatinous in its structure, but here and there, a. d. l. r. introduces a jarring smash of rhythmic sounds—effectively giving the composition something to anchor its weightless husk to.

Wisp