Alex Albrecht writes 'Someday, Sara' out of field recordings

Vanessa Nguyen · 20 February 2025

The title track opens Someday, Sara on a vocal hook that doesn't resolve into one, sitting over a low bed of something that sounds recorded rather than programmed. It's the track Alex Albrecht says means the most to him, and it's easy to hear why. He's been making records for over a decade, on his own label, away from anywhere Anjunadeep's audience was looking. This is his first outing on the label, and it's built the way he builds everything. Start with a place. Record it. Write the track around whatever's on the tape.

What's underneath it is the more interesting move. It isn't a straight 2-5-1 walking toward a landing point. The chords sit and turn instead, texture stacked on texture, until the harmony is what you're following, not the frame around a vocal. It's more than the sum of its parts, and it's an adventurous signing for a label whose catalogue usually resolves exactly where you'd expect it to.

That's not incidental. "The record draws on my habit of recording the environments around me," Albrecht has said of it. The habit shows up in the arrangement, not in any obvious sample. Anjunadeep's own profile of him traces pieces of it to a trip through Sri Lanka and to Picnic at Hanging Rock, the 1975 film he credits with the record's eerie edge. Cloud Perch took several passes before the balance was right, he's said.

Perrins Creek follows and does the same trick a register lower, patient in a way most Anjunadeep openers don't get the chance to be. Count Me In and It's Only a Bloody Dream read thinnest on their own. Both sit under four minutes. Both lean harder on mood than on melody.

Here's the tell. Every one of the five songs on Someday, Sara gets two versions. Five originals, all under four minutes. Five extended mixes, running six to seven and a half. That isn't streaming-algorithm padding. It's the same five ideas, published twice — once for the drive home, once for the booth. Whether the longer version earns its length is the actual test of a record built this way, and it does. Perrins Creek (Extended) runs to 7:30 and doesn't rush toward a peak. It wasn't built for one. It was built for a room that's already there. Count Me In and It's Only a Bloody Dream come back at 6:08 and 7:03 with enough room to let the field-recorded textures that read as decoration the first time through actually do something.

Analogue Attic, the label Albrecht co-runs out of Melbourne, is where he's spent most of his career. That explains why this doesn't sound like a producer chasing Anjunadeep's usual shape. He plays piano. He leans on jazz and ambient records more than on dance ones, and it shows in how little the harmony here is built to serve a drop. Follow him on Instagram and that's what's posted. Field-recording clips, not studio flexes.

It won't work everywhere, and it isn't trying to. This is a headphones-and-3am record before it's a peak-time one. Five tracks that ask you to sit with something like a train platform's worth of ambience before the beat does anything at all. Play the extended mixes back to back at a warmer point in a longer set and they open up. Play the originals in the car on the way there. They're as much the point.

Someday, Sara is a record built from tape rather than presets, on a label that trusted a producer enough to release the same five ideas twice instead of editing them down to one.