Daniel Lentz’s "Lips" is the kind of album that sneaks up on you, wrapping itself around your senses like the lingering fog over a California coastline. It’s a compilation of works from 1965 to 1989, an era when Lentz was absorbing the sights, sounds, and cultures of California, much like a sponge left too long in the ocean. The results are a collection of pieces that simultaneously disorient and captivate, pushing the boundaries of what music can be—often frustratingly so, but always with purpose.

Right from the opening track, “North American Eclipse”, it’s clear that Lentz isn’t interested in holding your hand through this experience. This 20-minute epic, recorded in a Stockholm church of all places, draws from the ritual dances of the Seneca people, using vocal loops, bone rasps, and small bells to create a soundscape that feels like a disintegrating echo of a long-lost culture. Lentz’s fascination with fragmented phonemes takes center stage here, each syllable hanging in the air like a question mark, demanding to be answered but never quite resolving. The effect is both haunting and disorienting, like watching a solar eclipse through the eyes of someone who’s never seen the sun.

“Song(s) of the Sirens”, composed in 1973, is perhaps the most emblematic of Lentz’s style during this period. The piece captures the essence of his California years — looped vocals, broken texts, and a harmonic language that flirts with both the sensual and the surreal. Lentz sets fragments of Homer’s tale of Odysseus and the Sirens to music that feels as if it’s been plucked from the breeze off the Pacific. There’s a dreamy quality here, but it’s not the kind of dream you want to wake up from; rather, it’s one where you’re content to float along, letting the music’s layers wash over you like gentle waves. The clarinet melody that emerges toward the end ties everything together in a way that’s almost too neat for Lentz—but then again, maybe that’s the point. In Lentz’s world, even chaos has its own kind of order.

The real emotional gut punch comes with “Requiem, In Memoriam Wolfgang Stoerchle – Songs in a Medieval Manner”. This isn’t just a piece of music; it’s a eulogy for a friend, an exploration of grief wrapped in the sounds of wine glasses, kalimbas, and harps. Lentz eschews his usual loops here, opting instead for a more straightforward (for him) vocal arrangement that allows the personal nature of the tribute to shine through. It’s a deeply moving piece, one that highlights Lentz’s ability to channel raw emotion into something ethereal and otherworldly. The use of Latin texts from the Requiem Mass only adds to the sense of timelessness, as if Lentz is reaching back through history to find comfort in the rituals of the past.

Then there’s “Talk Radio”, a piece that feels as much a product of its time as it does a reflection of Lentz’s environment. Composed in 1989, near the end of Lentz’s Californian period, this track is a chaotic collage of the sounds of Los Angeles—AM radio chatter, freeway noise, and snippets of early music all thrown into the mix like ingredients in a particularly avant-garde stew. It’s a piece that captures the frenetic energy of LA’s highways, the kind of thing you’d expect to hear while stuck in traffic, scrolling through radio stations as the city’s smog settles in around you. There’s a certain brilliance to this chaos, a reflection of Lentz’s ability to find beauty in the most unlikely places.

But if "Lips" has a centerpiece, it’s “Uitoto”, a sprawling 25-minute piece inspired by the creation story of the Uitoto people of Colombia and Peru. This is Lentz at his most expansive, using layers of piano arpeggios to create a soundscape that’s as vast and unfathomable as the Pacific Ocean itself. The gradual shift in harmony, combined with the hypnotic repetition of the loops, gives the piece a sense of inevitability, as if the music is slowly drawing you back to some primordial state. The voice that enters halfway through is like a guide through this soundscape, reciting the creation story before dissolving into the very fabric of the music. It’s a stunning piece, one that encapsulates Lentz’s ability to blend the ancient with the modern, the concrete with the abstract.

But of course, "Lips" wouldn’t be complete without the oddball outlier that is “Fünke”. This 1965 piece, composed before Lentz’s Californian days, is a strange beast — part bebop, part serialism, with a dash of Stockhausen thrown in for good measure. It’s an early example of Lentz’s obsession with “music as becoming”, a piece that only reveals its true nature with its final note. In the context of the rest of the album, it feels like a glimpse into the mad scientist’s laboratory before he found his true calling. It’s a piece that stands apart from the rest of "Lips", yet somehow, it fits—a reminder that even in the most experimental of artists, certain tendencies are always there from the start.

In the end, "Lips" is an album that demands to be experienced rather than simply listened to. It’s a journey through Daniel Lentz’s world, one that’s as much about the people and landscapes of California as it is about the music itself. It’s not an easy journey — there are moments of disorientation, confusion, and even frustration — but for those willing to take the plunge, it’s one that’s richly rewarding. "Lips" is music in a state of becoming, constantly shifting and evolving, much like the landscape that inspired it. And in that sense, it’s a perfect encapsulation of Lentz’s artistic vision—chaotic, beautiful, and utterly unique.