Staraya Derevnya’s "Garden Window Escape" feels like stepping through a wobbly portal in your grandmother’s greenhouse - only to find yourself in a shared dream where folk tales tangle with post-punk psychedelia. Recorded between London, Israel, Mexico, and Bulgaria, this London-based collective’s LP unspools seven tracks of restless invention, conjured by an octet of improvisers who treat every toy-like instrument as a doorway to a different corner of the mind.

Gosha Hniu sits at the album’s beating heart, layering field-recorded murmurs, wheel lyre spirals, kazoo processions, and creaking percussive objects into shifting, half-remembered landscapes. His production recalls the shadow-play of early Tangerine Dream sessions, but it’s grounded by the undercurrent of folk ritual, like a distant ritual bell heard through hail.

Maya Pik’s synthesizer lines and flute breaths drift in and out of focus, sometimes framing a simple melody like stained-glass light, other times dissolving into vaporous loops that feel both ancient and futuristic. When she switches to drum machine, the rhythms have the off-kilter precision of a clockmaker’s warped design, pushing the music forward with an almost uneasy propulsion.

Ran Nahmias moves between silent cello, the crystalline hammering of a santur, moody oud drones, and wordless vocal sighs - her instruments carved from old-world traditions yet refracted through a modernist prism. It’s as if she’s channeling the ghosts of desert caravans and medieval court musicians all at once.

Grundik Kasyansky’s feedback synthesizer smears and tears at the edges of each composition, adding a bruised, industrial rasp that keeps you alert to the tension beneath the pastoral veneer. Miguel Pérez’s guitars appear like half-remembered lullabies one moment, and erupt into smeared, celebratory noise the next. And Yoni Silver’s bass clarinet - deep, reedy, and stretched through distortion - grounds the collective’s flights of fancy in a warm, subterranean hum.

Even the track titles seem plucked from an absurdist fable: a “Tight-lipped Thief” creeps along on kazoo and field recordings, while “Cork Flight Operation” hitches a ride on squeaky percussion and drum-machine hiccups, as if attempting to abide by some secret aeronautical manual for the unorthodox aviator. “Virtue of Standing Still” paradoxically pulses with motion, its flute and synth weaving in counterpoint to the lowest electronic hums, capturing the uncanny stillness at the center of a storm.

Lyrically, the album draws on poems by Arthur Molev - fragments of Russian surrealism translated into rhythmic incantations that loop and echo. Occasionally, those murmured lines surface like the faint text on a fading manuscript, reminding us that even in the most kaleidoscopic soundworlds, meaning can be both elusive and irresistible.

Underneath it all, Garden Window Escape is a testament to collective improvisation: seven compositions recorded in a single London session, then spliced with contributions from far-flung locales. The result is neither purely folk nor strictly avant-garde electronica, but a shimmering hybrid - an ouija board of instruments that summons something uncanny, playful, and oddly comforting.

Staraya Derevnya aren’t offering easy answers here. Instead they invite you to roam their sonic greenhouse, lean in close to the strange flora of kazoo and santur, and let those half-glimpsed melodies bloom in your imagination. If the modern world feels too bright, too loud, too certain, these seven tracks might just provide the perfect escape hatch - one that leads not away from reality, but deeper into its hidden corners.