Will Yates, aka memotone, is a sonic gardener. Over the years, he has planted seeds in multiple genres, allowing them to twist, hybridize, and bloom into strange, otherworldly forms. "Pruning", his debut on Discrepant, is both a selection process and an act of cultivation - a careful trimming of excess, revealing the gnarled beauty underneath.

This is not a discard pile of leftovers, nor a random assemblage of sketches. It’s an album that feels cohesive despite its temporal evasions, a map of shifting sonic landscapes where Fourth World textures, cybernetic exotica, and ghostly jazz-fusion melt together into something both familiar and unsettling.

The journey begins in a foggy pre-dawn mist. "Moss Zone" is a brief but telling introduction - a synth-washed murmur, a warm but queasy welcome, setting the stage for the sci-fi jungle hallucinations of "Weird Figures". This track moves like foliage in the wind, its small percussive chimes and rainforest pads rising, morphing, whispering strange incantations. It’s not quite organic, not quite mechanical - it’s the sound of something half-remembered, half-invented.

Then, suddenly, we’re riding air currents. "Riders" drifts into early-Warp-meets-Jon Hassell territory, where a synth-flute carries us into a dreamstate. There’s an unease here, as though the horizon is shimmering just a little too much, as if time itself has been slightly detuned. "Wisdom [MOTHER]" picks up that same motif but disrupts it, scrambles it, folds it into itself - a moment of unstable reflection before the next transformation.

"Not What I Thought" is where things start to get strange, its lo-fi percussion and skewed tropical guitar conjuring an image of a beach scene viewed through broken binoculars. Then comes "Jim Starling and the Inverse Church", a jazz-fusion fever dream, where Mouse on Mars’ 'Autoditacker' collides with Smalltown Supersound in some parallel dimension. It’s playful yet uncanny - like watching a puppet show where the puppets suddenly become self-aware.

Then, as if realizing we’ve been wandering too long, the album shifts. "Beach Scene" does exactly what it says on the tin, painting a sunset with languid synth washes and lazy percussion. But before we settle too deeply into warmth, "Come In [Don’t Mind the Ghost]" reminds us that ghosts have been here all along, its spectral tones flickering like the last light in an abandoned building.

Memotone is not interested in making one kind of music - his work has always existed in the cracks between genres, pulling from avant-jazz, abstract electronics, surreal ambience, and post-club experimentation. But "Pruning" is more than just a collection of ideas - it’s a statement about process, about refinement, about letting some branches die so that others may flourish.

It’s the sound of a landscape in transition, of a place where nothing stays quite still, where melodies appear, dissolve, and reassemble into new forms.

And yet, despite the careful sculpting, there’s still wildness here - a sense that at any moment, the vines might start growing in unpredictable directions.

Score: 8/10 - Best listened to while watching plants grow in slow motion.