If postmodernism ever had a family reunion, "Rain Flowers" would be the enigmatic great-uncle who shows up with a weather-beaten accordion, a bag of old photographs, and three other people sharing his coat.

Gordon H. Whitlow - of Biota and Mnemonists legend - has reanimated Sorry For Laughing not as a solo pseudonym but as a kind of avant-garde roundtable séance. This time, the ghosts come bearing string sections, half-sung lullabies, processed folk memories, and dreams of agrarian hallucination. "Rain Flowers" is an album made not so much for listening as for inhabiting. Enter carefully: the floors creak, the wallpaper breathes, and someone is definitely reciting poetry to a dog in the attic.

Across two discs, "Rain Flowers" plays like a wandering ethnomusicological field recording compiled by telepaths. There are old songs, yes - fragmented folk traditions viewed through cracked stained glass - but there are also original compositions that behave like they were grown, not written. The presence of Edward Ka-Spel (The Legendary Pink Dots) and Martyn Bates (Eyeless in Gaza) adds an oracular sheen to the proceedings. Ka-Spel’s spoken incantations drift like the mutterings of a prophetic librarian; Bates, meanwhile, brings his unmistakable mixture of devotion and doubt to lullabies and laments alike.

Take "Johnny’s Gone to Hilo": not the sailor’s ditty your granddad remembers, but a reverb-laced resurrection in which the ocean is more psychological than geographical. Or "Christ Child Lullaby", where the sacred is rendered fragile, sung from beneath a pile of detuned harmoniums and dusk.

There are moments of cracked beauty ("The Hunter", "I Go Bound") and moments that seem to arise purely out of tape hiss and memory fog ("Processional", "Will Be"). Violinist Patrick Q Wright (formerly of Tuxedomoon), the spectral guitar stylings of Janet Feder, and Whitlow’s arcane organ work give the album a slightly ecclesiastical air - if your church was designed by Kurt Schwitters and haunted by John Cage.

But don’t mistake "Rain Flowers" for preciousness. There’s play here, too. This isn't the kind of seriousness that needs to explain itself; it's the sort that knows how to let contradiction bloom. The album’s name itself - "Rain Flowers" - evokes something impossible yet tenderly natural, like a garden grown under bad weather or a memory you never had.

And that's perhaps the album’s most poetic gift: its embrace of the liminal, the marginal, the in-between. These pieces operate in the cracks between genres, between tradition and experiment, memory and invention. You won’t find a clean melodic narrative or anything resembling a hit single here - but what you will find is a complex emotional topography, a field of sonic ruins that reveals, for those willing to linger, a kind of spiritual archaeology.

By the end of the journey, you may not be able to recall the precise instrumentation of any given track - but you'll remember how the whole thing felt, like waking from a dream where a baroque puppet troupe performed a Beckett play in an abandoned greenhouse.

"Rain Flowers" is a love letter to imperfection, to collage, to listening with your whole nervous system. It’s a record that rewards patience and curiosity, a kind of strange pastoral mass for our scattered, overwhelmed moment.
So, sit in the garden. Let it rain. And listen.