There’s a particular magic in the way Gonçalo F. Cardoso keeps turning the humble act of listening into a passport. With "Impressões de Várias Ilhas", the Discrepant mastermind continues his sonic travelogue into island life, after previous detours to Unguja and Borneo. This time, his ears, and microphones roam Macaronesia - those scattered archipelagos of the Azores, Cape Verde, and the Canaries, places that seem to exist halfway between postcards and geological fables.

But if you expect lush sound panoramas ready for a National Geographic special, think again. Cardoso doesn’t make sonic tourism; he makes sonic hauntings. His “impressions” are less about documenting reality than about filtering it through memory, dreams, and a certain sly mischief. A frog chorus in Santo Antão becomes musique concrète in disguise ("Rãs em Xoxo"), while the hiss of waves in "Bufadeiros de São Vicente" carries the weirdly soothing irregularity of something alive and disinterested in human schedules. It’s as if the sea is saying: “You may record me, but you’ll never own me”.

Pieces like "La Cueva Scuba Livre" dive beneath the surface (literally), surrounding us with subaquatic pads and reverberant emptiness, a scuba-dream bordering on cosmic. Others, like "Noite em Rabo de Peixe", evoke night’s low-level anxieties: detuned chords scraping in the dark, the sound of shadows leaning too close. Then there’s the culinary oddity of "Cozido na Caldeira Velha", a field-recorded memory of food bubbling away in volcanic steam, but rendered like a Boards of Canada miniature that slipped into a cooking pot. You can almost smell the sulphur in your headphones.

What makes the record compelling is Cardoso’s refusal to choose between the real and the unreal. His recordings are at once intimate and estranged: the natural sounds are so specific they feel tactile, but the processing and juxtaposition push them into surreal territory. Take "Salinas de Pedra Lume" - a piece that shuffles between crackling ambience, ghostly synths, and what could be flutes or wolves or both. It plays like a saltpan remembering its past lives, or perhaps foretelling yours.

Cardoso’s role here is less composer than medium, a guide who knows how to stand back and let places whisper through him. The album’s diary-like form, with its short sketches and sudden shifts, resists any neat narrative. It mirrors island life itself: fragmented, cyclical, full of small details that refuse to coalesce into a single picture. And yet, listening across its 14 vignettes, you do feel a unity - an archipelago of impressions that together form a map of the in-between: between land and sea, between memory and invention, between postcard prettiness and something stranger, more enduring.

At its core, "Impressões de Várias Ilhas" is a reminder that islands are not isolated dots on a map but dense nodes of memory, myth, and sound. Cardoso approaches them not as a tourist, but as a conspirator with their echoes. The result is an album that is playful, uncanny, and quietly profound - an archipelago of listening exercises that invites us to hear not just the islands, but the way they continue to reverberate in us long after the waves recede.