The aural journey proposed by Melbourne-based musician and visual artist Alex Last aka Soda Lite is one of the closest to what was known as "new age music" I ever reviewed. To be honest, I've never been a fan of this kind of music as it's too strictly related to a marketing-driven system of belief, but Soda Lite's sound is well recorded and has a remarkable quality in spite of the typical hissing noise of cassettes. I can't say Alex made a sleep-inducing album due to the short length of each track (not enough time to fall into sleep...); any of them seems to be the aural postcard of some luckily uncontaminated place on this planet. As you can easily guess, the constant element of them is the presence of field recordings - chirping more or less exotic birds, croaking frogs, entrancing water streams and maybe some insects supposedly grabbed during his camping trips with friends and his dog Liffey or the contemplative sessions of frogs, lizards and kingfishers, his main hobby according to the attached biography... no ambitions to become a guru, as far as I know - as well as the typical set for this kind of "environmentalist" stuff (relaxing pad synths, Pan flutes, single hits on xylophones, overstretched guitar drones, oceans of reverb and slightly delayed sounds...), but there's a sense of blissful naivety in his aural postcards (as well as some really weel-assembled track like "Aurai" or "Lagoon" - oh, those lukewarm placental tones sounding like a telepathic chat with a dolphin found inside a Mesmer's pool!) that can let you indulge in some excessively predictable sonic amalgamations.