Anenon’s Tongue is a beautiful album. That’s an adjective whose meaning has practically been obliterated by Hallmark prose and hyperbolic idiocy. But occasionally, a work of art digs deep enough to excavate the underlying meaning that existed in antiquity and figures to persist until we’re soil and dust. This is beauty materialized through the abstract articulation of love, loss, fear, addiction, confidence, longing, hope, and sadness distilled into sound. Sound becomes melody, harmony, and rhythm. The medium happens to be music, but it could really be anything. Pure expression. The fourth LP from the musician and composer born Brian Allen Simon was created in just under a month far away from his native Los Angeles near the small town of Palaia in Italy’s Tuscany region—home to some of the history’s finest creators from Dante to the Florentine Renaissance painters, Puccini to Andrea Bocelli. It’s reminiscent of Brian Eno trying to produce an ambient record for Fela Kuti or Mulatu Astatke. Hints of John Cage and Steve Reich suffuse the former UCLA music history student’s deft manipulation of space, time, tension, and mood. It’s a beauty that’s both plaintive and prismatic. A jazz album, an electronic album, an ambient album, a classical album, an agnostic spiritual. It’s Tongue—a self-contained universe, a place where emotional and intellectual articulation coalesce and are physically let go into the world through sound and human communication. A masterwork of ineffable and profound beauty.