Beauty and the East is all about bringing seemingly disparate cultures together through sound. Bionic, vintage drum machine beats are backed up by organic, really vintage far-east wooden percussion. You’ll hear classic Moog-like monophonic synth strings harmonizing with the highly polyphonic 21-string sitar. Beauty and the East is what it sounds like if you were to just drop a whole borough of Jaipur into the heart of Detroit, or if you put the Higashiyama District somewhere on the northside of downtown Atlanta. Your feet will want to strut; your head will want to get lost in faraway lands... and your hips? Well, those are none of our business.

Heartsick Vol. 1 gets you 700+ megabytes (uncompressed) of big ballads backed by boom-bap bombast, with a special focus on mid-tempo yearning and soaringly dreamy arpeggios. Heartsick’s yin-yang push-pull between major and minor tonalities is the secret to its bittersweet, mixed-emotion atmosphere, and its contemporary R&B vibe will lift you up into elation just to gently lay you down again. (Sound familiar? Well, happy Valentine’s Day.) Oh, and it turns out that the best way to pull one’s heartstrings is with, well... strings. And you’ll get a lot of both analog- and synthesized-sounding string loops here. Plus pianos and harps and 808s, ya big softie.