VF releases Michael A. Muller's return to Ojas Music on vinyl

Elyria Sound is the second release from Ojas Music.

Ojas Music, the imprint co-run by Michael A. Muller and Devon Turnbull, has partnered with The Vinyl Factory for a vinyl pressing of its second release.

Elyria Sound is a solo guitar album from Muller, recorded to analogue tape during a winter storm in Brooklyn in January 2026 and available now as a limited edition vinyl pressing of 500 hand-numbered copies.

Muller has spent over two decades working across multiple roles in music — as co-founder of Balmorhea, as a solo artist whose recent catalogue has been released on Deutsche Grammophon, and as a film composer. His collaborations include work with Hania Rani, Alva Noto, Víkingur Ólafsson, The Album Leaf and Douglas McCombs of Tortoise.

The album is built on the same listening-first ethos that shaped Unna, Ojas Music's inaugural release. "It's becoming harder and harder to get people to really listen," Muller has said of the label's intent. "Everyone's busy, everyone's distracted. The idea of going to a record shop, finding something, sitting down and doing nothing but listening — that's rare now."

The album title traces to 2018, when Muller began writing solo music while housesitting for a friend in Elyria Canyon in the East Los Angeles hills. The address became the name of his studio, and when he moved to LA shortly after, it became a way of life for the next six years. Elyria Sound is an intimate homage to his sensorial world of that time: the quality of light through a kitchen window.

To make it, Muller developed entirely new guitar tunings, relearning the instrument's language from scratch. The result moves between lullaby and lament with spare, cyclical compositions where motifs return at different angles and tempos, variations on a central thread.

Elyria Sound's production chain reflects the label's ethos. Analogue recording and mixing were handled by Jonathan Low in Brooklyn, analogue mastering and all-tube lacquer cutting by Frederic Stader in Cologne and the vinyl plated and pressed on the EMI1400 at The Vinyl Factory in Hayes.

A premiere of Elyria Sound will be presented as a listening event via 1/4" master tape on May 9, 2026, at 180 Studios in London, ahead of a fifteen-date European tour.

Order a copy now.

‍

Tracklist:

Side A
Lacuna
Nocturne For Leigh
Blue Hour
Loom
Aubade

Side B
This Is The Water And This Is The Well
Caché
Half-Light
Tasogare
Ohne
Arundel