Tara Clerkin Trio are a Bristol-based group formed by musicians Pat Benjamin, Sunny Joe Paradisos, and Tara Clerkin. Their lush music drips with brightness, texture, and strangeness. Although borrowing from trip hop, jazz, electronica, and psychedelic rock, Tara Clerkin Trio defy genres. What they play is baroque in its intricacy, tonality, and detail, but there is nothing “ornate” nor conventional in what they do: their songs breathe life and warmth into their surroundings. Their recent five-track EP, On The Turning Ground (2023) on label World of Echo, is a testament to the trio’s depth of textural and compositional understanding. Their song “World in Delay” is a downtempo avant-pop masterwork. Elsewhere on the EP, “The Turning Ground” offers a contemporary kraut-tinged take on the poppy, break-driven alternative rock sounds of decades past. “Once Around,” which closes out the EP, is an ambient wonderland of fantastical visuality and timbre – this feeling of being transported to some fantasy realm is so strong in their music that you may wake from listening to it wondering whether it was all a dream.