A decade ago, you could send away for masterpiece CD-Rs from labels that existed only as P.O. boxes in Brooklyn, Asheville, South Bend, Berkeley, Chicago, etc. This was a time when a person and a guitar and tape recorder could, and often did, produce music of otherworldly power, particularly when placed for an amount of time in a remote location. A woman and a flute and a mountaintop cabin and a staggering supply of Diet Mountain Dew = a pretty EP of rambling pastoral jams. A man and a sleeping bag and a mandolin and a mini-disc player/recorder and a couple bags of Trader Joe’s pork jerky = a legend is born. This was a rich era for music, and there were so many fly-by-night (in a good way) labels, with gnomic, never-updated websites, and byzantine ordering procedures, that there was always something new to be discovered, some puzzle to solve, some new shipping rate to calculate. Rafi Bookstaber’s Late Summer is exactly all that: it’s pretty, it’s contemplative, it’s full-on slow-flowing riparian jams, it’s freaky, it’s muted, it’s latent, it’s the random disc you take a chance on and end up loving for a long, long time.[BUY Late Summer]