Šimanský Vaľko Podracký pick up where Spacemen 3 left off. The Czech-Slovak trio of experimental musicians apparently share Pete Kember and Jason Pierce’s guiding principle of “taking drugs to make music to take drugs to”. The group’s psychedelia was inherited from the freewheeling 1960s, a decade when Western music – from rock to minimalism – was infused with the meditative transcendence of sustained tones. But the most important question is left unanswered: what drugs to take to make drone music to take drugs to? The album’s title may offer some cues.
Born of spontaneous free improvisation sessions, K-drone is the joint journey of three psychonauts: experimental guitarist Jakub Šimanský, hurdy-gurdy player Michal Vaľko and…
You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please Log In.
In early 2025, experimental trio 
Tiarn is a gorgeous sophomore record by Australian ambient-folk producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist 
Two of Britain’s most exciting folk musicians, both of Hebridean heritage, are behind Donn/Dubh (Black/Brown), an album inspired by Saltair na Rann, a 10th-century Celtic collection of cantos in which sacred history is foretold, and winds are given colours. 
The new full-length from Laurie Sara-Smith and Lifeguard’s Asher Case is an experimental, feverish portrayal of physical repetition built from guitars, drum machines, and woodwinds.
Down in rural Tennessee, place names often arose from the activities that occurred there: Whetstone Mountain, Poorhouse Branch, Tater Hill, Washboard Creek. If this folk etymology holds, it makes you wonder what was going on in Sweet Lips, Finger, and Hookers Bend. Each of these locations lends its name to a song on 
Nashville-based guitarist and composer 
…Made up of teachers, activists and artists, London’s 
Mikey Powers has a folk voice 200 years out of time. Not the cute kind you get from bands who bought a banjo and a flannel shirt and called it Appalachia, but the authentic kind, where you can’t tell if the guy singing is having a religious experience or a stroke, due to the song’s conviction. With a full entourage, Powers leads 
Hazy and out of focus, not as in a dream, but as in awakening from short, uneasy sleep. Uneasy because it never became a full separation from the world, instead letting all of its invisible threads pass through, the mind yet another cat’s cradle – a spider’s web, leaf veins spreading fractally, voices intersecting, branching thunder, constellations in the night sky changing over millions of years. Here in the Valley, with its blurred cover art, its Grouper-like soft and processed vocals, and its echoing folk instrumentation, nurtures that disorientation, experienced as a light porosity; its murmurs become you, its murmurs become the world.
The lines have been blurred everywhere in music, so why not in what goes by the name of field recordings? What once was solely the concept of actually going outside and recording sounds you hear and then (but not necessarily) combining them with music itself, has become something a bit different.
Stash, the second album from 
This Is My Blood finds 
There is an impressively austere quality to 
…
While their instrumentation and aesthetic may evoke parts of Appalachia and the rural South, North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband (MTS) are anything but a traditional folk group. Theirs is a different kind of rootedness, one indebted to the landscape they call home, but as attuned to its ecology and environmental contours as to its social history. Since making their label debut on Thrill Jockey in 2024, the duo of Courtney Werner (fiddle) and Evan Morgan (guitar/organ) has expanded to a trio, welcoming banjoist/bassist Mike DeVito into the band. There are no vocals, yet they manage to convey complex emotions through their strange, discordant music.