Nicholas Krgovich and Joseph Shabason’s shared musical journey began in 2020 when, along with Chris Harris, they released Philadelphia, one of that year’s best and most highly acclaimed albums. In the six years since, the pair have joined forces with a series of other notable collaborators, including M. Sage and, most recently, Japanese avant-pop heroes Tenniscoats. Four Days in June, though a Shabason and Krogovich album by name, sees the pair enlist a wide range of musicians, including fiddle and banjo player Sam Amidon, guitarist Thom Gill, bassist/keyboardist Bram Gielen and drummer Phil Melanson. Krgovich sings and writes the lyrics, while Shabason plays synth, piano, sax and flute. The result is an album of subtle, often delicate layers, borrowing…
Category: ambient
The innovations of Berlin’s Basic Channel in the mid-’90s led to a whole new way of thinking about dance music, introducing countless producers to the possibilities of reverb and delay. Producers have been working off the template they set for dub techno ever since. Less often imitated is the duo’s work as Rhythm & Sound, where they slowed their music to reggae tempos and hewed closer to the Jamaican innovations that informed their trippy production tricks. This sound is having a small moment right now. Stuttgart’s Ghost Dubs has made a career of it, both solo and with a fired-up Kevin Richard Martin; Brussels’ Carrier shaped it into cavernous forms on last year’s awesome Rhythm Immortal; all the while, co-originator and close Rhythm & Sound collaborator…
A lot of life can happen when nothing’s going on. As the years tick by, landmarks become less regular. Highs become less vaulted. Lows become less abyssal. There’s a reason that posting to social media is mostly a younger person’s game. It’s not that less becomes less exciting or moving, it’s just less flashy. Most of life tends to happen in those quiet periods, which we far too often write off as boring, which, in turn, makes us feel bad about our lives, as if we’re not living up to the influencers we could be.
On her first album in five years, British composer and pianist Poppy Ackroyd explores those moments that fall between the posts, the phone calls and text messages; they might not even warrant a diary entry, depending on how…
…compiled by Robert Fripp, including Brian Eno, David Sylvian, Andy Summers, The League of Gentlemen and more.
“[Panegyric label head] Declan Colgan told [Fripp’s manager] David Singleton: ‘Robert has more ampersands in his professional life than anyone I know!’ We went through three iterations of this CD – a David version, a Declan version, and then I made my own comments, and we have this CD that you have. Primarily this is stuff that I want to sit down and listen to. How do we begin? How do we get drawn into this? And then in the middle, when everything sags, what do you do there? And then at the end, well, how do you complete and wind this all up in such a way that the beginning and the end have gone full circle? And there you are.”
A lot of people are making music influenced by trip-hop right now, and a lot of it is very good. But it typically skews towards the sultry meeting point of sexual danger and stoned paranoia with the razor-sharp aesthetic edges of the ’90s and ’00s internet. Bristol’s Tara Clerkin Trio are steeped in their hometown’s trip-hop tradition, but their approach is more folk-rock than the voluptuous blues associated with Tricky or Massive Attack. They make music for autumnal scenes with scarves and coffee rather than a time loop where you’re always ashing the same spliff. Car-stereo stuff like Dido and Beth Orton sometimes comes to mind. It’s almost twee.
Somehow, this approach makes their second album, Somewhere Good, sound slipperier and…
The tracks on Along the Low Road, by multi-instrumentalist Gustaf Ljunggren and bassist Skúli Sverrisson, seem like modernized versions of medieval music. Many of the songs have a twang and a snap to the string-plucking that adumbrates the Renaissance and Baroque styles. However, the duo offers a fantastic update. The acoustic atmospheres and the jazzier undertones that filter in and out of the pieces all point to an innovative yet approachable musical perspective.
Nowadays, this style sometimes gets pigeonholed into the neo-folk or dark folk genre. However, these two musicians also wander into classical-crossover terrain and chamber jazz areas. They clearly have a great sophistication and knowledge about music from a plethora of eras…
When Carlos Niño sits behind an arsenal of percussion instruments, he isn’t there to create pockets, lay down grooves, or keep a strict meter; he’s laying out a billowing textural blanket for other instruments to settle upon.
“I’m going to have a lot of bells,” he once told me, “a lot of metals, plants, wood, wind. I’m gonna open it up like it’s a little forest.” If he does create a pulse, it’s reminiscent of the way cicadas’ buzzing can sound like an LFO filter sweep, or how toad calls can sync with firefly illuminations on a warm summer evening. His playing expands and contracts at an intuitive pace, helping guide other players further into the moment and listeners further into themselves.
On a day off from tour in November 2025,…
Jolanda Moletta has been described as a “one-woman electronic choir”, creating wordless compositions or “sonic and visual spells”, as described on her Bandcamp, through extended vocal techniques. On her two previous albums, Night Caves (2025) and Nine Spells (2022), she created gorgeous, cavernous worlds with layers of impeccable singing.
On her third release, Oceanine, she expands her vocal universe through collaboration, with each track featuring a different female vocalist. At the same time, the foundational elements are generated entirely by her own voice.
Moletta’s Bandcamp page describes the record as “representing a musical practice that is distinctly feminist”. The album harkens back…
Gigi Masin‘s form of ambient music has often incorporated rippling textures and forward motion, so it’s not hard to see how his records have become favorites of DJs and sample-flipping producers. Soon after the Talk to the Sea compilation on Music from Memory introduced Masin’s music to new listeners, he made two albums with Tempelhof which delved into downtempo and Balearic house, and later recorded some mellow jazz sessions with Greg Foat.
For his 2026 solo album Movement, he intentionally created ambient music that connects with the body as well as the mind. While some of the album’s tracks, like opener “Bed on Mars,” sound like drifting clouds or a fog rolling in, others are far more rhythmic, utilizing deep house…
U.e.’s Other Girl is a singer-songwriter album that strips away a lot of the singing and even more of the songwriting. With the words buried behind layers of interference, the music itself is left to do most of the emotional legwork, and while the palette is the sort traditionally associated with “intimacy” in Western pop music — acoustic guitars, piano chords you can feel in your chest — there’s no readymade narrative to map onto these 10 songs. You can either let this obscure approach bewilder you or treat it as a blank slate on which you can map your own feelings. From this angle, the spaces between the chords can fill with your own thoughts, and the distance between these recordings and your ears can stand in for the distance from whatever you…
Think about music, all the music that is available to hear, all the music that’s been made, especially in the past 80 years of popular styles. Where does it all go in your mind? How do you get from one thing to another?
These questions matter for this album, because Haruhi Kobayashi started off in the public eye as a J-Pop singer, putting out the 2017 album Inside Out on Sony. To be frank, it’s an undistinguished derivation of American soul and soft rock, the kind of imitation of styles that young musicians work through to find their own voice.
Well, Kobayashi has found that voice, and it’s not just orders of magnitude distant from the earlier album, but a remarkable journey from the universe of pop music into the kind of…
…Music of the Terrazoku: Ethnographic Recordings from an Imagined Future is the brainchild of drummer-composer Will Glaser, who has assembled a wide array of experimental musicians to help him execute his vision. There’s pretty much everything here, from ambience to industrial music, free improv to early 20th-century jazz. The idea is that such musicians have lived through a climactic event that has wiped away all reference points, and are recreating music from scratch, a metaphor for rebuilding a fractured society.
The very first sounds are like a Geiger counter and a human playing on found containers before breaking into an array of junk drums: just what one might expect for the re-origins of music. Isn’t this how our primitive ancestors started?
With Aves de Nahá, Bosque Vacío turn from the fractured wetlands of Mexico City toward the dense cosmologies of the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas. Where 2023’s Cantera Oriente traced the unstable boundaries between quarry, reserve and megapolis — a site where nature exists in continuous dialogue with urbanism — this new work listens further back and further outward.
Asphalt gives way to canopy; infrastructural hum yields to breath, feather, omen.
Developed through an exchange between anthropology, ornithology and the Lacandon community of Nahá, the album situates birds not as documentary field-recording subjects but as sentient presences embedded in ritual, subsistence and prophecy. Crucially, they are…
Interesting monikers are something you are going to run into quite often lately, and vocal artist Leslie Lowder has one for you – idiiom. With her latest album Neural Network, Lowder establishes herself as one of the more intriguing vocalists, starting with Laurie Anderson back in the eighties up to more current vocal experimentalists like Juliana Barwick.
And Lowder picks up a double-edged sword here, as all of the five tracks are improvisations, with Lowder manipulating her vocals with electronics to create a unique effect with each. The double edge here is that such experiments can often be quite risky, with no middle ground, and Lowder doubles the risk here by having no other instrumentation added – they could fail…
Noise can feel like drowning. This is often intentional and a large part of its appeal to the sickos, but even the largest of whales comes up for air every 15 minutes — breaking the surface tension, pupils constricting toward the atmosphere, and taking a bus-sized gulp.
Is there anything that experimental noise can learn from this mammalian constraint?
Max Klebanoff is working on it. For several years, his project Death Kneel has kneaded noise music into a wide range of shapes, from diving directly into the harsh void on 2023’s Dawn Simulation, released via très fashion noise imprint Chondritic Sound, to the cavernous, waterlogged ambiance of 2025’s Ink Wash Apparition. On his new release Remembering Well, he picks up…
“He has an energy to him like he’s floating,” Fratti said about Orcutt when she chucked his self-titled 2017 album, his first solo electric studio jaunt, on her Baker’s Dozen list for the Quietus. She’d stumbled over the record via a blog and immediately set about following the breadcrumb trail, picking through his blues deconstructions, free jazz side-quests and his early, formative work with Adris Hoyos as Harry Pussy, one of the USA’s greatest noise duos. What happened next isn’t completely clear, but Fratti and Orcutt began communicating and, at some point, Orcutt shuttled over a pack of improvised guitar solos that lit the touch paper for the next stage. At home in Mexico City, Fratti (alongside her partner and Titanic cohort I. La Católica) retreated…
Paradessence spotlights the innate surrealism of Visible Cloaks shimmering, digital-powered exotica. Since 2014 the duo, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile, have forged a borderless space where echoes of globally dispersed music converge in a glimmering zone and the periphery between synthetic and otherwise is porous. Their albums bring to mind Yves Tanguy paintings, filled with impressions of familiar forms contained in unusual contours and doused in hyperreal sheen.
Visible Cloaks’ first full length since 2017’s Lex, Paradessence amplifies the portals and colourful intrusions generated by their crossing of streams. Opener ‘Apsis’ begins with slithers of synth that mutate between elegant brush strokes and serrated sequences. ‘Skylight’ begins in…
What would happen if one were to mix LSD with fundamentalist Christianity? Hammock‘s Marc Byrd learned the answer when watching the moonrise and mistaking it for the apocalypse. Looking back, Byrd writes of “letting go of toxic shame and bad religion, while holding onto what is good, beautiful and true.” Rather than lamenting the delayed rapture, he writes, “Seeing and experiencing a moonrise is a miracle in itself.”
The Second Coming Was a Moonrise reimagines Christianity as a religion of seeking and sometimes finding, in which beauty possesses more power than dogma. The fact that Byrd references Philippians 4:8 in his description – and that by adding ten guests, he and Andrew Thompson end up with a group the same size…
On Su Shaw’s self-titled debut as SHHE, the sea seemed to flood into her songwriting unbidden, imagined as it was by the water at her home in Dundee. When Shaw moved on to the ambient suite of DÝRA, set around the fjords in Iceland, she welcomed the water in.
At the same time, Shaw picked up a somewhat nomadic existence as an artist, moving from place to place, capturing field recordings and establishing environmental installations that flowed with the very currents and tides of the water itself, finally ending up in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, where THALASSA took shape.
Its six movements chart an ambient seascape that is heightened and alarmed. Processed voices mimic breathless gasps and sharp intakes,…
For fans of electronic music, 1977 represents a sacred frontier. It was a time when synthesizers were massive, unpredictable walls of cables and knobs, and live performances were high-wire acts executed entirely without a safety net.
Among the most legendary documents of this era is Tangerine Dream’s performance at the Place des Arts in Montreal on April 9, 1977, during their iconic first North American tour. Performed by the definitive “Sonic Trinity”- Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann- this breathtaking two-hour set captures the absolute zenith of the Berlin School of electronic music, serving as the final, radiant hurrah of their classic lineup right before Baumann’s departure.
Originally broadcast by Montreal’s CHOM-FM…