To truly listen is not a passive gesture but a radical, embodied act of attention. Christina Vantzou’s The Reintegration of the Ear offers a slower presence: one rooted in care, intimacy, and reflection. Composed by the Greek-American composer between 2023 and 2025 after being commissioned by INA GRM as a multi-channel acousmatic work, The Reintegration of the Ear unfolds as a durational electroacoustic suite, meticulously arranged by Vantzou and performed with Irene Kurka (voice), John Also Bennett (flutes, synthesizers), Roman Hiele (double bass), and Oliver Coates (cello).
…Their play is fluid and instinctive, requiring each performer to listen to each other for small cues and inspired turns. Glissandos rise as waves crash against shores; the tides reflect…
Category: ambient
On her latest album, Delphine Dora is concerned with temporality, its pace and pressures it produces. L’ineluctable pulsation du temps finds the French pianist, composer and improviser summoning a gentle collection of piano cycles with drone undertows. The record took shape during a time of intense touring, while Dora was simultaneously busy engaging with writings on acceleration and alienation by Hartmut Rosa, a “sociologist of speed”.
According to Rosa, capitalist societies are programmed for constant economic growth, which forces us into a rat race, approaching the world instrumentally and as a competition. It may sound too esoteric for a German sociologist, but Rosa proposes a different mode of…
Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin are kindred spirits, with their musical inclinations leaning towards improvisation, experimentation, and the testing of the limits of musical forms.
Branciforte, based in New York, constructs and produces process-based music – often implementing electronic keyboards – through his prolific label greyfade. Dumoulin, from Belgium, is recognized for his role in redefining the Fender Rhodes electric piano as a 21st-century instrument through extensive electronic manipulation. A chance meeting more than a decade ago led to the two of them recording what would become ITERAE, a record that brings together their passion for imbuing the Rhodes with electronics and processing.
Browse the live listings in Tokyo long enough and you’ll inevitably stumble across a party themed around modular synthesizers. Whether it’s an annual event at a multi-level nightclub (Festival Of Modular) or an intimate set at a cozy neighborhood venue (Modular Wednesday at Shibuya Otto), the itinerary remains the same-artists plugging away in the moment, tinkering ad hoc for a live audience.
Ephemeral & Fleeting: Modular Music of Japan celebrates the transient nature of the country’s contemporary modular scene. Curated by accomplished modular artist Yumi Iwaki, these 10 songs are a chronicle of the diverse sonic approaches taken by synthesizer aficionados, and the creative rewards that await those steadfast enough to master…
There are so many ways that musicians can currently cooperate, without necessarily having to be physically together in the same studio, room, basement or whatever, and we got a clear example here with Developments, the album that is, well, developed by Six Missing & Patrik Berg Almkvisth.
Behind the Six Missing moniker is Austin, Texas-based ambient composer and sound designer TJ Dumser, while Almkvisth is a musician/pianist and actor from Stockholm. To create this seven-part set of ambient movements, Almkvisth kept sending improvised solo piano pieces in their raw form to Dumser. Then, as their PR notes, Six Missing then expanded each one into a fully realised scene, cycling them through tape machines, routing them into modular systems, and…
While it sounds like it might be the work of some mysterious intergalactic orchestra, Unbalance is the work of two musicians performing with little to no advance direction. Brazilian experimental guitarist and composer Carlos Ferreira and Korean performer and composer Dasom Baek combined their adept skills in ambient/drone, avant-garde, musique concrète, and free improvisation to create an album of four pieces entirely through uninterrupted improvisational flow.
…In addition to the electric guitar, Ferreira uses live electronics, working with an open-source software program called ppooll, which enables audio signal processing, performance, and routing. Baek, meanwhile, performs on traditional Korean wind instruments – jungju, daegum,…
Fans of the darker side of modern musical forms, particularly Swans, have Jarboe somewhere in their minds and surely in their music collections. As a solo artist, Jarboe has made a series of career-defining recordings, 15 in all, before Sightings, her latest. Yet, it took her some eight years between The Cut of the Warrior (2018) and her latest offering, so what is there to expect?
Well, the musical direction is the one Jarboe followed from the beginning of her career, and in that respect, there’s nothing new to report. Yet, what did change is that the quality of her songwriting and performance has grown for the better as time passes. There is a sort of assurance that comes along with experience that exudes here, with practically no lapses in…
Gamelan has long been a fascination for the headier end of the electronic world, whether it’s Plaid asking a 26-person Balinese ensemble to open for them at Le Poisson Rouge, Aphex Twin emulating the genre in his more acoustic experiments, or Björk using it as a template to create her own customized instruments. The two forms make a surprisingly logical pair: Both dance music and the ancient Indonesian style are based around repetition, exploring the gradually evolving frictions in rhythm and melody that can suck the listener into a state of hypnosis. It’s not that it’s a brand new concept for the Russian producer Hoavi to incorporate gamelan into his music, as he does on his latest album; rather, it’s the way he subsumes the style into his very logic that feels…
Ambient techno comes in two forms. The first features steady, propulsive kick drums and mechanical disco hi-hats that are slathered in surface noise and field recordings. The second leans into the ambient, sounding more like one of those Environments CDs you’d listen to at a kiosk if you’re old enough to remember when malls existed; the sound of crashing waves or hissing cicadas occasionally interrupted by the steady thumpthumpthump heartbeat of a subtle beat. The Setting Sun, initially released in 2009 as the first record from Stephen Hitchell’s Variant project, goes even harder into the ambient, with nary a beat to be heard for almost two-thirds of its runtime. It’s a hypnotic, deeply immersive listen, meant mainly for opening third eyes and inner…
Music has long served as a space where emotions can be expressed and explored without the pressure of resolution.
For listeners and composers alike, it offers a rare place to contend with grief, anxiety, or despair without requiring those feelings to go anywhere or even mean anything in particular.
Meadowsweet (redux) is a case in point – a 20th anniversary remaster and rerelease of Yann Novak’s 2006 album Meadowsweet. A tribute to a family member who had just passed, the album represents both Novak’s struggle with the silence that rushes in when someone is gone, and how he chose to live in that emptiness rather than flee it.
Meadowsweet was recorded in a single take, glitches and all, as a musical representation…
In the heart of Tunisia lies a giant salt lake called Chott El Djerid, or “Lagoon of the Land of Palms”. Measuring 160 miles across, the lake has been the subject of numerous works of art, most famously Star Wars, where it was used as a filming location in A New Hope.
Although Chott El Djerid is crossable by foot or car in the summer, when the lake is dry, this is generally inadvisable — the salt crust on the surface is often thin and unstable. What appears as a desert can quickly turn into a drowning pool.
It’s against this backdrop that Chott arrives, the second full-length album from Tunisian producer Taroug, out via Denovali Records. Everything about this LP is echoey and huge, from its searing string arrangements to its down-swooping…
This rather beautiful, unhurried recording is the work of guitarist and composer Chaz Prymek (aka Lake Mary) and musician and intermedia artist Matthew Sage, who also works with Chaz on their Fuubutsushi project with Patrick Shiroishi and Chris Jussell. Although the jazz stylings of Fuutbutsushi are absent here, the lightness of touch and delicacy of playing is present across the five songs.
Shelter began life back in 2022, as both Chaz and Matthew settled back into the rural mountainous landscapes of Utah and Colorado, where each resides. The skeletons of these songs are the live improvisations played by Chaz and Matthew in the pole barn studio Matthew set up, with Chaz on electric guitar and Matthew on piano. Over time, the duo very delicately adorned…
Since she started making music with a Buchla synthesizer in 1968 — an obsession that landed her a job actually manufacturing the machines, soldering iron in hand, until she saved up enough money to buy her own — Suzanne Ciani has embodied electronic music’s spirit of limitless possibility. Instead of imitating other instruments and conforming to conventional musical ideas, Buchla (and Ciani) set out to create a paradigm based on harnessing the flow of electricity itself. Ciani’s method with the Buchla is a way of taming electrical currents and shaping them into pathways, rather than composing music traditionally. She would later become known as a prominent new-age artist and a composer of commercial music for brands like Coca-Cola, but in…
Inspired by the writings of Mark Fisher, Present Tense is about “mourning an imagined future.” xor (Asheville, North Carolina’s Matthew Boman) cites “old space age photos” as a prime example, lamenting that “there used to be so much optimism about what humans were going to achieve.” The feeling is common, as a seemingly unending barrage of bad news has caused a worldwide malaise. And yet, Boman ~ who saw his own community flooded during Hurricane Helene, but was also part of the rebuilding ~ does more than lament; he also plunges forward in hope. Building a community around the album, he commissions seven different filmmakers to produce videos for the tracks, underlining the value of collaboration and the possibility that things…
Bands are like the people in them; they tend to get set in their ways. But not Cleared. The sole fixed part of their method is that guitarist/electronic musician Michael Vallera (Luggage, Maar, numerous solo recordings and a swell duo with Lee Ranaldo) and drummer/electronic musician Steven Hess (RLYR, Haptic, Locrian, Slow Bell Trio) are both involved. They have the potential to like an instrumental rock combo and have often done so on previous recordings. But Lustres, their first for the Australian Room40 label, continues a process of ping-ponging material into diffusion.
One of the musicians collects, plays or synthesizes some audio, then sends it to the other. He works on it, adding and subtracting and atomizing the sound, then sends it back. The work gets…
But a single listen to Heart Songs is required to recognize how natural a fit Cassie To is for Nat Bartsch’s Amica Records imprint. As the eight pieces featured on the thirty-three-minute album reveal, the Sydney-based To composes music possessing many of the same qualities that distinguish Bartsch’s own: heartfelt, intimate, elegiac, and harmonious neo-classical settings that couple piano, strings, and painterly dashes of woodwinds, synthesizers, and electronics into transporting chamber wholes.
Both artists produce spiritually replenishing music of humanity, integrity, and authenticity. Consistent with To’s own comment that “running through all of it is a thread of hope,” her music chooses uplift over resignation. It’s not…
Jeffrey Ericson Allen’s Chronotope Project embodies narrative convergence, which is as it should be. The cellist, composer and philosopher has spent much of his life as a storyteller, but in recent years, he’s reshaped his own narrative to focus more on the music that has always been a primary focus. Since his librarian days concluded, the mode of inquiry has shifted, so that now, he tells stories in music more than in words. His chief vehicle, the afore-mentioned Chronotope Project, is a solo effort that labeling “ambient” resides somewhere between a deserved badge of honor and a near disservice. Rather, this music shares certain characteristics with one of Allen’s influences, Brian Eno, in that it can function in the background but rewards deeper listening with…
Esoteric Recordings present the release of Gemini – Pieces for Piano, a brand new album by Ant.
Gemini – Pieces for Piano was recorded between October 2022 and October 2025 and features what Ant describes as the best of the keyboard compositions he has written since the release of his previous solo piano album Soirée in 1999. The title of the album comes from a piece of the same name that Ant wrote for the celebrated pianist Martha Argerich, who premiered the work in duet form in 2018. Gemini – Pieces for Piano includes Ant’s solo version of the track. Anthony Phillips has stayed the course, having long mastered the art of the quiet overachiever. While many of his contemporaries have settled into a predictable cycle of nostalgia, ‘Ant’ continues to operate as a singular moodsmith.
The lapping water that burnishes the edges of this collaboration between multidisciplinary artists Félicia Atkinson and Christina Vantzou – friends for over 15 years, kindred spirits for eternity possibly – holds the multitudes of humanity’s draw to the sea. These Water Poems sit in a lineage with the trireme of Ancient Greece, sickly Victorians at the coast for healing, writers beckoned to Tangier, and point-and-shoot film photos in a box in your family home, sunbleached and filled with bright swimsuits. Atkinson and Vantzou channel their own oceanside dwellings into ambient sounds tinged with nostalgia, joy and hidden depths.
It manifests in compositions that subvert the usual calm of water-based field recordings. The repeated piano chords and chanted mantras…
Born in Tehran in 1983 as son of the world renowned tar and setar virtuoso Hossein Alizadeh, Saba Alizadeh established himself not only as a true master on the Iranian spike fiddle kamancheh but one of the groundbreaking voices in contemporary Iranian music.
After the critically acclaimed releases Scattered Memories (his international debut, released on Karlrecords in 2019), I May Never See You Again (2021) and last year’s Temple of Hope, his new album Rituals of the Last Dawn unfolds as a deeply meditative dialogue between tradition, experimentation, and the present moment. The Iranian composer and kamancheh virtuoso — widely recognised for bridging classical Persian heritage with avant-garde sound — crafts…