Isobel Waller-Bridge has had a highly eclectic career to date. Primarily it’s involved being a film and television composer, working on her sister Phoebe’s smash Fleabag, Autumn De Wilde’s update of Emma and the acclaimed dark comedy Sweetpea. One of the things underpinning these projects across a range of disparate genres is the breadth of Isobel’s score, suiting both period works, epics and intimate character-driven projects.
This range is apparent on her sophomore record, solo project Objects from the seven-minute opener “Pillow”. It has a cinematic quality to it, easy to picture as part of a score, hauntingly beautiful but never feeling its length, full of depth. “Glass” feels like something from a horror film, with background noise and effects at its epicentre;…
Category: ambient
With his tenth Spotted Peccary release Along the Coppermine Ridge, Rudy Adrian reminds us once again of his remarkable tone painting abilities. A scan of its eleven track titles and those of the album titles preceding it also show the New Zealand-born producer to be an ambient artist who fervently embraces the associative potential titling offers. Eschewing abstraction, Adrian gives his pieces titles that trigger strong visualizations, the latest recording’s “Alpine Tarn,” “Serpentine River,” and “Autumn Snow” three examples. Albums preceding the new one, Reflections on a Moonlit Lake and Beyond the Sleepy Hills, likewise evoke clear images and highlight another aspect of his music, its deep connection to nature. There have been times when Adrian’s…
Belarus is not a place necessarily known for its transparency, which is why Krope feels like such an unexpected and extraordinary psychogeographic ramble around a country largely estranged from the rest of Europe.
Anton Anishchanka, field recordist and composer, was pleasantly surprised when he went along to the Institute of Art History, Ethnography and Folklore in Minsk around the time of the pandemic and found he was able to access an archive of field recordings from roughly 1960 to 2005. Thanks to the ethnographer and researcher Iryna Vasilyeva, who works at the institute, Anishchanka managed to retrieve Belarusian folklore songs from various regions, forming the basis of this strangely betwitching album.
…features the remastered original stereo mix, along with an extended introduction version of ‘Rubycon’ mixed by Steven Wilson. The set also features the complete concert recorded at The Rainbow in London in October 1974 over 2 CDs and the complete concert at The Royal Albert Hall in April 1975 (which featured Michael Hoening replacing Peter Baumann) also over 2CDs.
The members of Tangerine Dream continued to hone their craft as pioneers of the early days of electronica, and the mid-’70s proved to be a time of prosperity and musical growth for the trio of Chris Franke, early member Peter Baumann, and permanent frontman Edgar Froese. The three of them had been delivering mysterious space records on a regular basis, and their…
Nine years have passed since Paul Jebanasam‘s last album, and mātr is only his third. But as the new album demonstrates, Jebanasam has a different view of time. mātr (Sanskrit for mother and a permutation of matter) places humanity in the context of geologic time and asks questions of scale and responsibility. The cover photograph of hands extended to the sky suggests prayer, although the recipient of said prayer is not revealed: Mother Earth, an unnamed divine source, or a grand void that nonetheless captures the spiritual imagination. The word “custodianship,” appearing in the liner notes, points toward a Judeo-Christian understanding, referencing the first chapter of Genesis, but custodianship implies preservation, a concept far…
From Academy Award® winning writer/director Chloé Zhao, Hamnet tells the powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet. Featuring powerful performances from Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, the film has already earned widespread acclaim, taking home the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Discussing his work on the Hamnet soundtrack, Richter explained: “In composing the score, I used the basic elements of Elizabethan music—period instrumentation, grammar, and sensibility—but applied them in ways that emerge directly from the story’s psychology. Having read the script before shooting, I sketched ideas reflecting themes of familial love and loss, our place…
Originally issued in 1998, Jon Jenkins‘ FLOW returns in a freshly remastered form to lend its soundscapes even greater resonance and depth. The seventy-four-minute album’s even more immersive than the ambient norm, but the commitment it asks of the listener is rewarded with deeply textured productions that show Jenkins to be an exceptionally meticulous sculptor of sound. Enhancing the music’s impact are electric guitar contributions from Jeff Pearce, David Helpling, and Howard Givens. A strong argument could be made that FLOW is the quintessential ambient album, given the many genre-defining boxes it checks. There’s atmosphere in abundance, melody too, and, need it be said, seamless flow.
While Jenkins’ soundscapes stand credibly…
Narcomancer covers a lot of ground. The album’s opening tracks are reminiscent of acousmatic music in the GRM sense, loose structures built from overlapping fragments of sound. Undergirding these complex textures are brooding and dark layers of synth that move slowly with a muted sense of dread. However, they are punctuated by abrupt bursts of shimmering tones, falling musical figures, didgeridoo, weird vocalizations, and soft beats. The album employs ambient, techno, and electroacoustic techniques without falling clearly into any of these genres.
This is the second release from Primal Era Worship (Bertrand Lachambre), both in 2025 and both on Cryo Chamber. Lachambre seems to be a new voice, as his discography (under this…
Fabiano Do Nascimento is not simply sticking to his Brazilian roots. After all, he currently has a split residence between Los Angeles and Japan, trying to include all his experience and form them into a specific whole on his latest album offering Cavejaz. Primarily a guitarist, he uses various multi-string and multi-tuning (nylon string) guitars, stretching the sound of his instrument as far as it goes and in any direction it takes him, while at the same time trying to firmly root his sounds into his Brazilian heritage. For Cavejaz, Do Nascimento organised three separate sessions – one as studio sessions with renowned UAKTI member Paulo Santos and Jennifer Souza back in Brazil, while the second was recorded live during a Tokyo concert with with veteran Japanese musician…
Old Saw conjures the ghosts of Americana, wrapping guitar-picking, banjo plucks, pedal steel whine and violin cries in ambient drone. The music hovers, envelops, levitates rather than moving forward. It’s drenched in overtone, which lends a mystic, other-vibrations aura. These are old time instruments bent towards alternate universes.
Old Saw is Henry Birdsey’s collaborative project with a septet of (possibly fictional) backwoods Vermont players: Harper Reed on nylon string guitar and banjo, Ira Dorset on fiddle and bowed strings, Ann Rowlis coaxing prolonged drones from reed organ and harmonium, J.M. Eagle on pedal steel, lap steel and resonator, Jim Cutler on telecaster, Addison Starkweather-Price on bass and Peter Catchpole clanking metal objects and…
The music heard on Kara-Lis Coverdale‘s album Changes in Air originated from an installation at a floating sauna in Oslo called Skarven. The pieces are inspired by five materials (wood, water, sun, glass, and metal) and were originally composed and recorded in 2019, then finished in 2025, when the album was released.
While From Where You Came, the first of Coverdale’s three 2025 LPs, was an expansive, collaborative work, and A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever was a series of solo piano nocturnes, Changes in Air is somewhere in between. It was composed and played by Coverdale alone, using electronic organ, modular synthesis, and piano, and it contains longer pieces which flow into each other, subtly evolving.
Remastered from the original source tapes for the first time, this edition includes the original album, bonus tracks, home and studio demos (from 1978-1980), and early live tracks.
The Durutti Column’s debut album does not have an auspicious origin story. The band whose name it bore had split acrimoniously just before they were supposed to record it. Their guitarist Vini Reilly was so poleaxed by depression that he was virtually unable to leave his house: 12 different attempts were made to section him over the course of 1979. Believing that Reilly was “going to die”, Factory Records boss Tony Wilson intervened, buying him a new guitar, then suggested he visit a studio with the label’s troubled but visionary producer Martin Hannett as “an experiment”.
…a newly remastered edition, expanded with two brand-new compositions reimagined from the original audio files: ‘Claustrophobia’, reworked by Carter, and ‘Uncaged’, reworked by Boddy.
In 2000, Ian Boddy founded the DiN label “to (purvey) fine contemporary electronica.” He is also the label’s chief artist.
Caged is a collaboration between Boddy and Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter. It is a dense mix of sequenced e-music, heavy rhythms, and vast atmospheres. One of Boddy’s strengths has always been his willingness to try something different and to learn new methods, techniques, and sounds. He allows Carter’s dense atmospheres to augment the overt Berlin school sound.
So, while this definitely has all the characteristics…
How does music communicate across the ages, and what can it teach about fragility, conflict, resistance and peace? In composing Non Fiction, a symphony presented by the 45-member Manchester Collective, conducted by Hugh Tieppo-Brunt with appearances from Jack Wylie and Valentina Magaletti, Hania Rani drew her inspiration from a surprising source: child prodigy Josima Feldschuh, who performed with the Jewish Symphony orchestra at age 11, wrote music of her own in occupied Warsaw, and died at age 13 while her family was hiding from the Nazis. The symphony is haunted by the echoes of old enmities, and speaks to a new generation of conflict in Ukraine and Gaza. Rani’s own performance anchors the set, her piano the central instrument.
Continuing his refraction of the rave continuum into pointedly dislocated, delicately bruising sound system meditations, Low End Activist returns to Peak Oil with a second and third instalment in his Airdrop series
…His last two albums, Airdrop and Municipal Dreams, sifted through the detritus of UK dance music, from dub to grime, hardcore to drum & bass, showing the gritty underbelly that Big Rave wants to hide from smiley face T-shirts. His newest album, Airdrop II, is a dark, impressionistic exploration of hardcore’s past — a haunted snapshot of three decades of rave comedowns. Together, Airdrop, Airdrop II and Airdrop III, are like piecing together the history of British bass music from disintegrating tapes…
While the cello might not seem the instrument most naturally suited to the progressive metal genre, its capacity for replicating vocal wail makes it an extremely effective conduit for its extreme emotional expression. On Lifeblood, the long-anticipated follow-up to his solo albums Worlds Within (2020) and Worlds Within Live (2021), renowned Ottawa-based cellist Raphael Weinroth-Browne demonstrates how effective the instrument can be when used in a metal context. Augmenting layers of acoustic cello (a 2012 model built by Raymond Schryer) with amplifiers, effects pedals, and on two tracks bass drum, the music exudes visceral fury from start to finish.
As his extensive discography shows, Weinroth-Browne’s a musician of immense range…
Electronic ambient producer Deborah Martin has collaborated with many great artists over her thirty-year career, but an especially fruitful partnership is the one she established with oboist Jill Haley in 2021 for their joint release The Silence of Grace and the sophomore effort that followed two years later, Into the Quiet.
The melding of Martin’s atmospheric soundscapes and Haley’s resonant woodwinds makes for riveting music, and a deep spell is again cast on the culminating chapter in their ambient trilogy, Rendering Time. Inspired by life’s cycles of birth, death, and everything in between (and beyond), the recording is sequenced to evoke that arc; it also, of course, can simply be experienced as a collection of ten transporting soundscapes…
Even on her debut EP, at just 22 years old, feeo sounded like the weariest of old souls.
She sang of a choking fear, of bombs falling like tears, of staying up to hear her lover leave because she couldn’t bear the thought of waking up to “haunted sheets.” Over toe-scuffing downtempo beats and wistfully unfurled synths, she asked questions — “Are we in love or is it just the drugs, babe?”; “Being lost is a bit like being free, isn’t it?” — in a tone that suggested she harbored few illusions about the answers.
It wasn’t just the wise-beyond-her-years lyrics that were so striking. It was feeo’s effortless balance of plaintiveness and composure, vulnerability and control. Her guarded, whisper-soft musings had a way of unexpectedly blossoming…
This is Independent Project Records’ own take on digging deep and unearthing revelatory treasures from its 45-year history. A trip through the past, present and future of a label that since 1980 has made the most prominent part of its name, that resounding “Independent”, not a trendy epithet but a mission. This two-album compilation is an invite to join the dots and find out what makes Afterimage – the early ’80s band the Los Angeles Times once called “LA’s own Joy Division” – and Alison Clancy – the artist making ethereal ambient dream pop in the basement of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, where she works as a dancer – kindred spirits. You’re invited to find similarities in the way The Ophelias reclaimed San Francisco’s unfettered psychedelic rock roots…
Loula Yorke’s Hydrology is an effortlessly flowing universe of modular synthesis. Deeply rooted in the essence of water as a starting point, the six pieces on the album explore fluidity in different forms and atmospheres, always true to Yorke’s unique and personal live expressive canvas.
From the circular mantra of the opener “SICL,” we are smoothly and progressively spiraling from the outer limits of the album towards the denser compositional artery of “Gleam” where whispering and at times manipulated voices form a backdrop for the tonal fluctuations of the repetitive synthesizers that zoom in and out like watery particles gleaming in the dark.
The reverberant and spacious production of the album allows for a clean and transparent…