Trinity, the third collaborative album between Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello, continues the pair’s patient, pliable musical explorations while marrying them with a unique collaborator — one per track — to map new territories.
Trinity presents five collaborations with acclaimed artists who work at the edges of sound and genre: Chris Abrahams (The Necks), improvising turntablist Marina Rosenfeld, Brendan Canty (Fugazi, The Messthetics), multidisciplinary artist Aki Onda, and the late contemporary artist and lowercase musician Steve Roden. The results deepen the music’s immediacy and directness, while pushing it in directions neither English nor Vitiello could have foreseen.
…In English’s words, “this record’s surprise…
Category: ambient
Implosion is a purely instrumental, collaborative album of cinematic, dystopian sounds from dubstepper and extreme electronica experimentalist the Bug and his pal Ghost Dubs. However, rather than working on the same tracks together, as could be implied, they have each applied their production know-how to alternate tunes on the two discs that make up this recording.
That isn’t to say that the sounds on Implosion swing from one flavour to another and back again. This is an album with a singular vision that is consistently eerie and sinister and has much in common with early 1990s ambient techno heads Sun Electric and the Sabres of Paradise, as well as Kevin Richard Martin’s (the Bug’s given name) alternative film soundtrack…
…After a decade of remarkable releases, Exzald S (Sarah Foulquiere) is finally ready to unveil her debut solo album ~ not counting the collaborative Serene Transfer Scheme, lodged in a unique steel box. The fantastic art ~ also by the artist ~ is an invitation to enter into a fabulous science fictional world. On Irisdesc, Exzald S continues to map the terrain of a planet only she knows, sending samples of her voice into space as if each were a passenger on Voyager‘s golden record. Words are secondary to expression, sucked into whirlpools of electronic sound.
While there are other travelers in the same sonic galaxy ~ Katarina Gryvul, for example whose recent work also appears on the Subtext label ~ no others share her planet. This is because…
Sébastien Betbeder’s comedy-drama L’Incroyable Femme Des Neige (The Incredible Snow Woman) looks like a lot of fun based on the trailer, but don’t judge the film score by the trailer music. What Ensemble 0 (Sylvain Chauveau, Stéphane Garin & Joël Mérah) have composed is something tonally different: more subdued, as lighthearted as falling snow.
…The tracks are as brief as flurries, the shortest only eleven seconds, and even the longest coming up just short of two and a half minutes. There’s little time to appreciate one before the next, but tougher they establish a playful mood.
The LP begins peacefully, with soft piano joined by swiftly expanding orchestral elements. “Les Grands Espaces” draws the listener in,…
Golden Brown’s Stefan Beck was inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series as he wrote this suite of songs, and he encourages listeners to read the books while absorbing Patterner. His interpretation isn’t especially literal; the title comes from a master wizard in the trilogy and a couple of the track titles are place names from the world LeGuin built. However, the books have a wonderful down-to-earth naturalism, spiked with the glitter of occasional magic, and massed, sometimes, into epic contours. That’s something this music has as well, a cosmic Americana made of ordinary sounds — guitar picking, cello predominate — polished to a heightened, semi-surreal clarity.
Beck has made three previous albums as Golden Brown. He’s also a member of Prairiewolf,…
…newly remastered by Josh Bonati and includes the entire five-hour suite that Basinski originally captured while looping analog tape as it actively deteriorated in the process.
A work of minimal, process-based tape music, experimental composer William Basinski‘s Disintegration Loops series achieves astonishingly moving and evocative states through relatively simplistic means. In the process of transferring aging reel-to-reel tape loops to a digital medium, Basinski found the reels (originally recorded in 1982) were so old and decrepit that the tape would shed slightly with each pass of the loop. This gradually affected the sound coming through, blurring the short, pastoral phrases of sound into an increasingly ghostly and…
In JJJJJerome Ellis’s magical compositions, their stutter is a guiding light. Pauses and repetitions spark new life, new ideas, new possibilities, as Vesper Sparrow explores their “dysfluency” in the context of Black musical traditions. The Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist and former Yale lecturer is heady, intellectual company: in the manner of Alvin Lucier, they gently talk the listener through the sonic and political reverberations of their work. “The stutter … (cc)can be a musical instrument,” Ellis announces, before an exhilarating rush of tiny noises – made from hammered dulcimer, flute, piano, voices – fizz into being.
To create Vesper Sparrow’s soundscapes of ambient, jazz, spoken word and reimagined gospel, Ellis works with granular synthesis…
As Farao, Kari Jahnsen has experimented with a range of electronic-acoustic palettes, setting her textured arrangements within indie folk, alt-pop, orchestral rock, glossier electronica settings, and combinations thereof.
With her third album, Magical Thinking, she leans into an R&B-inflected alternative dance sensibility that falls on the sleeker extreme of her output thus far, although it should be noted that both she and producer Ådne Meisfjord (120 Days) are credited with beats, synths, percussion, and, last but not least, zither. So, she hasn’t left her blended, psychedelic-leaning approach behind. It also isn’t entirely club-friendly. The album was recorded between Berlin and Oslo, Jahnsen’s former and re-adopted base, respectively.
For their third collaborative album, Ruth Mascelli & Mary Hanson Scott have come up with an intriguing title – Esoteric Lounge Music Now, presenting a sort of dilemma for the listeners – what should esoteric lounge music sound like now?
Well, what Mascelli and Scott seem to have in mind is their take on all things noir in music – from a vision of jazz noir soundtracks of fifties and sixties combined with the dark touches that could be found on the prime trip-hop of second part of the nineties, neatly combined and meshed into dark late night tone sculptures that combine Mascelli’s deep, darkened vocals with Scott’s, often FX-blasted reeds and other electronic embellishments. The duo draws both on their previous musical experiences (Mascelli as a part of…
Tangerine Dream are unquestionably one of the most influential electronic groups of all time. Their music has made an immeasurable impact on ambient, new age, techno, trance, and progressive rock, as well as modern film score composition.
On August 1, 1987, Tangerine Dream performed a landmark open-air concert in front of the Reichstag in Berlin, celebrating the city’s 750th anniversary. Held at the Platz der Republik and drawing over 100,000 attendees, the event unfolded near the Berlin Wall – a powerful symbol of Germany’s division at the time. The band’s signature electronic sound, paired with stunning visuals and fireworks, made for an unforgettable experience. It’s even said that the music could be heard across the border in East Berlin.
The subgenre of cumbia, cumbia rebajada, was born in the ’90s when Gabriel Dueñez was DJing a club in Monterrey. All of a sudden his tape deck overheated, and the music began to slur. The beat of tracks like El Manicomio de Vargasvil’s “Mi Abuelo” were slowed from cumbia’s usual 100 BPM chug to a sluggish 65 BPM, their once peppy choruses resembling the gurgly bass of the Star Wars character Jabba the Hut. Fortunately for Dueñez, though, the dancers loved it.
Fellow Monterrey musician, Delia Beatriz (AKA Debit), met with Dueñez and his family in preparation for her second album Desaceleradas. She studied the history of cumbia rebajada, and used Dueñez’s first two mixtapes as source material for her hauntological rewiring.
It’s weird, right? We’ve somehow stumbled into a world where, for all we’re told that algorithms homogenise music, actually more people than ever are exposed to very, very odd and abstract soundmaking.
There’s new age gong baths at even the most normie health spas. There’s a kajillion hours of “relaxation music” flooding streaming services from who knows where, a lot of it just drones and/or modulating white noise.
There’s the sound design of scores by the likes of Hildur Guðnadóttir, Daniel Lopatin, Cristobal Tapia De Veer that reach millions in surround sound via movies, games and prestige dramas yet are in their own right sound sculpture on inhuman scale with chasmic voids and nanoscopic…
Remastered by Mark Beazley.
After the calm, measured beauty of Sakura, versatile Japanese producer Susumu Yokota followed a comparatively experimental and eclectic path on Grinning Cat.
The beats are more prevalent (though never as floor-friendly as his voluminous house, trance, and techno releases), the instrumentation is more varied, and the overall feel shifts markedly from track to track. Piano is the dominant instrument here, just as guitar was for Sakura. But Yokota’s skill with context finds him tailoring the sound of the instrument to suit each individual track. “Imagine” uses a hazy piano loop and vocal samples seemingly lifted from sacred music to achieve a thoughtful, meditative effect.
Even before ambient firmly formed as a genre, with krautrock mid explorations by Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Harmonia and others, there has always been a thin line between explorative and simply boring, with artists slipping into the latter often falling into the very dreaded New Age genre. Sticking to the former often meant following the path the above-mentioned initial explorers took, but that meant re-imagining the elements they brought and adding new ones along the way.
That is where the concept for the new collaboration between Jamie Lidell and Luke Schneider lies for their new album A Companion for the Spaces Between Dreams. Yet, there was an imminent danger of the duo drifting into musical wallpaper, as the idea was to create music…
Shortly following the noisy ambient Americana of no floor, claire rousay‘s 2025 collaboration with more eaze, rousay remained on Thrill Jockey with the solo effort a little death. On this album, the composer mixes numerous found sounds and field recordings with droning strings, rustic guitars, stirring pianos, and electroacoustic processing. It feels very autumnal, like crunchy leaves underfoot, but also like a warm jacket in the crisp night air. When spoken samples are clearly audible, such as on the brief opener “i couldn’t find the light” or the comforting drone of “somehow,” they directly relate to topics of disassociation and mental illness. On “just,” M. Sage’s delicate, considered piano notes give way to swelling, gliding strings and curdled tape distortion, packed with…
British composer and multi-instrumentalist Roger Eno’s releases his 3rd album for DG Without Wind, Without Air. The project follows on from the success of The Turning Year (2022) and the skies, they shift like chords (2023). The latter was described by Spectrum Culture with the words: “a remarkable release that unsettles with haunting lines and simultaneously makes one tingle with warmth at a display of beauty”.
The new album includes both solo piano pieces and tracks orchestrated for various combinations of clarinet, guitar, bass, strings, synths, percussion and electronics. There are guest vocal appearances from soprano Grace Davidson and Roger’s daughters Cecily and Lotti Eno, with Roger himself singing on The Moon And The Sea.
Night CRIÚ evokes clandestine ceremonies in forest glades, covert rituals taking place in the depths of a cave. Crepuscular and ghostly, this is a realm where an intoned, reverberant voice meshes with ritualistic choirs, undulating brass, methodically bowed strings and unhurried percussion.
Musically, the lineage could be the solo work of Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard or Anna von Hausswolff at her most reductive. If the fifth solo album from the Ireland’s Hilary Woods were employed as the soundtrack to the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová or Werner Herzog’s 1976 Herz aus Glas, it would be a seamless transposition – this music exists beyond place and time.
For Woods, getting to this point has not been linear. From 1999, she was the bassist of…
Fears are very individual, and how one person copes with theirs might not make their struggles evident to others. So while Argentinian artist aylu took a generally delicate approach to her latest album, she’s made explicit that it is an exercise in processing with the title Fobia.
aylu – real name Ailin Grad – sets a panicked tone with short, laboured breathing from the opening seconds of Fobia. Depending on your own mental state, this might be the only uncomfortable aspect of the album. But if your brain has ever played a round of pinball with your thoughts, Fobia will resonate in a different way.
Fobia is the sound of nervous energy and someone trying desperately to quell it. Afflicted with claustrophobia and agoraphobia,…
On his fourth release on Orindal Records, Matt Bachmann’s Compost Karaoke is a representation of “songs of change”, as he explains. It’s a transition from his previous years touring as the bass player for Mega Bog.
“At the heart of this transition was a personal struggle between the ‘clouds’ (art) and the ‘earth’ (the systemic problems of New York/US/world),” he says. “Doing this more earthly work and having less time for the clouds changed my relationship to music. I had been so inside the music world that I had become blind to its generosity – the way it brings us together and allows us to collectively feel, dream, and escape.”
Adding that this new project was an opportunity to work alongside old friends, Bachmann…
Cryo Chamber’s seventh entry in its ongoing Tomb series opens strongly with a pairing of Apocryphos & Pœna Sensus. Their track, ‘The Sigh of Archaic Tragedy’, is weighty and oppressive, built from deep drones, bass-heavy descending chords, and unstructured percussion that evokes places of burial and stillness.
The rest of the album explores similar themes in different ways. The variety on this compilation is remarkable considering that each piece adheres to a common aesthetic framework.
Dødsmaskin’s Messiaskomplekset’ is borderline post-industrial with rattling textures accompanied by haunting melodies and tones. Fractalyst’s ‘Those Who Slither’ is cinematic and varied, with abrupt changes in volume and palette.