Doperider, the fourth release from The Utopia Strong, is mainly a record of great and giving calm. The cover’s lettering may suggest Hawkwind at their most planetary, but this record is not a full on, pedal-driven dive into deep space. Rather, Doperider often encourages an investigation of its immediate surroundings, by way of some lysergically-tinged soundtracks.
Opener ‘Prophecy’, maybe the most narrational track on Doperider, is also its lodestar in terms of what to expect. The pleasantly wriggling synth sounds initially suggest we are present at a secretive undertaking in a lab somewhere. The slightly mycological patterns formed by the synths suddenly give way after two minutes to a crunchy beat (one of the few on the record)…
Category: ambient
The album title is a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which includes the phrase “what steps forth, in holiday clothing, out of the great darkness.” Cellist Clarice Jensen regards the image as a metaphor for the creative process, which often begins in isolation before its public unveiling.
The title track is separated into two parts, a trio of other tracks in-between. One can hear an obvious appreciation for Bach, although the compositional process is vastly different; the cello lines are played, layered and looped to create the illusion of a small ensemble. After a melodic base is established, the counter-melodies begin to develop, growing ever more assured. If a track could be recorded behind closed doors,…
Klein used to work as a “logger” on a reality TV show, where she would record what cast members were doing in excruciating detail for use in B-roll shots. In an interview with Pitchfork, Klein noted how easily TV can be manipulated by people willing to distort the narrative, as when her fellow loggers would exclude activities by certain actors to make them look bad.
Klein is the complete opposite. She puts everything out as it comes, raw and unfiltered. It’s obsessive and mundane in a different way, suffused with meaning even at its most impenetrable. After two albums of searing guitar noise, sleep with a cane feels like a retreat into the shroud of her earlier work. She finds solace, and intrigue, in the billowing folds of ambient…
Faten Kanaan‘s music has a transporting quality that is hard to define. The manual repetition of her approach — performing looped keyboard parts entirely by hand — lends her electronic compositions a human feel, as does her choice of organic-leaning sounds and tones. But there is always something otherworldly about them, an abstraction that suggests a natural world shimmering just out of reach.
Diary of a Candle, Kanaan’s sixth album and third for U.K. indie Fire Records, may be her most enigmatic release yet. Its mystique is undeniable — each piece unfolds like a chapter in a dark fairytale that goes nowhere and everywhere. Tracks like “Afternoon” and “Celadon” have a curious, questing nature, though it’s unclear…
Designed in 1962 by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the concrete dome in Tripoli, Lebanon was intended to be one of 15 structures that housed a permanent International Fair, expected to welcome over two million annual visitors. By the time civil war broke out in 1975, construction had not yet been completed, leading to the suspension and eventual abandonment of the project. The Dome Sessions, conceived by audiovisual artist Firas El Hallak, is a series of recordings that captures musical performances in the space of Niemeyer’s unfinished concrete dome, and also serves as the soundtrack to an upcoming documentary about the dome’s position in Tripoli’s cultural history. Each piece features a different artist, both solo and ensemble,…
Memories of conflict are very much on the mind of Yara Asmar, who splits her time between Beirut and upstate New York and tries to make sense of it all. Or perhaps there is no making sense, only a box of pieces from many puzzles. “There is no future to yearn for,” Asmar writes. “There is a big, sprawling, horrifying present that eats everything in its path.” Pouring her grief into instrument-making and playing, she creates an elaborate musical tapestry of deconstruction and reconstruction. One of the symphomioms she builds is large enough to sit inside, and she invites listeners to “sit inside the sound” with her.
The white noise and whirring that open the album connote absence, swiftly countered by the sounds of traffic and chimes.
This third album from the Lebanese duo Snakeskin vibrates with intention from its opening seconds, trembling on the blocks with an eagerness to surge forward. In the opener, “Ready” electronic distortion buzzes around Julia Sabra’s crystalline voice, which undulates, ever so slightly with an Arab tonality; you can discern, but just barely, her Lebanese origins. The piece trembles with anticipation, and swirls up with organ-like overload, a hymn, a prayer, a plea for justice. We Live in Sand took shape in 2024, as Israel’s war on Gaza spread north.
Sabra lived close enough to hear and feel the impact of an August 2020 explosion in the port of Beirut. She and her partner Faddi Tabal have had a close-up view of the destructive currents…
The history of experimental musicians from Europe and North America adopting Japanese aesthetics is… patchy. It got especially dodgy in the 1990s when every other electronica dork started flinging random kanji characters on their sleeves, writing soundtracks for imaginary Akira bike races and the like. And there are so, so many ambient producers who reference Zen gardens, minimalist interior design and bamboo flutes, you can’t go into a health spa without knocking over a pile of their CDs.
Thankfully Catskills Mountains-raised, LA resident soundscaper Emily A. Sprague is a little bit more substantial than this. Well, perhaps “substantial” isn’t the word for her distinctly mist-like structures, but her engagement with…
The third in their collaborative series, Liminal sees lauded ambient producer Brian Eno and conceptual composer Beatie Wolfe join forces once again to deliver the third act of their experimental triptych with Verve Records.
Following predecessors Lateral’s “space music” and Luminal’s “dream music”, Eno and Wolfe meld their respective strengths to round off their thematic wander of the aural unknown with Liminal’s “dark matter”, a singular record that eschews the former’s twofer offering that’s all the more stirring on both thematic and musical levels.
Where Eno’s ambient wanderings felt like aural retreads from much of his career on his Lateral half, here such celestial washes glow with sparkling beauty against Wolfe’s plaintive vocals…
In the midst of a career writing, creating, and recording music with a wide array of influential popular artists and for television and film, Grammy award-winning Nashville-based producer and musician Emery Dobyns is releasing his debut album, Improvs, on Hammock Music Label.
A series of 16 improvised works, Improvs sees Dobyns step from the fast-paced environment of the studio and into a world of glowing ethereal ambiance, where time slows and rays of hope and poetry illuminate life’s quiet moments and days full of wonder and promise.
…Improvs is Dobyns’ first album, but he’s racked up over two decades on the other side of the mixing desk, producing and engineering for multiple artists from Mary J Blige, through…
Grounded in personal loss and the trauma that accompanies such an experience, sound artist Arvin Dola presents eight mid-length tracks of experimental ambient music. As suggested by the title, the album explores the concept of ghosts – not necessarily in a literal or supernatural sense, but in how both the past and unrealized futures can haunt the present.
These ideas are based on the works of Mark Fisher and Jacques Derrida, and are commonly referred to as “hauntology.” The latter has a rich recent history in the darker side of modern ambient music, with entire albums dedicated to exploring its aesthetics of memory, absence, and grief.
Dola’s take employs a typical set of building blocks – droning synth chords,…
As well as making atmospheric electronic compositions, the Baghdad-born, Barcelona-based musician Dania also works night shifts as an emergency doctor. These nocturnal hours are the influence behind her new album Listless: all seven tracks were composed and recorded after midnight, while the artwork features the spindly flower of the Japanese snake gourd, a plant that only blooms after dark. But there is little trace of the chaos of her late-night schedule here: instead, the record embodies a quiet calm that is sometimes blissful, sometimes eerie.
Meeting somewhere between trip-hop, shoegaze and ambient, with a touch of pop, the textured tracks slink along dreamily, propelled by washes of synths and, for the first time, drums.
Earlier this year, nomadic Texan instrumentalist Jason Dungan, who operates out of Copenhagen under the moniker Blue Lake, released Weft, a beautiful, shimmering short album of finely textured, intricate instrumentals. Although the record is in itself a significant piece of work, Jason considered it an interim project of sorts, testing his ability as bandleader and promising a full-length album by the end of the year.
So here we have The Animal, an LP that fully embraces the community spirit of music and a band sound. Before Weft, Blue Lake releases have been more solitary endeavours, with only 2019’s The Parrot splitting a solo structure with a collaborative sound. This makes the thinking behind Weft clearer, and that process immediately…
Remastered by Mark Beazley.
Multi-talented producer Susumu Yokota returns to the ambient realm with the beautiful and diverse Sakura. When he indulges his fondness for pop hooks with his dancefloor material, Yokota’s melodic choices are glossy and extroverted, but his music for home listening is focused, controlled, and deeply internal. His knack for blending traditional instruments like guitar and piano with simple electronics harks back to ambient music’s birth in the mid-’70s; at times Sakura recalls the work of pioneers like Brian Eno, Cluster, and Manuel Göttsching. The icy “Saku” sets the meditative tone on Sakura, with gentle, winding guitar lines, relaxed synthesizer oscillations, and plenty of breathing space for the minimal…
Kelly Moran is an incredibly versatile performer whose music straddles the categories of ambient, electronic and modern composition. On Don’t Trust Mirrors, she completes a circle, returning to prepared piano and synth after a gorgeous foray into solo piano on last year’s Moves in the Field. But her trajectory is not quite that simple; a pianist at her core, she would often play concerts in the early evening and dance to techno until late in the night. Last fall, Loraine James & Fyn Dobson teased out the club underpinnings of solo piano piece “Superhuman,” and this year, Bibio helps her to revisit “Don’t Trust Mirrors,” which first appeared on last year’s LP and is now the title piece of a new one. It’s exciting to hear tracks transformed in this manner, and both re-imaginings…
In a vanitas painting, life is captured in ephemera. Popular with Dutch Baroque painters during the 16th and 17th centuries, the style used the still-life format to comment on the frivolity of earthly possessions. Artworks showcased scattered — and for the time, pretty mundane — stuff: a lute, a conch shell, a half-drunk glass of wine. The old masters didn’t include descriptions of why each item mattered or what historical memory they were meant to evoke. But they rendered them in vivid detail nonetheless.
The French producer Malibu, whose debut album Vanities draws its name from the vanitas movement, imbues her New Age-inflected ambient with a similarly sharp eye for the totemic. Past records, like 2024’s Essential Mixtape…
Brooddark (Yaroslav Gavrilyuk) releases his second album on Cryo Chamber this year, following an excellent collaboration with Tsarewitch. On Overvoltage, he employs some of the same sounds – dense drones, roughly-hewn textures, and a wealth of background elements, from sculpted static to broken percussion and rhythmic lines. Chromatic sweeping takes thick chords up or down a few notes in pitch, providing a dramatic feel.
Indeed, these pieces are quintessentially cinematic. Described as “futuristic and industrial” in the liner notes, there is a strong science fiction theme with dark overtones. One can easily envision the spaceships being infiltrated by alien life forms.
After starting off in a more busy and unconventional direction, Brooddark brings…
The best ambient music has two distinct ways of pulling you in. On one hand, the genre’s purpose is to wash over you or to pass you by. The clue is in the name: ambient music is in the ether, it is furniture, made for semi-conscious immersion rather than immediate connection. But it can connect. There are those rare albums that achieve a second way, albums that, despite their slowness or their beatlessness, somehow become utterly engaging or even transcendent.
Eno at his best fits the bill; so too does Inoyamaland’s Danzindan-Pojidon. And so did M. Sage’s 2023 collaboration with Zander Raymond, Parayellowgram, four ten-minute compositions of lush, blissful complexity.
Also in 2023, Sage released a solo album,…
Piotr Kurek plays it stone-faced. His music teems with strangeness, yet even his most outré pieces have a lulling effect; it’s uneasy listening that casts a blissful spell. Make no mistake: The Warsaw composer’s music is way out there. His records are miniature worlds where the usual laws don’t hold. Kurek loves to blur the line between authentic and ersatz, natural and synthetic, cause and effect; resolutely tactile instruments like vibraphone are balanced by ethereal wisps of Auto-Tune. Drop the needle anywhere, and you might hear cybernetic bagpipes; holographic harps; voices that might be cellos, or vice versa. For someone who frequently writes for theater — an art form based on real people moving around in three-dimensional space — he’s got an uncanny knack…
…includes five bonus tracks – music made during the ‘Talk from Home’ sessions, alternative versions as well as a live version of Renee Sleeping, recorded at Japan’s FFTK festival in 2023.
In 2011, an L.A. producer blipped into view thanks to a well-received debut EP on Gerd Janson’s Running Back imprint. Credited to Suzanne Kraft, an alias of dublab DJ Diego Herrera, Green Flash did nu-disco infused with a low-slung pacing and a warmth not unlike a cassette tape left on the dashboard at midday. It was soon followed by the Horoscope EP and a handful of more Balearic cuts from Herrera’s other band, Pharaohs, suggesting that more floor-filling tracks lay ahead.
But when Missum, Kraft’s next release for Running Back, came out last year, it showed…