Somewhere in an old mill in Yorkshire, a man – maybe – has been buried under patch cables, feeding electricity through modular synths long enough for the hum to be part of the drizzly landscape. That no one really knows who they are feels appropriate. Their anonymity has become part of the machinery, like an unlabeled switch. Sidings is the latest in a long drift of releases, a third double album that doesn’t move forward so much as nestle deeper into its own circuitry.
The word “sidings” tells us a lot: the quiet track off the main line, where trains go to rest, or wait, or rust. That’s what this record feels like. Music built for those in-between hours when nothing needs doing and no one is expecting you. Where 2023’s Standers felt like slow travel, Sidings feels…
Category: ambient
British duo Insides made their debut with 1993’s Euphoria, a sensual set of ambient pop songs filled with airy guitars, intricately crafted beats, and provocative lyrics about intimate relationships and emotional tension. The distinctive album was praised by critics and remains a favorite of dream pop aficionados, and the duo have sporadically released new recordings, including the 2021 full-length Soft Bonds.
Insides’ elusive and icy electronic pop explores the darkest, seamiest corners of love and sex – their songs capture the emptiness and hostility that surface when the afterglow fades, ugly scenes punctuated by eruptions of violence, waves of self-loathing and caresses that are cold to the touch. Singer/bassist Kirsty Yates’ vocals…
There is a certain solace to be found in minimal music-a contemplative joy that emerges through sustained repetition and subtle variation. Solo Three, the slyly absorbing new album from Michigan-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Erik Hall, embodies that hypnotic charge while boldly reimagining a distinct selection of contemporary classical works.
Hall’s affinity for minimalism began decades ago, when as a jazz-studies drummer at the University of Michigan he first encountered Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. The piece altered his trajectory completely. Years later, amid a creative lull, he revisited that formative work by attempting a solo reconstruction. Working alone in his home studio, Hall painstakingly recreated…
Every field recording is a virtual reality. Joshua Bonnetta understands that precept: The Canadian artist eschews “authentic” reproductions of any space, openly embracing subjectivity. “I abstract the sounds,” Bonnetta has said of his 2016 album Lago, “so that they would align more with my experience and the feeling of what I got from that place.” A personal perspective comes to the fore in his experimental documentaries, too. El Mar La Mar, his 2017 collaboration with director J.P. Sniadecki, placed oral histories alongside audio of the Sonoran desert, painting the U.S.-Mexico border as a landscape of trauma and bureaucratic racism. In 2020’s The Two Sights, he portrayed the epistemological reality of clairvoyant townspeople in the Outer Hebrides by eschewing…
Six years after 1987’s celebrated Wings of Desire, German director Wim Wenders released Faraway, So Close!, an examination of the differences between the angel figures and humans inhabiting Berlin and the myriad social and political factions within the newly unified city. A sequel of sorts to 2023’s Summer Chronicles, the similarly titled second collaboration by David Cordero and Rhucle references both the pronounced physical distance between the ambient producers’ respective home bases in Cádiz and Tokyo but also how musically connected the two feel when collaborating. By sending each other tracks and adding to them in their separate studios, the two have developed a file-sharing methodology that for them functions smoothly. As research on social…
Endless Cold, Endless Darkness, the latest effort from experimental ambient artist Ugasanie, is centered on deep, rich layers of drones evoking windswept and snow-covered landscapes (a repeating theme across Ugasanie’s releases). Even when played at a modest volume, the low frequencies emanating from your speakers resonate with desks, chairs, walls, and so on to an immersive and suffocating effect.
Accompanying these undertones are additional sonic elements – either from field recordings or synthetic processing – that crackle, skitter, and echo. Animal noises, wordless vocalizations, and ritual percussion add to the haunting, pneumatic atmosphere. For the most part, the pieces are low-density ambient, combining…
…The remixed and remastered expanded edition of ‘Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong’ includes ten previously unreleased bonus tracks presented as a ‘mini’ album.
Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong is the debut album by the London-based duo Woo. Originally issued on the Sunshine Series imprint in May 1982, it was subsequently picked up for a 1987 US release by the LA-based Independent Project Records label. After this, Woo’s second album, It’s Cosy Inside, came out in 1989 on Independent Project Records. There was no UK version of the follow-up album back then; a US reissue on Drag City followed in 2012.
When Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong appeared in the UK in 1982,…
There are at least three ideal situations in which to listen to Tragic Magic, the gentle, contemplative new collaborative album from the ambient composer Julianna Barwick and experimental harpist Mary Lattimore. The first is on an early morning train ride across the country, cocooned in liminal space where you feel both exhausted and alive, wiping the dreary sleep from your eyes in anticipation of the destination to come. The second is during a languid stroll through the city at night, your mind cradled by the soft glow of streetlamps and the insulated warmth of the snow-blanketed streets. And finally, in the bath, if you’re the kind of person who bathes.
Like any good ambient music, the songs on Tragic Magic have a balming effect…
…author of the immersive Manu Chao biography, Clandestino, roving world music journalist, composer and “nomad pianist” Peter Culshaw released his previous set, Music from the Temple of Light, in 2023.
Surrender to Love is spun from the same threads that were woven through that Temple of Light – mixing an ambient piano as a grounding for the music, with a range of Eastern and Middle Eastern instruments and voices, and a ruling spirit and approach that’s drawn from the Sufi wing of spirituality – a music and practice associated with Islam, but one that perhaps predates it, stretching away into older, even prehistoric means of devotion and surrender.
The authority in these Sufi-inflected pieces is…
In even the most straightforward Tanner Matt production, there’s a moment where everything threatens to disintegrate. Since he began putting out leftfield house music in the early 2010s — working under aliases like Hashman Deejay, Studio Mody, and Ttam Renat, and in the groups Aquarian Foundation, Kinetic Electronix, and INTe*ra, among others — the Vancouver electronic musician has specialized in stripped-down tracks with shaky foundations and a sneaky dub underpinning. He’s fond of twisting the delay knob until the groove wobbles at the knees, or tweaking the syncopation until the downbeat disappears. A recent series of 12″ EPs with the similarly elusive producer C3D-E has taken his trickster tendencies to the extreme, stretching blunted,…
…Musician, composer, producer, collaborator and more, Kramer, of Noise New York/Shimmy Disc/Half Japanese fame, is so prolific in so many fields that the fact that it’s been five years since his last solo album barely registers. For those who are aware of him, he’s a presence, rather than a specific kind of artist. For those who aren’t …and the crimson moon whispers goodbye, “a 4-part ambient drone-poem for The Living and the Dead,” will give an idea of some of the sides to his talent. It is maybe as good a place to start as any, since there’s no such thing as a typical Kramer album.
Compared to his work of the early 2020s like Music for Films Edited By Moths or And the Wind Blew it All Away, …and the crimson moon whispers goodbye feels almost conventional,…
Not since Cities and Memory’s The Chimes has an album delved so deeply into the resonance of church bells; and Campana Sonans (Ringing Bell) has the dual advantage of being a single-artist LP and a physical release. One may even purchase a printed stained glass tote bag to carry one’s record (plus 19 more)!
After relocating from LA to Berlin in 2019, Jake Muir became enamored with the sound of the city’s church bells. This led him on a Europe-wide trek as he began to record and examine the vast differences between sonorities and approaches, most especially the staid practices of Germany versus the melodic sequences of England.
But of course the album is not just bells; Campana Sonans is a reflection of history and…
When solo and collaborative releases are counted, the discography Ian Hawgood‘s amassed is nothing short of staggering. What makes it all the more impressive is that, as this latest release shows, he’s still capable of creating vital and imaginative work unlike anything he’s produced before. One of the ways he accomplishes that is by devising ever new strategies for creating material, in the case of Savage Modern Structures the sound-generating gear he used, specifically guitar and that beloved prog standby, mellotron. It’s all Hawgood, though in October 2024 he and Will Bolton brought the album to its final form by using the AKG BX20 spring reverb units at Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm to give the material extra analog warmth and organic reverb.
There’s some search for definitions needed here. Of course, both OdNu and Ümlaut are monikers, in this case referring to New York artists Michel Mazza and Jeff Düngfelder.
Then we come to Mitochondria Johatsu, the title of their second joint project. Using two separate terms, they seem to want to create a new one – mitochondria are small organelles found in nearly all eukaryotic cells, often referred to as the “powerhouses of the cell” because they generate most of the cell’s energy. On the other hand, johatsu is a Japanese term for people who vanish from their lives without a trace, often to escape shame or stress.
In many ways that combination of terms does seem to define the music Mazza (electric guitar,…
There is no warning and no chance to prepare. The instant you press play on Ash Fure’s Animal, a mass of thundering sub-bass hits you like a predator pouncing on its prey. With consciousness too slow to react, some ancient, primal region of the brain lights up. Suddenly, you find yourself in fight or flight mode, pumped with adrenaline, heart racing and palms sweating.
The US experimental musician and composer has dedicated a significant part of her career to exploring the physicality of music and our instinctual feedback to sound, with The Force of Things: An Opera for Air (2014–2022) and Hive Rise (2020) tackling the human body’s relationship with fear and the palpable effect that sonic waves have on the psyche. However, none…
Typically, when an artist stays out of our view, every public gesture he or she does make is loaded with extra significance. Think of the ways each demo, cover, or bit of extramusical trivia is instantly subsumed into the canons of D’Angelo, Fiona Apple, or Frank Ocean.
But given how Corbin, who drifted from SoundCloud stardom to deeper recesses of the internet, has released music — first under a different, instantly infamous stage name, and then in intermittent bursts that suggest a true disregard for self-promotion and self-mythologizing — the temptation is to receive his songs as a series of experiments, tips of an iceberg that will languish in a Google Drive folder until it melts.
The grey cover of his new album, Crisis Kid,…
This is a very unusual Australian album, featuring the spoken and singing voices of Warlpiri elders Wantarri ‘Wanta’ Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu and his father Jerry Jangala Patrick, who hail from the Aboriginal desert community of Lajamanu. They are backed by electronic composer-producer Marc ‘Monkey’ Peckham.
Together they have created Crown and Country, an immersive sound-and-film project that translates their shared intergenerational cultural knowledge of country, history, language, spirituality, and even Indigenous astronomy, utilising a fascinating contemporary format.
Wanta’s flair for storytelling centres the narrative, a product of his central role as a fully initiated elder in the traditional law and culture…
Propulsion and stillness coincide in the atmospheric “State of Motion,” an early single from this third volume in the Nanocluster series. Vibrations build and surge, their overtones merging in limpid pools of sound. A pedal steel arcs over ambient tones, a drum beat pushes it onward, but mostly this music doesn’t develop so much as it exists. You can float on it, on your back, like a swimmer in salt water, effortlessly taking in the liquid tone and pulse of it.
Nanocluster Vol. 3 pairs Wire’s Colin Newman and his creative partner Malka Spigel with cosmic country’s SUSS, two sets of musical talents that Dusted has long admired. We’ve covered works by Spigel and Wire since moving to the Tumblr and Githead in the before times. As for SUSS, of the 2024 Birds and Beasts,…