A deluxe 4-CD box set bringing together the seminal Columbia recordings of Terry Riley. A landmark reissue from one of the most pivotal figures in 20th-century music. The Columbia Recordings brings together the four seminal albums that Terry Riley created for Columbia Masterworks between 1968 and 1980-a body of work that redefined the possibilities of minimalism, electronic music, and compositional freedom. The deluxe 4CD box set includes In C (1968), A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969), Church of Anthrax (1971, with John Cale), and Shri Camel (1980). Each title marks a critical moment not only in Riley’s evolution but in the wider cultural shift of American music: where avant-garde practice collided with high-fidelity production, and radical sonic ideas…
Category: ambient
Does it annoy you that people today find electronic voices ugly?” Björk asks Mikä Vainio, hanging out in his studio in the 1997 BBC TV documentary Modern Minimalists. “It’s a pity that many people just cannot in a way relate with them,” ponders the Finnish musician. “Some of them are ugly for me as well, but quite many are interesting and beautiful as well.”
Much of Vainio’s work, including his recordings with Pan Sonic and as Ø, explores the tension between beauty and ugliness. Across his life and career there are many tantalising appeals to the power of the binary. “Mika Vainio was the most dualistic person of all. On one hand he had an extreme sense of beauty, and on the other, demonic shadows and death”…
Wonderful Aspiration of the Source is a solo ambient guitar project from the Nashville Ambient Ensemble’s Michael Hix. It celebrates long, shape-shifting tones and languid atmospherics, moving slowly through spectral washes of sound with clear, assured melodic purpose.
For this first solo album, Hix experimented with a B-Bender, a mechanical adaptation to the guitar that shifts the B-string up by a whole tone through a pulley mechanism activated by pulling on the guitar strap. The B-Bender was invented by the Byrds’ Clarence White and Gram Parsons in the late 1960s, intended to replicate the waving tones of pedal steel on a conventional guitar, usually in the live setting. You can hear B-Bender’s characteristic twang on any number of classic…
Kieran Hebden, the electronic musician/producer best known as Four Tet, first collaborated with boundaryless guitarist William Tyler remotely, resulting in a breakbeat-driven interpretation of “Darkness, Darkness” by the Youngbloods. The two artists booked time in a Los Angeles studio and recorded material together, then Hebden gradually tinkered with it for a couple of years, with Tyler sometimes adding overdubs and additional sounds. When the two first began talking, they bonded over a familiarity with ’80s country and folk music, as both their fathers were fans of Americana during that time period — in fact, Tyler’s parents worked as songwriters in Nashville. 41 Longfield Street Late ’80s is informed by this nostalgia, but it’s also a forward-thinking record that…
F.S.Blumm and Nils Frahm share their fifth collaborative album, Handling. Containing three tracks but 40 minutes long, it finds the duo advancing from 2021’s dub-influenced 2X1=4, deploying its lessons in ambitious new territory that also nods to earlier collections. Recorded at his studio in Berlin’s Funkhaus, the album will be released by Leiter on vinyl and via all digital platforms on September 19, 2025.
Handling’s three exquisitely detailed pieces are each entitled ‘Leuchter,’ German for ‘candlestick,’ encapsulating the LP’s luminescent glow and rising inner energy. Its scrupulous arrangements exploit a magic cabinet of instruments, among them pianos, celestas and cristal baschets, glockenspiels, guitars and multiple forms of percussion.
Waiting at a stoplight, there’s sometimes a brief instant when all the turn signals of the cars in front of you sync together. Maybe you were zoning out, watching your windshield wipers, listening to the soft murmur of the radio, but in that moment, you snap to attention. What might be even more satisfying is when they begin to pull apart from each other again, creating an increasingly complex sequence. It feels magical: Each signal drifts into its own zone before gradually locking back together for another few beats of synchronicity.
The members of Flur, the London-based jazz trio of harpist Miriam Adefris, saxophonist Isaac Robertson, and percussionist Dillon Harrison, understand this dance. Throughout Plunge, their spellbinding debut, there are stretches…
Ever lock your gaze on a fractal animation and have the dizzying impression you were tumbling into the screen? The British multimedia artist Lucas Dupuy’s recent exhibition One panoramic view after another will unfold operates on a similar principle. His artworks begin as airbrush studies, which he then photographs and rephotographs, zooming in on smaller and smaller details, drilling down to microscopic levels of granularity. Only at the end of this iterative process does he hit solid ground: Having achieved the desired tangle of lines, he pulls out his pigments and paints the ropy forms on heavy burlap, the fabric’s pits and threads giving the piece a three-dimensional, larger-than-life quality.
If Dupuy’s paintings are a way of removing…
In a way, Rafiq Bhatia‘s improvisational second album for Anti- is an extension of his interpretive work. The musician paid tribute to Flying Lotus and Sam Cooke in 2012 with versions that bore strong rhythmic and melodic likenesses to the originals. Crepuscular and turbulent 2020 renderings of classics by Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman, and Ewan MacColl, as heard on Standards, Vol. 1, were more unorthodox, far less likely to be heard on a “coffee house vibes” playlist than in a dim bohemian cafe or den where scuffed copies of David Lynch soundtracks, Ambient 4: Isolationism, and Ben Frost’s By the Throat are in rotation. With his guitar and laptop and other gear at his feet, Bhatia takes inspiration this time from the elements, but we’re not talking…
The original album plus rarities and b-sides, all remastered by Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound.
A strange thing happens before the two-minute mark in “Saeglopur.” All the twinkling and cooing erupts, at what might seem like eight minutes earlier than normal, into a cathartic blast of tautly constructed group noise — or, as those who prefer songs and motion over moods and atmospheres might say, “The good part comes.” “Saeglopur” is emblematic of Sigur Rós‘ fourth album, released nearly three years (!) after ( ). Nothing resembles a drone, and no part of it could be described as funereal. Even so, Takk… is still very much a Sigur Rós album, due in large part to the ever-present otherworldly vocals, but also because the only real changes are the activeness of…
Belgian composer and multi-instrumentalist Ward Dhoore has been touring globally for over a decade in numerous projects, including string trio Northern Resonance, and in the duo Siger, alongside his brother Hartwin.
For this solo release, Ward is joined by an eclectic group of international musicians, including Louis Favre (drums), Seraphine Stragier (cello), Daniel Herskedal (tuba), Oscar Beerten (violin) and Esther Coorevits (viola).
This is fusion folk/jazz music created with love and a modern edge. Favre’s drums lend a vibrant and subtle rhythmic power on bracing opener ‘Angela’ which builds from delicate piano to a warm and breezy affair. ‘Balloon House’ unwinds from graceful, unadorned lines into…
As naïve or as idealistic as the notion might seem to some amid the current circumstances and fractures in the world, there’s thankfully still no real telling what might happen when inspiration strikes. Each of us can, of course, navigate the world with the ready list of influences or factors in our head, primed to make cool conversations and good impressions; but at that critical moment when things become more than the sum of their collective parts, there’s nothing else for it, but to simply pursue that impulse.
Such is the case of Irish experimental trio Throwing Shapes, a project initiated by jazzman, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Gareth Quinn-Redmond reaching out to percussionist Ross Chaney and harpist Méabh McKenna after…
Renowned for her formidable and boundary-pushing cello improvisations, including free jazz, improvised noise and experimental electronics, South Korean artist Okkyung Lee is taking a surprising turn with her new album, Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music for Your Mundane Activities. The album marks a significant departure for the composer as she sets aside her cello for the first time to explore the realms of ambient and minimalist music. The lead single, the charmingly titled “good morning, harrison, it’s time to go,” offers a first glimpse into this new, intentionally understated sound world.
For over two decades, Lee has been a towering figure in experimental music, renowned for her creative rigour and emotive depth.
The cover of Riccardo La Foresta’s ZERO, 999… depicts an impossibly tall spiral tower vanishing into the sky, an aptly disorienting visual metaphor for an album that dismantles traditional notions of drumming. Here, drums are not rhythmic anchors but vessels for breath, sustain, and drone — gestural yet devoid of traditional pulse, animated by instability and flux. La Foresta’s practice centers around the drummophone, an instrument of his own invention he began developing in 2015, when he first experimented with blowing air through a cymbal attached to a drum. Forged from a decade of research expanding his process — through live performance, improvisation, and installation — ZERO, 999… is a conceptually focused and compositionally sophisticated…
Moving Images invites the audience to explore the deep connections between sound and imagery, encouraging an introspective journey where the boundaries blur between classical music, cinematic storytelling, and mental imagery. Spanning sombre chamber pieces, ominous yet hopeful and hypnotic ambiances, soft solo piano interludes, poetic and playful flutes, to tension-laced cinematic strings and synths, Emil Friis‘ latest work transcends the conventional album release. The project expands into a collaboration with a group of filmmakers, exploring how music and film intertwine to provoke our interpretation, the sound we experience and our internal narratives.
Each track is paired with a corresponding film, with the filmmakers — including Kevin Brooks,…
To the Irish outsider, the traditions of the island may have seemingly long sat still, but in recent years an exciting new wave of forward thinking artists are reinterpreting ancient myth, legend and culture through their own contemporary lens.
Now, traditions shift like the tide, re-emerging in new guises and carrying old weight into fresh contexts. Dublin’s Ian Nyquist’s latest work, Gilded steps directly into this restless current; the bodhrán, his vessel.
The Irish frame drum is the launch point for Gilded, a record that positions Nyquist in that liminal space between heritage and innovative sound design. Although serving as the record’s axis, Nyquist refuses to let it sit within its familiar frame. Through digital modelling,…
“What did you do today?” asks a man with a gentle, encouraging manner. “I did something,” says a small child.” Laughing, the man replies, “And what ‘something’ did you do?” The child answers, “I made my house.” This conversation comes from a home cassette recording made in 1983, when Eliot Krimsky was five years old. The man on the tape is his father, who passed away unexpectedly in 2022. Krimsky’s purpose on I Made My House is to connect this moment with the present day, to understand his father’s role in his life, and to come to terms with his passing.
To do this, Krimsky had to delve into his past. This process materializes on I Made My House in creative production choices that led him back to where he was raised. Krimsky replayed his…
james K has the kind of voice that rises from the ground like steam. As a singer, she follows in the tradition of trip-hop vocalists like Beth Gibbons, Tracey Thorn, and Nicolette Larson, as well as shoegaze frontwomen like Bilinda Butcher and Elizabeth Fraser. Magnetic without being the main event, her idiosyncratic vocal presence has made her an in-demand collaborator over the past decade. It also serves as the driving force behind her most bewitching solo work.
On her hotly anticipated new LP, Friend, james K sets herself loose inside a carefully-constructed assemblage of drum & bass, trip-hop and shoegaze, drawing fresh water from the contemporary resurgence of all three genres.
Since releasing her debut EP RUM in 2013,…
Shrunken Elvis are Spencer Cullum, Rich Ruth, and Sean Thompson, a trio of Nashville musicians who boast some mainstream credits but live more comfortably on the city’s experimental fringe. The music they make together is modern and impressionistic, taking elements from jazz fusion, ambient, post-rock, and even hints of country, which are then filtered and freshened through their combined instincts.
What comes out is a sort of cosmopolitan future jazz, a sleek soundtrack for road-tripping the astral plane. Guitars of every texture weave in and out of the digital froth, joining together in harmony, then sprinting out on their own for a while. The playing is tasteful, occasionally scintillating, but unified by a common aesthetic that nods…
What if the trip to Everest were not about the summit? Two springs ago, composer Patrik Berg Almkvisth journeyed through Nepal to the famed mountain, stopping at base camp. The journey was not what he expected; it began with a local funeral and ended with the sight of the sun rising over Everest. In the middle arrive intervals of wonder and joy, but also anger and disappointment. Despite the efforts of locals over time, trash litters the vast trail, a travesty transformed into sculpture by Leslie Leong, shown on the cover. Bodies remain unrecovered. Once-proud glaciers have receded. Might there still be room for revelation?
The album begins with field recordings of Kathmandu, the cheer and chimes of local streets melting into contemplative strings and…
For as long as it has existed, it seems as if the piano has been subject to opinions and experiments of various types. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the player piano was a popular self-playing piano with a mechanism that operated the piano action using perforated paper or metallic rolls to play popular tunes.
Later on, it became more fashionable for pianists to play inside the piano lid, for example by striking or plucking strings, by vibrating strings using an ebow and/or inserting items such as door keys or ping pong balls onto the strings, which made some sounds unlike an untreated piano. In addition, opinions differ greatly about the ideal tuning to make a piano sound as good as possible.
All of which brings us to Jo David Meyer Lysne,…