Music holds many forms, and for Jens Kuross, it’s a vehicle of inner expression, dotted with piano chimes. Curdled instrumentation decorates Crooked Songs, a record bristling with anguished vocals and pulverised piano patterns. Such is the frenzy that Kuross momentarily takes a break from singing during “No One’s Hiding from the Sun” to let out a ghostly whisper. This type of soulful searching is like a throwback to Roger Waters during the Amused to Death era, preferring fierceness over form.
In terms of sonics, Crooked Songs feels like a lo-fi record: many of the tunes, like “Stereotype”, open with an inhaled breath before banging through the song. Many of the songs purportedly flowed based on instinct, as the musician…
Category: ambient
This cutting-edge experimental/ambient work was created after a long hiatus by electronic musician Roedelius, renowned as a pioneer of German experimental music, environmental music, and Krautrock, and Onnen Bock, known not only as an audio engineer for the Berlin Philharmonic but also for his work with Roedelius in the unit Qluster, and composer, arranger, flutist, keyboardist Yuko Matsuzaki, the creator of the extremely rare Japanese ’80s New Age / ambient album “Raden no Hako”!
After a long hiatus since the early 2000s, when Yuko Matsuzaki arranged and edited music data by Roedelius and Onnen Bock, added new compositions and mixed it, the final mix was finally released in 2020. The title track…
…Shinetiac returns to West Mineral with the follow up to their debut album, Not All Who Wander Are Lost and brings us Infiltrating Roku City.
Initially composed and rehearsed as a live set for a 29 Speedway x Conditioner’s show in Brooklyn, and performed again at Philly’s Spindrift, the Shinetiac boys spent the winter of 2024 taking these odds and ends of recordings and jams and sculpting them into something beautiful, critical, and earnest all at once.
Comprised of Philly’s Pontiac Streator (Slunty), Brooklyn’s Shiner, and Berlin based Ben Bondy, the trio deliver us a delicious perspective on their worldview through their deep friendship.
The first ten seconds of Infiltrating Roku City speak for themselves: Shinetiac make music…
NoRinTon (Alireza Fatemi Jahanabadi) has only been recording for a few years, but Leviathan exhibits a degree of maturity and thoughtfulness that makes it a perfect jumping off point to explore his discography. Consisting of 12 short tracks – each between 2 and 5 minutes – the album is a mixture of deep drones, sophisticated overlapping melodies, and airy textures.
The album exhibits a strange brightness that counters what might otherwise be viewed as a dark ambient release. Arpeggiated chords, echoing notes, sequenced patterns, and soft vocalizations provide a drifting counterbalance to the shadows. As a result, NoRinTon manages to strike a balance between uplifting and melancholy.
Like many albums on the Cryo Chamber label,…
With Polygon Reflections, Galya Bisengalieva has become the latest artist to release an entirely remixed and reimagined version of her latest album – virtually a new work – joining Glacier, The Cure and Hatis Noit, the later who also appears on this set. This is not only a great way to draw welcome attention to the original compositions, but to amplify subtle nuances and add fresh perspectives.
But first, it’s important to remind listeners of the album’s original intent: to focus our attention to the ravaging of sacred Kazakh land by the Russians, who irradiated the steppe known as the Polygon with 456 nuclear tests, destroying the local ecosystem, taking what they claimed was “uninhabited” and turning it into the uninhabitable.
The original “Alash-Kala,” the opening track…
Newly remastered and reissued as part of Lo Recordings’ campaign to excavate all Susumu Yokota‘s Skintone releases, Image 1983-1998 might be the most revelatory of the lot.
It’s not the Japanese artist’s most enjoyable record by any means, but it contextualizes everything he’d go on to create in the years that followed, from Magic Thread to Sakura. The earliest material dates from 1983 and 1984, and it’s rudimentary stuff, jammed on guitar and organ. And here’s where it gets interesting – over a decade later, between 1997 and 1998, Yokota recorded a response to those early miniatures, and that’s where we get to hear exactly how his process evolved. In the interim of course, he came in contact with acid house, which led him towards electronic…
When singer/songwriter Nicholas Krgovich and multi-instrumentalist Joseph Shabason booked a two-week tour of Japan in 2024, they enlisted Saya and Takashi of Tenniscoats to be their backing band. The pairing might have seemed a bit of a disconnect at first as the Tenniscoats sparse, loose, and lo-fi approach differs greatly from the precise, well-sculptured feel of Krgovich’s work. The concerts went well enough that the four musicians decided to make a record together. They booked a couple of days at an artist retreat housed in a century old house in Kobe and the result was a charming record titled Wao. There were no songs or ideas worked out in advance, the four just improvised and honed the results just a little bit. Despite the lack of planning or…
Frequent collaborators Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke performed their first concerts outside of Japan during a 2023 European tour. Pareidolia is derived from those shows, but it isn’t a straightforward live recording, documenting a real-time event. Instead, it’s pieced together in the studio like a collage, splicing elements from different dates and locations. Both artists prepare for performances separately, then improvise on-stage. This album finds synergies within different performances, and constructs a more fleshed-out, finalized version of their live sets. The continuously flowing pieces find their own rhythms, as the musicians’ laptop signals follow currents to and from each other, throughout time and space. “Par” is a bit heavier on fluttering flutes…
Originally developed during an Australian Art Orchestra residency in remote Tasmania, the Hand to Earth ensemble creatively established itself in 2021 with their glorious self-titled debut album, followed up in 2023 by the equally impressive Mokuy. Founded by trumpeter-producer and ex-AAO musical director Peter Knight, the progressive multicultural quintet also features Indigenous Arnhem Land songman Daniel Wilfred, his yidaki (didgeridoo)-playing brother David, contemporary South Korean vocalist Sunny Kim and Australian woodwind virtuoso Aviva Endean.
As the evolution of this unique collaboration continues, their third album is perhaps more ambient-electronic in nature, but no less grounded in the timeless Aboriginal manikay…
An unadulterated opening statement intoned by Saul Williams three times, as he joins Carlos Niño & Friends in sound ceremony underneath oak and black walnut trees in Coldwater Canyon Park, Los Angeles, on December 18, 2024.
The performance, which was organized by Noah Klein of Living Earth on the grounds of longstanding conservationist organization TreePeople, was the first of its kind for longtime friends and collaborators Williams and Niño. The two have been in contact since 1997 and have worked on a variety of projects together, but had never been moved to present in this way. For the occasion, Niño assembled and directed an ensemble of frequent collaborators including Nate Mercereau (guitar synthesizer,…
Perila steps up solo with a heavily satisfying debut for West Mineral, investigating negative space and states of subconsciousness.
The shift in tone feeds forward into arcane realms of resonant dark ambient and dream-pop, harnessed in amorphous structures using dub-as-method. It’s wholly immersive stuff in a way that’s long been Perlia’s calling card, but here more careful in its command of personalised, atmospheric physics from the Coil-esque ‘cheerleader’, thru the deeply smudged and sexy trip hop of ‘lava’, and the oozing, sloshing OOBE-like spectres of ‘give it all’.
The title of the album is a reference to Carl Jung’s phrase “all haste is of the devil” which informs Perila’s writing process here;…
Leading figure of modern ambient Florian T M Zeisig drifts in adult contemporary neo classical space for a shimmering 2nd turn with Stroom, blessed by harp and saxophone from Róisín & Cathal Berkeley and Lia Mazzarri’s cello.
Fresh from minting his Angel R project with Aaliyah Enyo, and building on a handful of cherished albums on enmossed, including the ambient soundtrack to Berghain’s cloakroom, Zeisig curves back onto Stroom with an album of effortlessly lush floatation tank/massage parlour music (delete as applicable).
The spirit of Eno and pot pourri is strong on this one as Zeisig diffuses instrumental gestures into aerosolised synth tones with a gossamer touch that’s come to be expected of his work.
In 2017, Los Angeles multi-instrumentalists Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer traveled to the Åland Islands, an archipelago of more than 6,000 islands in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland. Their ostensible purpose was to help two friends rehab an old building in the tiny municipality of Kumlinge — population 320 — and convert it into a hotel. They brought more than just construction tools; they came prepared with a collection of instruments and electronics, and as they adjusted to their surroundings, they documented their time with musical improvisations and field recordings.
They found themselves profoundly moved by the experience, and they returned two years later to perform in a 14th century church on the island.
The Vines, a band consisting of outsized Australian rockers, are releasing an album this summer. So is Vines, sans ‘the,’ a project by Cassie Wieland, a Brooklyn-based composer, multi-instrumentalist and electronic musician.
I’ll Be Here is by the latter artist, who writes songs interwoven with new classical sensibilities and chops. One can’t help but wonder what the algorithms will make of it.
There are a lot of doleful song titles on I’ll Be Here, such as “I’m getting sick,” “Evicted,” “Happy is hard,” and “Tired.” The music is less overt, consisting of atmospheric instrumentals and songs, with the vocals are shrouded in vocoder. This technique was used last year, to good effect, by Alan Sparhawk on White Roses,…
In the liner notes for his seminal album Music for Airports, Brian Eno wrote that ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Before him, French composer Erik Satie, whose musique d’ameublement (‘furniture music’) prefigured ambient, reportedly used to get angry if his compositions drew too much attention. Ambient music, then, has long occupied a strange space. It should reward deep listening without demanding it; operate with presence, but not insistence.
This is a paradox that sits at the heart of Sen’nyū, the latest effort from Japanese ambient bodach Meitei. Inspired by Japanese onsen culture, it’s an album with place as its central tenet. And it’s best enjoyed in the bath.
The record, released on Singapore’s Kitchen…
In keeping with the albums he’s released recently under his given name (following nine full-length albums under various project names), Fletcher Tucker continues to “explore rationality – aural and poetic expressions of his ever deepening relationships to place, ancestors, ceremonial practice, and kinfolk (human and more-than-human)” on his latest album, Kin, according to the press materials. Residing in Big Sur, California, Tucker uses a foundational palette of “breathing” instruments – Swedish bagpipes, pump organ, elder and bamboo flutes, Mellotron saxophone and flute tapes – alongside chanting and other meditative tactics, to “exhale enchantment back into the living world”.
In short, Kin is about the Earth and our…
Tament is a personal translation, an audio diary of sounds created and heard. Glinca calls it “the audio of the everyday.” The timbre is warm and welcoming: the tenderness of thumb piano, music box and chime set against the click-clack of rail lines and the blur of unfocused conversation. One walks through this life as if it is a dream, or as the cover photo suggests, the memory of a life. On “Swoq,” one hears what seems to be a modified clock. The gorgeous Fluid Audio packet includes survey maps, slides, prints and photos, travel tickets and reel-to-reel snippets. The combination of material objects and collected sounds creates a hazy glow, suggesting that the pleasant feelings of the past can be recreated, or at least re-experienced, in the present.
Tangerine Dream’s breakthrough album will celebrated in a box set that features a host of audiovisual material taken from a bigger box set.
Virgin/UMR reissue the German group’s 1974 hit Phaedra as a 5CD/Blu-ray box set featuring all the relevant album-related material featured in 2019’s 16 CD/2BD In Search of Hades (The Virgin Recordings 1973-1979). Beyond the remastered album, extras include two discs of outtakes, the band’s first U.K. concert and some 5.1 surround and stereo remixes of the album material by celebrated engineer Steven Wilson. The set also comes with a new illustrated book featuring liner notes by band expert Wouter Bessels. Though Tangerine Dream had been recording for several years by this point – this was their…
The frightening ubiquity of artificial intelligence can be enough to concern any artist who possesses even a modicum of creative dignity. However, acclaimed Canadian composer Andrew Staniland offers a refreshing deployment of innovations; one that, in the words of a recent press release, “emphasizes rather than approximates humanity”.
In collaboration with the Memorial ElectroAcoustic Research Lab (MEARL) at Memorial University College in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Staniland has been working for the last several years on the digital instrument JADE, a versatile tool that, according to the press release, “expands upon conventional tactile means of performing music, employing sensors that measure environmental traits such as humidity, temperature…
Disseminating experimental music from the myriad of vibrant scenes across the SWANA region to the wider world has been Ruptured Music’s generous undertaking for over fifteen years. Its creative source keeps giving and its curational insight keeps providing. Enter amongst the label’s significant June releases, the poignantly titled Crashing waves dance to the rhythm set by the broadcast journalist revealing the tragedies of the day, an expansive collaboration between Charbel Haber, Nicolás Jaar and Sary Moussa.
Jaar’s name maybe the most familiar, the Chilean-American electronic musician and polymath behind seminal IDM albums under his own name and the Against All Logic aka, as well as one half of the illusive downtempo duo Darkside.