After focusing on the rhythmic, proto-techno side of Krautrock with the second volume, the third installment of Bureau B’s Silberland series gathers ambient, new age, and progressive electronic selections from the vast catalog of the reissue-heavy German label. This covers a lot of ground, from eerie, washed-out soundscapes to driving tracks that feel propulsive enough, even without drums. The set starts with Cluster & Eno’s gently contemplative “Ho Renomo,” immediately followed by a tranquil, shimmering Roedelius piece that feels like a pleasant drift down a river. Vono’s “Hitze” inhabits a much different mood, resembling a voyage into a bat-filled cave, and Der Plan’s “Die Wüste” is a haunting gothic miniature. You’s “E-Night” paints a sky-like canvas…
Category: ambient
Scattered notes seem to stretch time, their repetition and countless combinations evoking (or invoking?) the infinite iridescence of light that accompanies dawn — a ritual as inevitable as it is unpredictable. With his Musique pour le lever du jour, composed over two years and completed in 2017, Melaine Dalibert once described his aim as creating “an infinite piece,” without beginning or end. Subtle, intangible, both complex and minimal, the variations forming this hour-long composition — dedicated to Belgian pianist Stéphane Ginsburgh — allowed silence and resonance to blossom into shades of color.
Released on the American label Elsewhere Music, led by Yuko Zama, the album was ranked among France Musique’s 100 best of 2018.
This second album from the Belgian violinist and composer introduces haunted shreds of voice. Unlike her more cerebral debut Picture a Frame, Chronotopia threads soft wordless lullabies among the plucking, gliding, thumping improvised string tones. It plays with time, as the title suggests, but also with memory and perception.
This is subtle, unobtrusive music, coming at you out of dead quiet and forcing you to lean in to catch it. The cascading violin notes of “Off Day On” swirl vertiginously but lightly; you might imagine that a mad, frantic orchestra plays several rooms away.
Drones build up like storm clouds in these looming, brooding pieces. “Night Bites” emerges out of a sustained hum of overtones, a sound that vibrates with inchoate possibility.
Close your eyes. Imagine the dawning of the earth: the sun rising slowly through a soft mist, spreading warmth, light and hope across an undulating landscape of jagged mountains, lush foliage, free-flowing rivers… Then conjure a soundtrack. The morning ragas of Indian classical music, perhaps. Or indeed, Nilam, the second album by celebrated New York City-born, South India-raised singer, experimentalist and multi-instrumentalist ganavya, the owner of a voice so profound, so intimate and spiritual, that it seems double as a reminder of why we are here.
Technically speaking (although to do so is to detract from the beauty), ganavya’s melodic manoeuvres are to be marvelled at. The inclusion of the ancient, formerly extinct Tamil harp,…
This is FB’s second album after Old Codes, New Chaos and for me, it is one of the most beautifully crafted albums I have ever experienced. From the very start the sounds cocoon you in their warmth and take you on a journey. Jazzy cords reverberate and repeat creating a slow trance-like effect as soothing “dubby” basslines perfectly complemented by ingenius percussion drive the tunes along. The late great Bill Hicks’s tirade against the advertising world is used to great effect in the middle of the album just before Fila Brazilia kick in with a folk-trance barnstormer. Starsky and Hutch era pure funk pumps up in later tunes, bubbling beneath the surface of exotica. Don’t expect anything fast, hard or intricate-just look forward to the fact that their brilliance lies in an uncomplicated…
Patricia Wolf‘s second Balmat album is the soundtrack to experimental filmmaker Edward Pack Davee’s feature-length documentary ‘Hrafnamynd’, and mixes field recordings with AFX-esque lullaby themes, tape-mangled instrumental vamps and VHS-burn’d analog pads.
There’s something oddly soothing about ‘Hrafnamynd’, and without seeing the documentary it’s hard to know exactly why. Using film and digital, Davee recounts his childhood in Iceland through the volcanic island’s ravens, exploring the landscape and folklore while scraping his own nostalgia. And Wolf’s score attempts to mimic the surreal fusion of old and new by using her UDO Super 6, a powerful binaural analog-hybrid synth, to bring the past towards the present.
There’s a recurring sound on “Crude Soil,” at the very start of Amulets’s Not Around But Through, that welcomes the listener in. It’s a grand effect, somewhere between a hum and a squeal: a distant cousin to air-raid sirens, an orchestra warming up, or that big THX whoosh at the start of a summer blockbuster. Its first appearance is right about where a pop music aficionado might expect to find a drop — but in its place, they find a lift: a subtly alarming musical suggestion that what happens next is going to demand your undivided attention.
It’s a tricky sound to put your finger on. Randall Taylor’s process — which relies largely on tape loops, samples, and his own guitar playing — creates such a rich sonic collage that the mystery is often the main attraction.
ProtoU returns with her seventh album of experimental ambient music, characteristically combining spaciousness with layers of sound.
The overall feel is expansive, with thick, sweeping chords undergirded by manipulated white noise, rumblings, field recordings, and even what sounds like stringed instruments.
Science-fiction themed, one can easily visualize spaceships steadily traversing a panoramic backdrop of stars.
Add to that unintelligible radio transmissions, soft sequenced rhythms, and shimmering drones. While pastoral at times, the mood is also ominous, as the machinery of the cosmos is indifferent to the fragility of its inhabitants.
A frequent collaborator, ProtoU is assisted by…
As a co-founder of the electronic label Faktura, Artem Dultsev is a champion of left-field sounds from Russia’s Ural region. The austere press photos for his project metra.vestlud typically center on hooded figures, thickets of hardware, and gritty spaces. But his music is surprisingly bloopy, as if melded from digital raindrops falling on Jell-O. Dulstev’s new full-length, Ashes That Made the Shape of My Dreams, is meandering and humid, and arrives via bohemian California institution Not Not Fun, where it lands seamlessly alongside twinkly experimental releases from Shine Grooves, Yayoba, and Frunk29. More than anything else in the NNF catalog, Ashes feels like a spiritual companion to x.y.r.’s 2023 record Aquarealm: Both albums are wordless, somewhat…
For Berlin-based, Syrian musician Khaled Kurbeh, the vast tapestry of everyday life, with all of its chaos, routines, bureaucracy, and (mis)fortune, can be experienced through the application of predictable and unpredictable rhythms.
Rhythms that often emerge from some of the least likely places.
On Kurbeh’s first album in seven years, Likulli Fadāin Eqāéh [To Each Space its Own Rhythm], stagnation is not an issue. A matter reinforced by the track titles, with their allusions to journeys and explorations, and by the perpetually moving sounds throughout. They never stand still, even when reduced to quietly looming ambience. The subdued notes of ‘Sunūnū al-Manara [Swallow of the Lighthouse]’, for example, slide by…
To understand Thank You Kirin Kiki, the ambitious and stunning debut album from jazz and ambient multi-instrumentalist Rindert Lammers, it’s essential to get the proper context. In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 film Shoplifters, Japanese actress Kirin Kiki plays the grandmother of a family who have all fled or lost their own families. In one of her final scenes (both onscreen and in her real life), Kiri looks at her family and says “thank you” twice, an improvised moment for the actress, who passed away later that year.
This moment had a profound effect on Lammers, a Dutch musician born in 1994 who was raised in a musical family and influenced by jazz and progressive rock. Experiencing the sudden loss of three loved ones while studying history…
Following the success of 2024’s reissue of 1980’s key works by cult Japanese outsider composer K. Yoshimatsu, Phantom Limb return with compendium release Zentai: The Collected Works of K. Yoshimatsu, collecting nine albums created from 1980-1985, over three volumes spanning exploratory home-recorded 4-track experiments.
Over a furiously prolific period from 1980 to 1985, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu composed, recorded and released some forty albums. These records primarily appeared under his own name, some required aliases, and others saw him compose, arrange, and produce for friends and peers in his creative circle. All of them, however, surfaced on Japan’s cult and inimitably fertile DD. Records, an astonishingly exhaustive catalogue…
A twenty-minute video filmed at Other Music, a record store in New York, captures Stars of the Lid live in 1996. Shot on a camcorder, the duo, the late Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie, are playing in a seemingly ad hoc space. While the latter stands next to a bookcase and a ladder, the former is perched left of frame by a door opening onto a packed closet. They tune up and chat, a guitar chord hits a longtailed delay and starts looping. The point where the banter stops and performance starts isn’t clear cut.
In terms of video, it captures a sparsely documented stage of Stars Of The Lid’s history, nearly two decades before they would return to NYC to play in a church for Boiler Room, but this time bolstered by a chamber orchestra.
Born from a longtime kinship, almost a spiritual sisterhood, composers Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith’s affinity for wondrous fantasy blossoms on their delicate self-titled collaboration, Disiniblud. Nayar’s digitally altered math-rock riffage and Keith’s modular synth embellishments coalesce into a sublime, indietronica journey exploring fantasy as a form of liberation.
Disiniblud teems with a chipper, warm tone as swirls of high voices and glitchy skitters flutter in the ears like butterflies. This spectacle is fairytale-like, with the duo’s similar neoclassical leanings leaving many enchanting moments to parse. Chimes continually coil as deep piano stabs swell into sweeping gusts of maximalist sound, rising to the highest realm of vibrant fantasy.
The collaboration between Sofie Birch and Antonina Nowacka began through the Unsound Festival in 2021 when they first met during the Morning Glory concert series at the Kraków Synagogue at noon. This initial encounter quickly blossomed into the creation of Languoria, an album recorded in Copenhagen and released the following year. In 2024, the duo journeyed to Sokołowsko, a small town in Lower Silesia known for its unique microclimate and historic sanatorium founded in the 19th century. There, Birch and Nowacka deliberately disconnected from modern technology and compositional plans, venturing into the surrounding nature armed only with a guitar, a zither, and a portable Nagra reel-to-reel tape recorder.
…Siavash Amini is a self-taught musician in rock and metal music, who later studied music for his university degree in Tehran. He belongs to a generation of young Iranian music enthusiasts who possibly had nothing except a personal computer and a dreadful dial-up internet connection. Electronic musicians like him were lucky enough to witness the unexpected rise of a genre in its pure artistic form. Electronic music in Iran was essentially introduced as an elite genre, and it took quite a while for it to be incorporated into popular styles. Raised and shined in this scene, where there were a handful of serious annual electronic music festivals in the 2000s and 2010s, Amini followed his path to become an internationally recognized musician.
Jonny Nash’s Once Was Ours Forever is a sterling example of the Made of the Same Stuff album — as in, it doesn’t sound exactly like his last album, but it’s made of the same stuff. You know the type. They’re not victory laps, diminishing returns, or B-grade leftovers so much as manifestations of how far an idea can go. They lack the element of surprise usually present in the prior album, instead showing off the artist’s ability to inhabit a particular sound. And while these follow-ups are easy to underrate on the first few listens, they might end up becoming your favorites.
Nash is a Netherlands-based artist who’s been enamored of woozy Robin Guthrie-style guitars since 2015’s Exit Strategies. He really hit on a distinctive sound, however, with…
It is always a tricky thing for artists to hinge their music on field recordings and use of found sound, particularly when you try to weave them into the sounds they composed.
It could be an intriguing listen or it could be a complete disaster, verging on unlistenable, with usually very little middle ground.
This is where Oregon artist Elijah Jamal Asani comes in with his latest album ,,, as long as i long to memorise your sky ,,,. Asani spent time as an artist in residence in the vast sonorous spaces of The Grand Canyon, where he collected sounds and field recordings which he then meticulously and quite sparingly used throughout the album here.
Yet, instead of relying just on these sounds to carry things, or making them the central…
A funny thing happens about two-thirds of the way through “Mistral,” the gospel-tinged fourth track on Fuubutsushi’s new album Columbia Deluxe: Someone yells “Woo!” The eruption of hoots and hollers on a live album shouldn’t be unusual, even if the deeply chill energy of the chamber jazz quartet usually evokes contemplation instead of rowdy celebration. Columbia Deluxe isn’t just a live album, however — it not only captures the first and only Fuubutsushi concert, it also marks the only time on record that the group has played in the same room with each other, let alone in front of other people.
Fuubutsushi started as a pandemic project, with each member — Chris Jusell (violin), Chaz Prymek (guitar), Matthew Sage (piano/synths),…
Following the success of 2024’s reissue of 1980’s key works by cult Japanese outsider composer K. Yoshimatsu, Phantom Limb return with compendium release Zentai: The Collected Works of K. Yoshimatsu, collecting nine albums created from 1980-1985, over three volumes spanning exploratory home-recorded 4-track experiments.
Over a furiously prolific period from 1980 to 1985, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu composed, recorded and released some forty albums. These records primarily appeared under his own name, some required aliases, and others saw him compose, arrange, and produce for friends and peers in his creative circle. All of them, however, surfaced on Japan’s cult and inimitably fertile DD. Records, an astonishingly exhaustive catalogue…