Undergoing an experience not unlike how Brian Eno came to his own experiments with ambient music, finding himself deaf in one ear and now hearing sound differently before, not to mention suffering auditory hallucinations, Jon DeRosa experimented with making music in an attempt to make sense of these disconcerting experiences. In that creative and therapeutic place No Solace in Sleep was born. Twenty-five years on from this extraordinary, in the very real sense of the word, debut album, it has been remastered by ambient/electronic pioneer Taylor Deupree a process which has unlocked an even brighter, deeper, broader, and stunning sonic experience.
As the name he chose for the project suggests, this this is an album that creates a tonal…
Category: ambient
Enigmatic, prolific singer/songwriter and author known for his genre-defying work and contrary personality.
Julian Cope welcomes you to the new age of the New Age with this brand new deeply sonic magical trip-out album. The three tracks invoke three different experiences: the 29-minute ’Star Garden’ emerges through the cosmic ooze like a grand ancient river gradually descending to meet its final coastal destiny; the shattered radio communications of ‘Who Put All Of This In Motion?’ perplex listeners through its veil of sonic mystery; the final epic ‘Psalm Zero’ is an incantation to the cosmos in which Cope duets with himself like some minimal avant-garde barbershop quartet. This CD is part of Head Heritage’s 2025 Ambient Autumn.
Leif swears off the ambient house of 2021’s ‘9 Airs’ and rediscovers his childhood guitar on Collide, visualising a shattered kosmische approximation that’ll surely speak to fans of Shackleton or James Holden.
If there’s a thread that links all of Welsh producer Lief Knowles’ albums, it’s memory. ‘Collide’ doesn’t aesthetically sound much like its predecessor, but there’s a shared sense of communion with the past. On ‘9 Airs’, Knowles attempted to rework old melodies into new compositions and on ‘Collide’, his decaying Aria Pro II electric guitar is used to recapture an era that’s slipping away. What sets this one apart is its commitment to the concept; Knowles has circled the dancefloor for years, muddling his foggy ambient tent-friendly…
Works in Metal is alchemic in its offering as Lamin Fofana’s pursuit of difficult meanings come to the fore yet again. Fofana sets about the arduous process of reworking and reshaping metals, seeking long-awaited transcendence from what writer, teacher, scholar, anti-colonial, feminist activist and Surrealist Suzanne Césaire refers to as the “sordid contemporary antinomies: Whites-Blacks, Europeans-Africans, civilized-savage”. Works in Metal seeks to destroy such paradoxes and damning self-beliefs sonically through sound archives, field recordings and unique production methods as a tribute to Césaire’s prophetic writing.
‘Arc’s Blues Flame’, the album’s opener, is dominated by high synth tones and occasional kick drums suggesting a vastness, equally…
…Working, for the first time, under her given name rather than the usual moniker of Ale Hop, Alejandra Cárdenas shapes A Body Like a Home and the book of poetry that accompanies it in the form of a memory palace, fills its rooms with generational wounds, then gives each of them their own voice, reciting poignant verses over a porous fabric of electronic timbres, electric guitar, field recordings, and Mexican musician Gibrana Cervantes’s violin drones.
“What is the point of remembering, let alone recording life?”, Cárdenas ponders on the opener ‘On Memory’. Her voice is soft but laden with weariness as she reflects on histories and the cruelty of those who get to write and erase them. “Somewhere, you and I, we met in…
The first Voices from the Lake album has taken on a mythical status, like a Selected Ambient Works 85-92 for the Berghain generation. Donato Dozzy and Neel, already masters of trippy, ambient-leaning techno (once called “headfuck techno”) on their own records, hit on some kind of flow state when they made their collaborative debut LP. This was a cerebral style of techno that sounded like it grew out of the forest floor, where rustling leaves and padding paws took the place of kick drums, and chords moved like swaying branches and trees. Since that album, as good a full-length as the genre has birthed, everything attached to the Voices from the Lake name — EPs, a live album, the occasional remix, celebrated live sets — has strengthened their reputation. With II, the duo…
Peals — the Baltimore-based ambient duo comprising William Cashion (Future Islands) and Bruce Willen (Double Dagger) — released the digital reissue of Seltzer, a rarity previously available only as a 2015 limited-edition cassette. Far removed from the high-energy bombast of their primary rock outfits, Peals focuses on intimacy, loops, and texture. Seltzer serves as a time capsule of the duo’s prolific 2013–2014 period, capturing the “fermentation of improvisation” that would eventually lead to their sophomore LP, Honey.
The release is structurally fascinating. While Side B, “Before and After,” acts as a seamless mixtape of home experiments, Side A documents a unique site-specific collaboration with multimedia artist Zoe Friedman inside Baltimore’s…
Julian Cope’s Head Heritage label recently unearthed another entry in its “Ambient Autumn” series: the archival release Now That I’m Different by the experimental project Queen Elizabeth. Spanning recordings from 1990 to 2005, this album is less a traditional musical experience and more a raw, immersive sonic artifact.
For those accustomed to conventional structure, this collection of drones and “near-music-concrete” will prove challenging. The tracks are rough-edged and often ramshackle, prioritizing texture and atmosphere over melody or rhythm. Imagine archaic, distressed sounds wrestling with the occasional, unexpected presence of a string quartet or the organic ur-drone provided by guest artist Stephen O’Malley of SunnO))).
Isobel Waller-Bridge has had a highly eclectic career to date. Primarily it’s involved being a film and television composer, working on her sister Phoebe’s smash Fleabag, Autumn De Wilde’s update of Emma and the acclaimed dark comedy Sweetpea. One of the things underpinning these projects across a range of disparate genres is the breadth of Isobel’s score, suiting both period works, epics and intimate character-driven projects.
This range is apparent on her sophomore record, solo project Objects from the seven-minute opener “Pillow”. It has a cinematic quality to it, easy to picture as part of a score, hauntingly beautiful but never feeling its length, full of depth. “Glass” feels like something from a horror film, with background noise and effects at its epicentre;…
With his tenth Spotted Peccary release Along the Coppermine Ridge, Rudy Adrian reminds us once again of his remarkable tone painting abilities. A scan of its eleven track titles and those of the album titles preceding it also show the New Zealand-born producer to be an ambient artist who fervently embraces the associative potential titling offers. Eschewing abstraction, Adrian gives his pieces titles that trigger strong visualizations, the latest recording’s “Alpine Tarn,” “Serpentine River,” and “Autumn Snow” three examples. Albums preceding the new one, Reflections on a Moonlit Lake and Beyond the Sleepy Hills, likewise evoke clear images and highlight another aspect of his music, its deep connection to nature. There have been times when Adrian’s…
Belarus is not a place necessarily known for its transparency, which is why Krope feels like such an unexpected and extraordinary psychogeographic ramble around a country largely estranged from the rest of Europe.
Anton Anishchanka, field recordist and composer, was pleasantly surprised when he went along to the Institute of Art History, Ethnography and Folklore in Minsk around the time of the pandemic and found he was able to access an archive of field recordings from roughly 1960 to 2005. Thanks to the ethnographer and researcher Iryna Vasilyeva, who works at the institute, Anishchanka managed to retrieve Belarusian folklore songs from various regions, forming the basis of this strangely betwitching album.
…features the remastered original stereo mix, along with an extended introduction version of ‘Rubycon’ mixed by Steven Wilson. The set also features the complete concert recorded at The Rainbow in London in October 1974 over 2 CDs and the complete concert at The Royal Albert Hall in April 1975 (which featured Michael Hoening replacing Peter Baumann) also over 2CDs.
The members of Tangerine Dream continued to hone their craft as pioneers of the early days of electronica, and the mid-’70s proved to be a time of prosperity and musical growth for the trio of Chris Franke, early member Peter Baumann, and permanent frontman Edgar Froese. The three of them had been delivering mysterious space records on a regular basis, and their…
Nine years have passed since Paul Jebanasam‘s last album, and mātr is only his third. But as the new album demonstrates, Jebanasam has a different view of time. mātr (Sanskrit for mother and a permutation of matter) places humanity in the context of geologic time and asks questions of scale and responsibility. The cover photograph of hands extended to the sky suggests prayer, although the recipient of said prayer is not revealed: Mother Earth, an unnamed divine source, or a grand void that nonetheless captures the spiritual imagination. The word “custodianship,” appearing in the liner notes, points toward a Judeo-Christian understanding, referencing the first chapter of Genesis, but custodianship implies preservation, a concept far…
From Academy Award® winning writer/director Chloé Zhao, Hamnet tells the powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet. Featuring powerful performances from Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, the film has already earned widespread acclaim, taking home the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Discussing his work on the Hamnet soundtrack, Richter explained: “In composing the score, I used the basic elements of Elizabethan music—period instrumentation, grammar, and sensibility—but applied them in ways that emerge directly from the story’s psychology. Having read the script before shooting, I sketched ideas reflecting themes of familial love and loss, our place…
Originally issued in 1998, Jon Jenkins‘ FLOW returns in a freshly remastered form to lend its soundscapes even greater resonance and depth. The seventy-four-minute album’s even more immersive than the ambient norm, but the commitment it asks of the listener is rewarded with deeply textured productions that show Jenkins to be an exceptionally meticulous sculptor of sound. Enhancing the music’s impact are electric guitar contributions from Jeff Pearce, David Helpling, and Howard Givens. A strong argument could be made that FLOW is the quintessential ambient album, given the many genre-defining boxes it checks. There’s atmosphere in abundance, melody too, and, need it be said, seamless flow.
While Jenkins’ soundscapes stand credibly…
Narcomancer covers a lot of ground. The album’s opening tracks are reminiscent of acousmatic music in the GRM sense, loose structures built from overlapping fragments of sound. Undergirding these complex textures are brooding and dark layers of synth that move slowly with a muted sense of dread. However, they are punctuated by abrupt bursts of shimmering tones, falling musical figures, didgeridoo, weird vocalizations, and soft beats. The album employs ambient, techno, and electroacoustic techniques without falling clearly into any of these genres.
This is the second release from Primal Era Worship (Bertrand Lachambre), both in 2025 and both on Cryo Chamber. Lachambre seems to be a new voice, as his discography (under this…
Fabiano Do Nascimento is not simply sticking to his Brazilian roots. After all, he currently has a split residence between Los Angeles and Japan, trying to include all his experience and form them into a specific whole on his latest album offering Cavejaz. Primarily a guitarist, he uses various multi-string and multi-tuning (nylon string) guitars, stretching the sound of his instrument as far as it goes and in any direction it takes him, while at the same time trying to firmly root his sounds into his Brazilian heritage. For Cavejaz, Do Nascimento organised three separate sessions – one as studio sessions with renowned UAKTI member Paulo Santos and Jennifer Souza back in Brazil, while the second was recorded live during a Tokyo concert with with veteran Japanese musician…
Old Saw conjures the ghosts of Americana, wrapping guitar-picking, banjo plucks, pedal steel whine and violin cries in ambient drone. The music hovers, envelops, levitates rather than moving forward. It’s drenched in overtone, which lends a mystic, other-vibrations aura. These are old time instruments bent towards alternate universes.
Old Saw is Henry Birdsey’s collaborative project with a septet of (possibly fictional) backwoods Vermont players: Harper Reed on nylon string guitar and banjo, Ira Dorset on fiddle and bowed strings, Ann Rowlis coaxing prolonged drones from reed organ and harmonium, J.M. Eagle on pedal steel, lap steel and resonator, Jim Cutler on telecaster, Addison Starkweather-Price on bass and Peter Catchpole clanking metal objects and…
