Category: ambient


The music heard on Kara-Lis Coverdale‘s album Changes in Air originated from an installation at a floating sauna in Oslo called Skarven. The pieces are inspired by five materials (wood, water, sun, glass, and metal) and were originally composed and recorded in 2019, then finished in 2025, when the album was released.
While From Where You Came, the first of Coverdale’s three 2025 LPs, was an expansive, collaborative work, and A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever was a series of solo piano nocturnes, Changes in Air is somewhere in between. It was composed and played by Coverdale alone, using electronic organ, modular synthesis, and piano, and it contains longer pieces which flow into each other, subtly evolving.

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Remastered from the original source tapes for the first time, this edition includes the original album, bonus tracks, home and studio demos (from 1978-1980), and early live tracks.
The Durutti Column’s debut album does not have an auspicious origin story. The band whose name it bore had split acrimoniously just before they were supposed to record it. Their guitarist Vini Reilly was so poleaxed by depression that he was virtually unable to leave his house: 12 different attempts were made to section him over the course of 1979. Believing that Reilly was “going to die”, Factory Records boss Tony Wilson intervened, buying him a new guitar, then suggested he visit a studio with the label’s troubled but visionary producer Martin Hannett as “an experiment”.

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…a newly remastered edition, expanded with two brand-new compositions reimagined from the original audio files: ‘Claustrophobia’, reworked by Carter, and ‘Uncaged’, reworked by Boddy.
In 2000, Ian Boddy founded the DiN label “to (purvey) fine contemporary electronica.” He is also the label’s chief artist.
Caged is a collaboration between Boddy and Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter. It is a dense mix of sequenced e-music, heavy rhythms, and vast atmospheres. One of Boddy’s strengths has always been his willingness to try something different and to learn new methods, techniques, and sounds. He allows Carter’s dense atmospheres to augment the overt Berlin school sound.
So, while this definitely has all the characteristics…

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How does music communicate across the ages, and what can it teach about fragility, conflict, resistance and peace? In composing Non Fiction, a symphony presented by the 45-member Manchester Collective, conducted by Hugh Tieppo-Brunt with appearances from Jack Wylie and Valentina Magaletti, Hania Rani drew her inspiration from a surprising source: child prodigy Josima Feldschuh, who performed with the Jewish Symphony orchestra at age 11, wrote music of her own in occupied Warsaw, and died at age 13 while her family was hiding from the Nazis. The symphony is haunted by the echoes of old enmities, and speaks to a new generation of conflict in Ukraine and Gaza. Rani’s own performance anchors the set, her piano the central instrument.

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Continuing his refraction of the rave continuum into pointedly dislocated, delicately bruising sound system meditations, Low End Activist returns to Peak Oil with a second and third instalment in his Airdrop series
…His last two albums, Airdrop and Municipal Dreams, sifted through the detritus of UK dance music, from dub to grime, hardcore to drum & bass, showing the gritty underbelly that Big Rave wants to hide from smiley face T-shirts. His newest album, Airdrop II, is a dark, impressionistic exploration of hardcore’s past — a haunted snapshot of three decades of rave comedowns. Together, Airdrop, Airdrop II and Airdrop III, are like piecing together the history of British bass music from disintegrating tapes…

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While the cello might not seem the instrument most naturally suited to the progressive metal genre, its capacity for replicating vocal wail makes it an extremely effective conduit for its extreme emotional expression. On Lifeblood, the long-anticipated follow-up to his solo albums Worlds Within (2020) and Worlds Within Live (2021), renowned Ottawa-based cellist Raphael Weinroth-Browne demonstrates how effective the instrument can be when used in a metal context. Augmenting layers of acoustic cello (a 2012 model built by Raymond Schryer) with amplifiers, effects pedals, and on two tracks bass drum, the music exudes visceral fury from start to finish.
As his extensive discography shows, Weinroth-Browne’s a musician of immense range…

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Electronic ambient producer Deborah Martin has collaborated with many great artists over her thirty-year career, but an especially fruitful partnership is the one she established with oboist Jill Haley in 2021 for their joint release The Silence of Grace and the sophomore effort that followed two years later, Into the Quiet.
The melding of Martin’s atmospheric soundscapes and Haley’s resonant woodwinds makes for riveting music, and a deep spell is again cast on the culminating chapter in their ambient trilogy, Rendering Time. Inspired by life’s cycles of birth, death, and everything in between (and beyond), the recording is sequenced to evoke that arc; it also, of course, can simply be experienced as a collection of ten transporting soundscapes…

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Even on her debut EP, at just 22 years old, feeo sounded like the weariest of old souls.
She sang of a choking fear, of bombs falling like tears, of staying up to hear her lover leave because she couldn’t bear the thought of waking up to “haunted sheets.” Over toe-scuffing downtempo beats and wistfully unfurled synths, she asked questions — “Are we in love or is it just the drugs, babe?”; “Being lost is a bit like being free, isn’t it?” — in a tone that suggested she harbored few illusions about the answers.
It wasn’t just the wise-beyond-her-years lyrics that were so striking. It was feeo’s effortless balance of plaintiveness and composure, vulnerability and control. Her guarded, whisper-soft musings had a way of unexpectedly blossoming…

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This is Independent Project Records’ own take on digging deep and unearthing revelatory treasures from its 45-year history. A trip through the past, present and future of a label that since 1980 has made the most prominent part of its name, that resounding “Independent”, not a trendy epithet but a mission. This two-album compilation is an invite to join the dots and find out what makes Afterimage – the early ’80s band the Los Angeles Times once called “LA’s own Joy Division” – and Alison Clancy – the artist making ethereal ambient dream pop in the basement of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, where she works as a dancer – kindred spirits. You’re invited to find similarities in the way The Ophelias reclaimed San Francisco’s unfettered psychedelic rock roots…

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Loula Yorke’s Hydrology is an effortlessly flowing universe of modular synthesis. Deeply rooted in the essence of water as a starting point, the six pieces on the album explore fluidity in different forms and atmospheres, always true to Yorke’s unique and personal live expressive canvas.
From the circular mantra of the opener “SICL,” we are smoothly and progressively spiraling from the outer limits of the album towards the denser compositional artery of “Gleam” where whispering and at times manipulated voices form a backdrop for the tonal fluctuations of the repetitive synthesizers that zoom in and out like watery particles gleaming in the dark.
The reverberant and spacious production of the album allows for a clean and transparent…

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Trinity, the third collaborative album between Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello, continues the pair’s patient, pliable musical explorations while marrying them with a unique collaborator — one per track — to map new territories.
Trinity presents five collaborations with acclaimed artists who work at the edges of sound and genre: Chris Abrahams (The Necks), improvising turntablist Marina Rosenfeld, Brendan Canty (Fugazi, The Messthetics), multidisciplinary artist Aki Onda, and the late contemporary artist and lowercase musician Steve Roden. The results deepen the music’s immediacy and directness, while pushing it in directions neither English nor Vitiello could have foreseen.
…In English’s words, “this record’s surprise…

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Implosion is a purely instrumental, collaborative album of cinematic, dystopian sounds from dubstepper and extreme electronica experimentalist the Bug and his pal Ghost Dubs. However, rather than working on the same tracks together, as could be implied, they have each applied their production know-how to alternate tunes on the two discs that make up this recording.
That isn’t to say that the sounds on Implosion swing from one flavour to another and back again. This is an album with a singular vision that is consistently eerie and sinister and has much in common with early 1990s ambient techno heads Sun Electric and the Sabres of Paradise, as well as Kevin Richard Martin’s (the Bug’s given name) alternative film soundtrack…

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…After a decade of remarkable releases, Exzald S (Sarah Foulquiere) is finally ready to unveil her debut solo album ~ not counting the collaborative Serene Transfer Scheme, lodged in a unique steel box. The fantastic art ~ also by the artist ~ is an invitation to enter into a fabulous science fictional world. On Irisdesc, Exzald S continues to map the terrain of a planet only she knows, sending samples of her voice into space as if each were a passenger on Voyager‘s golden record. Words are secondary to expression, sucked into whirlpools of electronic sound.
While there are other travelers in the same sonic galaxy ~ Katarina Gryvul, for example whose recent work also appears on the Subtext label ~ no others share her planet. This is because…

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Sébastien Betbeder’s comedy-drama L’Incroyable Femme Des Neige (The Incredible Snow Woman) looks like a lot of fun based on the trailer, but don’t judge the film score by the trailer music. What Ensemble 0 (Sylvain Chauveau, Stéphane Garin & Joël Mérah) have composed is something tonally different: more subdued, as lighthearted as falling snow.
…The tracks are as brief as flurries, the shortest only eleven seconds, and even the longest coming up just short of two and a half minutes.  There’s little time to appreciate one before the next, but tougher they establish a playful mood.
The LP begins peacefully, with soft piano joined by swiftly expanding orchestral elements. “Les Grands Espaces” draws the listener in,…

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Golden Brown’s Stefan Beck was inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series as he wrote this suite of songs, and he encourages listeners to read the books while absorbing Patterner. His interpretation isn’t especially literal; the title comes from a master wizard in the trilogy and a couple of the track titles are place names from the world LeGuin built. However, the books have a wonderful down-to-earth naturalism, spiked with the glitter of occasional magic, and massed, sometimes, into epic contours. That’s something this music has as well, a cosmic Americana made of ordinary sounds — guitar picking, cello predominate — polished to a heightened, semi-surreal clarity.
Beck has made three previous albums as Golden Brown. He’s also a member of Prairiewolf,…

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…newly remastered by Josh Bonati and includes the entire five-hour suite that Basinski originally captured while looping analog tape as it actively deteriorated in the process.
A work of minimal, process-based tape music, experimental composer William Basinski‘s Disintegration Loops series achieves astonishingly moving and evocative states through relatively simplistic means. In the process of transferring aging reel-to-reel tape loops to a digital medium, Basinski found the reels (originally recorded in 1982) were so old and decrepit that the tape would shed slightly with each pass of the loop. This gradually affected the sound coming through, blurring the short, pastoral phrases of sound into an increasingly ghostly and…

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In JJJJJerome Ellis’s magical compositions, their stutter is a guiding light. Pauses and repetitions spark new life, new ideas, new possibilities, as Vesper Sparrow explores their “dysfluency” in the context of Black musical traditions. The Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist and former Yale lecturer is heady, intellectual company: in the manner of Alvin Lucier, they gently talk the listener through the sonic and political reverberations of their work. “The stutter … (cc)can be a musical instrument,” Ellis announces, before an exhilarating rush of tiny noises – made from hammered dulcimer, flute, piano, voices – fizz into being.
To create Vesper Sparrow’s soundscapes of ambient, jazz, spoken word and reimagined gospel, Ellis works with granular synthesis…

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As Farao, Kari Jahnsen has experimented with a range of electronic-acoustic palettes, setting her textured arrangements within indie folk, alt-pop, orchestral rock, glossier electronica settings, and combinations thereof.
With her third album, Magical Thinking, she leans into an R&B-inflected alternative dance sensibility that falls on the sleeker extreme of her output thus far, although it should be noted that both she and producer Ådne Meisfjord (120 Days) are credited with beats, synths, percussion, and, last but not least, zither. So, she hasn’t left her blended, psychedelic-leaning approach behind. It also isn’t entirely club-friendly. The album was recorded between Berlin and Oslo, Jahnsen’s former and re-adopted base, respectively.

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