For their third collaborative album, Ruth Mascelli & Mary Hanson Scott have come up with an intriguing title – Esoteric Lounge Music Now, presenting a sort of dilemma for the listeners – what should esoteric lounge music sound like now?
Well, what Mascelli and Scott seem to have in mind is their take on all things noir in music – from a vision of jazz noir soundtracks of fifties and sixties combined with the dark touches that could be found on the prime trip-hop of second part of the nineties, neatly combined and meshed into dark late night tone sculptures that combine Mascelli’s deep, darkened vocals with Scott’s, often FX-blasted reeds and other electronic embellishments. The duo draws both on their previous musical experiences (Mascelli as a part of…
Category: ambient
Tangerine Dream are unquestionably one of the most influential electronic groups of all time. Their music has made an immeasurable impact on ambient, new age, techno, trance, and progressive rock, as well as modern film score composition.
On August 1, 1987, Tangerine Dream performed a landmark open-air concert in front of the Reichstag in Berlin, celebrating the city’s 750th anniversary. Held at the Platz der Republik and drawing over 100,000 attendees, the event unfolded near the Berlin Wall – a powerful symbol of Germany’s division at the time. The band’s signature electronic sound, paired with stunning visuals and fireworks, made for an unforgettable experience. It’s even said that the music could be heard across the border in East Berlin.
The subgenre of cumbia, cumbia rebajada, was born in the ’90s when Gabriel Dueñez was DJing a club in Monterrey. All of a sudden his tape deck overheated, and the music began to slur. The beat of tracks like El Manicomio de Vargasvil’s “Mi Abuelo” were slowed from cumbia’s usual 100 BPM chug to a sluggish 65 BPM, their once peppy choruses resembling the gurgly bass of the Star Wars character Jabba the Hut. Fortunately for Dueñez, though, the dancers loved it.
Fellow Monterrey musician, Delia Beatriz (AKA Debit), met with Dueñez and his family in preparation for her second album Desaceleradas. She studied the history of cumbia rebajada, and used Dueñez’s first two mixtapes as source material for her hauntological rewiring.
It’s weird, right? We’ve somehow stumbled into a world where, for all we’re told that algorithms homogenise music, actually more people than ever are exposed to very, very odd and abstract soundmaking.
There’s new age gong baths at even the most normie health spas. There’s a kajillion hours of “relaxation music” flooding streaming services from who knows where, a lot of it just drones and/or modulating white noise.
There’s the sound design of scores by the likes of Hildur Guðnadóttir, Daniel Lopatin, Cristobal Tapia De Veer that reach millions in surround sound via movies, games and prestige dramas yet are in their own right sound sculpture on inhuman scale with chasmic voids and nanoscopic…
Remastered by Mark Beazley.
After the calm, measured beauty of Sakura, versatile Japanese producer Susumu Yokota followed a comparatively experimental and eclectic path on Grinning Cat.
The beats are more prevalent (though never as floor-friendly as his voluminous house, trance, and techno releases), the instrumentation is more varied, and the overall feel shifts markedly from track to track. Piano is the dominant instrument here, just as guitar was for Sakura. But Yokota’s skill with context finds him tailoring the sound of the instrument to suit each individual track. “Imagine” uses a hazy piano loop and vocal samples seemingly lifted from sacred music to achieve a thoughtful, meditative effect.
Even before ambient firmly formed as a genre, with krautrock mid explorations by Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Harmonia and others, there has always been a thin line between explorative and simply boring, with artists slipping into the latter often falling into the very dreaded New Age genre. Sticking to the former often meant following the path the above-mentioned initial explorers took, but that meant re-imagining the elements they brought and adding new ones along the way.
That is where the concept for the new collaboration between Jamie Lidell and Luke Schneider lies for their new album A Companion for the Spaces Between Dreams. Yet, there was an imminent danger of the duo drifting into musical wallpaper, as the idea was to create music…
Shortly following the noisy ambient Americana of no floor, claire rousay‘s 2025 collaboration with more eaze, rousay remained on Thrill Jockey with the solo effort a little death. On this album, the composer mixes numerous found sounds and field recordings with droning strings, rustic guitars, stirring pianos, and electroacoustic processing. It feels very autumnal, like crunchy leaves underfoot, but also like a warm jacket in the crisp night air. When spoken samples are clearly audible, such as on the brief opener “i couldn’t find the light” or the comforting drone of “somehow,” they directly relate to topics of disassociation and mental illness. On “just,” M. Sage’s delicate, considered piano notes give way to swelling, gliding strings and curdled tape distortion, packed with…
British composer and multi-instrumentalist Roger Eno’s releases his 3rd album for DG Without Wind, Without Air. The project follows on from the success of The Turning Year (2022) and the skies, they shift like chords (2023). The latter was described by Spectrum Culture with the words: “a remarkable release that unsettles with haunting lines and simultaneously makes one tingle with warmth at a display of beauty”.
The new album includes both solo piano pieces and tracks orchestrated for various combinations of clarinet, guitar, bass, strings, synths, percussion and electronics. There are guest vocal appearances from soprano Grace Davidson and Roger’s daughters Cecily and Lotti Eno, with Roger himself singing on The Moon And The Sea.
Night CRIÚ evokes clandestine ceremonies in forest glades, covert rituals taking place in the depths of a cave. Crepuscular and ghostly, this is a realm where an intoned, reverberant voice meshes with ritualistic choirs, undulating brass, methodically bowed strings and unhurried percussion.
Musically, the lineage could be the solo work of Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard or Anna von Hausswolff at her most reductive. If the fifth solo album from the Ireland’s Hilary Woods were employed as the soundtrack to the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová or Werner Herzog’s 1976 Herz aus Glas, it would be a seamless transposition – this music exists beyond place and time.
For Woods, getting to this point has not been linear. From 1999, she was the bassist of…
Fears are very individual, and how one person copes with theirs might not make their struggles evident to others. So while Argentinian artist aylu took a generally delicate approach to her latest album, she’s made explicit that it is an exercise in processing with the title Fobia.
aylu – real name Ailin Grad – sets a panicked tone with short, laboured breathing from the opening seconds of Fobia. Depending on your own mental state, this might be the only uncomfortable aspect of the album. But if your brain has ever played a round of pinball with your thoughts, Fobia will resonate in a different way.
Fobia is the sound of nervous energy and someone trying desperately to quell it. Afflicted with claustrophobia and agoraphobia,…
On his fourth release on Orindal Records, Matt Bachmann’s Compost Karaoke is a representation of “songs of change”, as he explains. It’s a transition from his previous years touring as the bass player for Mega Bog.
“At the heart of this transition was a personal struggle between the ‘clouds’ (art) and the ‘earth’ (the systemic problems of New York/US/world),” he says. “Doing this more earthly work and having less time for the clouds changed my relationship to music. I had been so inside the music world that I had become blind to its generosity – the way it brings us together and allows us to collectively feel, dream, and escape.”
Adding that this new project was an opportunity to work alongside old friends, Bachmann…
Cryo Chamber’s seventh entry in its ongoing Tomb series opens strongly with a pairing of Apocryphos & Pœna Sensus. Their track, ‘The Sigh of Archaic Tragedy’, is weighty and oppressive, built from deep drones, bass-heavy descending chords, and unstructured percussion that evokes places of burial and stillness.
The rest of the album explores similar themes in different ways. The variety on this compilation is remarkable considering that each piece adheres to a common aesthetic framework.
Dødsmaskin’s Messiaskomplekset’ is borderline post-industrial with rattling textures accompanied by haunting melodies and tones. Fractalyst’s ‘Those Who Slither’ is cinematic and varied, with abrupt changes in volume and palette.
Doperider, the fourth release from The Utopia Strong, is mainly a record of great and giving calm. The cover’s lettering may suggest Hawkwind at their most planetary, but this record is not a full on, pedal-driven dive into deep space. Rather, Doperider often encourages an investigation of its immediate surroundings, by way of some lysergically-tinged soundtracks.
Opener ‘Prophecy’, maybe the most narrational track on Doperider, is also its lodestar in terms of what to expect. The pleasantly wriggling synth sounds initially suggest we are present at a secretive undertaking in a lab somewhere. The slightly mycological patterns formed by the synths suddenly give way after two minutes to a crunchy beat (one of the few on the record)…
The album title is a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which includes the phrase “what steps forth, in holiday clothing, out of the great darkness.” Cellist Clarice Jensen regards the image as a metaphor for the creative process, which often begins in isolation before its public unveiling.
The title track is separated into two parts, a trio of other tracks in-between. One can hear an obvious appreciation for Bach, although the compositional process is vastly different; the cello lines are played, layered and looped to create the illusion of a small ensemble. After a melodic base is established, the counter-melodies begin to develop, growing ever more assured. If a track could be recorded behind closed doors,…
Klein used to work as a “logger” on a reality TV show, where she would record what cast members were doing in excruciating detail for use in B-roll shots. In an interview with Pitchfork, Klein noted how easily TV can be manipulated by people willing to distort the narrative, as when her fellow loggers would exclude activities by certain actors to make them look bad.
Klein is the complete opposite. She puts everything out as it comes, raw and unfiltered. It’s obsessive and mundane in a different way, suffused with meaning even at its most impenetrable. After two albums of searing guitar noise, sleep with a cane feels like a retreat into the shroud of her earlier work. She finds solace, and intrigue, in the billowing folds of ambient…
Faten Kanaan‘s music has a transporting quality that is hard to define. The manual repetition of her approach — performing looped keyboard parts entirely by hand — lends her electronic compositions a human feel, as does her choice of organic-leaning sounds and tones. But there is always something otherworldly about them, an abstraction that suggests a natural world shimmering just out of reach.
Diary of a Candle, Kanaan’s sixth album and third for U.K. indie Fire Records, may be her most enigmatic release yet. Its mystique is undeniable — each piece unfolds like a chapter in a dark fairytale that goes nowhere and everywhere. Tracks like “Afternoon” and “Celadon” have a curious, questing nature, though it’s unclear…
Designed in 1962 by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the concrete dome in Tripoli, Lebanon was intended to be one of 15 structures that housed a permanent International Fair, expected to welcome over two million annual visitors. By the time civil war broke out in 1975, construction had not yet been completed, leading to the suspension and eventual abandonment of the project. The Dome Sessions, conceived by audiovisual artist Firas El Hallak, is a series of recordings that captures musical performances in the space of Niemeyer’s unfinished concrete dome, and also serves as the soundtrack to an upcoming documentary about the dome’s position in Tripoli’s cultural history. Each piece features a different artist, both solo and ensemble,…
Memories of conflict are very much on the mind of Yara Asmar, who splits her time between Beirut and upstate New York and tries to make sense of it all. Or perhaps there is no making sense, only a box of pieces from many puzzles. “There is no future to yearn for,” Asmar writes. “There is a big, sprawling, horrifying present that eats everything in its path.” Pouring her grief into instrument-making and playing, she creates an elaborate musical tapestry of deconstruction and reconstruction. One of the symphomioms she builds is large enough to sit inside, and she invites listeners to “sit inside the sound” with her.
The white noise and whirring that open the album connote absence, swiftly countered by the sounds of traffic and chimes.