This third album from the Lebanese duo Snakeskin vibrates with intention from its opening seconds, trembling on the blocks with an eagerness to surge forward. In the opener, “Ready” electronic distortion buzzes around Julia Sabra’s crystalline voice, which undulates, ever so slightly with an Arab tonality; you can discern, but just barely, her Lebanese origins. The piece trembles with anticipation, and swirls up with organ-like overload, a hymn, a prayer, a plea for justice. We Live in Sand took shape in 2024, as Israel’s war on Gaza spread north.
Sabra lived close enough to hear and feel the impact of an August 2020 explosion in the port of Beirut. She and her partner Faddi Tabal have had a close-up view of the destructive currents…
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The history of experimental musicians from Europe and North America adopting Japanese aesthetics is… patchy. It got especially dodgy in the 1990s when every other electronica dork started flinging random kanji characters on their sleeves, writing soundtracks for imaginary Akira bike races and the like. And there are so, so many ambient producers who reference Zen gardens, minimalist interior design and bamboo flutes, you can’t go into a health spa without knocking over a pile of their CDs.
The third in their collaborative series, 
In the midst of a career writing, creating, and recording music with a wide array of influential popular artists and for television and film, Grammy award-winning Nashville-based producer and musician 
Grounded in personal loss and the trauma that accompanies such an experience, sound artist 
As well as making atmospheric electronic compositions, the Baghdad-born, Barcelona-based musician 
Earlier this year, nomadic Texan instrumentalist Jason Dungan, who operates out of Copenhagen under the moniker 
Remastered by Mark Beazley.
The best ambient music has two distinct ways of pulling you in. On one hand, the genre’s purpose is to wash over you or to pass you by. The clue is in the name: ambient music is in the ether, it is furniture, made for semi-conscious immersion rather than immediate connection. But it can connect. There are those rare albums that achieve a second way, albums that, despite their slowness or their beatlessness, somehow become utterly engaging or even transcendent.
A deluxe 4-CD box set bringing together the seminal Columbia recordings of Terry Riley. A landmark reissue from one of the most pivotal figures in 20th-century music. 
Does it annoy you that people today find electronic voices ugly?” Björk asks Mikä Vainio, hanging out in his studio in the 1997 BBC TV documentary Modern Minimalists. “It’s a pity that many people just cannot in a way relate with them,” ponders the Finnish musician. “Some of them are ugly for me as well, but quite many are interesting and beautiful as well.”
Kieran Hebden, the electronic musician/producer best known as 
F.S.Blumm and Nils Frahm share their fifth collaborative album,