Gamelan has long been a fascination for the headier end of the electronic world, whether it’s Plaid asking a 26-person Balinese ensemble to open for them at Le Poisson Rouge, Aphex Twin emulating the genre in his more acoustic experiments, or Björk using it as a template to create her own customized instruments. The two forms make a surprisingly logical pair: Both dance music and the ancient Indonesian style are based around repetition, exploring the gradually evolving frictions in rhythm and melody that can suck the listener into a state of hypnosis. It’s not that it’s a brand new concept for the Russian producer Hoavi to incorporate gamelan into his music, as he does on his latest album; rather, it’s the way he subsumes the style into his very logic that feels…
Category: ambient
Ambient techno comes in two forms. The first features steady, propulsive kick drums and mechanical disco hi-hats that are slathered in surface noise and field recordings. The second leans into the ambient, sounding more like one of those Environments CDs you’d listen to at a kiosk if you’re old enough to remember when malls existed; the sound of crashing waves or hissing cicadas occasionally interrupted by the steady thumpthumpthump heartbeat of a subtle beat. The Setting Sun, initially released in 2009 as the first record from Stephen Hitchell’s Variant project, goes even harder into the ambient, with nary a beat to be heard for almost two-thirds of its runtime. It’s a hypnotic, deeply immersive listen, meant mainly for opening third eyes and inner…
Music has long served as a space where emotions can be expressed and explored without the pressure of resolution.
For listeners and composers alike, it offers a rare place to contend with grief, anxiety, or despair without requiring those feelings to go anywhere or even mean anything in particular.
Meadowsweet (redux) is a case in point – a 20th anniversary remaster and rerelease of Yann Novak’s 2006 album Meadowsweet. A tribute to a family member who had just passed, the album represents both Novak’s struggle with the silence that rushes in when someone is gone, and how he chose to live in that emptiness rather than flee it.
Meadowsweet was recorded in a single take, glitches and all, as a musical representation…
In the heart of Tunisia lies a giant salt lake called Chott El Djerid, or “Lagoon of the Land of Palms”. Measuring 160 miles across, the lake has been the subject of numerous works of art, most famously Star Wars, where it was used as a filming location in A New Hope.
Although Chott El Djerid is crossable by foot or car in the summer, when the lake is dry, this is generally inadvisable — the salt crust on the surface is often thin and unstable. What appears as a desert can quickly turn into a drowning pool.
It’s against this backdrop that Chott arrives, the second full-length album from Tunisian producer Taroug, out via Denovali Records. Everything about this LP is echoey and huge, from its searing string arrangements to its down-swooping…
This rather beautiful, unhurried recording is the work of guitarist and composer Chaz Prymek (aka Lake Mary) and musician and intermedia artist Matthew Sage, who also works with Chaz on their Fuubutsushi project with Patrick Shiroishi and Chris Jussell. Although the jazz stylings of Fuutbutsushi are absent here, the lightness of touch and delicacy of playing is present across the five songs.
Shelter began life back in 2022, as both Chaz and Matthew settled back into the rural mountainous landscapes of Utah and Colorado, where each resides. The skeletons of these songs are the live improvisations played by Chaz and Matthew in the pole barn studio Matthew set up, with Chaz on electric guitar and Matthew on piano. Over time, the duo very delicately adorned…
Since she started making music with a Buchla synthesizer in 1968 — an obsession that landed her a job actually manufacturing the machines, soldering iron in hand, until she saved up enough money to buy her own — Suzanne Ciani has embodied electronic music’s spirit of limitless possibility. Instead of imitating other instruments and conforming to conventional musical ideas, Buchla (and Ciani) set out to create a paradigm based on harnessing the flow of electricity itself. Ciani’s method with the Buchla is a way of taming electrical currents and shaping them into pathways, rather than composing music traditionally. She would later become known as a prominent new-age artist and a composer of commercial music for brands like Coca-Cola, but in…
Inspired by the writings of Mark Fisher, Present Tense is about “mourning an imagined future.” xor (Asheville, North Carolina’s Matthew Boman) cites “old space age photos” as a prime example, lamenting that “there used to be so much optimism about what humans were going to achieve.” The feeling is common, as a seemingly unending barrage of bad news has caused a worldwide malaise. And yet, Boman ~ who saw his own community flooded during Hurricane Helene, but was also part of the rebuilding ~ does more than lament; he also plunges forward in hope. Building a community around the album, he commissions seven different filmmakers to produce videos for the tracks, underlining the value of collaboration and the possibility that things…
Bands are like the people in them; they tend to get set in their ways. But not Cleared. The sole fixed part of their method is that guitarist/electronic musician Michael Vallera (Luggage, Maar, numerous solo recordings and a swell duo with Lee Ranaldo) and drummer/electronic musician Steven Hess (RLYR, Haptic, Locrian, Slow Bell Trio) are both involved. They have the potential to like an instrumental rock combo and have often done so on previous recordings. But Lustres, their first for the Australian Room40 label, continues a process of ping-ponging material into diffusion.
One of the musicians collects, plays or synthesizes some audio, then sends it to the other. He works on it, adding and subtracting and atomizing the sound, then sends it back. The work gets…
But a single listen to Heart Songs is required to recognize how natural a fit Cassie To is for Nat Bartsch’s Amica Records imprint. As the eight pieces featured on the thirty-three-minute album reveal, the Sydney-based To composes music possessing many of the same qualities that distinguish Bartsch’s own: heartfelt, intimate, elegiac, and harmonious neo-classical settings that couple piano, strings, and painterly dashes of woodwinds, synthesizers, and electronics into transporting chamber wholes.
Both artists produce spiritually replenishing music of humanity, integrity, and authenticity. Consistent with To’s own comment that “running through all of it is a thread of hope,” her music chooses uplift over resignation. It’s not…
Jeffrey Ericson Allen’s Chronotope Project embodies narrative convergence, which is as it should be. The cellist, composer and philosopher has spent much of his life as a storyteller, but in recent years, he’s reshaped his own narrative to focus more on the music that has always been a primary focus. Since his librarian days concluded, the mode of inquiry has shifted, so that now, he tells stories in music more than in words. His chief vehicle, the afore-mentioned Chronotope Project, is a solo effort that labeling “ambient” resides somewhere between a deserved badge of honor and a near disservice. Rather, this music shares certain characteristics with one of Allen’s influences, Brian Eno, in that it can function in the background but rewards deeper listening with…
Esoteric Recordings present the release of Gemini – Pieces for Piano, a brand new album by Ant.
Gemini – Pieces for Piano was recorded between October 2022 and October 2025 and features what Ant describes as the best of the keyboard compositions he has written since the release of his previous solo piano album Soirée in 1999. The title of the album comes from a piece of the same name that Ant wrote for the celebrated pianist Martha Argerich, who premiered the work in duet form in 2018. Gemini – Pieces for Piano includes Ant’s solo version of the track. Anthony Phillips has stayed the course, having long mastered the art of the quiet overachiever. While many of his contemporaries have settled into a predictable cycle of nostalgia, ‘Ant’ continues to operate as a singular moodsmith.
The lapping water that burnishes the edges of this collaboration between multidisciplinary artists Félicia Atkinson and Christina Vantzou – friends for over 15 years, kindred spirits for eternity possibly – holds the multitudes of humanity’s draw to the sea. These Water Poems sit in a lineage with the trireme of Ancient Greece, sickly Victorians at the coast for healing, writers beckoned to Tangier, and point-and-shoot film photos in a box in your family home, sunbleached and filled with bright swimsuits. Atkinson and Vantzou channel their own oceanside dwellings into ambient sounds tinged with nostalgia, joy and hidden depths.
It manifests in compositions that subvert the usual calm of water-based field recordings. The repeated piano chords and chanted mantras…
Born in Tehran in 1983 as son of the world renowned tar and setar virtuoso Hossein Alizadeh, Saba Alizadeh established himself not only as a true master on the Iranian spike fiddle kamancheh but one of the groundbreaking voices in contemporary Iranian music.
After the critically acclaimed releases Scattered Memories (his international debut, released on Karlrecords in 2019), I May Never See You Again (2021) and last year’s Temple of Hope, his new album Rituals of the Last Dawn unfolds as a deeply meditative dialogue between tradition, experimentation, and the present moment. The Iranian composer and kamancheh virtuoso — widely recognised for bridging classical Persian heritage with avant-garde sound — crafts…
Long before Caterina Barbieri’s Eurorack met Bendik Giske’s tenor saxophone, the two artists were already on the same wavelength. The Italian modular savant and the Norwegian reed player have both situated their sounds to the left of center, thriving at the edges of their respective instruments and conservatory educations. Giske uses his classical training to translate his experiences on Berlin’s queer techno circuit into gymnastic transmutations of breath. Barbieri, recently named artistic director of Venice Biennale’s music department, once got booted from a church venue because a priest found her music “satanic.” Their first joint EP, At Source, gathers four hypnotic improvisations that move like drill bits, spiraling towards a creative core that’s…
The number of recordings that combine electronics with acoustic instruments and sounds picked up in the field (whatever that field might be) is proliferating by the day. Yet, as it could be expected, it is always a hit and miss affair, often depending on the ability of the artists involved to make a musical combination that actually works in a manner that all those sounds involved create the result all involved are set to create and something that listeners can actually relate to.
The combination of Ben Seretan & John Thayer goes for such a concept on the duo’s joint offering Sunbeam of No Illusion in an attempt to reverse the concept described as “machine in the garden,” something attributed to American Transcendentalists, a 19th-century…
Despite the fact that it includes the track “Winter, Don’t Let Go,” For Those Who Stay is very much an album of spring. More specifically, it’s about the emergence into spring after a long winter, which has been chronicled month by month, track by track by Hollie Kenniff.
The first two singles appeared in December, the second two in January (including the winter track), followed by one in February, one in early March, and finally the full eleven track album the first week of spring.
We have been anxiously awaiting this set (ironically, one track is titled, “The World Can Wait”), whose tracks are now presented in a different order, telling a complete story, although we also appreciated the chapter-by-chapter reveal.
Florian T M Zeisig is one of contemporary ambient music’s preeminent shapeshifters. The Berlin-based producer first made waves in late 2020 with You Look So Serious, a compilation of Enya edits that distilled the singer’s voice down to a distant emanation. Since then, he’s set his talents to throbbing neurodrone, skunky spiritual jazz, West Mineral tropical unease, and a fantastic album about working at a nightclub that sounded like a party heard through the wall. His latest endeavor is a rotating collective with a name so florid it makes Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 seem like a perfectly modest moniker, and the theme this time is rock music, stripped of orthodoxy.
Zeisig assembled The Thinking of the World Began Pounding in Our Ears the Moment We Hit Shore…
Previously known as a member of Afrobeat fusionists NOMO and for his introspective indie rock songwriting as In Tall Buildings, Erik Hall reached a new audience with his acclaimed solo recordings of minimalist works during the 2020s. Turning the genre on its head, he recorded Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians by himself, multi-tracking all the instruments without any pre-programmed arrangements or loops, and he did the same with Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato. Following Solo Three, which included pieces by Glenn Branca, Laurie Spiegel, Charlemagne Palestine, and Reich, Hall released a different version of Canto Ostinato, this time performed with two of his regular collaborators, Metropolis Ensemble and Sandbox Percussion.
…remastered edition with bonus tracks.
As the title suggests, Akira Kosemura‘s entrancing Polaroid Piano is a wistful meditation for minimal piano and field recordings, bleached out with old light. The glitchy electronics of Kosemura’s prior work are gone. The music is so hushed you can hear the action of the pedals, the keyboard shifting in the body of the piano. This quiet rumpus serves as a relaxed rhythm track — one suspects Kosemura mic’d the piano to capture these extraneous sounds, drawing them purposefully into the music. The gesture is Cagean, but the questioning, wonder-filled style is pure Satie. The cover art captures the mood perfectly, although a blue sky filled with kites and balloons would have been just as apt.
There’s a current tendency among post-modern classical composers to paint their musical pictures, or compositions if you will, in darker overtones, but then, it just might be the mirror of the times we live in. Or, as a composer, you can devote a composition cycle to an inspirational friend and colleague who passed too early, as Canadian post-classical composer Matthew Patton, who operates under the moniker of Those Who Walk Away, does on his latest release, Afterlife Requiem.
Devoted to, as he points out, a friend and collaborator, late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, Patton uses an interesting concept – he combines drone, electroacoustic, and near-silences extracted from unfinished recordings on Jóhannsson’s hard drives, underpinning…