Category: ambient


Ambient Americana Volume 2 brings together major icons of the ambient and experimental folk scenes, including legendary producer Daniel Lanois, ambient guitar pioneer William Tyler, and standard-bearers of the current cosmic Americana revival like Hayden Pedigo and North Americans.
“Our May 2021 issue came with a special free CD – the then-latest instalment in our Sounds of the New West series. Titled Ambient Americana: A Road Trip Across Psychic State Lines, it brought together a group of artists who were mixing the traditions of country and folk with the mind-expanding sounds of ambient and kosmische music.
…a mere five years on, we’re delighted to bring you Volume 2, which comes free with Uncut’s August 2026 issue.”

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Mohamed Bourouissa has long treated sound as an integral part of his artistic practice, but LILA marks the first time it fully steps into the foreground. Conceived as a “musical object,” the album functions as an inventory of relationships: each track is dedicated to someone who has shaped the artist’s life, transforming memory into vibration rather than portraiture. Just as Bourouissa’s photographs and films explore lives at the crossroads of integration and exclusion, LILA constructs an intimate sonic space where people survive not through representation but through the emotional traces they leave behind.
Drawing on a decade of collaborations and experiments with sound, Bourouissa assembles a vocabulary that slips effortlessly between…

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All India Radio’s sixth studio album and the first to be released on vinyl back in 2010. The new vinyl and digital version features gorgeous new artwork from Ryan T Hancock. This repress uses the original 2010 vinyl master by Tony Mantz which was flawless.
The Silent Surf features the voice of Professor Don Gurnett, famous for his NASA ‘space sounds’ (also used by the Kronos Quartet on their famous Sun Ring recordings) and a cameo (on ‘The Bomb’) by The Church’s Steve Kilbey (Under The Milky Way). “Since the turn of the 21st century, All India Radio has mashed the ambient-hop signatures of DJ Shadow, Tortoise and Thievery Corporation with the instantly recognizable guitar soundtracking of Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalamenti.

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Kirk Barley has spent time tracing the edges of sound without ever seeming especially interested in arriving at any definitive statement. Arc continues that tendency, but with a new confidence in duration and restraint. Rather than presenting a sequence of discrete statements, these nine tracks seem to breathe through one another, each leaving traces that subtly colour what follows. The record’s title proves apt: its movement is gradual, curved, almost architectural.
The opening stretch is particularly striking. ‘Billow’ emerges with a sense of suspended motion, its slow internal shifts proving more compelling than any obvious destination. ‘Ion’ introduces a denser physicality, its low frequencies lending weight without sacrificing the sense of…

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Isn’t the world gorgeous through Sofie Birch-tinted glasses? Listening to “Sefirot Surfa,” a gentle, whimsical romp from Bivabippabualukka, has made the harsh and poorly maintained streets around my East London flat feel magical and new: What portals, it begs a listener to ask, could lie between those cracks in the pavement, or beneath that pile of refuse?
Lush and animated, Bivabippabualukka is an extraordinary break from convention in comparison to Birch’s previous releases, a series of ambient folk records that encouraged scholarly engagement with the minutiae of Birch’s compositional choices. 2025’s soundbath-like Hiraeth, for example, was hardly casual listening, a listening experience that would likely be impeded…

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Attention should definitely be given to the remarkable sound design achieved by ambient-electronic artist Hollan Holmes on The Sanctity of Rust; his maturation as a composer and conceptualist impresses even more, however, and marks the release as a high point in this Texas-based sound sculptor’s career. The sound design first: among the hardware and software listed on the release’s inner sleeve are the Korg MS20 and Oberheim Matrix 12 plus tools such as Native Instruments, Arturia Pigments, and Spectrasonics Omnisphere; custom samples and FM synthesis also played a part in the project’s production. He’s no purist, by the way: Holmes is happy to work acoustic sounds into a composition if the music requires it, which means one shouldn’t…

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At the age of 72, “Evil” Graham Lee, the legendary pedal steel pioneer and veteran of the iconic Australian band The Triffids, delivers his first ever album under his own name titled I Think I’m Alone Now. In addition to his work with The Triffids, Graham’s place in ambient history was cemented in 1990 when his evocative pedal steel became the soulful centerpiece of The KLF’s masterpiece, Chill Out (specifically on the highlight “Baltimore to Fair Play”).
…He’s recorded with Robert Forster and Cut Copy. But for nearly a decade, he has used his Bandcamp page as a repository of ongoing experiments, from ascendant longform instrumentals and aleatoric collages to exquisite and tender tributes to late songwriters like John Prine and…

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Consider the phrase “in the zone.” Usually, it refers to a state of concentration that enhances productivity. From a musical standpoint, it suggests the locked-in flow that musicians can achieve when riding a juicy groove or digging into a wicked series of riffs. To “zone out,” on the other hand, evokes a blissful state of ethereal detachment in which such things as rhythm and momentum are left behind or transcended.
Colorado trio Prairiewolf operates in both these realms, creating limpid yet propulsive instrumental music that faces the stars while remaining focused on doings on the ground.
For their first two albums, Stefan Beck (guitar), Jeremy Erwin (keys/synths), and Tyler Wilcox (bass) created retro-futuristic lounge music…

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Room 40’s J.WLSN returns to Lawrence English’s label flanked by his old mate Liam Keenan with a haze of guitars, synths and samples that evokes the rugged, beautiful landscape of New South Wales.
Wilson and Keenan had been working together at an art museum in Sydney for some time when they finally decided to book a session at a local studio. It didn’t take long either; working with their mutual friend David Akerman, they laid down a set of peaceful longform jams that appeared as they reminisced about different stretches of time in the area where they both grew up. Finding the shared similarities and differences, the music appeared as a soundtrack. On the four-part ‘Teflon Blues’, their hazy recollections buried beneath a fog of blurry instrumentation, while on the generous…

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A sign of the ever-encroaching AI times in which we’re living, the words “Produced Entirely by Humans” appear on the back cover of this superb joint effort from electronic artists David Helpling and Scott Reich — not that such clarification is needed when the music couldn’t more possibly reflect a human touch and the sensibilities of its creators. Both figures are long-standing practitioners of the ambient art, and the two appear to bring out the best in each other when pooling their talents as they do here.
While details about “who plays what” are clarified, the nine compositions are credited to both, making it impossible to determine who might have been more involved in the production of a given piece or whether each was equally…

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Inspired by a bird landing on a city windowsill, Air Signs by anthéne looks to the skies for meaning or assurance. We don’t find a feathery, avian energy here. Instead, this is an airborne album of open expanse and surging textures, matching the bird’s natural element. Ephemeral guitar sounds overlap in loops, rising and falling like breath. Diffuse gusts of melody blow past. Bright glimmers of sound give a sense of sunlight and shadow.
Air is immediate evoked on Air Signs. So what about signs? With guitar, pedal, and filter, artist Brad Deschamps weaves signification out of thin air, or transcribes the air’s own signifying. The finished work may be organic and effortless, but the activity of meaning-making is hinted at. Rustles, clicks, pops, and crackling…

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Przemysław Jankowiak, aka 2k88 (and fka 1988), is one of Poland’s most singular producers. Long associated with alternative rap and experimental electronics, he gained a cult following as a member of duo Syny and later lent his hand to some of the adventurous figures in the Polish mainstream. His music is, like his concerts, full of smoke: airy, cloudy, inscrutable, dreamy, and unreal.
Everything Always Changes, for We’re Truly Here started as a one-off special project for Kraków’s Unsound Festival. Jankowiak enlisted a trio of acclaimed, like-minded British artists who, like him, work across ambient, rap, R&B, and pop. The four musicians passed ideas back and forth, bringing forth their shared sensibilities and aesthetics: Rainy Miller delivers his signature…

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Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri have independently created some stunning ambient-drone over recent years, including Mogard’s Circular Forms (2015) and Irisarri’s The Shameless Years (2017). Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun is the duo’s third collaborative release, following 2024’s Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close and 2025’s Live at Le Guess Who? The raw materials for this new collection originally came together during a three-day live residency at Morphine Raum in Berlin, with Mogard on synths and Irisarri on guitar. The sound masses accumulated during those performances were later hewn in the studio, then cello (Martina Bertoni), and violin and vocal (Andrea Burelli) overdubs were added. The resulting six-track suite is…

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Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto recorded Lichtung after the married couple decided to settle down near Berlin, close to where Hacke grew up, after living a nomadic lifestyle for 14 years. The album also marks the duo’s first since Hacke left industrial pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten, the group he joined as a teenager in 1981. In some ways, particularly due to the vocals, which are entirely sung in German this time around, Lichtung actually sounds closer to Neubauten than hackedepicciotto‘s previous work. Hacke re-incorporates electronic experiments similar to the ones he made as a youth, before he joined the group. Several of the songs take the form of slow-moving, sorrowful dirges with weeping strings and drone metal guitars.

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The jig is up. The act behind the most bewildering ambient techno of the past 15 years is not a shadowy syndicate or group of evil geniuses. It’s actually just Izaak Schlossman, who started the project back in Seattle as part of a crew called Aught. The proliferation of aliases, and the artist’s eventual move to San Francisco — where he started the synth-pop band Loveshadow — caused lingering confusion. No one could decide where Topdown Dialectic was based, or how many people it was, or if people were even making the music, instead of algorithms or bots. But now the 20,000 r/TheOverload followers who couldn’t sleep at night can rest easy: We found our guy.
For those not in the know, Topdown Dialectic was originally a faceless project putting out…

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Hazy and out of focus, not as in a dream, but as in awakening from short, uneasy sleep. Uneasy because it never became a full separation from the world, instead letting all of its invisible threads pass through, the mind yet another cat’s cradle – a spider’s web, leaf veins spreading fractally, voices intersecting, branching thunder, constellations in the night sky changing over millions of years. Here in the Valley, with its blurred cover art, its Grouper-like soft and processed vocals, and its echoing folk instrumentation, nurtures that disorientation, experienced as a light porosity; its murmurs become you, its murmurs become the world.
Helllhound is the duo of renowned harpist Nailah Hunter and her partner, multi-instrumentalist Cadmar Fitzhugh, and it is named…

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Lifted’s recordings chase the feeling of being a “fly on the wall,” of witnessing a musical moment emerge as if you were right there in the studio with them. The many-aliased duo of Andrew Field-Pickering and Matt Papich invite a rotating cast of instrumentalists to unspool their ideas and discover the results — sometimes finding loping grooves, often fanning out into roaming ambience that they further process with computers and CDJs. You’re asked to devote attention to a few layers of abstraction at once: The analog improvisers are finding common ground in the room, while the duo’s digital wayfinding structures the music, organizes the personnel, and charts new paths for them all to travel together. It’s a challenging proposition that requires the right…

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The lines have been blurred everywhere in music, so why not in what goes by the name of field recordings? What once was solely the concept of actually going outside and recording sounds you hear and then (but not necessarily) combining them with music itself, has become something a bit different.
These days it includes recording on tour, in hotel rooms, Airbnbs, and small studios, often across multiple countries. It could be because of the spur-of-the-moment, when a song idea pops up, or getting a certain feeling from the location you find yourself in. Or, it could be all of those.
It seems that singer songwriter (another term that is gathering new meanings along the way) Melanie Radford had all of those things in…

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