How do you move from electronic dance music (or EDM, if you will), with 14 million views for your Boiler Room set, to creating a boundary-pushing label and post-modern classical music that veers into ambient? It might sound perplexing on paper, but for an inventive, classically trained composer/musician, in this case German-Italian pianist/composer David August, it seems a breeze, as his latest album Hymns showcases.
And yes, August also runs 99CHANTS, a label that is supposed to push boundaries between genres, but also art forms.
It seems that Hymns serves as some kind of career deconstruction/reconstruction move for August. Going back to his classical piano training, August moves from prime EDM to…
Category: ambient
Haiku Salut are one of a kind and always have been from the moment their debut EP, How We Got Along After the Yarn Bomb, landed in the summer of 2011. Fusing elements of folk, classical, chamber pop, lo-fi indie, and electronica, the trio — Louise Croft, Gemma Barkerwood, and Sophie Barkerwood — have made creating the unconventional into an artform. They’ve been lauded by both music fans and critics alike, not to mention other artists — some of whom have collaborated with them over the years, such as Public Service Broadcasting.
Over the course of the band’s 16 years of existence, they’ve put out five albums plus a handful of EPs and singles of music that refuses to conform to any structured genre or fad. As multi-instrumentalists of various facets themselves,…
As Pan•American, ambient musician Mark Nelson has gradually shifted through different phases of style and sound while maintaining the same emotional core of muted longing. Nelson was playing in the equally atmospheric band Labradford when he launched Pan•American in the late ‘90s, first exploring dark and dubby electronic landscapes and slowly expanding into more beat-focused pieces and then an Americana reading of his spacious ambience. Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane is another shift for the project, moving away from the high and lonesome acoustic touches of his 2010s and early-2020s output into something that’s at once more playful and more serious. The instrumentation takes different forms over the course of the ten-track album.
Author Philip K. Dick spent his career poking at the porous boundary between reality and illusion, questioning the reliability our perception and memory. Using motifs such as artificial intelligence (AI), mind-altering drugs, simulated realities, and corporate and governmental power, he examined our sense of identity, the nature of truth, and the very essence of reality. Given recent advances in AI as well as ongoing sociopolitical changes, Dick’s work now seems more prescient than ever.
Ubikuitous, yet another thematic compilation from Unexplained Sounds Group, uses experimental ambient and acousmatic music – with a touch of glitch and techno – to explore these concepts. Many of the 14 tracks employ synth-based droning with dark overtones as a core element,…
In the five years that they’ve been active, it sometimes seems as if Purelink are dissolving right before our eyes. They’ve never again released anything quite as corporeal or propulsive as their debut EP, which paired visceral dub techno with rolling drum’n’bass.
On their 2023 debut album, Signs, glitchy drums crackled in a pastel haze, and last year’s Faith was even more ethereal; the trio’s individual identities melted together under cover of amorphous arrangements that suggested fogbanks, blizzards, and other zero-visibility conditions.
Anyone who has seen Purelink live, however, knows how much physical heft they’re capable of conjuring — a bold, bassy throb that sets bodies in motion even in the absence of obvious…
As this fourth release from electronic ambient-rock collaborators Craig Padilla and Marvin Allen plays, connections to two electronic legends suggest themselves. When Allen’s blistering guitar roars against his partner’s pulsating synthesizer-generated backdrops, those moments where Edgard Froese took up guitar to wail alongside his Tangerine Dream cohorts come to mind, and though the music Padilla and Allen create in no way resembles Kraftwerk’s, one can’t help think that the band’s “power plant” name applies when the two generate an epic force-field of electronic sound. But to be clear, the sonic identity fashioned by Padilla and Allen shares little with the personae associated with their precursors; as Unfolding Skies once again argues, the two…
On his sixth LP In Another, Toronto-based, Japanese-born, musician and composer Masahiro Takahashi (髙橋 政宏) continues the collaborative expansion of his sonic universe that listeners witness on his 2023 release, Humid Sun. Here he enlists a rotating ensemble of ten guest artists from Toronto’s vibrant music community, including his labelmate Joseph Shabason, who also serves as the album’s co-producer and engineer.
Spurred by his longtime admiration for chamber pop spanning the High Llamas and Free Design to the Beach Boys, Takahashi deviates from the underlying processes of his past two outings, trading Ableton sequences for lead sheets, focusing on creating robust melodic and harmonic foundations first.
You could count the number of intelligible words across IOWA on your fingers if you wanted to.
One of them is “January,” and another one is “snowstorm.” The new album from the Brooklyn-based artist Lia Ouyang Rusli, who records as OHYUNG, is both flush with the timbre of the human voice and almost completely empty of language. As OHYUNG’s first ambient album since 2022’s imagine naked!, IOWA joins a growing body of recent work — by more eaze, Lucy Liyou, even Ethel Cain on her more experimental ventures — that positions the voice not as an authoritative anchor at the center of a composition, but as a stray vapor trail daring listeners to draw meaning from its wisps.
Rusli, who lived in Iowa City from 2023 to…
The Funkhaus complex in Berlin, originally built in the 1950s, was in Communist times the home of an East German radio station. After the fall of the Wall, it fell into disrepair and remained neglected until Nils Frahm oversaw a restoration of Studio 3 where he has subsequently recorded his own music during the last ten years or so.
The renovation has also brought back the distinctive acoustic of the original studio, and this is certainly a contributory factor in the success of this fine album by the multi-instrumentalist Ralph Markus Sieber (aka Aukai).
The main instruments here are classical guitar and charango (ten-stringed, lute-like, Andean), but these are delightfully supplemented and complemented by, among other…
Los Angeles-based duo Green-House first surfaced in 2020 with Six Songs for Invisible Gardens, an EP of calm, delicate, flora-inspired synth instrumentals accompanied by bird song and other natural sounds. Appearing soon after the much-heralded reissue of Mother Earth’s Plantasia by Mort Garson, it slotted nicely into plant-themed playlists of ambient and new age music, and became a streaming favorite during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Green-House’s music continued to celebrate nature and domestic environments on subsequent releases like Music for Living Spaces and A Host for All Kinds of Life. After releasing most of their work on Leaving Records, Hinterlands is Green-House’s first effort for Ghostly International. It maintains the same soothing feel…
Following no floor, a remarkable instrumental collaboration with claire rousay that focused on pastoral electro-acoustic soundscapes, more eaze remained with Thrill Jockey for her vocal-based solo effort sentence structure in the country. The album’s lyrics, often delivered through Auto-Tune but occasionally left unaltered, explore intimate moments and frustrating situations, reflecting on jealousy, apathy, and the difficulties of trying to succeed as a musician.
Fragile vocals and bubbling, twinkling synthesizers adorn the patient opener “leave (again),” while ambient pop gem “bad friend” is propelled by a gently blipping pulse and softly crying steel guitar. Another of the record’s more accessible tunes, “the producer,” also contains…
Some artists follow a consistent developmental path in their work, others are more mercurial, the routes they take less predictable by comparison. That overly simplistic binary’s challenged by German ambient pioneer Markus Guentner: his output on the one hand seems to have developed organically, with each step naturally leading to the next and all exemplifying his particular sensibility; he’s also, however, someone capable of a sudden left turn in stylistic direction.
Consider how different his 2025 release, Black Dahlia, is from his latest, On Brutal Soil, We Grow. Whereas the earlier set feels like an unremitting plunge into a Black Hole, the new one feels at times celestial by comparison. The titles Guentner chose mirror that change: Black Dahlia is…
Under the Sign is Irvine Myling, and this is his first Cryo Chamber release. Other than that, he has little visible online presence or prior discography. Nonetheless, whether he is a newcomer or veteran, Conflux is a commendable effort. The album is an interesting and unusual blend of instrumentation, drones, and effects that could be roughly classified as tribal ambient. But like with many such classifications, it is only somewhat descriptive of the actual sound.
Indeed, the album is centered around indigenous or folk drumming, low-end strings, and flute motifs. Atop this are keyboard drones and throaty vocalizations. The sound is frequently dense, full, and varied. It is arguably cinematic, but different from the dark ambient leanings of…
In this unusual album, Helen Anahita Wilsonnot only produces sonic tributes to the members of the Solanaceae plant family; she provides them with a voice. Biodata from member plants is used to trigger certain instruments and sounds, with whom Wilson produces duets both electronic and organic. The mysterious nature of the family ~ represented in the clever alliteration of “magic, medicine, myth and mortality” ~ is extended to the allusive sounds.
The first surprise: every member of the nightshade family contains nicotine: not only the tobacco plant, but the eggplant, potato, pepper and gooseberry. In the opening piece, Wilson establishes a percussive pulse, quicker than one might expect for something called “Nicotine Hit,” backed by what sounds like a saw, likely triggered by…
The cover of Tectonic Particles looks like it could be a photo of organic matter shot through a microscope. It suits both the album and the label, Quiet Details, who have a specific vision: each of their releases is meant to elaborate what the phrase “quiet details” as interpreted by the artist. In this case, the artist is Kayla Painter, an eclectic creative with a background in multimedia visual arts in addition to music.
…If Tectonic Particles is put on in the background, a first listen of the opening track “Forest Floor” is like a routine stroll through the woods. A gentle three-note piano theme paves the way. But upon a closer listen, as the sonic lens zooms in, one notices every twig that snaps underfoot and each distant bird call. This is not just…
Laurel Halo composed the score for Midnight Zone, a film created as part of an installation by Julian Charrière. The film is a lighthouse lens’ voyage deep into the Pacific Ocean, revealing all manners of underwater life, from the fascinating to the frightening. Even without the visuals, the score perfectly encapsulates the feeling of drifting deeper and deeper into the darkest recesses of the ocean, a sensation filled with both wonder and fear. The 11-minute opener “Sunlight Zone” is absolutely mesmerizing, with distant, almost thundering bass shuddering beneath waves of slowly shifting strings. As the lens gets farther away from the surface, the music gets heavier and cloudier, until it manages to clear out a bit by the end. The other pieces generally illustrate similar…
In 1974, Phaedra redefined the landscape of electronic music. What began as an experimental session at Richard Branson’s Manor Studios in Oxfordshire became a seismic event in modern sound.
Using the Moog sequencer for the first time, Tangerine Dream – then comprised of Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann – crafted an album brimming with innovation, mystery and discovery.
Half a century later, Tangerine Dream performed the landmark album at London’s Barbican, reimagining it for a new era.
50 Years of Phaedra: At The Barbican captures a transcendent live performance, in which the current line-up – Thorsten Quaeschning…
Sublimatio Mortis is a Canadian duo that, at least on this latest release, focuses on deep, slow drones with bassy throat singing and chant.
Over the course of three long tracks spanning 55 minutes, Ghur is an exercise in wall-shaking frequencies coupled with, electronics, static, and guttural vocalizations that provide a haunting yet modern atmosphere.
The sound palette on these tracks is often sparse – overlapping drones that buzz with dark energy, growls from the abyss, and perhaps a chromatic sweep from a synth. This is not ambient music in the usual sense, but an act of transforming raw emotion into tectonic vibrations that physically and psychically pummel the listener. As the album progresses, the palette expands…
“I became interested in the idea that recording is a bottomless medium,” explains multi-instrumentalist Gryphon Rue in the press notes of his new album. “You have a bag that can fit any sound; the room in the bag is limitless.” Indeed, the sounds conjured up by Rue on I Keep My Diamond Necklace in a Pond of Sparkling Water draw from a variety of sources and span multiple genres within the “experimental” umbrella. Rue plays bowed chimes, modular synthesizer, acoustic guitar, Mellotron, bells, and more, but also adds found sounds, animals, and even planetary signals to create a setting that is at once mysterious, soothing, complex, and quirky.
Coming off last year’s 4n_objx, which implemented a more electronic, processed aura,…
Charles “Poppy Bob” Walker’s guitar compositions have a liquid, expansive cosmic Americana scope. The notes linger in pellucid backwashes and slide eerily between the known tones. Not much is known about the Yuma-based outsider artist, now apparently deceased, but his work on DOUBLE-WIDE —and on the earlier Dirt Bike Vacation — is a far cry from the usual pickin’ and grinnin’ proficiencies of blues-folk old-timers.
The guitarist and song-hunter Cameron Knowler stumbled on Walker’s work at, of all places, a Texas local library branch. Intrigued enough to track down a sample, Knowler immediately became obsessed with the music, which evokes ambient kosmische players like Chuck Johnson, Luke Schneider, and in some moods, William Tyler.