We always want life to make sense, yet despite our best efforts, it does not. This is the starting point for Asymmetry, which distills a lifetime of thoughts and emotions into 88 keys. Alex Kozobolisis no stranger to such efforts; his seasonal quadrilogy, The Seasons Are Not Four, swept 14 tracks into four quadrants, a tidy project, although as the title indicates, the “real” seasons seep into their neighbors’ yards.
Asymmetry includes wholly original tracks, plus a couple reimaginings; the slightly jazzy tone represents a shift from the composer’s prior works, but a holiday spirit bubbles below; at times the tender notes call to mind Vince Guardini’s classic Peanuts score. As early as opening track “Lost Hours,” one can hear the snow…
Category: ambient
YODOK III is something of a catch-all outfit, part free improvisation, part post-rock, part ambient, and a few other parts. The group consists of Tomas Järmyr (drums), Kristoffer Lo (tuba), and Dirk Serries (guitar), who have been performing and recording together for over a decade. Here, they are joined by organist Petra Bjørkhaug on a 54-minute improvised set recorded live at the Nidarosdomen Cathedral in Trondheim.
The album consists of one self-titled piece that begins quiet – not just ambient but hovering at the edge of perception – and slowly builds into a crescendo of sound nearly a hour later. Nidarosdomen’s organ has 9600 pipes and this performance must have been a spectacle, with subsonic frequencies that you could feel…
H.R. Giger (1940-2014) was a surrealist artist known most for his design of the xenomorph from the Alien films and a number of album covers and related artwork for Magma, Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, Celtic Frost, and the Dead Kennedys. A Giger insert in the latter’s Frankenchrist album was the subject of a criminal lawsuit, where members of the Kennedys and several other parties were alleged to have contributed to “distribution of harmful matter to minors” due to the sexual nature of the artwork. The trial ended in acquittal, with the judge recognizing that the piece had at least some artistic merit. This publicity probably led to more people (including teenagers) becoming aware of Giger’s psychosexual works.
But Giger is mostly known for his disturbing…
Laputa, a title taken from the fantastical floating island of Gulliver’s Travels is aptly named as ‘The album that never landed’ for, apart from a limited touchdown in Japan, Laputa was never released.
Laputa‘s obscurity was a prime reason Lo Recordings decided on the Skintone retrospective. Falling as it did between The Boy and the Tree on The Leaf Label and our own debut of Symbol. It was something of an audio crime that the album had never been properly explored and discovered.
…Susumu Yokota makes albums that increasingly worry the boundaries of IDM, ambient and sound collage. Yokota has come at abstract music from the origin of being a house DJ in his native Japan, meaning that his sensibilities are not always aligned with those who balk at the cheesy…
This lush but elusive record promises depth for ambient heads, but might feel too little too late for fans of kwes.’ earlier work.
Kwesi Sey came up almost two decades ago among the loose London scene that always seemed to centre on Mica Levi: their collaborative mixtapes as Kwesachu featuring a range of local cult heroes like Ghostpoet and Tirzah. Sey eventually became a prolific producer, working with everyone from Bobby Womack to Solange.
In a career thick with such backseat collaborations, it’s easy to miss the thin stream of solo records Sey has released as kwes. But 2012’s Meantime EP and 2013’s ilp. were both singular — notable not only for Sey’s trippy, warped productions but also his quavering, almost childish vocals.
Dundee composer extraordinaire Andrew Wasylyk enlists some well-known names for his latest project, Irreparable Parables. From Gruff Rhys and Kathryn Joseph to Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, for first-time listeners this is likely Wasylyk’s most accessible material, blending his cinematic noir charm with pockets of jazz, classical and indie flair.
It’s counterpointed by two key highlights: the first being ‘Love Is a Life That Lasts Forever (ft. Molly Linen)’. Reminiscent of Glasgow duo Cloth via Linen’s hushed vocals, its bright trumpets and textures echo waves of joy and hope, with Wasylyk looking to the writings of Derek Jarman for inspiration. Constrastingly, Kathryn Joseph’s pain-ridden vocal delivery on…
zakè’s deep attachment to the seasons of the Midwest, along with his intuitive approach to sound creation, has led to a deep and varied body of analog ambient drone recordings across the past ten years. Many of his albums take on the forms and colors of the space in which they are heard, but others convey something more fleeting and indefinable, far beyond the five senses. Cantus for Winter in Six Parts creates a space for comfort, contemplation, nostalgia, and longing; a moment of stillness that honors the cycle of all things, wandering fallow landscapes while dreaming of their renewal.
…The music billows and drifts like snowbanks under wind, and as such is well-suited for playing while indoors, watching the flakes fall…
The music of BlankFor.ms, aka Tyler Gilmore, emphasises duality, at its core representing both the calm and chaos of everyday life. The Brooklyn-based ambient artist is known for his disruption and manipulation of degraded tape loops, taking a medium which is by definition repetitive and making it unpredictable, shadowing the beats with slow, shifting synths which are sometimes sinister, sometimes glorious.
Gilmore’s 3rd solo album contains audible elements of his 2023 jazz-electronica album Refract, released in collaboration with pianist Jason Moran and drummer Marcus Gilmore. ‘Crail Family Post Office’ is where this is most apparent, with somewhat atonal and seemingly improvised bleeps dotted in rapid succession throughout.
And the Clocks All Ran Dry is the result of a single night suspended outside of time. Recorded in one continuous session, the collaboration between Andreas Voelk (das ende der liebe) and Scott Monteith (Deadbeat) captures the rare intensity of two artists fully surrendering to sound — unrehearsed, unhurried, and unbound.
The album unfolds as a meditation on transience and stillness, a dialogue between dub’s deep spatial pulse and krautrock’s hypnotic motion. Across its duration, drumless anti-rhythms dissolve into organic textures, and moments of silence take on equal weight. What begins as improvisation gradually becomes architecture — music that builds itself in real time and then vanishes into the night from which it came.
Described in the press materials as “an outstanding visual artist, a righteous community member, and a kind soul”, Chad Kouri has been absorbing and meditating on music in Chicago and Detroit for decades. His full-length debut album, Mixed, brings together an abundance of inspiration filtered through his lyrical saxophone, combined with field recordings, percussion, and synthesizers to create a unique, deeply felt musical experience.
For Kouri, 15 years of visual art and community work – including commissions from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Art and Design New York, and Adidas, in addition to solo exhibitions and performances in Los Angeles, New York, and Italy – were followed by five years of returning to music practice as…
After a loved one dies, might part of their essence be inscribed in the objects they owned? When the object is as personal as a beloved accordion, the case grows stronger. When a member of Arigto happened upon such an instrument, memories came flooding back: not only of the relative playing but breathing, an act performed not only by the artist, but the instrument. When one hears the lungs of this accordion – the only instrument used here – the impression of breath is so strong that we wrote to receive confirmation. Is this really Arigto (Noah Haußmann and Sebastian Stauß) or a communication from the great beyond? There’s no reason why it cannot be both.
The cover photo is haunting; black-and-white lends itself to such moods, and has been…
Catrin Finch has been at the top her field for a long time now. The Welsh harpist was appointed to the ancient office of Royal Harpist by Prince Charles in 2000, was nominated for a Classical Brit Award in 2004 and her World Music collaborations with Seckou Keita resulted in their winning the 2019 BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Best Duo.
After her three acclaimed albums with Keita, she released the striking Double You with Irish fiddler and classical violinist Aoife Ni Bhrian in 2023. And now, striking out with her first solo album in a decade, she turns to her self – in fact, to her 13-year-old self – in this beautiful set of pieces accompanied by short pieces of prose in the form of letters to herself, and archive family photos that focus on the young Katrin, and…
Ben Vince plays his saxophone like a man with one foot in another dimension. His tone is searching, mystical, molten; his penchant for looping and layering evokes blurry shapes emerging from a thick mist. No stave could contain him: Even the sweetest tone might peel off into a harried bleat. If the wind instrument’s magic is to turn breath into seemingly solid form, Vince is just as likely to wrest a stray note as it passes across his reed and dissolve it back into air.
On his early records, the London musician made do with saxophone alone, looping and layering his instrument into billowing expressions of foghorn melancholy. He cut a profoundly romantic figure: One imagined him out wandering the heath, half shrouded in fog, braving…
Conjuring images of blizzards and howling winds, Kevin Richard Martin’s Sub Zero is called that for a reason. It’s monolithic and unforgiving, even by the Bug’s standards, representing his most suffocating take on ambient dub yet. It’s not just a matter of making already heavy music heavier: Here, Martin hollows out his materials, leaving just the bass and high frequencies.
The only real midrange comes from what sounds like inclement weather or the occasional distant, lumbering percussion. It’s a new wrinkle in Martin’s sound, making yet another record of bleak electronic dirges feel unexpectedly novel. Sub Zero is a black hole of sound that sucks the color out of everything around it and makes a universe out of what feels like nothingness.
…Composer and sound designer Victoria Barca combines bleeps, crunchy percussion and chirping electronics on her albums to create music that blurs the line between acoustic and synthetic, laboratory-created and field-recorded. Her fourth album, released by Mondoj, has the power to create musical worlds. It combines electronic, electroacoustic and acoustic sounds, juxtaposing exotica-style sounds, quasi-folk forms, vocalisations and snippets of recordings. It also shows the potential and possibilities that sound offers. This album was created almost entirely without leaving home.
…Camilla Nebbia’s saxophone in ‘Sporo’ spins seductive phrases, sounding as if someone were playing in the next room. Everything here…
This latest release from Stephen O’Malley consists of two organ drones, each more than 20 minutes, recorded on Les Grandes Orgues at Église Saint‑François, Lausanne.
This 18th-century instrument had been twice updated and expanded. The pieces were played by O’Malley, Kali Malone, and Frederikke Hoffmeier in December 2021.
O’Malley is best known as a co-founder of Sunn O))), where his measured yet high-volume approach helped define a major sub-genre of 21st-century drone and doom metal.
Across projects, collaborations, and commissions, he continued to push into more diverse forms. As a consequence, this pipe-organ recording serves as a logical extension to his works rather than a detour.
The genocide in Gaza continues despite the ceasefire. In January 2024, braving the heart of the horrifying conflict, Mai Mai Mai sojourned to Bethlehem and Ramallah to record with Palestinian musicians and capture the raw emotions of the region. Karakoz is the heart-rending result.
One need not speak the language to hear the sorrow in “Grief.” Maya Al Khaldi begins in a whisper as Mai Mai Mai builds a warm ambient glow around her voice. As she begins to sing, the ambience turns to drone and the sun seems to recede. The percussion imitates a heartbeat, soon joined by dark electronic tones. The gobbling monster is already here, has already passed through, has turned around for another strike.
While glimpses of brightness will appear in…
The star of Trio Ramberget‘s self-titled sixth album isn’t Trio Ramberget, but a “fourth player”, a big oil cistern on the island of Svanö, Sweden, in which the album was recorded. While it’s unclear how many people can fit in such a cistern, while listening, one yearns for the live experience; such is the gorgeous reverberation, the echo, the decay.
Released on New Year’s Day, Trio Ramberget is perfectly suited to the sprawl of deep winter and the contemplations of a new year. There are no markers in the slow, six-part suite, which flows together as one, although the tone changes subtly from piece to piece: for example, the peering into a higher register in the second part. The trombone, bass clarinet and double bass find themselves in conversational territory with…
Although they’re based on opposite coasts, Elori Saxl and Henry Solomon have collaborated in the past – Solomon played in Saxl’s quartet live and accompanied her on the Texada soundtrack and Drifts and Surfaces EP – but this latest release marks the first time they’ve worked together as equal partners. With Solomon on baritone saxophone and bass clarinet and Saxl on the Juno 106 synthesizer, Seeing Is Forgetting exquisitely blends ambient and jazz while working in the occasional pop melody.
Saxl is based in New York City, and Solomon is in Los Angeles; their new record was recorded in Solomon’s hometown over five days. Self-described as “improvised music from the ground up… a meeting of both our minds,…
Intrinsically entwined with the landscapes of Hokkaido, Japan, Whispers of the Distant Past is a meditation on transience and nostalgia. Yuki Aizawa’s first physical release acts as a vessel to preserve and reflect on the fading vestiges of childhood. This emotional core is rooted in Aizawa’s memories of vast fields of lavender in Furano, an endless purple horizon acting as a calming yet melancholic backdrop to the passing of time.
The soundscapes of Whispers of the Distant Past were built through the intricate layering of guitar volume and feedback swells. Aizawa then sculpted the resulting textures into living spaces using a variety of treatments and effects, flecked with field recordings of rivers and wildlife captured…