…Adding to the remarkable collection of work the Canadian-born, Berlin-based artist has produced as a solo artist and through collaborations with figures such as Monolake and Paul St Hilaire is this strong contribution to the quiet details label.
The Deadbeat moniker’s granted immense stylistic latitude to Monteith, as a given release might as easily be a clubby floor-filler as trippy ambient excursion. No matter the direction a release takes, it always bears the unmistakable handprint of its creator.
Scott’s in full-blown ambient-soundscaping mode on Kansai Botanticals, whose creation was inspired by an autumn Japan tour and explorations of the countryside undertaken during downtime. Sounds were gathered during such…
Category: ambient
There are so many instrumental combinations that artists use to create ambient soundscapes. Some work, some don’t. Some create credible music that works, some turn into vapid, new-age-like aural wallpapers. And that does not necessarily depend on the combination of instruments but on the inventiveness of the artists involved and their ability to transform that into music that actually resonates with the listeners, instead of just creating an aural background.
Being Grammy-nominated doesn’t necessarily have to be a good sign, but both Manu Delago (handpan) and Max ZT (hammered dulcimer) not only have Grammy nominations but are recognised as innovators, able to use their instruments to create intriguing music, as they do…
Isabel Pine has been quietly releasing independent EPs for a while now, and it was high time that a label like Kranky would pick up her new album release, Fables. And it all seems to fall into place, with that quiet description, the album title and cover, telling a bit about what is going on here.
Pine, a classically trained viola and cello artist, has exactly that touch to make that fluid area between modern classical and ambient music work.
It is not just about creating moody soundscapes but make those soundscapes transform obvious instrumental capabilities into music that presents personal emotions in a way that listeners can not only pick up on them, but understand them in a way the artist, in this case Pine, wanted it in the first place.
Remastered by Mark Beazley.
On The Boy and the Tree, Susumu Yokata continues the trajectory of ambient albums formed by Sakura and Grinning Cat. Like Sakura, The Boy and the Tree is gentle and buoyant, but for the most part Yokata leaves guitars behind for odder instrumentation — plinks, clacks, gurgles, gongs, and bells. The result, especially on tracks like “Live Echo,” sounds like Brian Eno crossed with the ancient and pastoral. “Fairy Link” dances through a dreamy repetition until it floats into even less grounded territory, “Secret Garden” employs hushed, indiscernible vocals that suggest some magical twilight realm, and “Red Swan” finds an exotic, sparkling Middle Eastern groove. “Thread Leads to Heaven,” possibly the best track on…
The Patterns Lost to Air is Marielle V Jakobsons‘ first solo album in a decade, though she’s collaborated with guitarist Chuck Johnson in the duo Saariselka. The album was recorded in a studio she built in Oakland, California, and its sonic palette consists of violin, Fender Rhodes, and Moog Matriarch. It marks Jakobsons’ intentional shift from drone-based music to harmonic composition, utilizing her classical training. The release is a reflection on renewal and loss, informed by a long-term case of the COVID-19 virus. Jakobsons’ music has always sounded warm, immersive, and exquisite, but this is her richest, most melodic, and most sonically detailed work to date.
Opener “Warm Spring” is an inviting blend of rippling synths, chiming Rhodes keys,…
We last encountered Midori Hirano in the company of a pair of Berlin electronic improvisers, noting that “A grounding cadence of piano arpeggios, a tremulous wash of strings, the fluting pulse of synthesizers, Berlin experimental artists Sebastian and Daniel Selke (“the brothers”) and Midori Hirano mix together organic and electronic sounds in this meditation on the scale.”
Here the Berlin-based artist — who trained on classical piano but has more recently shifted to analog and modular synths — revisits the spare, searching aesthetic on her own, mostly on synthethic keyboards but also on piano.
On the synthy side, consider the purity of “Before the Silence,” as it negotiates a brief but luminous keyboard riff. It rolls like a wheel,…
In order to escape the world’s pressures, Moby often finds refuge in ambient and neo-classical music, and Future Quiet is one of several ventures into such territory. It isn’t the type of extended meditation session he reserves for his lengthy ambient releases, instead coming a bit closer to his orchestral releases on Deutsche Grammophon.
The album begins by revisiting “When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die,” the elegiac closing number to Everything Is Wrong that gained a new audience after it soundtracked particularly emotional moments during three seasons of Stranger Things. Jacob Lusk of Gabriels stays faithful to the Mimi Goese-sung original, if anything making the song sound more intimate and sacred. Two songs from the previous Moby album,…
Labeling any music as spiritual can play as a (fiery) double-edged sword for any artist involved, and if that is your debut full-length album, like is the case with Brooklyn’s multi-media artist AnAkA, and her album Crisis of the Concrete, those edges just might get a bit sharper, and those edges might spew just a bit more fire either way.
Of course, that spiritual element that the artist might be trying to evoke could have more or less openly religious content (less in AnAkA case here), and it can involve a number of musical elements and/or genres, and AnAkA certainly goes that multi-genre route here. Very often, the best music with that spiritual element was done with quite a few jazz elements, and AnAkA certainly doesn’t shy away from bringing them in,…
Editions Mego welcomes KMRU back to the fold. Kin is Nairobi born, Berlin based, sonic wizard Joseph Kamaru’s second release on Editions Mego, following on from the classic 2020 release Peel.
…Kin could be construed as the second child following Peel. The project came out of initial discussions with Peter Rehberg about what a Peel sequel would sound like. Kamaru is quick to clarify that Kin is not that record; “I’ll know when that record will come and when I’ll make it. It’s already happening… or maybe it lives within both of these Mego records”.
Kin was started early 2021 in Nairobi with Kamaru exploring his noisier palette of sounds encompassing distortions reminiscent of the sounds he would muster from in his…
The title As Human carries a multitude of meanings. What is it like to be human, or to pass as human? At what juncture might one lose or gain one’s humanity? The Chicago band calls the title track “a meditation on vulnerability and the small triumphs that come with choosing to feel, even when it hurts.” The Color of Cyan paints with a wide swath of moods, plumbing the depths of human experience and exploring its potential heights.
Eduardo Cintron’s striking cover image is available separately on t-shirts and linoleum block prints; the vinyl is offered in red-and-white variants. The rich red hues prompt the listener to imagine lifeblood flowing and spilled, even before the record is spun. (For those who are curious, cyan was incorporated into the cover art…
After a decade of silence, Chloe Harris returns as Raica with an album that is garnering lavish praise. Chloe’s roots run deep – a veteran stalwart of the US and global electronic scenes – starting out working in record shops, to a wildly successful radio career, leading to establishing herself as one of the most in-demand international DJs. From there her production took-off with support from some of the biggest names in the house/techno world.
…Alongside this she’s also the founder of the seminal Further Records and runs the truly underground store of the same name in Seattle. An endless musical curiosity and open-mindedness runs through Chloe’s psyche, and an important part of this is experimental and…
“Three people will die listening to this album,” the Bandcamp description of Nashpaints’ first record since 2020, Everyone Good is Called Molly, reads. “Zzz they will endup in the same place.” There’s no backstory to Finn Carraher McDonald, only mystery and angelic voicings spread across decaying pop tapes with a butter knife.
Lead single “Boyfriend First” is this seven-minute mass of swirling noise with guitar streaks you’d have to break your nails just to make. There’s a lot of color in here even as the static fattens and the synths undress, because McDonald has melodies coming out the eyes. “Boyfriend First” sounds more like Natalie Imbruglia covering Deerhunter-or maybe it’s Deerhunter covering Natalie Imbruglia-in a sewer tunnel than the Duretti Column…
Released by Houndstooth (the in-house record label of London nightclub Fabric) in partnership with Mastery-a London sound studio best known for putting on installations and live shows with a host of performers-Quantum Sound is billed as a record “for listening with eyes closed.” You can listen to each of the comp’s 12 tracks in its entirety or, for maximum transcendence, an hour-long continuous mix crafted by composer and club supremo Hannah Holland, who also contributes two excellent productions of her own. The vinyl even comes with an eye mask if you buy it from Fabric’s website.
The air of peace and tranquility permeating this music is to be expected. But it comes from several unlikely sources, author and TV personality…
Live at Nelsonica & Clothworkers Hall – this is the first ever released recording of this unique trio comprising of: Bill Nelson (Be Bop Deluxe/Red Noise), Theo Travis (Soft Machine/Robert Fripp/Steven Wilson), Dave Sturt (Gong/Jade Warrior).
The trio performed various concerts between 2009 and 2019 often as part of Bill Nelson’s ‘Nelsonica’ conventions. Following years of planning and preparation, this album consists of live recordings made by the trio in 2011, 2012 and 2018 from 3 concerts in Leeds and York.
The music, a broad sound palette from ambient soundscapes, to rocky workouts and ethereal mood painting was improvised over loosely prepared structures. with occasional use of backing…
John Beltran is Detroit techno’s foremost daydreamer. His first albums under his own name, 1995’s Earth & Nightfall and 1996’s cult classic Ten Days of Blue, were blissful-sounding ambient techno records that took the melodic sensibilities of the local scene to their cosmic extremes. Every beep and blip was in harmony with a lush string line, the rhythms less like breakbeats or programmed drums than trance-inducing hammered dulcimers. By 1997’s The Cry, the first album released under his Placid Angles moniker, Beltran had drifted even further into new-age sounds, the beats dislodging themselves and seemingly hanging in mid-air.
As the next generation of electronic musicians, including Four Tet and Skee Mask, absorbed…
For the front cover of his fifth solo album for Home Normal, Wil Bolton‘s opted for something a little more unsettling than the usual kind of bucolic imagery favoured by ambient practitioners. Shot by Bolton, the grainy photo shows a building structure on the left and on the right the upper part of a dome, its distinctive shape initially suggesting it could be an observatory. However, upon learning that the recording merges synthesizers (Buchla, Nord Wave) with “environmental sounds, radio waves, and found objects” collected by him along the Suffolk coast, the interpretation shifts as the locale is home to a nuclear power station, specifically the Sizewell B nuclear reactor. That one of the seven track titles is “Reactor Dome Haze” would seem to lend further…
The music of David Moore’s Bing & Ruth has typically resembled cloud systems, ocean waves, swarming shoals of fish. In the spirit of compositions like Terry Riley’s In C and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, each of his pieces stirs diminutive patterns into unfathomably vast forces. But over the long sweep of his career, Moore gives the impression of an artist steadily clearing away cobwebs, determined to get at the essence of something. There were 11 players on 2010’s City Lake, his post-classical ensemble’s breakout album, and then seven on 2014’s Tomorrow Was the Golden Age; by 2020’s somber Species, he had stripped his materials down to Farfisa organ, clarinet, and double bass. Moore recently dropped the Bing & Ruth alias for a duo…
Spectralism is a type of composition that is organized by taking as its basis aspects of the harmonic series, or the overtones resulting from a sounding pitch. From the ’70s onward, composers, many of them residing in France or Romania, have looked at spectrograms of sounds to plot out the harmonies that they will deploy over time in a piece. This may sound rarified, but it is also one of the oldest traditions in music. Early humans listened for resonances, particularly in caves, some even using conch shells (brought in from many miles away) to create loud enough sounds to hear lots of reverberating overtones. Throat singers manipulate their voices to sound more than a single pitch at a time. If you have ever heard a bunch of higher sounds…
It’s tempting to associate the titles of the two Disappearing Collective volumes crafted by Pacific Northwest-based Drew Sullivan under the Slow Dancing Society moniker with the years of their release. The first, appearing in 2020, evokes the image of people withdrawing into their homes fearful of contamination by the spreading virus; the just-released second, on the other hand, suggests a rather more political interpretation in light of the deportation of specific groups within the United States. As it turns out, the title originated from a different place altogether. By way of clarification, Sullivan references a lyric by Matthew Ryan, who sings, “The things we love will one day disappear / First slow, and then so quick.” Such a sentiment dovetails with Sullivan’s own…
What does motherhood mean in an age of anxiety and fear? For Maria Papadomanolaki (Dalot), the question became especially salient when she lost her mother and gave birth to her second daughter against the backdrop of the invasion of Ukraine. A year-long, Crete to Hanoi conversation with Nhung Nguyen (Sound Awakener) led to the formation of Ianos, a fitting reference to the god who looks forward and back and from whom January gets its name.
Given the choice between empathy and despair, the two artists prefer the former. Their contributions are so intertwined that one cannot tell where one artist ends and the other begins; the textures feel like an embroidered cloth, passed woman to woman, nation to nation,…