Jolanda Moletta has been described as a “one-woman electronic choir”, creating wordless compositions or “sonic and visual spells”, as described on her Bandcamp, through extended vocal techniques. On her two previous albums, Night Caves (2025) and Nine Spells (2022), she created gorgeous, cavernous worlds with layers of impeccable singing.
On her third release, Oceanine, she expands her vocal universe through collaboration, with each track featuring a different female vocalist. At the same time, the foundational elements are generated entirely by her own voice.
Moletta’s Bandcamp page describes the record as “representing a musical practice that is distinctly feminist”. The album harkens back…
Category: ambient
Gigi Masin‘s form of ambient music has often incorporated rippling textures and forward motion, so it’s not hard to see how his records have become favorites of DJs and sample-flipping producers. Soon after the Talk to the Sea compilation on Music from Memory introduced Masin’s music to new listeners, he made two albums with Tempelhof which delved into downtempo and Balearic house, and later recorded some mellow jazz sessions with Greg Foat.
For his 2026 solo album Movement, he intentionally created ambient music that connects with the body as well as the mind. While some of the album’s tracks, like opener “Bed on Mars,” sound like drifting clouds or a fog rolling in, others are far more rhythmic, utilizing deep house…
U.e.’s Other Girl is a singer-songwriter album that strips away a lot of the singing and even more of the songwriting. With the words buried behind layers of interference, the music itself is left to do most of the emotional legwork, and while the palette is the sort traditionally associated with “intimacy” in Western pop music — acoustic guitars, piano chords you can feel in your chest — there’s no readymade narrative to map onto these 10 songs. You can either let this obscure approach bewilder you or treat it as a blank slate on which you can map your own feelings. From this angle, the spaces between the chords can fill with your own thoughts, and the distance between these recordings and your ears can stand in for the distance from whatever you…
Think about music, all the music that is available to hear, all the music that’s been made, especially in the past 80 years of popular styles. Where does it all go in your mind? How do you get from one thing to another?
These questions matter for this album, because Haruhi Kobayashi started off in the public eye as a J-Pop singer, putting out the 2017 album Inside Out on Sony. To be frank, it’s an undistinguished derivation of American soul and soft rock, the kind of imitation of styles that young musicians work through to find their own voice.
Well, Kobayashi has found that voice, and it’s not just orders of magnitude distant from the earlier album, but a remarkable journey from the universe of pop music into the kind of…
…Music of the Terrazoku: Ethnographic Recordings from an Imagined Future is the brainchild of drummer-composer Will Glaser, who has assembled a wide array of experimental musicians to help him execute his vision. There’s pretty much everything here, from ambience to industrial music, free improv to early 20th-century jazz. The idea is that such musicians have lived through a climactic event that has wiped away all reference points, and are recreating music from scratch, a metaphor for rebuilding a fractured society.
The very first sounds are like a Geiger counter and a human playing on found containers before breaking into an array of junk drums: just what one might expect for the re-origins of music. Isn’t this how our primitive ancestors started?
With Aves de Nahá, Bosque Vacío turn from the fractured wetlands of Mexico City toward the dense cosmologies of the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas. Where 2023’s Cantera Oriente traced the unstable boundaries between quarry, reserve and megapolis — a site where nature exists in continuous dialogue with urbanism — this new work listens further back and further outward.
Asphalt gives way to canopy; infrastructural hum yields to breath, feather, omen.
Developed through an exchange between anthropology, ornithology and the Lacandon community of Nahá, the album situates birds not as documentary field-recording subjects but as sentient presences embedded in ritual, subsistence and prophecy. Crucially, they are…
Interesting monikers are something you are going to run into quite often lately, and vocal artist Leslie Lowder has one for you – idiiom. With her latest album Neural Network, Lowder establishes herself as one of the more intriguing vocalists, starting with Laurie Anderson back in the eighties up to more current vocal experimentalists like Juliana Barwick.
And Lowder picks up a double-edged sword here, as all of the five tracks are improvisations, with Lowder manipulating her vocals with electronics to create a unique effect with each. The double edge here is that such experiments can often be quite risky, with no middle ground, and Lowder doubles the risk here by having no other instrumentation added – they could fail…
Noise can feel like drowning. This is often intentional and a large part of its appeal to the sickos, but even the largest of whales comes up for air every 15 minutes — breaking the surface tension, pupils constricting toward the atmosphere, and taking a bus-sized gulp.
Is there anything that experimental noise can learn from this mammalian constraint?
Max Klebanoff is working on it. For several years, his project Death Kneel has kneaded noise music into a wide range of shapes, from diving directly into the harsh void on 2023’s Dawn Simulation, released via très fashion noise imprint Chondritic Sound, to the cavernous, waterlogged ambiance of 2025’s Ink Wash Apparition. On his new release Remembering Well, he picks up…
“He has an energy to him like he’s floating,” Fratti said about Orcutt when she chucked his self-titled 2017 album, his first solo electric studio jaunt, on her Baker’s Dozen list for the Quietus. She’d stumbled over the record via a blog and immediately set about following the breadcrumb trail, picking through his blues deconstructions, free jazz side-quests and his early, formative work with Adris Hoyos as Harry Pussy, one of the USA’s greatest noise duos. What happened next isn’t completely clear, but Fratti and Orcutt began communicating and, at some point, Orcutt shuttled over a pack of improvised guitar solos that lit the touch paper for the next stage. At home in Mexico City, Fratti (alongside her partner and Titanic cohort I. La Católica) retreated…
What would happen if one were to mix LSD with fundamentalist Christianity? Hammock‘s Marc Byrd learned the answer when watching the moonrise and mistaking it for the apocalypse. Looking back, Byrd writes of “letting go of toxic shame and bad religion, while holding onto what is good, beautiful and true.” Rather than lamenting the delayed rapture, he writes, “Seeing and experiencing a moonrise is a miracle in itself.”
The Second Coming Was a Moonrise reimagines Christianity as a religion of seeking and sometimes finding, in which beauty possesses more power than dogma. The fact that Byrd references Philippians 4:8 in his description – and that by adding ten guests, he and Andrew Thompson end up with a group the same size…
On Su Shaw’s self-titled debut as SHHE, the sea seemed to flood into her songwriting unbidden, imagined as it was by the water at her home in Dundee. When Shaw moved on to the ambient suite of DÝRA, set around the fjords in Iceland, she welcomed the water in.
At the same time, Shaw picked up a somewhat nomadic existence as an artist, moving from place to place, capturing field recordings and establishing environmental installations that flowed with the very currents and tides of the water itself, finally ending up in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, where THALASSA took shape.
Its six movements chart an ambient seascape that is heightened and alarmed. Processed voices mimic breathless gasps and sharp intakes,…
For fans of electronic music, 1977 represents a sacred frontier. It was a time when synthesizers were massive, unpredictable walls of cables and knobs, and live performances were high-wire acts executed entirely without a safety net.
Among the most legendary documents of this era is Tangerine Dream’s performance at the Place des Arts in Montreal on April 9, 1977, during their iconic first North American tour. Performed by the definitive “Sonic Trinity”- Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann- this breathtaking two-hour set captures the absolute zenith of the Berlin School of electronic music, serving as the final, radiant hurrah of their classic lineup right before Baumann’s departure.
Originally broadcast by Montreal’s CHOM-FM…
The collaborative projects of Austrian experimental double bass player, guitarist, and sound artist Werner Dafeldecker (of Polwechsel) and Australian sound artist, composer, head of the Room40 label Lawrence English, have consistently concerned themselves with processes of transformation. Their new sound work, Fathom Tides, is made of English’s field recordings collected from diverse coastal environments, with some preparations, later treated extensively by Dafeldecker, who added subtle layers of electronics.
Fathom Tides is an LP of incremental change. Best heard as a single, slowly-developing piece, the album reflects the pace of nature over that of humanity. The earth is in no hurry; the trees are not multi-tasking; the streams do have…
Virga III continues the series established in the early 2020s by two of Eluvium‘s most purely ambient releases. Virga I was created following a temporary evacuation from the artist’s home due to a snowstorm, and Virga II emerged from a dream sequence during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to escape all the unspeakable horrors of the world, Virga III takes refuge in small ecosystems and other natural spaces. As such, it’s a lighter and more calming effort than Virga II, though it still has its haunting moments.
“The Fires at Night” feels like a safe space far away from danger, with a supremely calming melody drifting in and out. “Remains” is desolate and forlorn, however, and “Hallucination II” revisits the lurching malaise of the opening…
It’s no knock on SUSS’s excellent music to admire the strategy behind their success. Their first savvy move was to embrace the kind of pat labeling that many artists try to avoid. Self-branding as “ambient country,” they made the tradition of diffusing American roots music through a new-age filter sound sexy and modern and algorithmic. They played to the playlists and got results, and were branded as pioneers in the process.
SUSS expanded their brand under the rubric Across the Horizon, which consists of a podcast; a compilation series featuring fellow travelers like Mark Nelson of Pan American, William Tyler, Marisa Anderson, and Chuck Johnson; and now a revolving all-star jam at the Big Ears Festival, a booking that’d be a feather in any upscale…
The combination of tabla (tuned Indian hand drums), santur (Iranian dulcimer) and harp does not pop up often, but hearing them together on the new trio album from Montreal’s Shawn Mativetsky, Amir Amiri and Sara Pagé, you’ll wonder why it’s not more common. Though hailing from different countries and traditions, the santur and the harp have intriguing tonal similarities, the former bringing out the latter’s metallic tactility, and the latter bringing out the former’s gossamer ripple. The hopping, polyrhythmic bounce and ricochet of Mativetsky’s drumming emphasizes the percussive nature of both instruments, adding to the music’s harmonic breadth, while the resonance of the strings bring out the more melodic aspects of the tabla. Metamorphose, as its title…
Gabriella Smart introduces listeners to the term Parasymbiosis, asking if two separate organisms can share a living space. The parable can be applied to many situations, but Smart concentrates on the earth and the universe as a whole
…Parasymbiosis was recorded live at 2024’s Music Meeting Festival in The Netherlands. Smart plays the Electric Cristal (which creates amplified sounds through manipulation of glass rods), and is joined by Kasper Toeplitz on bass and electronics, and Didier Casamitjana on percussion and electronics. Toeplitz and Casamitjana’s contributions do not become obvious until later in the album (gritty and menacing, no less), though they may have been present throughout.
Across eight numbered and self-titled tracks…
Midge Ure released A Man of Two Worlds, a new double album. His first album of new material in 12 years sees the former Ultravox frontman divide the offering into two parts. The first half, World One: Music, consists of eight instrumental pieces, while the second half, World Two: Songs, features eight ‘proper’ songs (with vocals).
This concept is said to be partly inspired by the time Midge spent during lockdown listening to instrumental music, and some of the work he heard whilst presenting THE SPACE on Scala Radio. He began writing what became a selection of instrumental pieces — “music shaped by reflection, uncertainty, and a strange kind of quiet”.
The eight vocal songs which form the second part of the album, are described as…
