In a world where the surface has become a trope for glistering repetitions of self, pompous explosions of short-reeled extremes, digital debris and its ephemeral, disconnecting and intoxicating comfort, a form of distanced, attentive and (perhaps hauntological) listening can serve as an antidote to the madness of “being connected”.
Somewhere between Derrida’s, Deleuze’s and Fisher’s (post-)nostalgic ruminations lies the solace of silence and remoteness as a way of connecting and belonging. Rafael Anton Irissari’s Points of Inaccessibility is a line of flight towards this reconfiguration of reality and an exploration of the way the present is haunted by all the futures that never arrived.
The album’s core material was recorded as…
Category: ambient
Yamila Rios is a kind of sound vessel — a composer, singer, and cellist who has the ability to conjure ethereal beauty in multiple contexts, carving out a space where gauzy textures, elegant melodic gestures, an almost subversive rhythmic presence, and trippy incantations mingle, collide, and pull apart. While she makes drifty, ambient pop as Yamila, she’s also been actively collaborating with choreographers and dance companies. Despite placid surfaces, her music pulses with movement. Splitting her time between Madrid, in her native Spain, and Brussels, Belgium, Yamila has found strong collaborators in the Echo Collective, whose founding duo — violinist Margaret Hermant and violist Neil Leiter — has established it as one of the go-to string ensembles in…
From the moment we are born, we begin the long walk home. Elizabeth and Beverly and Glenn-Copeland started down the path together nearly half a century ago, and have been trailing it since, hand in hand and song by song. Together, they’ve made a life sharing their unselfish hearts-ones too large for earthly configuration-through art and community, encouraging us all to take our own dance down the road with elemental love and grace.
Now, as Glenn lives with a version of Dementia known as LATE, their walk has taken on a different weight. Out of this season comes Laughter In Summer, an album the couple made together-realizing, before long, that it was a love letter to one another: a tender ledger of memories, shared devotion, grief and joy.
… The UK-based Phil Tomsett, who otherwise issues material under The Inventors of Aircraft name, is a supreme crafter of atmospheric electronic-ambient music, and the 13 soundscapes he’s spread across the two discs uphold that reputation. Tomsett helpfully provides preambles to bring clarity to the two parts, details that in no way detract from the listening experience. The idea behind Noise Print has to do with shadow selves and the different versions of ourselves that make up who we are. Beyond the self we present to the world, there are shadowy ones we don’t share or only do with select individuals plus parts deeply buried that we struggle to identify and understand. One might think of Noise Print, then, as an aural, print-to-tape document of…
What if insomnia were a great black black ball of smoke, drifting above thoroughfares, slowly unfurling into ovoid shapes before spreading its tentacles across the land? What if it were to descend upon the general populace, creeping insidiously lower and lower until it cloaked local buildings and was inhaled by those below? What if it became virtually indistinguishable from the night? Yuki Murata’s video for Takahiro Kido‘s title track may be seen as a metaphor, but the subject might be extended to depression, apathy, or even the state of the world today. The music follows suit: foreboding, patient, enveloping. On this track, Kido is joined by other members of Anoice, who will reappear throughout the set. Insomnia contains tracks with the full band and…
a nothing / a void is an album of “fragments, detours and half-formed ideas” that coalesce into a whole – even if this is not the composer’s intent. Asher Fusco (St. Catherine’s) is more interested in texture than in form, process than in result; yet the mind’s tendency toward pareidolia places the puzzle pieces together, from frame to interlocking fragment. The album is incredibly homespun, recorded on the banks of the Delaware River, on a porch in Saugerties, New York and at the artist’s home in Brooklyn. In deference to its title, a nothing / a void feels like a solid something, operating as a sonic diary of snapshots and intimate moments, occasionally reminiscent of Philadelphia’s Hour but touching on the pointillist leanings of ’80s micro-electronics as well.
The press release for Pop Ambient 2026, the 26th installment of Kompakt Records’ influential ambient compilations, paraphrases Heraclitus, comparing ambient music to a river: “everything flows, nothing remains.” It’s an apt summation of what makes the Pop Ambient series such a compelling listen, even if it is mostly quiet, unobtrusive and unassuming.
Pop Ambient 2026 leans ever-so-slightly towards the “different” end of the ambient continuum, although you’d have to really lean in to notice. On its surface, Pop Ambient 2026 radiates the same pastoral, vaguely melancholic mood that has made the series such a mainstay for the past quarter-century, but there’s something more, a sense of the human wandering through the garden of machines. Take Segensklang’s “Schauer…
A common theme through The Soft Pink Truth’s records of the 2020s is music’s ability to build sanctuaries. As the world’s got harsher, SPT’s albums have got lusher.
2020’s Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?, recorded during the first Trump presidency, saw the project, led by Matmos’s Drew Daniel, blur propulsive deep house into velvety minimal composition. 2022’s Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?, made during pandemic lockdown, is a glimmering electro-orchestral record played by a ‘fourteen-piece virtual disco band’. Latest album Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? meanwhile, is a suite of largely drum-less chamber music played on harps, pianos, acoustic guitar and strings.
Uncut readers may already be familiar with Barry Walker through his association with Ripley Johnson, for whom he serves as pedal steel guitarist in Rose City Band. Or perhaps his collaborative work alongside Patrick McDermott as country-folk duo North Americans, or else heading up experimental trio Mouth Painter, whose broad palette encompasses acid country, weird exotica and the odd freakout.
In 2021, extended solo piece “Shoulda Zenith” (from the album of the same name) fetched up on Uncut’s Sounds of The New West: Ambient Americana CD, placing Walker in roughly the same territory as Steve Gunn, Andrew Tuttle and Luke Schneider. And it’s here where Paleo Sol, the latest in a series of inquisitive solo…
Some records are so forthright, so direct in their intent, that they become a challenge — maybe even a dare — to discuss in critical terms.
In the case of low clouds hang, this land is on fire, Bhutan-born Tashi Dorji‘s latest work for Drag City, this challenge becomes less about pinning down some sonic intangible, and more about the mere listening experience.
The LP is not concerned with subtlety; it’s presented as a meditation on openness and humanity in trying times. That intentionality is evident in Dorji’s freeform guitar improvisation, notable here for its absence of both textural sturm und drang and dissonance. Focus lies instead on tonal interplay, with special mention to “burn the throne” as a center point.
On Langeleik, two pioneers of alternative pedal-steel meet across oceans, time, and temperament. Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Geir Sundstøl and London-based pedal-steel player Joe Harvey-Whyte merge the instrument’s ghostly resonance with field recordings, ambient drones and vintage synths to create a sound that feels as fluid and alive as the rivers that inspired it.
Geir and Joe got in touch in 2016 when Joe, exploring beyond his usual listening habits, stumbled upon Geir’s debut Furulund. Struck by its hypnotic slide melodies, he reached out. A musical friendship grew through years of conversation, sharing curiosities and visiting each other’s studios in Oslo and London.
In August 2024, during a break from touring…
Making a choice among artists who create ambient music veering into modern classical is becoming harder by the day. It is becoming hard sifting through hours of music and finding the ones that don’t end up into a musical wallpaper territory, the ones that keep up in both quality and emotional intensity.
That list is quite rarified these days, but you can easily add Southend-on-Sea visual artist and musician Adrian Lane and his latest album Their Ghosts and Ours to it.
Lane, who has been releasing music since 2013 on various independent labels, is among those who combine acoustic sources with electronic/computer-generated embellishments, something that has been done a lot these days.
…2025 edition was mastered by Rashad Becker and features a new track ‘Sacrificial Code III’.
The first and only time that Kali Malone sat down for a lesson on the pipe organ, she managed about five minutes at the console before begging her teacher to take her inside the belly of the beast. That desire is borne out in her music: Listening to her expansive, slowly moving compositions, which bristle with dazzling arrays of layered waveforms, you feel like you are not just inside the organ — pressed against its pipes, vibrations coursing through your body, air whisking over your skin — but enveloped in the sound itself. The simplest interval might throb like an outboard engine, every new chord triggering wave after rippling wave of beating effects, vibrations as…
Music from Memory presents Aquáticos, a collaboration between Los Angeles producer Eddie Ruscha (aka E Ruscha V / Secret Circuit) and Brazilian guitarist Fabiano Do Nascimento. Blending Nascimento’s expressive, Afro-samba- and choro-inflected guitar with Ruscha’s cosmic, groove-driven sound, Aquáticos marks the start of a vibrant musical partnership — an organic, free-spirited collaboration full of interplay and vitality.
Conceived during the early 2020’s, Aquáticos grew from a series of recording sessions in which the music unfolded naturally, in a state of effortless flow. Album opener ‘Nascer,’ the very first piece they recorded, captures such a moment perfectly: Nascimento’s 7- and 10-string nylon guitars weave seamlessly with Ruscha’s modular synths,…
Imagine you were a collector of folk songs in 1970s Kyiv, a student at the Conservatory, and a member of the Leninist Youth League (obligatory if you wanted easier access to higher ed). Coming back from weekend expeditions to rural villages, you would deposit your field recordings in the archive, but not before you edited them — excising references to gods, Christian or otherwise, or songs too tragic for the Communist Party, which expected optimism from the folk. Composers in the Conservatory might draw from your collections and adapt them for the saccharine folklore ensembles sponsored by the Soviet state.
Imagine you wanted to sing like the women you heard in the village, with the full gritty materiality of your body, even though…
While many of us are bundling against the elements, cursing an abundance of cold, we pause to remember that a year ago a hotter weather event was unfolding in Southern California. The initial warnings called the combination of accumulated drought and fierce wind “a particularly dangerous situation.” On January 7, the first plumes of smoke appeared. Ian Wellman was there, using his field recording equipment to document the sounds of the Santa Ana winds. As the day went on, he began to smell the smoke; he saw the moon turn crimson as ash accumulated on his clothes. When he returned home, he had begun to realize the extent of what was unfolding. The Palisades and Eaton fires would burn throughout the month, demolishing 180,000 structures,…
Somewhere in an old mill in Yorkshire, a man – maybe – has been buried under patch cables, feeding electricity through modular synths long enough for the hum to be part of the drizzly landscape. That no one really knows who they are feels appropriate. Their anonymity has become part of the machinery, like an unlabeled switch. Sidings is the latest in a long drift of releases, a third double album that doesn’t move forward so much as nestle deeper into its own circuitry.
The word “sidings” tells us a lot: the quiet track off the main line, where trains go to rest, or wait, or rust. That’s what this record feels like. Music built for those in-between hours when nothing needs doing and no one is expecting you. Where 2023’s Standers felt like slow travel, Sidings feels…
British duo Insides made their debut with 1993’s Euphoria, a sensual set of ambient pop songs filled with airy guitars, intricately crafted beats, and provocative lyrics about intimate relationships and emotional tension. The distinctive album was praised by critics and remains a favorite of dream pop aficionados, and the duo have sporadically released new recordings, including the 2021 full-length Soft Bonds.
Insides’ elusive and icy electronic pop explores the darkest, seamiest corners of love and sex – their songs capture the emptiness and hostility that surface when the afterglow fades, ugly scenes punctuated by eruptions of violence, waves of self-loathing and caresses that are cold to the touch. Singer/bassist Kirsty Yates’ vocals…
There is a certain solace to be found in minimal music-a contemplative joy that emerges through sustained repetition and subtle variation. Solo Three, the slyly absorbing new album from Michigan-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Erik Hall, embodies that hypnotic charge while boldly reimagining a distinct selection of contemporary classical works.
Hall’s affinity for minimalism began decades ago, when as a jazz-studies drummer at the University of Michigan he first encountered Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. The piece altered his trajectory completely. Years later, amid a creative lull, he revisited that formative work by attempting a solo reconstruction. Working alone in his home studio, Hall painstakingly recreated…
Every field recording is a virtual reality. Joshua Bonnetta understands that precept: The Canadian artist eschews “authentic” reproductions of any space, openly embracing subjectivity. “I abstract the sounds,” Bonnetta has said of his 2016 album Lago, “so that they would align more with my experience and the feeling of what I got from that place.” A personal perspective comes to the fore in his experimental documentaries, too. El Mar La Mar, his 2017 collaboration with director J.P. Sniadecki, placed oral histories alongside audio of the Sonoran desert, painting the U.S.-Mexico border as a landscape of trauma and bureaucratic racism. In 2020’s The Two Sights, he portrayed the epistemological reality of clairvoyant townspeople in the Outer Hebrides by eschewing…