Six years after 1987’s celebrated Wings of Desire, German director Wim Wenders released Faraway, So Close!, an examination of the differences between the angel figures and humans inhabiting Berlin and the myriad social and political factions within the newly unified city. A sequel of sorts to 2023’s Summer Chronicles, the similarly titled second collaboration by David Cordero and Rhucle references both the pronounced physical distance between the ambient producers’ respective home bases in Cádiz and Tokyo but also how musically connected the two feel when collaborating. By sending each other tracks and adding to them in their separate studios, the two have developed a file-sharing methodology that for them functions smoothly. As research on social…
Category: ambient
Endless Cold, Endless Darkness, the latest effort from experimental ambient artist Ugasanie, is centered on deep, rich layers of drones evoking windswept and snow-covered landscapes (a repeating theme across Ugasanie’s releases). Even when played at a modest volume, the low frequencies emanating from your speakers resonate with desks, chairs, walls, and so on to an immersive and suffocating effect.
Accompanying these undertones are additional sonic elements – either from field recordings or synthetic processing – that crackle, skitter, and echo. Animal noises, wordless vocalizations, and ritual percussion add to the haunting, pneumatic atmosphere. For the most part, the pieces are low-density ambient, combining…
…The remixed and remastered expanded edition of ‘Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong’ includes ten previously unreleased bonus tracks presented as a ‘mini’ album.
Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong is the debut album by the London-based duo Woo. Originally issued on the Sunshine Series imprint in May 1982, it was subsequently picked up for a 1987 US release by the LA-based Independent Project Records label. After this, Woo’s second album, It’s Cosy Inside, came out in 1989 on Independent Project Records. There was no UK version of the follow-up album back then; a US reissue on Drag City followed in 2012.
When Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong appeared in the UK in 1982,…
There are at least three ideal situations in which to listen to Tragic Magic, the gentle, contemplative new collaborative album from the ambient composer Julianna Barwick and experimental harpist Mary Lattimore. The first is on an early morning train ride across the country, cocooned in liminal space where you feel both exhausted and alive, wiping the dreary sleep from your eyes in anticipation of the destination to come. The second is during a languid stroll through the city at night, your mind cradled by the soft glow of streetlamps and the insulated warmth of the snow-blanketed streets. And finally, in the bath, if you’re the kind of person who bathes.
Like any good ambient music, the songs on Tragic Magic have a balming effect…
…author of the immersive Manu Chao biography, Clandestino, roving world music journalist, composer and “nomad pianist” Peter Culshaw released his previous set, Music from the Temple of Light, in 2023.
Surrender to Love is spun from the same threads that were woven through that Temple of Light – mixing an ambient piano as a grounding for the music, with a range of Eastern and Middle Eastern instruments and voices, and a ruling spirit and approach that’s drawn from the Sufi wing of spirituality – a music and practice associated with Islam, but one that perhaps predates it, stretching away into older, even prehistoric means of devotion and surrender.
The authority in these Sufi-inflected pieces is…
In even the most straightforward Tanner Matt production, there’s a moment where everything threatens to disintegrate. Since he began putting out leftfield house music in the early 2010s — working under aliases like Hashman Deejay, Studio Mody, and Ttam Renat, and in the groups Aquarian Foundation, Kinetic Electronix, and INTe*ra, among others — the Vancouver electronic musician has specialized in stripped-down tracks with shaky foundations and a sneaky dub underpinning. He’s fond of twisting the delay knob until the groove wobbles at the knees, or tweaking the syncopation until the downbeat disappears. A recent series of 12″ EPs with the similarly elusive producer C3D-E has taken his trickster tendencies to the extreme, stretching blunted,…
…Musician, composer, producer, collaborator and more, Kramer, of Noise New York/Shimmy Disc/Half Japanese fame, is so prolific in so many fields that the fact that it’s been five years since his last solo album barely registers. For those who are aware of him, he’s a presence, rather than a specific kind of artist. For those who aren’t …and the crimson moon whispers goodbye, “a 4-part ambient drone-poem for The Living and the Dead,” will give an idea of some of the sides to his talent. It is maybe as good a place to start as any, since there’s no such thing as a typical Kramer album.
Compared to his work of the early 2020s like Music for Films Edited By Moths or And the Wind Blew it All Away, …and the crimson moon whispers goodbye feels almost conventional,…
Not since Cities and Memory’s The Chimes has an album delved so deeply into the resonance of church bells; and Campana Sonans (Ringing Bell) has the dual advantage of being a single-artist LP and a physical release. One may even purchase a printed stained glass tote bag to carry one’s record (plus 19 more)!
After relocating from LA to Berlin in 2019, Jake Muir became enamored with the sound of the city’s church bells. This led him on a Europe-wide trek as he began to record and examine the vast differences between sonorities and approaches, most especially the staid practices of Germany versus the melodic sequences of England.
But of course the album is not just bells; Campana Sonans is a reflection of history and…
When solo and collaborative releases are counted, the discography Ian Hawgood‘s amassed is nothing short of staggering. What makes it all the more impressive is that, as this latest release shows, he’s still capable of creating vital and imaginative work unlike anything he’s produced before. One of the ways he accomplishes that is by devising ever new strategies for creating material, in the case of Savage Modern Structures the sound-generating gear he used, specifically guitar and that beloved prog standby, mellotron. It’s all Hawgood, though in October 2024 he and Will Bolton brought the album to its final form by using the AKG BX20 spring reverb units at Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm to give the material extra analog warmth and organic reverb.
There’s some search for definitions needed here. Of course, both OdNu and Ümlaut are monikers, in this case referring to New York artists Michel Mazza and Jeff Düngfelder.
Then we come to Mitochondria Johatsu, the title of their second joint project. Using two separate terms, they seem to want to create a new one – mitochondria are small organelles found in nearly all eukaryotic cells, often referred to as the “powerhouses of the cell” because they generate most of the cell’s energy. On the other hand, johatsu is a Japanese term for people who vanish from their lives without a trace, often to escape shame or stress.
In many ways that combination of terms does seem to define the music Mazza (electric guitar,…
There is no warning and no chance to prepare. The instant you press play on Ash Fure’s Animal, a mass of thundering sub-bass hits you like a predator pouncing on its prey. With consciousness too slow to react, some ancient, primal region of the brain lights up. Suddenly, you find yourself in fight or flight mode, pumped with adrenaline, heart racing and palms sweating.
The US experimental musician and composer has dedicated a significant part of her career to exploring the physicality of music and our instinctual feedback to sound, with The Force of Things: An Opera for Air (2014–2022) and Hive Rise (2020) tackling the human body’s relationship with fear and the palpable effect that sonic waves have on the psyche. However, none…
Typically, when an artist stays out of our view, every public gesture he or she does make is loaded with extra significance. Think of the ways each demo, cover, or bit of extramusical trivia is instantly subsumed into the canons of D’Angelo, Fiona Apple, or Frank Ocean.
But given how Corbin, who drifted from SoundCloud stardom to deeper recesses of the internet, has released music — first under a different, instantly infamous stage name, and then in intermittent bursts that suggest a true disregard for self-promotion and self-mythologizing — the temptation is to receive his songs as a series of experiments, tips of an iceberg that will languish in a Google Drive folder until it melts.
The grey cover of his new album, Crisis Kid,…
This is a very unusual Australian album, featuring the spoken and singing voices of Warlpiri elders Wantarri ‘Wanta’ Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu and his father Jerry Jangala Patrick, who hail from the Aboriginal desert community of Lajamanu. They are backed by electronic composer-producer Marc ‘Monkey’ Peckham.
Together they have created Crown and Country, an immersive sound-and-film project that translates their shared intergenerational cultural knowledge of country, history, language, spirituality, and even Indigenous astronomy, utilising a fascinating contemporary format.
Wanta’s flair for storytelling centres the narrative, a product of his central role as a fully initiated elder in the traditional law and culture…
Propulsion and stillness coincide in the atmospheric “State of Motion,” an early single from this third volume in the Nanocluster series. Vibrations build and surge, their overtones merging in limpid pools of sound. A pedal steel arcs over ambient tones, a drum beat pushes it onward, but mostly this music doesn’t develop so much as it exists. You can float on it, on your back, like a swimmer in salt water, effortlessly taking in the liquid tone and pulse of it.
Nanocluster Vol. 3 pairs Wire’s Colin Newman and his creative partner Malka Spigel with cosmic country’s SUSS, two sets of musical talents that Dusted has long admired. We’ve covered works by Spigel and Wire since moving to the Tumblr and Githead in the before times. As for SUSS, of the 2024 Birds and Beasts,…
One of the traits of what is loosely dubbed as modern classical music is that the classical composition concept serves solely as the base, where other elements are brought in, coming from the musical ideas developed further elsewhere – it could be pop in all its shapes and forms or just a figment of the artists’ imaginations.
That is basically a manner in which Vanbur, a collaboration of Bristol-based composers Jessica Jones and Tim Morrish, seem to be building their music upon their (formal) debut album Of Becoming. Actually, the manner in which the duo were to develop their music could have already been visible/audible with their debut EP Human (2020), and its remix version (2022), including versions by Mogwai, Alexandra…
The music is calm, the cover is calm, the effect is calm. After releasing four singles over the course of spring, Harbors (Hollie Kenniff & Goldmund) released When We Are Free in the heart of summer. But from what does one yearn to be freed? The answers may vary from person to person, from the physical to the emotional. Having unveiled the stellar For LA project earlier this year, the Kenniffs are keenly aware of the threats posed by prejudice, callous government and fire. Their music – whether solo or duo – has always promoted peace, but has seldom been so intentional. The liner notes suggest the music as the backdrop to everyday activities, while promoting the practice of mindfulness; and the moniker implies safe harbors. Nothing will hurt you here.
a sad song for A. brings together Stefano Gentile, Giulia Dal Vecchio, Gigi Masin, Fabio Orsi, Anacleto Vitolo, and the multimedia project Hiseka to explore emotional states through music, text and photography. Originating from an informal conversation about anxiety, the project evolved into a creative dialogue in which inner experience became shared expression.
Structured around four stages we may recognise – Panic, Anxiety, Light and Dream – each contributor shaped one phase in their own language. Gentile provided imagery, Dal Vecchio translated feelings into words, and the musicians responded with original works reflecting each emotional shift. The result is a thoughtful constellation of perspectives that invites listeners to…
According to Roland Barthes, the event of grief gives way to an absence that paradoxically fills us. “We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.” The oxymoron of becoming full with emptiness. The hollows fill with more empty space. When Richard Skelton lost his wife in 2004, he began to process the tragedy by composing music. He filled the empty spaces with sound. At that time he also returned to his parents’ home in Wigan, where, in his own words, he was “reconnecting with a sense of that childhood wonder, completely refracted through the prism of grief”.
Born in the UK and most recently based in Ireland, Skelton is a multidisciplinary artist: a musician, poet, filmmaker, and writer. He resolves to bury his ghosts and then exhume them,…
…Only a few months ago, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith released GUSH, a vocal synth set packed with perky, romantic, danceable club cuts, with an undercurrent of social commentary. On Thoughts on the Future, the artist returns to the instrumental realm, offering three extended ambient-electronic meditations. The first single, “I Miss the Way You Swim,” is rife with melancholy, easing the way into the new year. Bubbling at the center, the nearly ten-minute piece blossoms into a gorgeous glockenspiel suite. As the orchestral elements enter, one takes a breath and whispers, “Maybe the new year won’t be so bad after all.”
The title track is peaceful and melodic, with percussive textures increasing in density, relaying a feeling of forward movement. Wordless voice…
Having earlier issued ‘t Geruis material on Lost Tribe Sound, LAAPS, Line, and Quiet Details, it was perhaps inevitable that Daniël Jolan would one day do the same on Home Normal. After all, Ian Hawgood’s imprint is a natural fit for the kind of lo-fi ambient the music producer from Belgium traffics in. It’s not the first time Jolan’s brand of dusty music has entered the world, but The Kindest Encounters finds him bringing the style to an advanced degree of artistry. As the album plays, it’s almost impossible not to draw a parallel between it and the nostalgic feeling that sets in when faded colour photographs are viewed. Much as in that case, one feels in listening to his music as if the world presented is both familiar yet at the same time impossibly out of reach.