Consummate troubadour and songwriter Tim Easton wrote much of his new album beneath a painting of a red horse. The artwork — created by his sister, visual artist Susan Easton Burns—was executed in an abstract-realist style, using gardening tools instead of paintbrushes to form a vivid image from fragmented strokes. It now serves as the cover art for fIREHORSE, Easton’s 14th commercially released record. Made with zero artificial intelligence, the album also arrives just as the Chinese calendar enters the Year of the (Fire) Horse — an apt coincidence given that Easton himself, born in 1966, is a Fire Horse.
“Whether the painting influenced the songs or the album was shaped to fit the painting makes no difference anymore,” Easton says.
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The Wilding soundtrack was produced in partnership by the English electronic musician Jon Hopkins and Icelandic soundtrack composer Biggi Hilmars. Hopkins‘ contributions mix electronically generated and/or processed sound effects, while Hilmars tends to emphasise orchestral textures, with both occasionally collaborating and blending their sounds. Wilding’s 13 short tracks form the ambient soundtrack to a 2024 documentary film of the same name, which tells the story of the wilding of 3,500 acres of English farmland, letting land that was once intensively farmed be recolonised by its flora and fauna.
Convention versus innovation: it’s techno’s constant battle. Sure, there aren’t meant to be rules, but ultimately it’s music created to blend and flow within a set. Dallas-born artist Gautham Garg, AKA 
Although they’re based on opposite coasts, 
Berlin’s experimental trio Zahn returns with their most electrifying work yet. A lush fusion of heaviness, electronics, and hallucinatory color. Monolithic grooves meet synthetic shimmer. 
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.
Formed in the 1980s, 
Almost four years separate 
Continuing Pet Shop Boys’ infrequent series of remix collections, Disco 5 mainly focuses on the duo’s own remixes and productions for other artists, like Disco 4 did, rather than outside remixes of their own material, like the first three volumes. Of course, when the pair remix or produce a song for another artist, they pretty much turn it into a Pet Shop Boys song, and considering that the majority of Disco 5 consists of material created during the 2020s, it’s close to being a PSB album that happens to have a lot of guest vocalists on it. Two of the set’s highlights are minor rarities that hadn’t appeared on a PSB collection until now. The duo produced several selections on the soundtrack to the 1993 film The Crying Game, including Boy George’s hit title track, but…
Formed in Jacksonville, Florida, in the mid-1980s, the 
Unsuk Chin describes her music as a conscious attempt to render in sound the visions she encounters in her dreams. This ear-catching profile album from Ensemble Intercontemporain presents three of the Korean-born, Berlin-based artist’s works: a triptych of visionary panels that flicker and swarm with kaleidoscopic colours.
Whenever 
…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.
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.