ETC | Spring '25: Protest Music But Not As You Know It
Bloom-scrolling as resistance against doom: a fountain of dissident initiations proposing 60+ amazing albums for an efflorescent era of sonic rebellion defying the dark forces of coldness and cruelty
This EVEN bigger edition of the Psychonaut Elite is book-length, featuring in-depth reviews of 60+ amazing albums, including some recently unearthed archival treasures. As a bonus, each hyperlink is a hidden Easter egg of even more amazing sonic discoveries. Enjoy endless scrolling and aural extravagance!
*Please note that this article is much lengthier than is allowed by the standard e-mail content limits, so the full text can only be read on-site or in-appIn contemplating the antithesis of doom, we encounter the sublime concept of "bloom" - not merely as semantic opposition, but as a profound philosophical counterforce to existential despair. This ethereal state encompasses the unfurling of possibility, the perpetual unfolding of potential that stands in defiant, efflorescent opposition to the shadowed march of decay.
Where doom speaks of inexorable decline, its opposite manifests as transcendent ascension - a spiraling upward through consciousness and being, reaching toward an ultimate point of convergence where complexity and awareness intertwine. It is the moment when potential crystallizes into actuality, when the seed of hope germinates in the fertile soil of circumstance.
This anti-doom state embodies the full flourishing of human excellence - not mere happiness, but a profound state of thriving that emerges when being aligns with purpose. It represents the triumph of creative order over dissolution, the moment when patterns spontaneously emerge from chaos, like the first stirrings of life in primordial seas. It is the self-creating, self-sustaining miracle of existence perpetually renewing itself.
In literary terms, this state might be understood as the moment of profound recognition stripped of its tragic implications - pure illumination of truth that enlightens rather than destroys. It is epiphany without the weight of fate, revelation that opens doors rather than sealing them. Within the smallest fragment of existence lies the infinite - each moment containing boundless possibility within finite form.
The opposite of doom carries within it echoes of a radical embrace of destiny - not mere acceptance of what must be, but active participation in what could be. It is the moment when potential energy transforms into kinetic grace, when the arrow of time points toward creation rather than targets the end.
This state manifests as both process and culmination - the journey and destination unified in a single point of becoming. It represents the resolution of opposing forces into something entirely new - not through conflict but through harmonious transformation. It is pure emergence - the spontaneous arising of new forms and possibilities from the fertile void of being.
In the realm of human experience, this anti-doom state might be glimpsed in moments of collective transcendence, when individual consciousness dissolves into larger purpose, or in those rare instances of perfect flow, when action and awareness merge into seamless creation. It is the philosopher's stone of alchemical consciousness - the transmutation of leaden circumstance into golden opportunity.
Thus, the opposite of doom might best be understood not as a single concept but as a constellation of related phenomena: emergence, efflorescence, transcendence, and becoming. It is the moment when possibility overcomes probability, when faith transcends hope, when the arc of existence bends towards manifestation rather than disappearance. It is, in essence, the universe saying "yes" to itself, an eternal affirmation of being here and now over the infinity of nothingness.
Time stands still, holding the most graceful pose: nothing ever happens, yet everything not only exists defacto but flourishes in an ever-expanding aura of enlightened consciousness. Enjoy a selection of appropriate soundtracks!
1. “Moon Pulses” by Nick Millevoi
The compositional breakthrough achieved by Nick Millevoi's "Moon Pulses" articulates itself through a radical reconfiguration of guitar-based composition, where minimalist methodology intersects with maximal sonic affect.
Following the densely collaborative "Digital Reaction" (2023) album, this turn toward austere means—single guitar, binary track structure, thumb-actuated performance—proposes intensification through limitation, revealing how elegance and refusal exist in perpetual dialectical tension.
The album's six interconnected pieces construct an atmospheric environment which undergoes continuous modulation through layered guitar textures. This thematic approach to sound design acknowledges historical antecedents while pushing beyond them into unexplored territories of guitar-generated textures. The deliberate choice to record for precisely one hour daily over six consecutive days establishes a rigorous temporal framework that paradoxically results in organic, flowing soundscapes.
Millevoi's technical approach—utilizing a single instrument to generate both melodic and rhythmic elements (save for the concluding lap steel composition)—exemplifies how technological constraints generate new possibilities rather than limitations. The exclusive use of thumb-picking technique creates a distinctive haptic relationship between performer and instrument, resulting in timbral variations that exceed traditional guitar vocabulary. This methodology suggests new vectors of sonic fiction, where technique becomes inseparable from artistic intention.
The acknowledged influences of ambient music pioneers allows Millevoi to simultaneously reference and transcend conventional formalism, creating new sonic potentialities. The additional presence of rock guitar methodologies suggests a complex genealogy of experimental guitar practice, one that Millevoi both acknowledges and reconstructs through his distinctive approach.
The album's structural conception—pieces that "float in and out of each other's orbits"—establishes a larger organic whole, creating what Millevoi describes as "an audio environment that's as complex as a planetary ecosystem." This cosmological approach to composition explores new possibilities for understanding the relationship between musical form and aesthetic systems, where individual elements maintain autonomy while contributing to a unified musical universe.
Millevoi's use of reverb functions as a structural element: "clouds of reverb" coating "busy notes" create individual musical events that blur into textural fields, a technical choice that generates a distinctive listening experience, where traditional notions of musical foreground and background dissolve into a single sonic field, a constellation of gently twinkling notes shining in the sky that shelters the indeterminate landscape between intentional and accidental musical invention, the no-man’s land separating improvisation and premeditation.
Through this inventive and open-ended approach to composition and performance, "Moon Pulses" achieves a rare balance between conceptual rigor and sonic immediacy, creating a truth content that exceeds both its technical means and artistic intentions. The work's ability to function both as immersive sound environment and structured musical composition suggests new pathways connecting structure and freedom, intention and accident, creating a wistful, sonic environment that simultaneously acknowledges its historical antecedents while establishing new possibilities for guitar-based composition in contemporary experimental music.
2. “Prismatics” by Cate Brooks
In "Prismatics," Cate Brooks (AKA The Advisory Circle, a leading figure of the hauntological hall of fame at the seminal Ghost Box record label), navigates the aesthetic, historic and technological space between analog and digital worlds, crafting a sonic archive of corporate electronica: a strand of late-capitalist aural aesthetics that simultaneously documents and transcends its institutional origins as a genre of music produced within the increasingly re-examined sphere of vintage library music.
Under this umbrella term, one could include computer game music, advertisement jingles and commercial sound design, public television announcement soundtracks, regional transmissions and educational programming.
The album's synth-pop framework deliberately inhabits the transitional period of the early 1980s, when the certainties of analog synthesis yielded to the binary promises of computational sound.
Brooks brings formidable technical expertise to this exploration, drawing upon comprehensive knowledge of West Coast synthesis systems, early digital frameworks like the Synclavier, and contemporary modular configurations. This technical mastery, however, serves a larger conceptual purpose: interrogating the relationship between corporate aesthetics and electronic sound during a crucial technological watershed.
The album's opening triptych establishes these conceptual parameters. "Blue Chip Fever" introduces the corporate soundscape with precision and intent, while "Living Data" expands the sonic palette toward wider horizons. These tracks build towards the propulsive "Chipset," a highly polished simulacrum of early library electro synthpop, a bold statement which fully realizes the album's investigation of time-sensitive preoccupations. The titular track "Prismatics" represents a particularly sophisticated engagement with electronic music history, evoking comparisons to Jean-Michel Jarre - a connection Brooks herself acknowledges, noting the transformative experience of encountering the French composer's works through mediating consumer technology courtesy of Sony Walkman.
The centrepiece "Technology Suite," extending beyond ten minutes, deserves particular attention. Brooks reveals its sonic genealogy through specific technical choices: "The big drums at the beginning were really influenced by things like 'Knight Rider' and the 'TVAM' theme - big drums gated through Lexicon reverbs."
This carefullly curated cultural specificity illuminates how corporate sonic aesthetics were facilitated and still persist as identifiable era signifiers through their particular technological configurations. The composition's connection to early computer gaming soundtracks, specifically those of the Commodore Amiga, further emphasizes the work's engagement with the memorial lore associated with specifically consumer-orientated technological transition points.
Brooks's position within contemporary electronic music merits consideration. Her work under various pseudonyms - The Advisory Circle, collaborations in The Pattern Forms, Hintermass and The Belbury Circle - demonstrates the multiplicity of approaches possible within electronic music's current configuration. At the same time, the release of "Prismatics" on the recently revived Belbury Music label, represents a deliberate departure from previously established avenues.
Brooks's methodological approach to music creation prioritizes studio work over live performance and media engagement, reflecting a philosophical stance towards the established protocols of electronic music promotion and dissemination. "It's just a question of priorities," she explains. "I've worked out that I would rather spend my time making music and being in the studio than doing things like interviews. It's the same for playing live; I don't, because I'd just rather be doing other things."
"Prismatics" functions simultaneously as archaelogical excavation and contemporary intervention. Its engagement with corporate electronica is documentarian rather than nostalgic, forensically examining how technological inflection points reshape sonic possibilities.
The album's investigation of the analog-digital boundary becomes particularly relevant in our current moment of accelerated machine intelligence. Through meticulous attention to historical sonic details and contemporary production techniques, Brooks creates an album that juxtaposes both historical analysis and contemporary sonic innovation, demonstrating how the aesthetics of marketing can be repurposed for a critical examination of musicological progress.
3. “Unlimited Lives” by Polypores
Recently released through the exquisite Aural Canyon cassette imprint, Stephen James Buckley's AKA Polypores’ latest opus "Unlimited Lives" establishes a dialectical relationship between synthetic soundscapes and neurological cartography. Created in the summer of ‘23, the album precedes Buckley's public disclosure of his autism diagnosis, yet seems to anticipate the heightened self-awareness that would follow. The work's title, "Unlimited Lives," takes on additional resonance in this context, suggesting multiple readings: as a gaming reference, as a commentary on neurodivergent experience, and as a statement about artistic reinvention.
The album's opening piece, "Golden Apple," introduces a staggered, almost broken beat that marches forward in a destabilized rhythm that simultaneously deconstructs and reinforces the signature Polypores sound, while its title appears to reference universal mythology, insinuating a complex interplay between folklore and synthesized aesthetic.
While the record shares lush polyphonic DNA and new age warmth with his 2020 release"Azure," it seems less of a continuation and more as a critical dialogue with Buckley’s earlier methodologies. In "Turtles All The Way Down," for example, he demonstrates a capacity to reference his own canon while pushing into uncharted territories by including traditional instrumentation – notably percussion and acoustic guitar – a choice that serves as a surprise within the coherence of the expected electronic listening experience.
The incorporation of video game sound design in "Strings Of Lights And Shapes" represents a sophisticated engagement with an already historic past that once signalled sonic futurism.
Rather than simply appropriating gaming ear candy, Buckley transmutes these elements through saturated delay lines and arpeggiated sequences, creating a ten-minute sonic expedition that begins as a minimalist sketch reminiscent of a percussive Steve Reich experiment before gently simmering down to an atonal gurgle of effervescent bleeps and bloops, a whimsical course of playful resolution that operates as a microcosm of the album's broader concerns with infinity, repetition, and variation.
"Screensaver" introduces a softly throbbing undercurrent, ever so discreetly suggesting dancefloor compatibility via the juxtaposition of contemplative ambience with the softest of rhythmic insistence of a beat whose suspended build-up, lacking the drops and beats to fully develop what amounts to a suspended intro, thus creating an unanswered tension that sounds as a question about the nature of electronic music's social function. Meanwhile, "Crocodile Girls From The Moon", an aberrant nuptial between the melancholic sublime of a languorous Debussy melody and vestiges of what sounds like a sonic miniature of a gamelan percussion orchestra, employs warm, punctuated sonics that recall early West Coast synth experimentation while simultaneously pushing forward into new textural territories, like the acidic oscillations fluttering teasingly above the track.
Similarly, "Summer 04" captures the unbearable lightness of seasonal being, its emotional warmth radiating from an expanding core of serene drones, whose almost accordion-like exhalations demonstrate a bravely earnest sentimentality conveyed through the most abstract of sonic means. This self-reflexive quality permeates the album, creating a work that can be enjoyed simultaneously as music and dissected as critical discourse about how such transitions between sentimentality, earnestness and compositional rigour can be navigated with both intelligence and grace.
Of particular note is "Guaranteed Astral Projection," where machinated whirrs and feedback-laden atmospherics construct a space for assuming vivid astro focus without resorting to new age clichés. The piece achieves a rare balance between technical complexity and emotional resonance, demonstrating Buckley's ability to navigate multiple modes of musical discourse simultaneously.
The penultimate track, "Lucy Overtone," exemplifies the album's sophisticated approach to genre, employing pulsating synth tones that reject simple metric organization in favour of more complex, and notably organic, arrangements, again influenced by Eastern traditions, particularly rindik, the traditional ten-piece set of Balinese bamboo xylophones and other such non-Western deployments of idiosyncratic percussive signatures.
Throughout "Unlimited Lives," Buckley demonstrates an unprecedented mastery of electronic music's full spectral range, escaping towards a sonic hyperspace – an environment that exists beyond the regulatory constraints of his own technical virtuosity and personal musicological origins, advancing the philosophical possibilities of the form while not only maintaining, but thrillingly augmenting its essential mystery and propensity for mistakes that are nobler than art.
4. “Options” by Ian Boddy
The reissue of Ian Boddy's "Options," originally released in 1982 (!) on Bristol's Mirage tape label, represents a significant artifact whose startlingly coherent musical statement necessitates a re-examination of orthodox historiography regarding the evolution of British electronic music, particularly illuminating the transformative period when synthesizer technology began reshaping the possibilities of independent sonic production.
The album's bifurcated structure—eight concise compositions on the first side, followed by three extended live performances culminating in a ravishing 24-minute orientalist delight—polymorphously perverts as a dialectical argument regarding the relative value of temporal constraints in electronic music democratization, i.e. the implications of 3 minute, chart friendly single tracks as opposed to the endless improvisations of more high-minded composers.
This binary approach confidently adopts the first option, the then-emergent synth-pop format, which is bound to the chart-and-radio-friendly ethos of 7" singles, with each side lasting a maximum of three minutes. This constraint anticipates Boddy's later engagement with library music's requirements for concise, focused statements. Additionally, this dual temporal strategy takes on the challenges of the then-already-predominant aesthetic of extended duration, established by the emergence of electronic composers crossing over from the academic confines of sound laboratories to the mainstream, figures like Jean-Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno whose meandering sonic expeditions facilitated their penchant for otherworldly romanticism.
The album's genesis at Newcastle-upon-Tyne's Spectro Arts Workshop situates it within a crucial network of experimental music spaces that facilitated youth access to sophisticated electronic instruments in early 1980s Britain. The workshop's provision of Revox tape recorders and VCS3 synthesizers represented popular access to electronic music production, enabling emerging artists like Boddy to develop sophisticated technical frameworks outside conventional studio environments. The temporary presence of a Fender Rhodes electric piano, which Boddy incorporated into "Water On Stone," exemplifies the serendipitous nature of artistic production in such communal spaces.
The acquisition of the Moog Opus 3 for these recordings marked a significant expansion of Boddy's timbral palette, particularly in polyphonic expressionism. This technological advancement facilitated a more nuanced approach to harmonic construction, evident in the album's varied compositional strategies.
Tracks like the opener "Corridors" demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of layered composition, employing a bass oscillation that self-propels both rhythmically and harmonically beneath precise drum machine patterns and melodic elements. "Karina" explores textural density through orchestral synthesis, combining sweeping string emulations with crystalline keyboard figures in a manner that prefigures later developments in ambient electronic music.
The second side's live recordings, captured on November 7, 1981, each exceeding thirteen minutes, showcase improvisational techniques within structured electronic frameworks. These extended performances illuminate the relationship between technological limitations and creative freedom in early 1980s electronic music practice. The warm timbral characteristics of the period's analogue synthesizers, particularly evident in these performances, reflect aesthetic choices that continue to influence contemporary electronic music aesthetics.
This reissue, limited to 100 cassettes, maintains fidelity to the original release's material presentation, including Letraset typography, acknowledging the significance of archival accuracy regarding visual design in early electronic music culture. The preservation of these elements speaks to the broader cultural context of independent music distribution in the early 1980s, when cassette networks facilitated the circulation of experimental electronic music outside mainstream commercial channels.
The overall sound of "Options" resonates with a shared context among British electronic musicians of the period. However, Boddy's distinctive approach to composition and sound design already indicated the artistic trajectory that would lead to his establishment of the legendary DiN label in the late 1990s and his continuing contributions to electronic music.
The album's reappearance in 2024 through Boddy's personal Bandcamp page, as part of his systematic digital archiving of non-DiN releases, provides valuable context for understanding the development of British electronic music practices. The decades between the original release and its reissue demand a critical reassessment of the album's startling significance in both historical and contemporary senses, while the quality of the music raises uncomfortable questions about how such special and advanced sensibilities can fall through the cracks of critical appreciation for so long.
"Options" stands as a crucial document and achievement of early 1980s British electronic music, deserving recognition for its prophetic brilliance and innovative daring. It’s an album that demonstrates a precociously sophisticated engagement with both technological possibilities and compositional frameworks. This archival gem reveals the origin story of an artist who is still, today, actively, tirelessly, and persistently expanding the parameters of electronic music creation.
5. "The Lanes Re-Development" by Carlisle City Council
6. "Dwell Time" by XQUI & Dogs Versus Shadows
7. "Music for Space Age Shopping" by David A Jaycock
Released simultaneously as "The Subexotic Shopping Centre Trilogy" in December 2024, these three interconnected vinyl recordings on Subexotic Records constitute a remarkable consolidated examination of British retail architecture and its socio-cultural implications, each offering distinct sonic interpretations of post-war commercial development.
Far from a forbidding exercise in thematic formalism and academic worthiness, these three albums also make for an absorbing listening suite of uninterrupted synth bliss, a heady mix of retrofuturism and fauxstalgia that is as unafraid to be wistfully melodic, emotionally engaging, earnestly poignant and intellectually stimulating, in equal, generous, measures.
Not surprisingly, there is a niche scene entirely dedicated to vintage sounds, either authentic or imaginary, spearheaded by collectors and archivists feverishly preserving the sonic legacy of tapes featuring hours of aural wallpaper. Sometimes, these compilations and mixes feature original music specifically commissioned in the last century for shopping malls, other times they are orchestral cover versions of mainstream pop hits. Adding to this subset of hauntological concerns, some contemporary composers assume the narrative context of consumerist aesthetics to create music of surprising sophistication, the crossover of easy listening, subliminal marketing, behaviour modification and crowd control.
Examining the sociocultural implications of post-war retail spaces from distinctly different sonic vantage points, these albums aim for a trenchant critique of consumer capitalism's reshaping of communal space, while simultaneously documenting the spectral resonances of displaced working-class communities.
"The Lanes Re-Development" by Carlisle City Council (the latest iteration of Jonathan Sharp's polymorphous musical identity) excavates the controversial 1984 development of Carlisle's central shopping complex. Sharp's composition carefully navigates the tension between urban renewal's utopian promises and its erasure of existing social fabrics. The track "Shopping Centre" deploys crystalline melodic structures that mirror the antiseptic optimism of modernist retail architecture, while subtly undercutting this brightness with ghostly tonal undercurrents that suggest the persistence of demolished histories. Sharp's approach demonstrates an acute understanding of how architectural transformation operates as both physical and psychological violence upon established communities, even as it presents itself as progress incarnate.
David A. Jaycock's "Music for Space Age Shopping" approaches similar thematic territory through a different sonic palette, one that deliberately evokes both the retro-futuristic aspirations of mid-century retail architecture and its subsequent decay. The diptych of "Arndale (Part 1)" and "Arndale (Part 2) Back Patches" synthesizes Kraftwerk's machine-aesthetic with lounge music's commercial pleasantries, creating an uncanny sonic space that simultaneously celebrates and critiques consumer culture's colonization of public space. Jaycock's work particularly emphasizes the quasi-religious aspects of retail architecture, drawing explicit parallels between shopping centres supplanting working-class neighbourhoods and Christianity's historical appropriation of pagan sites - both representing ideological impositions manifested through architectural dominance.
The trilogy's most experimental and intriguing offering, "Dwell Time" by XQUI & Dogs Versus Shadows, deconstructs shopping center muzak through Dadaist interventions that expose the manipulative mechanics of retail soundscapes.
The album's title references retail metrics measuring customer lingering time, transforming this cold statistical concept into a critique of capitalism's commodification of human temporality. Tracks like "Arndale Dawn" and "Arndale Dreams" progress from seductive commercial ambience into increasingly unsettling soundscapes, while "Arndale Hopes (Shattered)" employs magnetic tape manipulation techniques to physically destroy the false promises of consumer satisfaction.
These works collectively document how shopping centres function as architectural manifestations of post-war Britain's shift from industrial to consumer capitalism, with each album approaching this transformation from complementary angles: Carlisle City Council's autobiographical haunting, Jaycock's retrofuturistic critique, and XQUI & Dogs Versus Shadows' avant-garde deconstruction. The trilogy demonstrates how commercial development simultaneously produces architectural presence, parasocial manipulation and ahistorical absence - the presence of new retail spaces necessarily predicated upon the absence of previous communities and their histories.
What distinguishes these works from similar explorations of architectural sound art is their specific focus on retail spaces as sites of class transformation. Where previous musical examinations of Brutalist architecture often fetishized its aesthetic qualities, these albums recognize shopping centres as instruments of class reorganization, their architectural forms serving to reshape not just urban space but social relations themselves. The trilogy thus assigns value both to the necessty of historical documentation and the need for critical intervention, preserving the memory of displaced communities while exposing the ideological mechanisms of their displacement.
This musical examination of British retail architecture arrives at a particularly resonant moment, as many of these shopping centers now face their own obsolescence in the age of digital commerce. The works thus capture both the original moment of architectural upheaval and its contemporary echo, as these once-futuristic spaces themselves become haunted by the ghost of an optimistic consumer future that never fully materialized. Through their varied approaches, these three albums collectively map the complex social, architectural, and psychological territories of British consumer capitalism, creating a sonic archaeology of retail space that reveals the persistent echoes of its violent transformations.
8. “Fauna” by Various Artists
"Fauna," a compilation curated by Franck Zaragoza under his moniker Ocoeur and released on the Oakland-based label n5MD, attempts a sonic exploration of humanity's estranged relationship with the natural world. Released on International Animal Rights Day, the album is both a lament and a call to ethical action, with its proceeds directed to the French nonprofit organization L214, which advocates for the recognition of animals as sentient beings and campaigns against industrial-scale animal exploitation.
Through the contributions of an international ensemble of electronic and neoclassical artists, "Fauna" intertwines ethereal melodies, vaporous ambient soundscapes, and introspective compositions to articulate the ecological and moral crisis of our times.
The album’s conceptual framework hinges on an urgent critique of modernity’s consumerist excesses and ecocidal disregard. It interrogates the anthropocentric paradigms that have historically reduced animals to commodities, perpetuating their suffering under the guise of human necessity and indulgence. Each track contributes to this critique, drawing from a diverse palette of sonic textures that range from luminous neoclassical piano to brooding electronic abstractions, offering a multi-dimensional meditation on the fraught interdependence between human and non-human life forms.
Opening the compilation is Memory Noise’s "L’ora," a delicate and evocative piece that blends airy atmospherics with interspersed field recordings of laughter and play. These fragmented voices, suspended amidst sine waves and soft tonal layers, juxtapose human life with synthesized lament standing for the weight of environmental neglect. The track’s evanescent atmosphere recalls the melancholic resonance of works by pioneers in ambient music, like Eno, offering a poignant prelude and establishing an aesthetic framework for the album’s thematic trajectory.
Later, Zinovia Arvanitidi’s "Light and Clouds" introduces its neoclassical sensibilities suffused with a sublime, almost sacred tenderness. Arvanitidi’s piano lines unfold with crystalline clarity, each tentative note resonating as though carved from elemental forces, encapsulating the austere fragility of nature, presenting it as both a sanctuary and a space under siege. Similarly, Stray Theories’ "Veil" employs a restrained guitar motif that lingers over a foundation of glassy chimes and ambient drones, imbuing the piece with an introspective depth that subtly invokes post-rock aesthetics.
The compilation’s tonal palette shifts with Shedir’s AKA Martina Betti’s "Invisible Cities," a brooding and electrifying work that conjures a psychogeography of urban entropy and ecological decay. Betti’s use of tense, pulsating electronics and layered textures creates an atmosphere of foreboding, underscoring the urgency of the album’s environmental message. In contrast, Mikael Lind’s lyrical "Fur and Feathers" offers a more tender lamentation, its pattering melodies and swelling strings evoking a sense of mourning and fragile hope. The composition’s cinematic quality, enriched by its emotive interplay of lullaby-like motifs and heightened string arrangements, exemplifies the album’s capacity to move between pensive introspection and sentimental grandeur.
Zaragoza’s own contribution, "Second Chance," epitomizes the vaporous ambient aesthetic that permeates the compilation. Known for his introspective soundscapes and evocative soundtracks, Zaragoza crafts a piece of understated beauty, its drifting textures and delicate harmonic shifts creating an immersive space for meditative reflection. His curatorial vision is evident not only in the cohesion of the album’s sonic identity but also in its ethical and emotional resonance. The track operates as both an individual statement and a connective thread within the broader tapestry of "Fauna."
What emerges across the compilation is a collective effort to reimagine humanity’s place within the biosphere, rejecting hierarchical dominion in favour of interconnected cöexistence. The sonic methodologies employed by the artists—ranging from granular synthesis to acoustic instrumentation—mirror this thematic exploration, emphasizing fluidity, hybridity, and the dissolution of boundaries. This is not merely an aesthetic gesture but a philosophical stance, challenging the anthropocentric dichotomies that have historically defined human engagement with the natural world.
"Fauna" also operates as a critique of the commodification inherent in the music industry itself. By channelling proceeds towards animal rights activists, the compilation resists the extractive logic of capitalist production, positioning itself as a form of praxis rather than mere entertainment. This ethical commitment extends to its sonic content, which eschews facile resolutions in favour of ambiguity and complexity. The album resists the temptation to romanticize nature or offer didactic solutions, instead presenting a nuanced and often unsettling portrait of ecological precarity.
In an era defined by environmental collapse and social fragmentation, "Fauna" resonates as both an aesthetic achievement and an ethical imperative. It challenges listeners to confront the violence embedded in everyday life, urging a reconfiguration of our relationships with non-human others. Through its evocative soundscapes and poignant thematic focus, the album not only protests the ecological crises of the present but also gestures toward the intersection of art, activism, and ecology, offering a powerful testament to the transformative potential of music as a medium of critical inquiry and collective action.
9. ”Galactic Sounds” by Retep Folo
"Galactic Sounds," the 2018 opus by Swedish artist Retep Folo, is a compelling auditory exploration intertwining nostalgic sonorities with avant-garde sensibilities. Retep Folo, the anagrammatic pseudonym of Peter Olof Fransson, has been a stalwart of Gothenburg's underground music scene since the late 1990s. His musical trajectory encompasses the experimental electronic duo Exhadley, with releases on Swedish label Psychic Malmö and British label Reverb Worship. He currently contributes to the 1960s psychedelia-inspired project The Owl Report.
"Galactic Sounds" is an auditory voyage conceived as "headphone music," facilitating an immersive and introspective experience. Fransson employs a curated selection of vintage instruments, including a Farfisa Professional Organ, a 1966 East German Klira Bass Guitar, a 1970s Japanese Glockenspiel, and an Elgam Carousel, an analogue preset rhythm box of 1976 vintage. This deliberate instrumentation evokes the aesthetic of ‘70s library music and Czech cartoon soundtracks, but also the gothic romance of his fellow Swede, Eric Malmberg, constructing a soundscape oscillating between the whimsical and the cosmic.
The album comprises sixteen tracks, each prefixed with "Galactic," suggesting thematic cohesion that invites the listener to traverse an interstellar journey. The opening track, "Galactic Pulse," serves as an initiation into this voyage, with rhythmic patterns reminiscent of the pulsating signals sought by Fransson during childhood experiments with shortwave radios. This motif of exploration and the search for the unknown permeates the album, reflecting a yearning for connection with the cosmos.
Tracks such as "Galactic Sun" and "Galactic Moon" juxtapose warmth and coolness, light and shadow, a duality of emotional registers, simultaneously wistful and whimsical, that characterizes the entire album’s ambivalent mood. The use of the Farfisa Organ in these pieces adds a layer of retro-futurism, bridging past conceptions of the future with present-day interpretations of optimism remembered.
"Galactic Friends" introduces a playful element, its melodic structures and glockenspiel's tinkling notes evoking a childlike sense of wonder, a nod to Fransson's formative years spent stargazing and imagining extraterrestrial companionship.
The album's production is immersed in the soft glow of a vintage, lo-fi aesthetic, a conscious choice that aligns with the DIY ethos of the Gothenburg underground scene. This idiosyncratic approach not only lends authenticity to the work but also situates it within a broader discourse on the accessibility of music production in the digital age. By utilizing analogue equipment, Fransson resists the homogenization of sound prevalent in contemporary electronic music, asserting the value of imperfection and the unique textures it produces.
"Galactic Sounds" is a cohesive narrative that invites the listener to engage in sonic fiction about an idiosyncratic aural universe, at once nostalgic, charming, invented and elaborate. Each piece succeeds its predecessor as a chapter in an overarching story, one that is both personal and universal, apparently simple yet touchingly profound, encouraging a mode of listening that is imaginative, active and interpretative.
In the context of Fransson's broader oeuvre, "Galactic Sounds" represents a synthesis of his previous explorations into experimental and psychedelic music. It reflects a maturation of his artistic vision, one that is unafraid to delve into the sentimental without resorting to emotional manipulation.
“Galactic Sounds” challenges the listener to navigate the space between familiarity and alienation, to find meaning in the recursive confabulation between past and present, and to consider the ways in which memories of the past, symbolized in the music by quasi-obsolete technology, mediate our contemporary (mis)understanding of the world.
In doing so, Retep Folo aligns itself with a tradition of art that seeks not to provide answers but to provoke questions, to unsettle as much as it comforts. It is an homage to the exploratory spirit of pioneers, who proceed even when the risks are still as unknown as the world to be discovered.
Through its intricate compositions and thoughtful production, the album offers a rich terrain for analysis and reflection, reaffirming the capacity of music to serve not just as a time machine, merely travelling through the ages in a crude, linear fashion, but is a magical spell for creating alternative histories, inventing an unexpected present and proposing unimaginable futures.
10. “Music for Bus Stations” by Rod Modell
Urban phenomenology materializes in Rod Modell's "Music for Bus Stations," a work that transcends conventional ambient music paradigms to establish novel theoretical frameworks for understanding the intersection of sound, space, and social movement, while interrogating the aural dynamics of transit infrastructure through carefully constructed sonic geometries that both complement and transmute architectural street vernacular.
The album's theoretical underpinning draws from urban acceleration theory and acoustic ecology, positioning the bus station as a nexus of temporary social relations where human bodies interface with the priorities of functionality, simultaneously protected and exposed to the elements of a cityscape, if not actual nature. Through four tracks Modell crafts sound fields that don't simply occupy space but actively reshape our perception of it, enacting 'sonic occupation' – autonomous zones where sound becomes an essential structural element rather than an imposed overlay.
Drawing inspiration from the bold forms and airy expanses of pioneering modernist transport terminals like Domitianus Arquitectura's Rio Maior station and Metaraum Architect's Pforzheim hub, Modell's composition operates as a site-specific, generative system that responds to and amplifies the inherent resonance of these spaces.
The work's polyrhythmic structure, designed for multichannel installation, illuminates a secret dialogue between sound, structure, and human movement, a hidden story that illusttrates the dialectical ballet danced between logistics infrastructure and social choreography in urban spaces.
The album's technical innovation lies in its deployment of generative algorithms that create ever-shifting sonic entanglements. These mathematical processes produce what Modell terms "organic sonic-tapestry," though this description barely captures the sophisticated interplay between determined composition and aleatory breakthroughs.
Repetition does not exist in this music for stationary passengers, because all sonic events simply are, instead of happening, challenging traditional notions of musical time and structure, suggesting instead the spatial purgatory of temporal experience particular to transit spaces, the bus-station-specific sense of being caught, albeit momentarily, in-between spaces, neither at home, not even moving towards any destination, neither on arrival nor yet departure, simply existing in an indeterminate there, a here that is simultaneously now, a seemingly insignificant yet consequential moment where the inconvenience of waiting is demarcated by monuments to patience and provident structures offering physical, if not existential, protection against meteorological whims.
"Music for Bus Stations" engages with questions of public space and collective experience with an emphasis on inducing states of calm through specific sonic phenomena that transform these secular spaces into agnostic sites of spiritual contemplation and collective resonance, non-denominational cathedrals for atheists travelling in search of suspension of disbelief, believers of an audibly perceptible faith whose meditational hymns are sung in the fugitive context of transitional circumstances, music whose physical consciousness transcends the reality it was inspired by and aimed towards, achieving the kind, affirming tolerance of transcendental consciousness, and even suborning emotional elevation through the deliquescent immateriality of sound as soft, and as essential to life, as breathing.
The album's relationship to architecture deserves particular attention, especially in its dialogue with structures like Bus Station Hamburg by Blunck + Morgen Architekten. The sound design principles employed here actively participate in the spatial logic of architectural forms, constructing 'acoustic architecture' with elements like specific frequencies and harmonic relationships that create conditions necessary for 'autonomous calm' – a listening modality of active engagement with the sonic environment rather than a passive state of reception.
The political implications of this work extend beyond its immediate context. By creating sound environments that encourage new forms of spatial awareness and collective experience, "Music for Bus Stations" suggests possibilities for reconfiguring public space in ways that emphasize unpredictability and organic development, standing in productive tension with the regulated, scheduled nature of public transit systems.
Modell's achievement lies in creating a work that can be appreciated simultaneously as practical sound design, theoretical intervention, and aesthetic experience. Enhancing rather than competing with architectural form and the politics of public space, while maintaining artistic integrity, is an achievement that represents a significant advancement in site-specific sound art.
Through its sophisticated engagement with questions of space, time, and collective experience, "Music for Bus Stations" establishes new possibilities for understanding and transforming our relationship to public infrastructure and shared urban space. Let’s transform waiting spaces to opportunities for spiritual enlightenment through music, why don’t we?
11. “Virtual Dreams II: Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, Japan 1993-1999” by Various Artists
In the evolving lore of electronic music historiography, "Virtual Dreams II: Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, Japan 1993-1999" orchestrates a vital archaeological excavation of Japan's distinctive antiquity during the final decade of the increasingly distant twentieth century.
This masterfully curated compilation, the posthumous culmination of Jamie Tiller's curatorial vision in collaboration with Eiji Taniguchi, interrogates the unique temporal and spatial coördinates where ambient sensibilities intersected with nascent club culture in Japan's electronic music landscape, whose unique perspective remains distant from mainstream electronic music trends in Europe and the US.
The collection's historiographical framework (1993-1999) coincides with a period when Japanese electronic music developed along aesthetic vectors markedly different from its Western counterparts. While the United Kingdom and Germany experienced ambient music as an outgrowth of rave culture's excesses, Japan's electronic music ecosystem integrated what they termed 'listening techno' as a foundational element rather than a reactive phenomenon related to nightclubbing. This fundamental divergence in cultural DNA yielded sonic artifacts of unique beauty and exotic allure that deserve careful examination through both technological and sociological lenses.
The compilation draws from an intricate network of Japanese labels - Sublime Records, Transonic Records, Syzygy Records, Frogman Records, and Form@ Records - each contributing to a complex musical infrastructure that privileged contemplative electronic exploration alongside rhythmic innovation. These imprints functioned not merely as distribution channels but as crucial nodes in a broader cultural network that shaped Japan's distinctive relationship with electronic music during this period.
What distinguishes this collection is its unearthing of works primarily confined to CD releases, highlighting the technological specificities of music distribution in 1990s Japan. This format preference reflects broader questions about technological determinism in musical evolution, as Japan's advanced consumer electronics industry and urban infrastructure created unique conditions for electronic music's development and dissemination.
The tracks navigate territories between house music's rhythmic imperatives, the sleek acoustics of polished studio proficiency, and ambient music's contemplative predisposition, creating hybrid forms that simultaneously embrace technological futurity while maintaining connections with traditional Japanese approaches to melody, space and silence.
The compilation's significance extends beyond historical documentation, functioning as a critical intervention in contemporary discussions about electronic music's geographical and temporal development. By focusing on Japan's unique trajectory, it challenges conventional narratives that position Western electronic music scenes as primary sites of innovation. Instead, it presents a more nuanced understanding of electronic music's global evolution, highlighting parallel developments that occurred simultaneously but independently.
The temporal scope (1993-1999) encompasses Japan's economic transition from the collapse of the bubble economy to the dawn of the digital age, contextualizing these sonic experiments within broader socioeconomic transformations. The often pensive, always introverted, music reflects this period's complex negotiation between technological optimism and economic uncertainty, embodying the contradictions and possibilities of late twentieth-century Japanese modernity.
Particularly noteworthy is the compilation's exploration of what might be termed 'technological ambience' - delicate, considered electronic compositions of admirable elegance and rigorous functionality, acoustic mechanisms that investigate the intersection of machine precision, harmonic frequencies and environmental awareness.
This meticulous approach, alert to the intricate esoterica of miniature sonic parts and highly engineered arrangements, distinguishes itself as a methodology from both the psychedelic excesses of British ambient house and the clinical precision of German minimal techno, establishing a uniquely Japanese interpretation of electronic music's acoustic protocols and regimented intentions.
Beyond its historical significance, "Virtual Dreams II" serves as a crucial document of cultural cross-pollination, demonstrating how Japanese producers absorbed and transformed Western electronic music paradigms through their own cultural and technological frameworks, ultimately occupying a complex transnational space that reflects the increasingly interconnected nature of global musical production in the 1990s and facilitates a deeper understanding of electronic music's complex global trajectories.
12. “The Gentle Island” by Tokyo Ambient Collective
"The Gentle Island", the fourth album by Tokyo Ambient Collective, a non-fixed member music project, cultivates a fertile intersection of improvisational methodologies, cultural exchange, and sonic architecture.
Utilizing deliberately chosen technological artifacts—music boxes, upright piano with soft pedal engagement, and vintage synthesizers—to construct an alternative framework that echoes historical experimental music cooperatives.
Their approach to improvisation demonstrates a distinctive philosophical position regarding collective authorship and transcends simple performer-tool dynamics. Their use of self-composed music box melodies particularly illuminates this complexity—the mechanical reproduction of personally inscribed musical phrases creates a fascinating multiversal fold where human composition and machine performance simultaneously exist in multiple states of manufactured intention.
Environmental sounds from Taiwan integrate into the work's fabric as crucial components of a larger discourse about geographical and cultural interfaces. These field recordings, captured during the group’s improvisational sessions, function as temporal-spatial markers that ground the otherwise ethereal compositions in specific geographic and historical contexts. This integration becomes particularly poignant given the album's connection to the 2024 Hualien earthquake, with proceeds from early releases directed to relief efforts through the Japanese Red Cross Society.
The work's sonic palette demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of timbral relationships. The decision to employ an upright piano with soft pedal engagement reveals a deep appreciation for the mechanical nature of sound production—the felt barrier between hammer and string creates not just a dampened tone but a completely different acoustic phenomenon. This technical choice aligns with the album's larger philosophical framework regarding mediation and distance in sound production.
Within tracks like "Sultry Night" and "Southern Song" the collective develops a complex relationship between natural and technological sound production, presenting these elements as interconnected aspects of a unified sonic ecosystem. The inclusion of Calu's ghostly vocals further complicates this relationship, introducing human utterance as another layer in this already complex sound environment.
"The Gentle Island" achieves a cinematic intensity of deeply felt emotional adumbrations, an immersive world of fragile sentiments that is never less than moving, even as it unfolds at the most gentle of paces, nocturnal solemnity and serene tones. The deliberate use of vintage synthesizers alongside contemporary recording techniques and a highly progressive iteration of sonic abstraction creates temporal discontinuities in the recording’s technical cohesion, symptoms of misremembered reminiscences that challenge sequential hierarchies of mnemonic legacy.
Through its carefully constructed sonic narrative, an impressive hybrid of lullaby-like solace and rigorous discipline, "The Gentle Island" presents a sophisticated examination of contemporary experimental music's capacity to engage with both abstract philosophical concepts, concrete social realities and emotional commitment.
This delicate, expressive album demonstrates how carefully considered sound production can create new protocols for understanding relationships between technology, nature, and human experience while maintaining genuine engagement with real-world events and their consequences.
13. “Meridians” by Fuubutsushi
In "Meridians" by Fuubutsushi, the quartet of Chris Jusell, Lake Mary, M. Sage, and Patrick Shiroishi, presents an extraordinary investigation into temporal phenomenology through sound, articulating a complex dialectic between structured musicality and abstracted sonic landscapes.
This double LP, including more than 80 minutes of music, is avowedly inspired by ECM, cool jazz, ambient, minimalism, experimental, and neoclassical music all the while eschewing facile atmospheric constructions in favor of a sophisticated sonic framework that evokes a variety of moods, cohesive in their ambivalent, pensive moods.
The album's opening piece, "Blue Rose," establishes a theoretical foundation through its deployment of crystalline bell tones, which gradually unfold into an expansive soundscape. This deliberate temporal dilation creates a phenomenological rupture in standard musical perception, forcing a reconsideration of how we process sonic information concerning chronological progression. The chimes serve not merely as melodic devices but as philosophical propositions about the nature of sound in space.
Throughout its two-hour duration, "Meridians" systematically deconstructs traditional notions of musical narrative. The work operates simultaneously on multiple provisional planes, creating what might be termed a non-linear sonic topology. This approach reflects contemporary discourse on the commodification of time in late capitalism, while paradoxically offering resistance through its steadfast refusal to adhere to conventional durational expectations.
The album's architectural complexity manifests in its careful balance between moments of structured clarity and passages of deliberate abstraction. This dialectical relationship creates a unique temporal metabolism, one that responds to and challenges our contemporary condition of accelerated time and compressed experience. The compositions resist easy categorization, operating instead as acoustic investigations into the nature of duration itself.
What distinguishes "Meridians" from similar sonic experiments is its sophisticated engagement with the phenomenology of everyday experience, mapping the cartography of quotidian emotions through careful manipulation of sonic textures and spatial relationships, creating a complex matrix of acoustic signifiers that references both personal and collective memory- from expressions of unbound joy to manifestations of existential uncertainty.
The work's timespan defies the compression of time in contemporary culture, demanding sustained attention in an era of fragmentary experience. Within its internal chronologies, and perhaps counterintuitively, "Meridians" achieves particular significance in its exploration of micro-temporal experiences, as the musical vignettes unveil further sonic miniatures hidden within the folds of layered sounds.
Through careful sonic architecture, these instances are expanded and examined with a microscopic focus. Combined with the album's macro-temporal scope, this sonic microcosm creates a sophisticated dialogue between immediate experience and extended duration.
The album's technical execution matches its theoretical ambitions. The production maintains exceptional clarity while allowing for necessary abstraction, arranging acoustic spaces that respect the boundaries of each note, tone, timbre and sound. This technical precision serves the larger philosophical project, enabling the musical manipulation of temporal perception and emotional response.
This double LP ultimately functions as both a theoretical proposition and an emotional document, mapping the complex relationship between structured time and lived experience both in the sense of fleeting moments and in the sense of luxuriating within the rambling timelines of extended improvisations and sensory-led ruminations.
14. “Early Spring” by Luke Loseth and Stefan Christoff
The release of "Early Spring" by Luke Loseth and Stefan Christoff on Pyramid Blood represents a significant contribution to contemporary experimental music's discourse on collaboration, spatial dynamics, and the intersection of analog and synthetic soundscapes. This work, conceived through quotidian moments of artistic fellowship—both intimate, including the seemingly mundane yet symbolically charged act of moving an organ through Montreal's winter streets and politically charged public activism—demonstrates how multivalent sonic output can be.
The album's dialectical structure pivots on the interplay between Christoff's acoustic guitar recordings and Loseth's synthesizer manipulations, reconstructing traditional notions of duet performance. Rather than operating within conventional collaborative frameworks, the musicians engage in a form of temporal displacement, where Christoff's initial recordings undergo a process of technological mediation through Loseth's electronic interventions.
In "Early Spring," the technological apparatus is an active agent in the creation of new sonic territories. The synthesizer's role is greater than that of background accompaniment and modification agent, instead functioning as a transformative medium that recontextualizes the guitar's acoustic properties. This approach addresses the broader historical trajectory of electronic music's relationship with acoustic instrumentation, while simultaneously proposing new methodologies for their integration.
The album's production techniques reflect contemporary urban music-making practices, where artistic creation often occurs through fragmented temporal and spatial arrangements, and generates new forms of musical coherence. The synthesis between Loseth's electronic textures and Christoff's guitar work creates an acoustic environment that simultaneously acknowledges and transcends its components' original contexts.
Loseth, known for his work under the Holobody moniker, brings a sophisticated understanding of electronic texture to the collaboration. His approach to synthesizer manipulation demonstrates an acute awareness of spatial dynamics, creating intimate environments that envelop rather than overshadow Christoff's strumming.
The album's title, "Early Spring," suggests an intermediate temporality that mirrors the music's hybrid nature, a bud in waiting to flower, reflecting the album's exploration of transition, transformation, and emergence. The recording captures the tension between stasis and movement, between the dormancy of winter and the generative potential of spring, translated into sonic terms through the interaction of febrile acoustic and reflective electronic elements.
The recording process, exemplifies how innovative approaches generate musical creation, capturing the spirit of the initial studio sessions, characterized by their warmth and organic development, which then undergo a process of electronic reimagining that preserves their essential character while expanding sonic possibilities.
This hybrid between compositional methodology and production tactic demonstrates how electronic processing can serve not as a distancing mechanism but as a means of revealing new dimensions within acoustic performance, creating a dialogue between different modes of sound production that enriches both.
Through its sophisticated integration of acoustic and electronic elements, "Early Spring" achieves a rare balance between technological sophistication and organic musical development. The result is a work that contributes meaningfully to ongoing discussions about the nature of musical collaboration in the digital age while maintaining a deep connection to the physical and social contexts of its creation.
This album stands as a testament to the continuing vitality of experimental music practices that emerge from specific local contexts while speaking to universal questions about artistic creation and technological mediation.
15. “Mirrored Hope” by Reign of Ferns
Yet another magnificent release on the exceptional Texas-based Aural Canyon imprint, "Mirrored Hope" by Reign of Ferns celebrates epiphanies triggered by the potential of everyday reality to awaken consciousness within the context of quotidian routines, like early morning walks where one can witness the miraculous succession of electricity and sunlight, and other such occasions where the environment arranges miracles by appointment, at once perceptually fragile and semantically fugitive in their profound yet transcedencental capacity for initiating poetry in comfortable co-existence with the mundane.
Articulating a sophisticated ambient vocabulary that avoids austerity, opting instead for maximalist atmospherics, Reign of Ferns is a collaborative entity formed by Ryan J Raffa and Andrew Weathers that achieves a remarkable synthesis between technological determinism and polyphonic layering, constructing exotic soundscapes which aim to assign meaning to the messages of encrypted spirituality that remain hidden within our contemporary urban existence, like artificial illumination surrendering to dawn sunlight, creating a temporal window through which deeper existential questions surface.
The album's conceptual foundation draws from Raffa's pre-dawn encounters along the Keelung River in Taiwan, where the composite of early risers performing Tai Chi gestures while surrounded by the interplay of environment and human structures serves as both technological choreography and metaphysical catalyst.
Each composition on "Mirrored Hope" operates as an algorithmic interpretation of these transitional moments, where binary systems of technological control intersect with organic temporal flows. This sonic paradigm deploys granular synthesis and generative processes as tools for excavating the submerged relationships between urban infrastructure and human consciousness.
The opening track "Bamboo" establishes a framework where ambient textures mirror the vapour-laden atmosphere of early morning Taiwan, while "Tomorrow" follows with sophisticated drum programming that echoes the footsteps of early morning practitioners of tai chi, transforming quotidian movement into rhythmic meditation. The centrepiece "Heading Home/Daybreak" captures the album's philosophical core, where the sudden absence of artificial illumination generates a moment of heightened awareness, rendered in sound through careful manipulation of negative space and reverberant decay.
Through their methodological approach, Reign of Ferns excavate the hidden phenomenology of urban experience, revealing how technological systems inadvertently create spaces for contemplation within their rigid temporal frameworks. The album's sonic palette draws from kosmische musik traditions while incorporating contemporary digital processes, creating a hybrid form that reflects the interpenetration of natural and artificial rhythms in contemporary existence.
The project's political dimensions emerge through its implicit critique of capitalist temporality, offering alternative modes of experiencing time through sound. By focusing on moments where technological systems temporarily recede, allowing natural cycles to reassert themselves, the album suggests possibilities for resistance against the acceleration and compression of time under late capitalism.
"Mirrored Hope" achieves particular resonance in its exploration of vulnerability within urban spaces. The track "Somewhere Around Here" investigates how reduced artificial illumination creates opportunities for authentic self-encounter, while "Gita" examines how atmospheric conditions mediate between technological and natural light.
The album's production methodology merits specific attention for its sophisticated integration of field recordings, modular synthesis, and digital processing. Rather than fetishizing either analogue or digital technologies, Reign of Ferns deploy both in service of their existential investigation, dissolving the artificial boundaries between electronic and organic sound.
Through their careful attention to the interplay between technological systems and natural phenomena, Reign of Ferns have created an album that executes in tandem a sonic documentation, a philosophical inquiry, and a political statement. "Mirrored Hope" reveals how contemporary urban existence contains hidden opportunities for transcendence, accessible through attention to those moments when technological control temporarily loosens its grip, allowing different modes of consciousness to emerge.
Reign of Ferns and their music suggest that hope resides precisely where authentic experience becomes momentarily possible, creating music that both reports and facilitates moments of genuine consciousness within the increasingly automated landscapes of contemporary existence.
16. “A Quiet Day” by The Balloonist
"A Quiet Day," the latest offering by The Balloonist, a solo project of instrumentalist and photographer Ben Holton, is a sonic tableau of understated intimacy, steeped in the ambient textures of memory and the architectural minutiae of 1980s suburban Britain. Holton is known for his contributions to epic45, My Autumn Empire and Birds in the Brickwork, and he also runs the Wayside & Woodland Recordings record label.
This album attempts to evoke the peculiar stasis of childhood days, particularly the quietude and emptiness of days spent doing nothing, off school or outside of other regimented contexts like extracuricular activities, days being either alone on sick leave, or feeling listless on Sunday evenings or bank holidays and other such temporary opportunities of non-episodic ennui, when time itself seemed an elastic and mysterious force.
The album’s thematic locus—the "quiet day"—is less an exercise in nostalgia than meticulous cartography of a bygone sensibility, an era before the internet when content was not ubiquitous and incessant, when the overstimulation of digitally mediated entertainment input did not yet exist, leaving empty periods of inactivity which in turn produced imaginative ways to entertain oneself, create something, cultivate an interest, adopt a hobby or even just learn to enjoy silence and stillness for all their introverted potential of meditative contemplation and all-important daydreaming.
Holton's musical language invokes a constellation of influences that range from the gentle electronica of Suzanne Ciani to the spectral traces of ECM’s ambient jazz. These touchpoints, however, are less quoted than metabolized, reconstituted as the grain of an audio narrative that feels distinctly personal yet uncannily universal. The tones of “A Quiet Day” carry the warmth of worn-out cassette tapes, the elusiveness of motifs heard faintly, in the background of otherwise irrelevant television transmissions, and the subtle grain of analogue static recording techniques, in other words, the sound design mirrors the textures of memories as they fade, blur, and occasionally sharpen into moments of startling clarity.
The album is anchored in its evocation of a suburban childhood shaped by the background hum of daytime television, the faint echoes of tamed nature, and the tactile acoustics peculiar of a home decorated according to the taste of the times, the outside world muffled by heavy curtains, formica surfaces absorbing vibrations. These details, minute yet resonant, are not merely backdrops but active participants in Holton’s soundscapes, which breathe with the dust motes of a world caught between stillness and the barely perceptible movements of time.
Tracks like “Midweek Rain” and “Waiting” embody this temporal ambivalence. The former channels the lackadaisical inertia of a rainy afternoon, its layered textures suggesting the quiet struggle to find purpose in a landscape of enforced stillness. The staticky interventions of a distant television in “Waiting” amplify this sensation, serving as both a narrative device and a textural counterpoint to the wistful guitar lines and hushed rhythmic undercurrent. The sense of interiority evoked here is not oppressive but generative, a fertile void from which the mind improvises its diversions, from aimless melodies to the mental cartographies of imaginary worlds.
Holton’s sound design across the album demonstrates an attunement to the intricate interplay of memory, place, and sound. “The Quiet Room” exemplifies this with its steady drum heartbeat and exploratory guitar lines, conjuring not only the physical textures of a place but also the sensory textures of being within it, as a child might lose themselves in the patterns of frosted glass or the hypnotic sway of tree shadows on a wall.
The album’s final triptych starts with “Clouds,” its sensual playfulness shuffling teasingly in a gentle haze, its optimistic harmonies feeling like a moment of ascension, affirming a subliminal acknowledgement of the capacity to find beauty in the diffuse. This delicate joyfulness is followed by “A Heart Full of Possibilities,” a track that crystallizes this realization of the creative capacities hidden not just in the always and the everywhere, but particularly in the inactive non-space of languor, capturing the tentative contentment of self-discovery, the interior moment when silence transforms into creativity, when the mind’s quiet meanderings stumble upon unexpected interpretations of reality.
Finally the concluding track “Above the Town” shifts gently toward resolution, a narrative arc that mirrors the maturity achieved by the universal transition from youthful ennui to the expansive quietude of adult reflection, the quiet triumph of perspective, at the peaks of existential mountains, admiring the new view from above, its expanded powers revealing a landscape once mundane and now shimmering with significance. In the context of the album, it is not merely an ascent but a reconfiguration, a recognition of the ways in which childhood’s seemingly interminable stretches of quietude used to shape, encourage and strengthen the adult’s capacity for reflection, resilience, and reverie.
In its quiet insistence on the value of stillness and introspection, "A Quiet Day" is an album that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary through the alchemy of sound and the poetics of detail, inviting the listener to dwell, to inhabit its spaces with the same attentiveness it brings to its own making of an acoustic topology of memory
17. “Aquarium” by dalot
The aural microcosm of "Aquarium," an album by Dalot AKA Greek sound artist Maria Papadomanolaki, offers a vivid sonic exploration that transcends its immediate premise of a lionfish’s life within a tank. Conceived initially as the score for a children’s dance performance, this work operates at the intersection of ecological parable, childhood wonder, and the cyclical routines of life, suggesting an intricate relationship between confinement and creativity, repetition and perception, memory and oblivion, vulnerability and resilience.
Its narrative, though ostensibly simple, reverberates with layers of seismic implication, inviting listeners to engage with its carefully rendered auditory world as both a reflection of human impact on nature and a meditation on adaptation within predetermined systems.
The lionfish, the album’s protagonist, is both a character and a metaphor. Its confined existence within the tank mirrors broader existential enclosures, from the routines of daily life to the pressing limits imposed by ecological degradation. The tank’s otherworldly inhabitants are not static accessories; they embody cohabitation, competition, and survival, forming a symbolic microcosm of environmental fragility.
This interplay of life forms comes into sharper focus when “Medusa” is introduced as an event both visual and auditory, a mythological entity whose name is also the Greek word for jellyfish, a wordplay simultaneously evoking both a petrifying gaze and a magnetic and luminous organism, creating a point of rupture that signifies the human hand in environmental disturbance. The jellyfish's shimmering presence evokes pollution’s deceptive beauty, the iridescent surface of an oil spill, a menace whose siren-like seduction is underscored by the album’s hypnotic soundscapes.
Dalot draws from a wellspring of eclectic influences, ranging from the unexpectedly surrealist aesthetics and narratives transmitted by Greek children’s television of the ‘80s and ‘90s to minimalist electronic and experimental traditions of a higher institutional cachet.
This confluence of the idiosyncratically nostalgic and the academically contemporary informs the album’s tonal palette, which oscillates between playful immediacy and contemplative depth. The music invites a dual audience—newcomers to ambient music, who might delight in its accessible melodic play, and connoisseurs of advanced sonorities, who can consciously perceive its deeper resonances.
With “Opening” and "Waking Up," the first two tracks of the album, set a tone of quiet anticipation, capturing the incremental unfolding of a new day in the tank. String-based loops evoke an expanding awareness, while subtle chimes and wooden xylophones suggest a blend of natural rhythms and mechanical precision.
The interplay of organic and artificial textures reflects the dual nature of the tank itself—a contained environment both natural and constructed. Tracks such as "Everyday Routine" reinforce this sense of circularity. Yet within this predictability, new motifs emerge, hinting at the latent dynamism of even the most repetitive cycles, like the ebb and flow of water, the interplay of light and shadow, and the lionfish’s rhythms of feeding, cleaning, and resting.
The philosophical and sociopolitica undercurrents of "Aquarium" are as compelling as its musical execution. The album interrogates the nature of confinement and adaptation, the allure of beauty in destruction, and the interdependence of routine and novelty. Its engagement with ecological themes is neither didactic nor simplistic; instead, it operates through subtlety and suggestion, inviting reflection without prescribing, yet still grasping at solutions. By rendering the lionfish’s life in such rich detail, Dalot underscores the interconnectedness of all life forms, a theme that resonates with the ecological crises of our time.
The narrative takes a darker turn with "Rocks and Sharks," where a foreboding undertone disrupts the otherwise harmonious soundscape. The next track, "Bubbles", marks a pivotal moment, transitioning from the lionfish’s innocent play to an ominous awareness of imminent threat. The bubbling sounds, initially light and joyful, acquire a sharper edge, evoking a tension between innocence and threat.
These dissonant presentiments crescendo with the arrival of “Medusa” and its companion piece, “Medusa’s Dance”, a diptych whose thematic allure is at once mesmerizing and sinister. Its haunting ambivalence is underscored by fairground music stylings and quaint toy-music timbres, their uncanny sonorities amplifying the symbolic representation of ecological crisis and capturing the paradox of human intervention in nature—aesthetic fascination intertwined with destructive consequence.
Dalot’s compositional flair navigates these shifts with a remarkable fluidity, weaving together disparate elements into a cohesive whole. The album’s sonic architecture is marked by its use of loops and layering, creating a sense of both enclosure and expansiveness.
This duality reflects the lionfish’s monomyth— a creature confined within the tank yet surrounded by the boundless rhythms of water and life. Tracks like "The Swimmer" encapsulate this tension. Pulsing beats drive the narrative forward, evoking a sense of urgency and movement. Brass tones and ascending melodies suggest resilience, a refusal to inhibit consciousness within the imposed boundaries of the tank or succumb to the hypnotic spell of jellyfish, symbolic or otherwise.
As "Aquarium" progresses toward its conclusion, it does not offer resolution so much as synthesis. The closing tracks incorporate angelic choirs and layered harmonics, creating a soundscape that feels both conclusive and open-ended. This is not a story with a definitive end; rather, it is an ongoing dialogue between the lionfish, its environment, and the forces that shape its existence. The listener is left to grapple with the implications of this dynamic—both for the lionfish in its tank and for humanity in its broader ecological context.
"Aquarium" is a sonic narrative that engages with universal themes of existence, resilience, and the fragile balance of ecosystems, rewarding the listener with a profound awareness of the beauty and precarity of life, both within and beyond the confines of any tank each of us might happen to inhabit.
18. “Connecting” by Floating Shrine
The act of listening to "Connecting," the latest album by Floating Shrine, is an immersion into a sound world that deftly navigates the thresholds of organic and electronic, presence and memory, stillness and motion. The album, released on the Decaying Spheres imprint, is an intricate mosaic of auditory textures that is both an excavation and a reconstruction—each track an artifact of a sonic past reimagined through the lens of a hyper-modern, yet fundamentally human, sensibility.
Drawing inspiration from journeys to Japan, where this particular niche of microscopically attuned ambient blossomed two decades ago, and informed by the interplay of natural and artificial realms in the context of miniatures crafted from the most minute of sounds and elliptical of snippets, Floating Shrine crafts a delicate balance where glitch, field recordings, and classical motifs converge, leaving a listener not just hearing but participating in an evocative act of diminutive lyricism. Each track unfolds as a microcosm of discovery, an intermediate space where the familiar and the strange coexist in dynamic equilibrium.
The album opens with "Empty" (featuring Wayd), a track that encapsulates Floating Shrine’s aesthetic ethos in a single gesture, introducing us to a microcosm of the album’s ethos, transitioning seamlessly between its various registers, layering elements that recall dial-up tones and shimmering metallic timbres atop organic underpinnings of trickling water and swelling pads. Misleading in its title, "Empty" is anything but void; rather, it is brimming with tonal abundance and textural intricacies. A melancholy piano motif initiates the listener’s journey, its measured simplicity giving way to cascading bursts of static, feedback and glitches. These interruptions become integral to the unfolding narrative—a sonic reimagining of an AGI entity in its last conscious moments, or perhaps an android’s yearning for the implanted memories of a lost yet lingering existence.
The album’s thematic ambition finds further elaboration in "Looking Back," a piece that juxtaposes wistful piano lines with dynamic, whirring accompaniments. A recurring motif throughout "Connecting" is the integration of field recordings—here, distant voices and environmental sounds are both cinematic and tactile, bridging an imagined sonic past with the immediacy of present experience. There is a sense of temporality at play: fleeting moments of warmth and familiarity collide with the indifferent technocracy of electronic manipulation.
The pastoral and the technological converge in tracks such as "Sitting Quietly" and "A Moment by the River," where natural soundscapes of chirping birds and rushing water are juxtaposed against intricate glitch patterns. The delicate result is a complementary symbiosis, reflecting the coexistence of tranquillity and hypermodernity in the spaces that inspired the album, hovering as softly and insistently as the faintest field recordings embedded in each composition. Floating Shrine does not seek to resolve these dichotomies but rather to dwell in their interplay, constructing soundscapes where each note feels like a deliberate act of listening, an attentive engagement with both the world and its echoes.
"Kintsugi," one of the album’s more overtly thematic tracks, embodies the philosophy of its titular art: the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold filling the cracks, transforming them into gleaming veins, turning flaws into features. The music reflects this concept through the juxtaposition of placid piano melodies and frenetic, fragmented electronic droplets.
Each glitch becomes a golden seam, a point of reconstruction that enhances rather than detracts. This track, perhaps more than any other, articulates the album’s overarching aesthetic: a celebration of imperfection as a site of beauty and resilience. The sparkling interplay of tones and textures echoes the artist’s exploration of fractured time, where memories, like repaired vessels, hold their own luminous integrity.
Throughout "Connecting," Floating Shrine demonstrates a remarkable capacity for evoking place and mood without resorting to cliché or banality. The album’s final track, "Always Changing," offers a contemplative descent into stillness, a gentle denouement that mirrors the ebbing energy of a day moving toward rest. Yet even here, the music resists closure, leaving traces of its sonic journey lingering in the air like the scent of cherry blossoms carried on a late spring breeze.
This is music that, while modern in its production techniques and conceptual ambitions, resonates with a timelessness that defies easy categorization. "Connecting" reimagines the borders separating synthetic and natural sound, creating a listening experience that is at once deeply personal and expansively universal.
The interplay of acoustic warmth and electronic precision speaks to a broader cultural condition—the morning of regardless in which human and machine increasingly coexist, sometimes even blur into one another. The album’s brevity only enhances its impact; like a sun shower that transforms a landscape with fleeting iridescence, the album is an act of sonic world-building whose luminous memory lingers in the listener’s imagination long after its final notes have faded.
19. “For Forever” by Hollie Kenniff
Hollie Kenniff’s fourth full-length album, “For Forever,” envelops the listener in an intimate aural embrace, as it unfolds a textural soundscape where melody and atmosphere coalesce into a sublime symphony of affect.
It is an album that dares to traverse the nebulous boundaries between electronic and acoustic terrains, merging the organic intimacy of lived experience with the expansive possibilities of synthetic sound. The result is auditory pleasure that vibrates with life, as tender as it is arresting, a work that gestures towards both the ineffable and the profoundly personal.
Released under the aegis of Nettwerk Music Group label, “For Forever” marks a pivotal moment in Kenniff’s artistic trajectory. While her previous release, “We All Have Places That We Miss,” glowed with evocative nostalgia, this latest offering achieves an even more crystalline articulation of her thematic concerns, specifically how time, memory, and emotion are meticulously interwoven.
The album’s opening tracks, including the titular “For Forever,” establish a sonic geography suffused with belonging and tenderness. Featuring Kenniff’s son’s piano performance conversing with diaphanous synth textures, the gently pulsating aura of the ethereal music radiates a familial warmth that underscores the album’s ethos of connection.
Kenniff’s compositions invite reflection and encourage immersion. Tracks such as “Linger in Moments” and “What Carries Us” are luminous in their simplicity, yet their intricacies unfold with each successive listen. In these pieces, Kenniff’s ethereal vocals glide over a bed of piano and synth, gently compelling the listener to inhabit the present. The delicacy of these arrangements belies their emotional heft, as they evoke a sense of stillness that feels increasingly radical in an era of relentless acceleration.
Nature, both as metaphor and material, pulses through the album like a living organism. “Sea Sketch” and “Over Ocean Waves”, with their aqueous atmospherics, summon the undulating rhythms of water, their ebb and flow mirroring the oscillations of hope and despair that define human existence. In “The Way of the Wind,” a surprising insertion of steady yet mellow beats disrupts the ambient serenity, introducing unpredictable dynamism of aural phenomena that allow the listener to experience the music as both solace and catalyst. As the album unfolds, its structure begins to resemble a journey, both topographical and emotional. The culmination of this journey in the denouement of “Far Inland” achieves a kind of catharsis, as anxiety recedes into the periphery, replaced by luminous peacefulness.
Kenniff’s work resists facile escapism, instead offering a nuanced exploration of how sound can embody and transform affective states. In a cultural landscape increasingly saturated with the commodified shallows of mood music, “For Forever” stands apart as a beacon of sincerity and depth. Its beauty lies in creating a space where vulnerability and introspection are not only possible but necessary.
“For Forever” is a testament to Kenniff’s artistry and her ability to make the personal universal, to transform the quotidian into the transcendent, enhancing life by inviting the listener to dwell within its folds and emerge, if not transformed, then at least more attuned to the fleeting, fragile, and exquisite nature of being.
20. “Plasticene” by Wound
In “Plasticene”, Wound AKA Polish musician Bartosz Szturgiewicz, has sculpted a sonic narrative as contradictory, intricate and self-referential as the era it critiques—a world inundated by synthetic excess, where the indelible fingerprints of humanity’s "progress" poison both the corporeal and the spiritual. The music, released in the format of a cassette tape on the nascent Krakow-based Okla Records, is tellingly encased in the very plastic it condemns, thus embodying a paradox that neither disavows its medium nor absolves it. It is an artifact of complicity, a soundtrack of culpability, and an elegy for futures prematurely truncated.
The opening track, “Breaking News 9:00 (New Horrors),” sets the stage with disarming clarity. Its bright, seemingly optimistic melody is juxtaposed against subtle snippets of chilling reportage about microplastic infiltration—into bodies, ecosystems, and the quotidian. Field recordings of waves crest gently beneath the electronic loops, situating listeners in a liminal auditory landscape that feels both grounded and unmoored.
The album’s cultural critique operates on multiple planes. While it laments the ecological and existential crises wrought by synthetic materials, it does so through the paradoxical beauty of those very materials' sonic counterparts. Tracks like the oscillating “Serfing on Mars” bristle with biting irony. Its playful homophony with “selfie”, “surf” and “serf” underscores the narcissistic gaze of exploitation recast as exploration. Mars, imagined as the new frontier, becomes yet another landfill for human detritus—selfies of serfs posing against a background of interstellar wastelands filled with satellite junk covered with red dust.
The flickering synth pulses of “Noctalgia” (a portmanteau of nocturne and nostalgia) offer a poignant meditation on light pollution’s obliteration of the night sky—a phenomenon symptomatic of broader ecological dissonances. The track’s twinkling synths evoke the flickering neon and fluorescent hues that drench urban nightscapes, their radiant aura obscuring the celestial markers of eternal time and infinite space, oxymoronically creating darkness as they emanate light, casting celestial invisibility via terrestrial illumination.
Wound transforms these dark lights into aural specters, their artificial luminescence both alluring and alienating. Beneath this sonic veneer lies a lament for the stars, for migratory patterns disrupted, for the natural brilliance of life obscured by the encroachment of human enlightenment.
The album’s titular suite, spanning two tracks, deepens this exploration. “Plasticene II” introduces a subtle shift: the unexpected return of birdsong trilling amid the electronic foliage. This moment, startling in its simplicity, illustrates how alien the natural has become in a world saturated by the synthetic, extricating not merely a contrast but a confrontation from the sonic juxtaposition, a reminder of what has been lost and what might yet be reclaimed, attempting a tenuous and fleeting intrusion into a dominion that no longer recognizes itself as sovereign.
Throughout the album, Wound’s sound design amplifies its thematic preoccupations. The loops—delicate yet persistent—mimic the iterative patterns of industrial rhythms, the ceaseless churn of consumption and disposal. Field recordings, layered with precision, tether the synthetic to the organic, only to blur the boundaries between the two. The vocal loops that close the album, rewound and replayed until they dissolve into abstraction, evoke the linear nature of plastic’s existence—ever-present, never decomposing, representing a grim perpetuity where there is neither regeneration nor evolution, a static lifelessness whose permanent half-life bears the Anthropocene’s indelible scars.
“Plasticene” is not content to remain a passive observer; it implicates its audience in its critique. The album’s physical form—a plastic cassette—embodies the very contradictions it deconstructs. This self-reflexivity is not a concession but a challenge: to listen is to acknowledge complicity, to hold the object is to confront the inescapable material realities of the world it inhabits. Wound invites us to grapple with this discomfort, to trace the itineraries of incosistency that run through our lives, our bodies, and our culture.
The album’s release on the fledgling Okla Records label, further asserts its decentralized position within the institutional ecosystem of ambient music. As a platform for leftfield experimentation, Okla situates “Plasticene” within a broader continuum of artistic resistance, where sound becomes a medium for critique and possibility. Yet, even as it gestures toward resistance, the album acknowledges the limits of its medium. The synthetic sounds that populate its tracks, however artfully rendered, are inextricably tied to the very industrial processes they critique. This tension, far from undermining the work, imbues it with a profound urgency—a recognition that the tools of critique are themselves compromised.
(Ultimately, a gun remains a gun, its implications starkly immanent and stubbornly immutable no matter who is holding it, since the only fact that matters is what kind of ethical belief system is served by the owner of said gun.)
In Plasticene, Wound reframes ambient and electronic music not as escapist idylls but as avenues of divergence. The album’s cascading bleeps and tranquil loops, its subtle interweaving of synthetic and organic, and its playful yet incisive titling—all coalesce into a meditation on the Anthropocene’s paradoxes.
It is a soundtrack for a future not yet realized, an imaginary documentary of an era defined by what it has destroyed, a civilization producing prefabricated ruins, an aesthetic realm in thrall with its own collapse, a self-regarding requiem, a sonic fossil that bears witness to humanity’s myopic pursuits and the residues of catastrophe they leave behind.
As the final loops fade into the ether, one is left with a sense of unease—a recognition that the new horrors and old terrors bookending the “Plasticene” era are not merely externalities but internalized, coursing through the bloodstream of culture and consciousness, as we listen to the sounds of a world on the brink, to the echoes of our own complicity, and to the faint, persistent murmurs of what might still be salvaged.
21. “Big Majestic” by Ellen Reid
The dialectic between physical space and sonic architecture finds a sophisticated articulation in Ellen Reid's "Big Majestic," a work that transcends conventional categorizations of ambient music through its radical reconceptualization of urban greenspaces as sites of acoustic transformation.
Reid, whose previous accolades include the Pulitzer Prize for her opera "p r i s m," has transmuted her groundbreaking SOUNDWALK installation—originally conceived as a GPS-enabled public art intervention—into an album that interrogates our fundamental understanding of site-specific composition and spatial sound design. Her integration of various guest performers suggests a musical heterotopia where different traditions and musicological concepts can coexist and cross-pollinate.
The album's titular opening piece "Big Majestic" establishes a framework where synthetic textures become vehicles for spatial-temporal displacement, with Reid's soaring synthesizer gestures interwoven with plangent string motifs, glissando harps and fleeting flutes suggesting new paradigms for understanding the relationship between synthetic sound and naturalistic scenarios.
This technological mediation of natural environments creates a fascinating tension between the organic and the constructed, particularly evident in "West Coast Sky Forever," where Kronos Quartet's string arrangements evoke Aaron Copland's pioneering explorations of American pastoral imagination, while simultaneously deconstructing these associations through contemporary performance techniques.
The inclusion of Shabaka Hutchings on "Spiritual Sun" and "Primrose Hill" offers a virtuosic intervention in the discourse between improvisation and composed space. His spellbinding performance consists of intertwined shakuhachi curlicues chasing an expressionist tenor saxophone solo, both wind instruments navigating between free jazz audacity and structured minimalism, creating layers of cultural signifiers while resisting easy categorization. This resistance to categorization becomes particularly potent in "Blue Sky | Mirrored Glass," where, courtesy of James McVinnie's synth organ, baroque flourishes destabilize traditional notions of sacred solemnity and secular narratives.
"Alone on Mulholland" presents perhaps the album's most sophisticated exploration of pitch and space, with Reid's employment of variable tuning systems on what appears to be a CS80 synthesizer creating a constantly shifting harmonic landscape of pitch variations.
The dual appearances of Lisel's voice in the diptych "Pavilion In The Trees" function as ghostly interventions in the album's otherwise symphonic arrangement. Her wordless vocalizations, reminiscent of minimalist composers like John Adams, create a vocabulary of tonalities inhabiting an aural twilight between human utterance and artificial sound.
What distinguishes "Big Majestic" from other contemporary experiments in ambient music is its sociopolitical engagement with questions of access and democratization. Originally conceived for specific urban parks—Central Park, Griffith Park, Regent's Park, Primrose Hill, and Ueno Park—the work now exists in a deterritorialized form that paradoxically maintains its site-specific power while transcending geographical limitations. This tension between localization and universality creates a fascinating dialogue about the nature of place in contemporary composition.
The album's transformation from a GPS-enabled installation to a fixed recording raises crucial questions about the nature of musical documentation and the politics of access. While the original SOUNDWALK installation gained particular resonance during the social distancing requirements of the COVID-19 pandemic, its current incarnation as a traditional album format suggests new possibilities for understanding how site-specific work can be meaningfully translated across different media without losing its essential character.
Reid's compositional approach throughout "Big Majestic" demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of how musical syntax can create virtual spaces within the listener's consciousness. This creates a work that functions simultaneously as a sonic delineation of specific physical locations and as an autonomous artistic statement about the nature of space, sound, and human perception.
Cohesively, convincingly and inventivelyamalgamating genres such as ambient, minimalist, 20th century modern or post-classical music throughout "Big Majestic", Reid has created an alchemical work that fundamentally reconfigures our understanding of what site-specific music can signify both aesthetically and politically.
22. “Ingegärd” by InnerLicht
"Ingegärd" by InnerLicht (AKA Ukrainian composer, oboist, producer and performer Maxim Kolomiiets) is a radical statement of historical consciousness through electroacoustic assemblage. The fourth of a sequence of albums the artist released last year—"Dragon Songs," "Skylines," "Black Crystal," and "Ingegärd"—this final work achieves particular resonance through its archaeological excavation of 11th-century political power structures and their contemporary echoes.
The album's narrative nucleus centres on Ingegerd Olofsdotter (1001-1050), Swedish princess turned grand princess of Kyiv through her marriage to Yaroslav the Wise, who in 1037 laid the foundations for Kyiv's St. Sophia Cathedral (its name a deliberate echo of Constantinople's 6th century Hagia Sophia, which means Holy Wisdom in Byzantine Greek).
Rather than constructing a conventional historical biography, Kolomiiets deploys sound as a tool for chronological collapse, creating acoustic spaces where ancient events reverberate through contemporary frequencies. The opening piece introduces this temporal vertigo through recordings of water—possibly Baltic, possibly Dnipronian—establishing an immediate material connection between geographical points of power in Olofsdotter's trajectory from Sigtuna to Kyiv.
"Lights on Sigtuna" references Olofsdotter's hometown on Lake Mälaren, but its sonic palette speaks to contemporary questions of identity, displacement and power, as modular synthesis techniques generate unstable harmonic fields that destabilize linear narratives, reconfiguring our individual relationships and experiences concerning eternity.
The album's affinity for ecclesiastical solemnity, demonstrates how sacred monuments function as both historical repository and contemporary political signifier. Rather than resort to simple sampling of liturgical music, Kolomiiets constructs dense drone frequencies that simultaneously evoke ancient rituals while remaining firmly rooted in contemporary electronic practice.
The closing track, "...and my lonely boat quietly disappears into the vastness of eternity," returns to aqueous sounds while introducing new harmonic elements that suggest both resolution and ongoing questions. This dialectical approach—between historical specificity and contemporary resonance, between geographic locality and universal themes—characterizes the entire work.
The album's significance extends beyond its immediate historical subject matter. In excavating the story of a Swedish princess who became a crucial figure in Kievan Rus, Kolomiiets engages with urgent questions about cultural formation and national identity in contemporary Ukraine. The work's release during a period of intense geopolitical realignment in the region adds additional layers of meaning to its historical investigations.
Technically, "Ingegärd" demonstrates sophisticated manipulation of acoustic space. Field recordings, modular synthesis, and digital processing techniques combine to create what Kolomiiets describes as a "hermetic spatial and acoustic world."
This isolationism, however, does not indicate exile from contemporary concerns but rather interrogates the current historical context through an intensified lens that refuses conventional narrative structures in favour of spatial and temporal discontinuity. This rupture of prefabricated expectations allows for multiple interpretations that maintains the work’s conceptual core statement about historical events as living, evolving phenomena, and allows the music to operate concurrently as historical investigation, contemporary political commentary, and pure sonic exploration.
The album's success lies in its ability to maintain this theoretical complexity while creating compelling sonic temples that spiritually reward both casual and intensive listening practices, their airy expansiveness resonating with heady atmospheres and metaphysical wonder.
23. "Origami Birds" by Klangriket and Sjors Mans
The Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park honours the innocent children who died from the atomic bomb and its aftermath. Atop the monument stands a bronze statue of Sadako Sasaki, a girl who survived the bomb at age two but died a decade later from leukaemia, like many hibakusha (bomb-affected individuals).
Sadako became a symbol of hope and optimism, inspiring "Origami Birds," a new album by Klangriket and Sjors Mans that engages with the historical weight of atomic devastation and its aftermath.
The title references the paper cranes Sadako folded while hospitalized, inspired by a Japanese legend that folding 1,000 cranes grants a wish. Despite limited resources, she folded 1,300 cranes, not only for her own recovery but also to spread kindness and compassion to others. Her story continues to resonate as a testament to resilience and selflessness.
The album, released via piano & coffee records, materializes as the culmination of a three-year dialogue conducted through more than 500 video calls—a production methodology that mirrors our contemporary dissociated reality while paradoxically generating intimate musical connections on multiple timelines, with three generations of women narrating Fabian Rosenberg's poem in both English and Swedish—a strategic choice that addresses a matrilineal transmission of trauma and hope.
“Open the window. Let the cold air in.
Fold one and make another. An identical twin.
Make them in different colours and shapes.
And when you’ve folded a thousand
look what a difference it makes.
They spread their wings they fly away.
They go places where you’ve never been.
Caught by the wind they swirl around and around.
And when you, and I fold a thousand.
They form rainbow clouds. They will cover the sky.
Thousands of thousands become a million.
And then they fall. One by one slowly, slowly to the ground.”
The sonic palette defies easy categorization, having undergone multiple iterations of reworking until the source material became indistinguishable even to its creators, a process of sonic détournement that yields unexpected textural combinations, mirroring larger questions about historical memory and documentation, particularly relevant given the album's thematic connection to Hiroshima and evident in tracks like "Where You Have Never Been," whose hazy ambient foundations dissolve into pulsing electronic territories.
The incorporation of Dan Berglund's contributions (known for his work with Esbjörn Svensson Trio) alongside a carefully selected string quartet introduces a layer of orchestral complexity that resists mere decorative function. Instead, these elements engage in dialectical relationship with the electronic components, creating zones of temporal suspension where acoustic and digital elements achieve momentary synthesis before spinning apart again.
"When You Have Folded a Thousand" opens with train sounds that function as both musique concrète material and memorial signifier, their mechanical rhythm suggesting both forward movement and the weight of historical remembrance. The track's evolution into layered voices over drone frequencies creates a spatial dimension that expands beyond conventional stereo placement, suggesting a sort of sonic origami where space itself appears to fold and unfold.
In "A Million," the electronic elements achieve their most sophisticated integration, creating architectonic structures that simultaneously reference club music's communal potential while maintaining critical distance from its usual formal constraints. The brass elements in the title track "Origami Birds" operate in counterpoint to field recordings that suggest empty ceremonial spaces, creating a temporary autonomous zone where past history and present memory reconcile in unstable equilibrium.
"Origami Birds" questions false dilemmas between hope and despair, acoustic and electronic, historical and contemporary. Instead, it creates a complex network of sonic and conceptual relationships that aims toward something more akin to emotional cöordination, where different modalities of historical memory, collective trauma and personal remembrance can coexist and interact, intersect and transform each other.
24. "Exin" by Otto A. Totland
The chronotopic edifice of contemporary piano music often oscillates between nostalgia and innovation, between the shadowy weight of historical convention and the lightspeed of technological mediation. Otto A. Totland's "Exin" inhabits this dialectical space with remarkable agility, presenting sixteen compositions that simultaneously acknowledge and augment the contemporary discourse around solo piano works.
The album's production, undertaken at Berlin's historic Funkhaus complex in collaboration with Nils Frahm, demonstrates an acute awareness of spatial acoustics, technological intervention, musical gesture, and the mechanical action of the piano and the electronic capture of sound.
The compositions themselves display a remarkable range of historical consciousness. "The French" engages with harmonic accents reminiscent of early modernist piano works while maintaining its own distinct formal ontology. "Marka" performs a minimalist translation of Baroque dance forms, recontextualizing these historical structures by evoking a semblance to the similarly brilliant reconfigurations of Glenn Gould. The jazz-inflected "Tapper" demonstrates Totland's ability to quote diverse musical languages with ease, grace and conviction.
Particularly noteworthy is Totland's approach to rhythm, like in "Seveight," where the time signature becomes both a structural constraint and expressive device as the piano repeatedly climbs and descends in looping circles of changing chords. This premeditated precision, crucially, remains, with increasingly stubborn intensity, within the emotional resonance of the overall piece. Similarly, "Savely" opens the album with a careful calibration of melancholic affect and technical control, establishing a tonal palette that the subsequent pieces both reinforce and challenge.
The album's circulation within digital streaming platforms presents an intriguing contradiction: these deeply personal, technically nuanced performances find themselves atomized and redistributed through algorithmic systems of music distribution. Yet rather than diminishing their impact, this technological mediation seems to amplify the works' intimate qualities. Tracks like "Soma" and "Ono" maintain their affective power even when encountered within the endless flow of digital content, their brief durations and solipsistic aesthetic autonomy creating ruptures of revolutionary suspension in the otherwise continuous stream of data.
Totland's status as a self-taught pianist informs these compositions in fascinating ways. His technical approach, unburdened by conservatory conventions, allows for innovative solutions to musical problems. This is particularly evident in "Fivril," where unconventional voicings and pedalling techniques create sonic textures that defy traditional categorization.
The album's production values deserve special attention. The Funkhaus recordings capture not just the notes being played but the full mechanical reality of the piano as a physical object. This attention to detail creates a documentary aspect to the recordings, preserving the mechanical processes that generate the music alongside the musical content itself. This technical transparency serves not just aesthetic but also philosophical purposes, highlighting the audible persistence of materiality in musical production, even as the metaphysics of digital abstraction increase.
"Exin" forms a coherent artistic statement that engages with questions of musicological history, technological mediation, and genre traditions while maintaining a distinct artistic vision, bold in its contradictions of playfulness, literary ambitions, stylish confidence and high-tech austerity. The work demonstrates how contemporary classical music can engage with both antiquity and state-of-the-art modernity while maintaining its supra-aesthetic integrity and emotional impact.
25. "Glass House" by Patrick Shiroishi
In "Glass House," Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist & composer Patrick Shiroishi examines the schematics of stillness and motion, engineers an acoustic domain that both contains and liberates its inhabitants. Originally conceived as a score for Volta Collective, a theatrical dance company directed by Mamie Green, the album glides beyond the limits of its origins to become a self-reflexive examination of the interplay of duration and dimension
The centrepiece "memories (i am in the vortex)", starts with a barely audible hum backing the ontological anchor of a ticking clock and gradually builds up to a dissonant symphony composed of fragmented dialogues, the shrill insistence of telephonic interruptions, and the ephemeral murmur of aleatory acoustics.
The incomprehensible discourse between domestic sounds—door closures, kitchen activities—and environmental elements—sounds of the sea, birds tweeting, furtive footsteps, kitchen activities— amounts to a fractured mosaic made of tessera cut from both interior and exterior spaces. When text message notifications pierce this audible situationism, they function as technological interruptions transmitting lived experience, highlighting the increasingly mediated nature of memory formation in contemporary society.
Shiroishi's multi-instrumental expertise manifests through the careful positioning of sonic events. The saxophone, his primary instrument, appears sparingly, a self-effacing gesture that introduces a meta-commentary on performance itself. The persistent audience chatter that refuses to yield to musical authority creates a fascinating power dynamic—one that speaks to the commodification of live performance in an age of perpetual documentation.
The whistles that punctuate the composition serve dual purposes: as theatrical direction within the narrative and as futile attempts to impose order on sonic chaos and spectator indifference. When the saxophone finally enters, it represents negotiation, finding expression within rather than above the cacophony, a conciliatory tactic that magically transforms the background clamour into a choir practice improvising vocalizations essential to the musical whole.
"The procession" marks a dramatic shift in the album's trajectory. Its piano-led first movement, later augmented by orchestral elements, leads to a harmonic sanctuary that stands in stark contrast to the preceding chaos. The arpeggiated acceleration of its latter half suggests a transformative intensification of temporal experience itself into a memory configuration system, the sound of consciousness that is at once alert of the present moment and already reminiscing about.
The album's conclusion presents a dialectical struggle between order and entropy. The reappearance of clock-like percussion connects thematically to the opening while suggesting resonant circularity rather than progression. The choir's brief emergence and subsequent silence together create a void that dissonant notes rush to fill, like cracks spreading across the titular glass house. The orchestral resolution that follows feels less like victory than temporary equilibrium—a precarious harmony that acknowledges its own fragility.
What distinguishes "Glass House" is the questioning of boundaries between composition and documentation, between intentional performance and captured reality, the specific examination of how sound shapes our understanding of both. Within its transparent walls, inarticulate rumours reverberate and mingle with the transient echoes of unplanned soundscapes and ephemeral rustle, creating new possibilities for sonic exploration while acknowledging the perpetual tension between structure and dissolution, like an aural orchid obstinately flowering amid the scattered debris of auditory happenstance.
26. “NONAGE” by Li Yilei
In "NONAGE," London baseed Chinese sound artist Li Yilei orchestrates an archaeological excavation of childhood's material culture, transforming broken toys and degraded recordings into sonic vignettes that chronicle the dissolution of remembered experience. The album's Chinese title "垂髫" (suggesting both childhood and disheveled hair) encapsulates the paradox of remembrance at its core by evoking a period of sanctioned disorder that precedes the enforced structures of maturity.
This dialectic between freedom and constraint is clearly stated by the opening track "Go, Little Book" which juxtaposes fragmentary piano passages against the ghostly invocation of vintage television broadcasts, setting the stage for past and present versions of the self to engage within the schematic diagram of an ephemeral counterpoint delineated by crackling vinyl textures and mechanical detritus, those very mechanisms through which memory becomes encoded in objects.
The album's methodology reveals itself as simultaneously archival and alchemical. Li transmutes damaged instruments—toy pianos, hand-cranked music boxes, bird whistles, broken accordions—into vehicles for sonic transfiguration. In "O O O O," electronic pulsations mimic the entropic decay of battery-powered playthings, while "Pond, Grief and Glee" dismantles the sanitized narratives of childhood innocence to expose the underlying currents of contradictory emotion, frustrating alienation and serendipitous confusion, all highly subjective states of ambivalent feelings that pervade early human experience.
The playground recordings in "++++" are preoccupied with the study of complex social choreography, where the sounds of playful children are inseparable from the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that shape childhood sociality. Li's use of bird whistles and electronic beeps insinuates an alternative system of communication— a language of invented sounds and tones that exists outside the restrictive frameworks of adult speech.
As the album progresses, its sonic palette evolves from chaotic experimentation toward more contemplative ambient territories, mirroring the progress of childhood anarchy as it is gradually subordinated to social order, protocol and pragmatism. Yet this progression resists simple linearity. The closing tracks "Pillow, Mantra and Trance" and "Thé Noir, Rêvasser, Retrouvailles" suggest not resignation to the stifling parameters of maturity but encourage reconciliation with our inner child—a way of preserving childhood's creative disorder within the structures of adult consciousness.
Li's incorporation of their own childhood piano recordings introduces a mnemonic legacy of autobiographical significance, as these early fragments function as points of quantum entanglement where multiple personal timelines intersect within the music itself, challenging conventional narratives of development and progress. The artist's practice of instrument building further compounds this temporal complexity—the act of creating new instruments to interpret old memories reveals time itself not as a labyrinth, where every turn brings one back to the starting point, and the journey is both infinite and infinitesimal.
In its deliberate unearthing of materiality, the album transforms the mechanical groans of toys, the erosion of analogue recordings, and the fragility of recollection from flaws to foundational elements. This celebration of decay is not a wistful glance backwards but an intimate exploration between retrospective knowledge and unknowing innocence, where the act of seeking becomes a kind of sacred disorientation, where consciousness stitches together the ephemeral into a semblance of continuity.
"NONAGE" aspires to exist as both document and intervention—an attempt to recover not just memories but the very conditions that made certain forms of experience possible. Li's use of sound as both medium and metaphor creates a work that transcends simple categorization as either experimental music or sound art. Instead, it functions as a critical investigation of how identity is constructed through the interplay of memory, materiality, and time.
This investigation reaches its apotheosis in tracks like "Sand, Fable and Tiger Balm," where the tripartite structure of the title reflects the fragmentary nature of remembered experience. The sonic elements—mechanical toys, processed recordings, and electronic textures—create a complex interplay between the tangible artefacts of childhood and their spectral echoes in memory.
Through its careful attention to both the material and immaterial aspects of childhood experience, "NONAGE" accomplishes something rare as it creates a sonic space where the past exists not as something to be recovered but as something to be continuously reimagined and reconstructed.
The result is music that challenges conventional understandings of both childhood and memory, suggesting instead a more fluid and dynamic relationship between past and present, between experience and recollection.
27. “rpm” by Philip Jeck
The tension between what fades and what endures courses through 'rpm,' a double album that reimagines Philip Jeck’s sonic explorations as a posthumous constellation of collaborative voices. Neither a simple homage nor a static memorial, this collection becomes an epochal threshold where the echoes of the past and the whispers of the future intertwine, shaped by the tactile whispers of vinyl’s spinning grooves.
Jeck (English, 1952-2022) distinguished himself through his radical repurposing of discarded turntables and records, transforming cultural detritus into instruments of sublime acoustic alchemy. His methodology rejected both naive nostalgia and technological determinism, instead excavating the spectral possibilities lurking within the grooves of forgotten vinyl.
This approach crystallized most dramatically in his 1993 work "Vinyl Requiem," an ambitious installation utilizing 180 turntables, nine slide projectors, and two 16mm projectors – not as an elegy for analogue media, but as a harbinger of sonic possibilities yet unrealized.
"rpm" opens with Fennesz's "Dancer," a composition that navigates from tenebrous depths toward luminescent heights, its digital processing maintaining a dialectical relationship with Jeck's turntablist methodologies. The collaboration with Gavin Bryars yields three pieces that submerge vocal fragments within oceanic loops, most notably in "4 Piste," where a spectral voice intones "When you're ready you can let go; it's right" – words that acquire unbearable poignancy in light of Jeck's passing, before transforming into an exhortation to "Embrace every minute of life while we have it."
The album's architectural complexity reveals itself through pieces like "Saltmarshe Station," where Chris Watson's field recordings of maritime environments create a psychogeographic dialogue with Jeck's manipulations. This reciprocal feedback exchanged between natural and mechanical sound sources continues in "Pilots," completed just before Jeck's death in March 2022, incorporating Jana Winderen's recordings of pilot whales. Here, the cetacean vocalizations undergo a transformation that collapses distinctions between biological and technological forms of communication.
Claire M Singer's organ sketches, initially intended for further collaboration, now function as ecclesiastical portals, their tonal expansiveness suggesting both sacred spaces and secular transcendence. This spiritual undertow surfaces explicitly in "I Measure Every Grief I Meet," where David Sylvian and Hildur Guðnadóttir transmute Emily Dickinson's poetry into aural philosophy, while Cris Cheek's "Clocking Off" deploys the ringing of church bells set against the constant rustle of cicadas in concert, interspersed with the whirring blades of hovering helicopters, airplane turbines roaring in distant skies and other sonic events, both natural and mechanical, marking the inexorable passage of time. Jeck's own composition "Mono" serves as a masterclass in his idiosyncratic techniques, demonstrating how his manipulation of found sound conquered technical experimentation to achieve genuine musical expression.
Functioning as both a repository and a generative facilitator, 'rpm' exists as an archive and a vision of what might come. Its format serves and mirrors this dual role, crafting a seam in the flow of instants where Jeck’s techniques continue to spark new ideas even after his departure. Curated by Mary Prestidge, Mike Harding, and Jon Wozencroft, the compilation, proving how artistic influence flows through interwoven currents of collaboration, each track layering onto an ever-evolving constellation of vibrations and silences.
What distinguishes this collection from typical posthumous releases is its rejection of both idolization and finality. It presents Jeck’s artistry as a living system of creative strategies, perpetually open to recombination and reinterpretation. Through this lens, the vinyl’s gentle crackle and the mechanical flutter that defined his sound become metaphors for resilience rather than decline, for unbroken flow rather than cessation.
'rpm' thus achieves the rare duality of being both a eulogy and a baptism, a farewell and a greeting, a testament and manifesto, a remembrance and a guide for future audio voyagers.
28. “Spectral Evolution” by Rafael Toral
Rafael Toral's "Spectral Evolution" presents the results of his more than a decade’s worth of experimental research dedicated to inventing his own devices, the nomenclature of which sounds like laboratory instruments built by an imaginary scientist investigating the metaphysics of music creation: glove-controlled sine-wave generator, theremin-controlled white noise generator, amplified coil spring percussion, an electrode-controlled random pulse width modulation oscillator, a light-controlled portable amplifier.
The result is an intricate negotiation between terrestrial and cosmic frequencies that spans a forty-seven-minute aural expedition, reconstrucing the boundaries between electronic experimentation and harmonically-anchored composition, while simultaneously dissolving the artificial distinctions between improvised and composed music.
The work’s opening moments introduce a delicate interplay between organic and synthetic textures—crystalline guitar motifs entwining with electronically conjured birdlike calls, creating a dialogue that is both intimate and expansive. The mood is alternately exotic, extraterrestrial and romantic, with surging harmonies whose emotional crescendoes swell poignantly, like hazy passages, half-remembered by Mahler when startled awake from his dreams while sleepwalking.
"Spectral Evolution" unfolds as a symphony of twelve interconnected movements, divided by a masterful bilateral axis where each segment finds its mirror in the latter half of the work. This symmetrical arrangement is an enquiry into the time-specific nature of the sonic experience itself.
Throughout "Spectral Evolution," Toral’s guitar work ranges from luminous chord structures to granular textural explorations, fleetingly reminiscent of Loren Connors’ spectral melancholy, while his electronic instruments generate an extraordinary array of sounds that somehow manage to operate within Western tuning systems, a feat previously thought impossible by the composer himself. The harmonic foundation of several movements draws from the jazz canon, specifically the changing chord progression of George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" and Duke Ellington's "Take the 'A' Train." However, by extending each of these chord changes into its own time signature, Toral transforms these familiar progressions into vast sonic territories that bear little surface resemblance to their sources.
What distinguishes "Spectral Evolution" from contemporary experimental work is its successful navigation between multiple historical trajectories: the drone/ambient guitar tradition Toral helped establish in the 1990s with albums like "Sound Mind Sound Body" and "Wave Field," the free improvisation heritage of electronic music pioneers like David Tudor, and the harmonic sophistication of 20th century modernist jazz. This intersection of lineages produces something genuinely unprecedented - a work that exists simultaneously in multiple musical universes while establishing its own productively unstable cosmology.
"Spectral Evolution" amounts to a devotional gesture towards harmony, improvisation, and form. By successfully integrating seemingly incompatible elements - the unpredictability of custom electronic instruments with traditional harmonic progressions, the immediacy of improvisation with carefully structured long-form composition - Toral has created a work that demands new analytical frameworks while remaining deeply engaging on a purely emotional level. This achievement suggests new possibilities for experimental music's engagement with historical forms while pointing toward future developments in the integration of electronic and acoustic sound sources.
29. “kurpark” by Guenter Schlienz
The release of "kurpark" by Guenter Schlienz, on cassette from the Lighten Up Sounds label, represents a wittty recalibration in the discourse surrounding site-specific electronic composition and the phenomenology of therapeutic spaces. Unapologetically introduced as “new spa music”, the album was recorded in situ at the Bad Wimpfen health spa park in Germany, the album's methodological approach poses fascinating questions about the intersection of healing spaces, technological mediation, and acoustic ecology.
Incrementally established since the early 1980s, the niche subgenre of healing music was unfairly written off as mere decorative aural wallpaper. Critics derided it as pseudo-spiritual, lazy listening, tailored specifically for the indulgent West Coast New Age crowd. Against this backdrop of enduring indifference—if not outright scorn—the choice to record live in a space devoted to bodily restoration emerges as a seductively provocative act. It asks us to reconsider what counts as radical in today’s ambient landscape, a realm too often mired in academic overthinking, fleeting intellectual trends, and the joyless, self-serious posturing of institutional gatekeepers.
Schlienz's synthesizer works not in opposition to, but in harmonic dialogue with the spa's acoustic ontology, making a witty commentary on the relationship between electronic music and environmental input. This synthesis manifests most prominently in "Pme," where opera singer Teresa Smolnik recites instructions for breathing excersises, uttered counterintuitively in the clipped, austere tones of the German language, her placid vocal delivery operating simultaneously as both linguistic signifier and relaxing sonority.
The album's technical execution reveals Schlienz's masterful understanding of spatial specificity and sonic intention. Each sound exists within a carefully constructed three-dimensional space, with field recordings providing the atmospheric backdrop and essential contextual conditions as the synthesizer envelops the listener in the most gentle of billowing pads and pacific tones.
The recording engages with time in a manner that calls for reflective consideration. The slow, measured unfolding of its sonic elements suggests a deliberate resistance to the speed of today’s generalized accident, creating a zone where sounds are given the freedom to reveal their intricate textures beyond the capitalist concerns of productivity-oriented timekeeping.
Schlienz integrates field recordings with great finesse, verging on the imperceptibly discrete, casting an auditory spell that charms the listener’s consciousness in a mental state between the recognizably empirical and the alluringly imagined. This "third space," a term borrowed from postcolonial theory finds resonance in musicology, serving as a critique of the binary logic that traditionally segregates natural from artificial soundscapes. By blurring these boundaries, Schlienz assembles a hybrid environment that functions as a phenomenological inquiry into the nature of what is internalized and what is observed externally in terms of sound itself.
Anchored in the specific topography and semantic universe of a health spa, the album interrogates the role of electronic music as both a witness and an agent within spaces dedicated to convalescence and renewal. This forensic investigation operates on dual registers: as a meticulous documentation of the spa’s acoustic environment and as an imaginative intervention that reconfigures this space through interpretative reconfiguration. This dialectic fosters a rich, polyphonic confabulation between the experientially verified and the fancifully speculative, offering a view towards a nuanced imaginarium thriving unexpectedly on the intersections of electronic sound, institutional place, and psychosomatic restoration.
"kurpark" demonstrates remarkably delicate technical dexterity in its attentive treatment of sonic materials. The transparency of individual elements, combined with their careful integration into a cohesive whole, foregrounds precise articulation of subtle details while maintaining artistic integrity within a coherent statement that both serenades and transcends its original context.
30. "Here" by Ludvig Cimbrelius
A prolific Swedish artist who has created quite a lot of music under various aliases, Ludvig Cimbrelius presents"Here" not only as a continuation of his sonic research in the area of vocal ambient, piano-centric works that he tends to release in his own real name, but also as the first of two records, the next of which is to come out sometime this year. This six-track collection is out now on the great Athens-based Greek Sound In Silence Records label.
The album’s prolonged and complicated gestation is a case study in the phenomenology of artistic creation, an erratic process of creative labour stretched across years and continents. Originally titled Foreverness and conceived in the aftermath of “Intimacy”, the project evolved through a protracted period of studio experimentation and geographical displacement, ultimately splitting into two interrelated yet distinct works.
From the opener “Left But Never Left,” the piano asserts itself as the ontological instigator of musical events to be addressed. What follows is the soundscape of “Here”, a radiant universe of angelic beatitude spun from the gentle touch of acoustic piano, voices that float like whispers, electric guitars that ripple like water, and field recordings that root the heavenly vision in the tangible world, like an audible revelation as ethereal, elevating and abstract as sacred music of spiritual intent, a hymn of gratitude emanating benevolently from a secular paradise welcoming agnostic devotees of sensorial enlightenment.
In the second track, “When Warm Tears Fell from the Sky”, a fluid, ever-shifting murmuration of choirs expresses stupefied awe against a glowing penumbra of synthesized twilight. The fully realized lattice of organic and synthetic composition introduces the album’s sonic palette in full, yet resists fixed interpretation as each whispered note and trembling chord feels like a fleeting moment in an endless process of apparition and fading, a testament to the beauty of impermanence.
“These Flames I Gently Let,” a fourteen-minute centrepiece, begins with an organ pad, while the almost ecclesiastical background for piano utters phrases that are deliberate, almost ceremonial, each note a small brushstroke that dissolves into a broader picture—rainfall, whispers, and the faintest traces of human voice, lingering like perfume even as they fade like the light at dusk, their sustained evaporation an equivocation of presence in a world in flux.
"Lost in the Mists at Dawn" advances these thematic concerns by delving deeper into indeterminate acoustics, where abstraction becomes a storytelling mechanism. Rather than relying on conventional musical structures, the composition builds its narrative through the careful arrangement of textures, each one a fragment of a larger, more ambiguous whole, embracing the uncertain and suggesting that truth is not always found in clarity but in the spaces where meaning flickers like light reflected in water.
According to Cimbrelius, his relocation from Sweden to Turkey during the album’s creation infused the work with a sense of displacement and transition, adding another layer of meaning to its themes of elusiveness and impermanence.
This physical movement mirrors the music’s own fluidity, as it transitions between defined structures and more abstract, atmospheric realms. The relationship between geographical and musical space is deeply intertwined, suggesting that the act of crossing borders—whether spatial, existential, national or sonic—can transform how we hear and feel.
The album’s seamless transitions between tracks create a continuous sonic stream, extending an invitation to lose oneself in the eternal now, where the boundaries between moments dissolve, and the act of listening becomes a gateway to the timeless.
31. “The afterlife is letting go” by Patrick Shiroishi
Functioning as both complement and counterpoint to Brandon Shimoda's eponymous literary work, Patrick Shiroishi's "The Afterlife is Letting Go," his second record featured in this batch of reviews, is a dialectical interplay between sonic invention and historical memory that aims for a critical interrogation of intergenerational trauma, state violence, and the persistence of historical wounds in contemporary consciousness.
Creating an intricate web of signification that extends beyond musical illustration through its two expansive compositions, the album builds a complex network of meaning, one that acts as a bridge, connecting the scars of the past to the awareness of the present, exploring the emotional and physical landscapes of Japanese American incarceration during World War II.
Shiroishi’s approach is both reflective and forward-looking, his extended saxophone techniques giving a voice to memories buried under oblivion and written out of history via intentional erasure. The inclusion of Yumi Shimoda’s recitation of her own poem “The Dead Tree” adds a deeply personal layer—her voice is a beacon of truth, both a witness to suffering and a call to vigilance.
The album's tonal registers demonstrate remarkable restraint, allowing silence to function as an equal partner in the construction of meaning, an approach that echoes the Japanese concept of ma (間), but reimagines it through the lens of American experimental music traditions, resulting in an unstable territory between documentation and abstraction, much like the memories of incarceration themselves, which persist in both concrete historical detail and ghostly atmospheric remnants.
The careful placement of sounds within the stereo field creates an immersive environment that subtly evokes both the physical spaces of enforced displacement and the psychological territories of memory and loss.
The work's significance extends beyond its immediate historical context, acting as an evaluation of what might be termed the structuralism of exclusion - those spatial and social mechanisms through which state power manifests its ability to segregate, contain, and erase undesirable populations, revealing a connection to contemporary zones of exclusion, from detention centres to refugee camps, highlighting the persistent nature of state-sanctioned violence.
Shiroishi's compositional approach vibrates with an acute understanding of how sound can articulate political resistance without resorting to obvious signifiers or didactic gestures, exemplifying the rigorous intellectual and considered emotional work required to confront historical trauma.
This work's significance extends beyond its immediate cultural context to address broader questions about the role of experimental music in addressing historical trauma and sociopolitical consciousness. By avoiding both sentimental nostalgia and abstract detachment, Shiroishi creates a sonic space where past and present coexist in productive tension and function simultaneously as historical document, artistic statement, and political intervention.
Through its sophisticated handling of form and content, “Here” exemplifies how experimental music can engage with political and historical subjects while maintaining artistic integrity and avoiding reductive simplification. In doing so, it establishes itself as an essential document of contemporary American experimental music and a vital contribution to the ongoing process of historical reckoning and healing.
32. “Lost - For Annie” by Natalia Beylis
In “Lost - For Annie,”, Irish sound artist Natalia Beylis draws a delicate sonic map that traces the delicate outlines of presence and absence in County Leitrim’s ever-shifting landscape. Through her careful attention to the subtle transformations of the acoustic ecology, Beylis moves beyond the familiar boundaries of field recording. Her work becomes a quiet yet urgent reflection on the ways industrial agriculture reshapes rural spaces, offering not just a record of change but a call to listen deeply to the stories embedded in the land. Beylis’s soundscapes are both a witness and a voice, revealing the quiet resilience and fragility of places caught between what remains and what has been lost.
In the leading piece "Lost - For Annie," nineteen minutes unspool like a surveyor's litany of absence, where Beylis orchestrates an intricate counterpoint between authentic and synthetic pastoralism. The composition reveals itself as a pentimento of natural authenticity and artificial reconstruction, where field-captured avian choruses (recorded by the artist around her home and sampled from LPs released, ironically, by oil multinationals) interweave birdsong with its corporate-commissioned doppelgänger.
Crystallizing the paradox of mediated nature, this fabricated Eden dissolves into the piece's essential nucleus: the measured rhythm of solitary footsteps traversing deforested wastelands, their isolation magnified by the conspicuous silence of absent wings.
The composition pivots on this haunting minimalist sequence, each step resonating with the weight of ecological severance, until the piece transforms into a sonic mirror where wilderness encounters its technological simulacrum.
When birdsong finally returns, it manifests as digital phantoms—an uncanny echo chamber of natural sounds transformed through electronic alchemy, compelling listeners to glimpse their own complicity in nature's technological exile.
Through this phantasmagoric representation, Beylis crafts an elegiac meditation on environmental metamorphosis, where each sonic element serves as a vestigial marker of humanity's estrangement from an increasingly absent natural world.
The inclusion of manipulated commercial recordings of birdsong alongside field recordings creates a complex commentary on the commodification of natural sounds and the role of corporate entities in both documenting and destroying environmental resources.
The album's second side comprises three interconnected pieces emerging from Beylis' collaboration with artists Laura Gallagher and Kate Murtagh Sheridan on "The Leitrim Sweathouse Project." These works excavate the archaeological and social history of County Leitrim's forgotten sweathouses, examining how these stone structures once served as nodes of community healing. "Interviews with Participants of The Leitrim Sweathouse Project" employs documentary techniques reminiscent of sound mapping methodologies, while the concluding piece, "The Roots of the Mountain Ash Embrace the Stone," deploys organ drones to reconstruct the experience of inhabiting these historical spaces.
Beylis' compositional methodology reveals a sophisticated understanding of how captured sound operates as both recording and intervention. Her work interrogates how acoustic environments serve as registers of social and ecological change, while simultaneously questioning the authenticity of processed sound itself.
The album's formal structure and conceptual rigour - moving from environmental documentation to historical investigation - suggests a broader thesis about the interconnectedness of ecological and social histories by demonstrating how sound art can function as a form of critical practice, one that moves beyond mere observation to confront questions of ecological justice, historical memory, and the role of art in social transformation, mainly by expressing a community response towards environmental change.
The album reasserts the possibility of creating work that is simultaneously politically engaged and aesthetically sophisticated, challenging listeners to reconsider their relationship to both natural and built environments while questioning the very categories through which we understand these distinctions.
33. “Takeaway Loops” by Gavin Vanaelst
In "Takeaway Loops," Belgian artist Gavin Vanaelst (aka DJ Charme) charts the invisible networks of digital labor by orchestrating a sonorous exegesis of late-capitalist spectral economies, rendering audible the silenced trajectories of invisible labor through intricate sonic exposure.
His archival intervention—conducted during his performative immersion as "brand ambassador" (courier) for the digital food delivery platform Takeaway —excavates subterranean acoustic strata from precarious production sites.
Gossamer piano resonances and electronic veils are meticulously layered, generating a dissonant score that deconstructs the embodied rhythms of gig-economy servitude. Each sonic fragment functions as a symptomatic trace, unveiling the spectral infrastructures that simultaneously accentuate and erase the corporeal vectors of contemporary labour exploitation.
Operating from his Antwerp space Aboli Bibelot—where exhibitions and performances coexist with folk art and historical furniture—Vanaelst brings a curator's sensitivity to the sonic assemblages of "Takeaway Loops", which marks his first release under his birth name, suggesting a more personal identity to the album’s concerns.
The album defines a dissonant topography that maps the overlapping zones where human kinetic energy overlaps with algorithmic capital. Vanaelst's acoustic forensics penetrate the hermetic sanctum of service economies, transforming mundane sonic detritus into a philosophical instrument that interrogates the metabolic exchanges between human physicality and technological abstraction.
His sonic text speaks of vibrational resistance, rendering perceptible the invisible choreographies of late-capitalist biotransformation, addressing the paradoxical invisibility of hypervisible labour.
Vanaelst's seven-part suite unearths the nocturnal phantasmagoria of urban transactional ecologies through an intricate survey of precarious embodiment. In "Falafel King," translucent keyboard fragments levitate above the resonant whirring of commercial refrigerative apparatus—a playful acoustic terrain where thermodynamic entropy pirouettes with culinary micropolitical choreographies.
"Dunkin' Donuts" sets modernist piano gestures against the mechanical sedimentations of late-capitalist consumer noise, transforming quotidian acoustic environments into a whispered meditation on the unseen architectures of sensory inscription.
The bright orange uniforms of Takeaway workers serve as high-visibility markers of social stratification, their presence simultaneously announcing and effacing the experiential infrastructure and affective territories of digital convenience—the cold winters, rain-slicked streets, and concrete heat that define the courier's lived experience.
The elongated centerpiece, "Searching for Kentucky Fried Chicken at Wijnegem Shopping Center," materializes as dream-logic wandering through the neural networks of retail consciousness. Its extended acoustic topology performs a symphonic vivisection of navigational grammar, tracing infinite circumambulations that expose the porous boundaries between human experience and the digital atlas upon which our existence is superimposed.
Vanaelst's acoustic manuscript emerges as a quantum codex: a resonant compendium that transfigures ephemeral spatial experiences into a symphonic critique of metabolic consciousness. The sparse communications between couriers and customers—complaints about warm Coke and misplaced French fries—become sonic artefacts that reveal larger patterns of social organization. By orchestrating sonic frequencies that oscillate between microscopic granularities and macroscopic philosophical gestures, the music spans a nuanced spectrum of sonic frequencies transmitted across the invisible geometries of late-capitalist spatial experience.
Belonging to a tradition of sonic investigation that reveals the hidden mechanics of contemporary life, simultaneously functioning as musique concrète and social critique, the album's power lies in its complex meditation on the spaces between privilege and precarity, visibility and erasure, connection and isolation.
The addition of piano and electronics to field recordings transforms everyday sounds into a commentary on contemporary labor conditions, while maintaining an aesthetic sophistication that avoids patronizing didactisism and political sloganeering. "Takeaway Loops" thus stands as a crucial document of platform capitalism's reshaping of urban space and social relations, rendered in seven movements of evening blue touched with orange glare.
34. “A Trial of Distances” by Julien Demoulin
In the oppositional synergy of sound and silence, “A Trial of Distances” appears as a methodical scrutiny of acoustic relationships, where brass instrumentation becomes a luminous thread weaving through the interstitial spaces of resonance, memory, and technological artifice.
This is the fourth release by Brussels-based Frenchman Julien Demoulin on the discerning Athens-based Sound in Silence imprint. At the core of the album is an ambient triptych—crafted from the interplay of trumpet, trombone, and flugelhorn with synthesized textures— accompanied by three remixes and reworks by HTDC (How To Disappear Completely), .foundation and Zakè, with a total duration of 60 minutes
Undertaking a radical reimagining of musical space, dismantling conventional hierarchies of instrumental placement and sonic geography, the brass instruments act like melodic conduits and intricate vessels of acoustic inquiry, their resonant frequencies carving out auditory domains with a warmth that defies the aseptic precision of strings. Almost tactile in its immediacy, the soundscape is imbued with an anthropological vitality, exhaling, heaving, sighing and breathing like a living entity representing the corporeal essence of sound.
The tripartite structure of the suite suggests a deliberate, almost tectonic arrangement, each segment a distinct region of sonic lore. Eschewing linear progression, the compositions unfold as a rhizomatic web of interactions, where brass and synthesizer engage in a dialectic of spatial reconfiguration. Each instrument acts as a sovereign force, delineating auditory territories and renegotiating invisible boundaries, creating a dynamic interplay of tension and harmony.
The inclusion of remixes by HTDC, .foundation, and Zakè extends the album’s conceptual reach, transforming it into a distributed network of reinterpretations over a precisely calibrated expanse, allowing sonic phenomena to unfold with neither compression nor dissipation.
The friction between synthesizer and brass generates a compelling tension, engaging both parts in a symbiotic relationship, each deconstructing and reconstructing the other’s epistemological limits, presenting sound as a dynamic field of negotiation rather than a static medium.
The entirety of “A Trial of Distances” boldly amplifies musicological complexity, with each reinterpretation functioning as a critical commentary on the latent possibilities of the original tracks, together forming a constellation of sonic texts that reveals a multiverse of hidden dimensions.
35. “AM/FM USA” & 36. Steele, ND by Phil Geraldi
Released on casette a year ago by the Not Not Fun imprint, "AM/FM USA" by San Diego-based Phil Geraldi is a mesmerizing exploration of American broadcast frequencies and highway solitude. Through two extended compositions, this release transforms radio static, pedal steel guitar, and nocturnal cricket chirping into an immersive sonic narrative that bridges the gap between analog transmission and digital reproduction, envisioning a cosmic dimension to classic US rock music.
Drawing from his extensive background as both a mixed-media artist and an itinerant performer (notably in the cathode noise project Mystics in Bali), Geraldi's approach stems from over a decade of experimenting with AM/FM radios as source instruments further developing an aural aesthetic that he terms "truck stop concrète" - a distinctive fusion of highway melancholia and broadcast interference.
The compositions unfold with deliberate patience, allowing waves of static to fade in and out like passing headlights on a desert highway. Pedal steel phrases emerge through the electromagnetic haze, their mournful tones simultaneously evoking classic country music traditions and contemporary experimental ambient techniques. Geraldi uses these familiar elements to examine how broadcast technologies have simultaneously connected and isolated communities across America's vast distances.
"AM/FM USA" explores rural atmospherics through the understanding of radio as both medium and message. The static carries within it the smoke of dreams burning, their ashes traces of failed promises - universal connectivity fractured by geography, class, and infrastructure. When the pedal steel surfaces through the interference, it doesn't seek pastoral comfort but rather acknowledges the persistence of distance in an age of constant transmission.
Geraldi's varied experiences - from pool maintenance to apartment photography to long-distance courier work - inform the album's nuanced perspective on American spaces and their relationship to broadcast technology. The music captures those borderline moments at non-places like gas stations and truck stops where local radio signals begin to fade, creating unintentional compositions from overlapping frequencies and atmospheric interference.
“Steele, ND”, Geraldi’s follow-up album just released on Make Believe DIY, explores an even more marginal cosmology of the same transient universe, “an alternate exit taken, an extended pause at a nondescript rest stop, golden dusk stretching through weeds and chain-link fence, footsteps in a concrete bathroom, liquid radio swirling”
Discussions of "ambient Americana" are inevitable, yet the music resonates beyond simple genre classifications. Rather than merely combining ambient textures with traditional American instruments, Geraldi examines how radio waves themselves have shaped territorial consciousness and cultural memory. The cricket stridulations that sizzle persistently throughout the pieces serve as organic counterpoints to the electromagnetic spectrum, highlighting the sonic alliteration between natural rhythms and technological mediation.
Both records succeed by avoiding not only rural romanticism but also eschewing urban cynicism, presenting instead, in almost documentary realism, an American soundscape as it exists now: fragmented by technology, haunted by history, yet still capable of producing moments of unexpected lyrical beauty, a pastoral symphony exalting the physical sensation of highway travel accompanied by the psychological space of broadcast isolation.
As static waves crest and recede, carrying fragments of signals from distant towers, we're reminded of how thoroughly broadcast technologies have altered our relationship to distance, locality, and presence.
Neither the pedal steel's plaintive tones nor the miniature snowstorms of white noise seek to escape this reality but rather find new meanings within it, acknowledging both the losses and possibilities created by our mediated aural landscape, even as it is projected onto a transient expanse of nowhere in particular.
38. “The Butterfly Drinks The Tears Of The Tortoise” by CS + Kreme
In a simultaneously uchronic and hyper-modern realm where ancient cadences yield to the intricate designs of high-tech ingenuity, CS + Kreme’s “The Butterfly Drinks The Tears Of The Tortoise” unfolds as an enigmatic fable—a whispered riddle emerging from Melbourne’s nocturnal rituals. Born of Conrad Standish and Sam Karmel’s after-hours experiments, the record inhabits a universe where the organic and the engineered converse in hushed tones.
Acoustic murmurs and digital reverberations intertwine, each sound a delicate inscription that blurs the intentions separating creation and contrivance. Guitars speak in subtle constellations, their plucked notes a quiet incantation to shifting horizons, while percussive elements and synthetic echoes trace a choreography of intricate abandon.
Disparate but measured voices exchange an accidental lexicon of glitches and resonances that reimagine both language and sound. Within this workshop of exceptional sentiments, each instrument concedes to an unexpected metamorphosis, embroidering patterns of fragile intimacies onto the fabric of a world reconstituted.
Every note seems to negotiate a fraught passage between conception and invention, echoing the album’s curious title—an impossible tableau where delicate creatures sate their thirst with second-hand sentiments. Mechanical precision and vanishing simplicity chart a subtle course through elusive, luminous paths, where time-worn incantations find new forms as they merge organic warmth with digital coolness. Here, in the hazy entwining of tones, one senses the hand of chance orchestrating a delicate balance between the known and the unknown—a narrative where every vibration is both a homage to tradition and an incantation of future possibility.
The record opens a view onto the twilight of opportunities, seen through a window left ajar towards the realm of possibility, at a time suspended between waning certainties and emerging potentialities, a gentle unveiling of contemplation about what might be—the soft murmur of an interior search for the substratum of invention within. The layered textures of sound, echo like a delicate conversation between shadow and light, channelling an expectant dusk imbued with the soft promise of starlight yet to be born.
The morning of regardless is soon to follow after yet another night is conquered by a defiant dawn, when the restraints of anticipation will dissolve into a fluid, unbound state, greeting the day with a brazen, spontaneous flourish—a moment when the natural order is revealed by the ephemeral glow of solar indiscretion.
Aberrant beats and dissonant chords carry an undercurrent of abandon as if daring the listener to embrace the unfiltered radiance of possibility irrespective of premeditation, basking in the raw energy of an emerging day that is, by its very nature, unbound by the weight of expectation.
Like a succession of miracles by appointment, the extraordinary music arrives in measured, almost ritualistic intervals. Within the framework of CS + Kreme’s creation, each musical gesture seems to be meticulously timed—a heartbeat punctuating the silence, a spectral note that appears as if summoned for a singular, intentional encounter. The album, in its measured yet unpredictable progression, insists on the fact that wonder is not an accident but a deliberate encounter, a planned anomaly within the flow of time. These moments, carefully sequenced like a series of clandestine rendezvous between irrelevant universes, are the deliberate offspring of a careful, almost metaphysical scheduling of chance and necessity.
There is a resonance here with the quiet despair of lost certainties and the soft exultation of new beginnings, a landscape where potentialities lie latent, ready to spring forth with every fading note being a precursor to something unforeseen. In the synchronicity between infinite ephemerality and the eternal now, CS + Kreme capture the essence of moments that are both transient and deeply significant, where the boundaries between what is remembered and what is yet to be experienced blur into a single continuum, echoing the paradox of a universe that is at once meticulously ordered and chaotically vibrant.
The record’s instrumentation, whether it be the murmuring guitar lines or the undulating pulse of synthesized rhythms, maps an inner geography where sound waves mimic the flow of thought, the fleeting encounters of notes imbued with the gravity of revelations, embracing willingly both the familiar and the enigmatic.
The evolution of sound on this record is marked by moments of subtle wonder—instances where the unexpected is welcomed with a knowing smile, recognized not as aberrations but as essential, decisive inflexions.
A discourse on the aleatory nature of possibility, the seductive inevitability of change, and the scheduled wonder of life's unanticipated turns, the music speaks of a twilight that suborns a fertile union of individual dreams and multiple realities, where each opportunity is both an end and a beginning. In every pregnant pause, in every carefully measured echo, CS + Kreme remind us that miracles, in their quiet persistence, arrive as destined encounters that transform the mundane into the extraordinary.
In this way, the album commemorates the reservoir of futurities that awaits our acknowledgment. It calls us to listen with a heart attuned to the delicate murmur of the universe, to perceive the art in the unavoidable, and to embrace the scheduled wonders that punctuate our passage through time. Here, in the gentle interregnum of sound and silence, CS + Kreme have composed a prelude to the miraculous.
39. “lacuna and parlor” by more eaze
Mari Maurice’s “lacuna and parlor”, released under the moniker more eaze, is a luminous artifact that exists at the confluence of sonic abstraction and the tactile immediacy of sound, where academic rigor, the serendipity of field recordings, and the alchemy of digital processing are in the service of a singular aesthetic vision.
Across its seven tracks, Maurice orchestrates a delicate interplay of harmonic deconstruction and reassembly, stretching tonal progressions into elongated arcs while excising key tonal anchors, crafting absences that resonate as deliberate, structural voids. The acoustics of physical environments are captured and transmuted into active compositional agents: room tones, the idiosyncratic tics of each instrument (an audible pluck, a felt-covered piano key, environmental whispers, and the resonant qualities of space itself become elements of sonic meteorology as unpredictable as any weather.
The dialectic between dominion and contingency conjures a cerebral expedition into the essence of sound itself, as the demarcations between the meticulously orchestrated and the serendipitously discovered remain in a constant state of fluidity and metamorphosis.
Maurice’s trajectory—from the experimental enclaves of Austin to the avant-garde ferment of New York City—imbues the album with a distinctly American sensibility, albeit one that interrogates and reconfigures its cultural inheritances. Her collaborations with figures like Claire Rousay and Lomelda infuse the work with a collective memory, a shared sonic vernacular that is both intimate and expansive.
The album’s engagement with the detritus of Americana—its fractured melodies, its post-rock echoes, its computerized distortions, its broken Appalachian fiddle strokes—suggests a reimagining of tradition through the lens of technological innovation, a dialogue between the organic and the synthetic that is as much about cultural critique as it is about sonic exploration.
The elaborate, psychedelic textural richness of “lacuna and parlour” is perhaps its most seductive feature. Bowed swells and tremulous slide guitar intermingle with processed soundscapes, creating a dialogue that questions the very foundations of musical structure, by including what Maurice calls “incidental recordings”—fragments of chance encounters with the environment until the boundaries between the intentional and the accidental are perpetually blurred.
At its core, the album is a meditation on the elasticity of elongated harmonic progressions, whose extended duration suspends traditional temporal expectations, being both immersive and disorienting, simultaneously glacially elegiac and recurrently episodic. Time becomes malleable, a medium through which the audience navigates perception as it is continually reshaped by the unfolding sonic narrative.
Exotic and enchanting in equal measure, the aesthetic temperature of the sonic micro-climate remains balmy and welcoming, its fragrant airiness a fortuitous result of meticulous construction and lively serendipity, a testament to Maurice’s ability to balance intention with spontaneity, transforming the identity of listening into a generative process of acoustic geographies, where the physical properties of sound-producing environments become integral to the work’s imagination.
40. “Dew Point Harmonics” by Luke Sanger
Luke Sanger’s latest album “Dew Point Harmonics” slips into the air like a thought half-formed, a chinese whisper that lingers on the edge of comprehension, neither fully grasped nor entirely misheard. It is not an album that announces itself with fanfare or clamor, but one that emerges as if from the folds of a dream, where sound and silence conspire in a delicate, unspoken pact negotiated the protective secrecy of a language older than words, each one a cipher for something just beyond reach—a memory, perhaps, or a premonition, caught in the act of becoming.
The opening strains of softly crashing waves and resonating singing bowl vibrations call the audience to attention like the first faint light that seeps through a crack in a shuttered room, announcing not only the dawn of a new day but also quietly revealing that which has always been there, waiting to be noticed.
Time does not march but meanders, as the music glides serenely, moving with the patience of a hand turning the brittle pages of an ancient book, each note a glyph etched in a script long forgotten, tracing the contours of thought too intricate to be spoken aloud.
Produced with an inventive array of obscure electronic instruments, including Ciat-Lonbarde wooden analogue synthesizers and monome grids connected via custom-written norns script to Buchla Music Easel, the digital tones are precise, almost surgical in their clarity, while the organic elements breathe with a life that feels both ancient and immediate. Together, they create a landscape that is neither wholly real nor entirely imagined—a place where shadows stretch and contract like living things, and reflections ripple across the surface of an unseen pool. It is a realm where the mechanical and the mystical intertwine, not in conflict but in a kind of quiet collaboration, as if each were the other’s echo.
In one passage, the music seems to sway like a pendulum suspended in a freeze-framed oscillation, its rhythm neither hurried nor languid but deliberately paused in momentary indecision. There is a tactile quality to the sound, as if it could be felt as well as heard, like the cool smoothness of a pebble rolling in the surf against its stony brethren, or like the metallic echoes of an ancient gong resonating through centuries of vibrating timelessness, a phenomenological paradox that the music does not seek to resolve but chooses to inhabit.
Sanger’s use of custom software is not a gimmick but a kind of alchemy, transforming the raw materials of sound into layers of texture and tone that are simultaneously charmingly decorative and structurally essential, each one adding depth and dimension to a sui-generis enunciation of music that resists easy categorization, refusing to be pinned down or explained, content instead to exist in the spaces between definitions.
As the album draws to a close, there is no grand crescendo, no final, triumphant chord. Instead, the music recedes like a tide, leaving behind only the faintest trace of its presence. It is a retreat, not into silence, but following dreams as they fade before awakening—a space where the echoes of what has been heard linger, like the afterimage of a flame that has just been extinguished. The effect is not one of finality but of continuation, as if the music were not ending but simply pausing, waiting for the right moment to begin again.
Sanger’s music is an invitation to step into a world of quiet, unassuming beauty, a world that is both familiar and strange, a world that is, in the end, our own.
41. “Pastoral Stills From Every Age” by Liai
Like light scattered through crystal prisms, Liai’s “Pastoral Stills From Every Age” refracts time into its constituent wavelengths. Each composition appears as a mathematical theorem expressed in pure sound—precise yet inscrutable, evoking the quantized states of subatomic particles, existing simultaneously in multiple harmonious configurations.
Importantly, 25% of Bandcamp sales go to Anera (American Near East Refugee Aid) to help provide food and medical supplies to civilians in the besieged Gaza Strip and an additional 25% goes to Love Wins NYC Food Pantry, a queer-led food distribution organization providing for communities in & around Jackson Heights, Harlem, The Bronx and Brooklyn.
The album opens with a contemplation of vastness, where sustained tones stretch like theoretical strings across the dimensional planes of a modernist electroacoustic context. These frequencies speak in languages borrowed from celestial bodies—the mathematics of orbital resonance translated into pure vibration.
Through careful permutation, rhythmic elements become coordinates of non-Euclidean musical vectors. Each beat pinpoints new topological coördinates, creating curved geometries of spherical sound that challenge the inherited understanding of sequential progression, suggesting an alternative physics—one where causality flows in multiple directions, where each sonic possibility contains within itself infinite potential variations.
Melodic elements surface like thought experiments in musical calculations. A single phrase might split into quantum superpositions, existing simultaneously as both wave and particle, resisting conventional harmonic resolution, preferring instead to occupy indeterminate states of perpetual division, like Zeno's Achilles paradox expressed in pure frequency.
The electronic signals here function as cryptographic codes, each burst of synthesis carrying embedded within it the ghost of an analog source: Voltage-controlled oscillators trace paths through probability clouds of possible timbres, filters carve away at white noise, suggesting a compositional set theory, each element existing in precise relation to every other, creating networks of significance
In its final moments, "Pastoral Stills From Every Age" achieves a state analogous to quantum entanglement, simultaneously replicating itself in various space-time configurations, thus demanding a new epistemology of listening—one that reconceptualizes our relationship to music by introducing a new axiom in the language of pure sound—a proposition that, once stated, fundamentally alters the premises upon which it was built, suggesting that the distance between mathematical truth and aesthetic beauty may be no distance at all.
42. “Spring at Home” by Saapato
In the cool embrace of an April twilight near a modest pond in rural Milan, New York, Saapato records "Spring at Home" as a quiet encounter between nature’s unscripted tones and an artful recalibration of sound. A solitary, unaltered capture of the evening’s rural chorus—the crisp calls of frogs, the measured cadence of distant urban humming, the discreet interjections of birds—serves as a foundation upon which electronic gestures offer their own delicate refrains.
Saapato is the music project of upstate NY based sound artist Brendan Principato. His work focuses on the intersection of ecology and music, using a distinct blend of manipulated field recordings and lush electronic soundscapes to encourage reconsidering our place within nature. With each ambient release he puts out he donates to different organizations that feel aligned to the album and/or the headspace he was in while making it.
The natural world speaks with unvarnished simplicity through “Spring at Home”, its irregularities acknowledged rather than polished, as a modest array of synthesizers gently recalibrate each tone into a new, contemplative phrase—among them a Roland Juno 60, a Moog Little Phatty, and a Korg Polysix—along with nuanced tools such as Soundtoys, Valhalla, and guitar pedals like Strymon NightSky and EarthQuaker Devices Avalanche Run.
The 45-minute work favors an understated collaboration: the intrinsic cadence of environmental immersion intermingling with the careful inflection of modern circuitry. In this refined confluence, every natural intonation—every spontaneous note born of the countryside—is treated with an honest deference, its character neither overshadowed nor appropriated but allowed to converse quietly with its synthesized counterpart, balancing pastoral reality and thoughtful invention.
There is a rare calm in this measured interplay, a mutual understanding that speaks as eloquently as any composed correspondence. "Spring at Home" does not command attention with grand declarations; rather, Saapato offers a reflective pause, a measured whisper of nature’s own accumulative acoustics recalibrated through human craftsmanship.
In this modest reordering of an evening’s delicate sounds, one perceives a gentle accord of technology with the wild —a reminder that even in a world increasingly shaped by instruments and machines, the unadorned pulse of the natural world remains an enduring, quietly eloquent presence.
43, “Exodus” by NEXCYIA
"Exodus" by Nexcyia is a mnemomic patcwork of delicate sensitivity, its fragile segments frayed like forgotten echoes and reborn whispers, stitching together the faded edges of a family’s pilgrimage from the quietude of Bryan, Texas, to the kaleidoscopic hum of Los Angeles in the 1960s.
Here, NEXCYIA (AKA Adam Dove, a Paris-born, ex-American sound artist, and experimental ambient musician, today based in Berlin), conjures a living archive, where the clang of discarded metal and the erratic buzz of broken wires are transmuted into a language of personal remembrance, each memory fragment a sigil of reinvention.
The album breathes like a city at dusk, its rhythms neither tethered to chronology nor aspiring to narrative, but drifting instead between the brittle sighs of lambent recollection and luminous pulse of renewal. Voices, fractured and fleeting, rise from the static-like apparitions, their murmurs both elegy and anthem, a quiet rebellion against the erasures of time.
At its core, "Exodus" is anchored by a confession, tender and unadorned: “My heart and soul. I wouldn’t exist if he didn’t move his family to LA in the 60s.” This utterance, raw and unvarnished, becomes the album’s beating heart, a bridge between the abstract and the achingly personal. Nexcyia’s work is a reimagining of absence, unfolding like a map of intersecting highways, each note a mile marker, each silence a horizon.
It is an earnest yet intriguing testament to the quiet tenacity of those who carve new identities from the shifting sands of place and time, their stories of movement across space and time, both remembered and recorded, imagined and captured, evidential and circumstantial, etched for infinity not in stone but rather in the ephemeral, yet ever present, vibrations of air and wire.
In "Exodus," the past is not an ossified relic but a living current, flowing through the present, reshaping it with every ripple.
44. “Corker Conboy X Purelink” by Corker Conboy
Reclaiming the spirit of "In Light Of That Learnt Later", the seminal 2003 album by the 00s post-rock/electronic duo of (Adrian) Corker and (Paul) Conboy, "Corker Conboy X Purelink" is a reawakening draped with the deliberate elegance of remix culture, cloaked in a cascade of diaphanous veils, each one tenuously insinuating the familiar while hinting at its disappearance and stirring an elusive desire that hovers at the threshold of perception.
The record assembles an interplay of influences—post‐rock expansiveness, dub’s resonant intricacies, Afro–Brazilian pulses, and the spontaneous turn of jazz—each motif emerging in a manner both measured and mysterious as if the notes themselves were engaged in a quiet discourse with their own hidden potential.
In a refined collaboration, the New York ensemble Purelink dissects and reframes the work with subtle precision, their intervention on a limited 12‑inch format a paradoxical exercise in revealing its methods of gentle concealment. Their approach is less an overt reinvention than a careful excavation, unearthing echoes of the original that shimmer through layers of deliberate obscurity.
Meanwhile, the creators, known only through rare live recitations, fleeting street impressions, and the near-imperceptible traces of their digital presence, allow their music to speak in an eloquent silence—a silence that is amplified by the curators at Bad Info, who restore its clarity while nurturing its quiet complexity.
In this rearticulated state, "Corker Conboy X Purelink" is a dynamic testament to the art of transformation, where each translucent nuance invites reflection upon the allure of surfaces and the magnetic pull of disappearance.
45. “M32” by Silv-o
London based Silv-o inaugurates a novel discourse in fractured urban beats and synthetic post-rave textures with his debut "M32" EP, an assemblage where glitch, dubstep, jungle, and ambient murmurs converge with unconventional insistence.
A shifting panorama of sonic impressions that defies the expectations of linear order, the detailed sound crafting interlaces with digital ingenuity, yielding a complex artificiality that is as enigmatically abstract as it is deliberately contemporary.
"It Iz" drifts into a realm of reflective abstraction, its delicate synths defocusing their sonic environment like refracted light filtered through the rain-streaked windows of a night bus passing through a blurred urban landscape on the way home from mid-week clubbing.
Here, sound assumes the quality of a fragile illumination—a remembrance of a vision never fully perceived—imbuing the listener with an ineffable sense of absence rather than consolation. Further along, in "Tryin 2," hesitant percussions stumble like tentative steps upon slippery stone, while soft layers of synthesized hues diffuse an uncertain monologue. Silv-o’s voice, reformed through digital alchemy, offers murmured intonations that oscillate between earnest striving and quiet resignation. The beat arrives not as a commanding pronouncement but as a subtle, deferred presence, suggesting the persistence of a rhythm that negotiates its own elusiveness.
The eponymous "M32" then articulates a paradoxical urgency; percussive accents echo with the stuttering menace of flickering neon, while distorted voices waver in quiet ambiguity, each element advancing in measured bursts that refuse to commit to a singular direction. Finally, "Blues" settles with a measured cadence, its sparse rhythm prodding the pitch-shifted echoes of highly processed vocal samples, their unintelligible babbling drifting through the sonic expanse like fragments of a whispered exchange, leaving behind a subtle impression of yearning that defies precise articulation.
Throughout the record, Silv-o crafts a reflective panorama—a series of sonic vignettes that resist conventional narrative or categorical confinement. Each moving part machinates its own delicate tension, a constellation of impulses that speak to an urban sensibility both intimate and detached. In this work, the city itself becomes an uncharted script, rendered in shifting shades and fleeting sounds, a vision as quietly assertive as it is mysteriously undefined.
46. “We Are Numbers” by LYS
In "We Are Numbers," an album by LYS—yet another nom-de-plume of the hyper-prolific Lorenzo Bracaloni, who also assumes the guises of The Child of A Creek and Fallen—the listener is seduced by an eclectic pluralism of references evoking an erudite connoiseurship that spans many aspects of chill out music: Balearic ambient sunset set sumptuousness, alternative electronica reminiscent of the cinematic moodiness pioneered by ’90s legends like the proto-hauntological Boards of Canada and the micro scene of rural English post-rave “intelligent” dance music, as well as darker trip-hop breakbeats, nocturnal Kosmische synthscapes and deep dub reverberations.
This record, released through Intellitronic Bubble, is an articulate reordering of deliberate sound design, where each carefully curated phrase and measured vibration speaks with a quiet yet insistent clarity, as faithful to its origins as a recognizable sonic artefact as it is independently authentic in its present recontextualization. Every note and interval is rendered with the precision of a handwritten instruction, a testament to the artist’s contemplation of the interplay between stylistic appraisal and the inherent measure of each genre.
The album’s title, "We Are Numbers," immediately suggests a meditation on the delicate balance between the individual and the collective, the personal and the quantified. Bracaloni’s choice to articulate his vision under the alias LYS introduces a layer of enigma, a conscious separation from any singular, conventional identity. This multiplicity of names and personas—Child of A Creek, Fallen, LYS—evokes a spirit of transformation as if each title serves as a discrete equation, a variable in a larger, ever-shifting formula of creative output.
The music that follows each iteration is equally nuanced, its content a careful calculation of contrasts, where measured calm collides with moments of unexpected urgency, each sonic fragment placed with deliberate regard to both form and the ineffable nature of all artistic inquiry.
From the first echoing keyboard notes to the final resonant tones, "We Are Numbers" boasts an elegant, restrained sound, fashioned with almost mathematical precision, imbued with a spirit that both reflects on and reinvents the legacy of earlier electronic innovations.
The spirit of pioneering experiments in electronic music finds itself recast into an intimate aesthetic ontology—a language of calibrated sophistication that speaks not in grand declarations but in the soft pace of its own internal modulations. The record negotiates a shifting terrain where influences merge with an inherent impulse towards harmony, resulting in a series of sonic equations that are as decorative as they are considered to their last detail.
Within these deliberate configurations, each segment of the record appears as a discrete proposition, a carefully considered variable within a larger, complex filigree of fractal arabesques. There is a measured confluence between moments of reflective silence and instants when sound affirms itself with a vibrant self-assurance. The album formulates its own syntax, an arithmetic of rhythms and harmonies that encourages a rethinking of the usual metrics by which we assess ambient chill out music even at its prettiest, least challenging enunciation.
In this recalculation of form, Bracaloni reveals a restless intellectual curiosity—an endeavour to rearrange the priorities, hierarchies and value systems of what constitutes contemporary electronica. The interactivity of minute adjustments next to incisive bursts of tone cultivates a sense that these arrangements are as much the product of rigorous thought as they are of a spontaneous poetic license. In this sense, "We Are Numbers" and its precise ordering of sounds, recalls a taxonomical reëxamination of how various strands of electronica can coalesce into a coherent stream of musical consciousness, simultaneously free-flowing, crystalline and unpredictable.
Throughout its course, the album demonstrates a delicate resilience against formalism—a willingness to oscillate between contrasting states without capitulating to a specific script. Each segment flows into the next with the kind of precision that suggests an underlying discipline, yet it is also steeped in an artistry that resists straightforward calculation, at once exacting and suffused with a reflective, almost enigmatic warmth, speaking with understated authority, offering a reimagined dialogue between past genre constraints and their mutant potentialities.
Ultimately, "We Are Numbers" is about the power of redefinition—a quiet yet unwavering assertion that music, in its most deliberate forms, can capture both the measure of our individual experiences, that is the authenticity of individual artistic expression but also cultivate an appreciation for the shared, unspoken language of our common affinities.
Through the pluralistic voice of LYS, at once cerebral and sensual, alert and relaxed, otherworldly and comforting, Lorenzo Bracaloni challenges the listener to attempt a careful dissection of form and feeling that reconsiders how we might understand the enigmatic language of music.
47. ”Space As An Instrument” by Félicia Atkinson
Félicia Atkinson’s "Space As An Instrument" is a statement of composed defiance against the tyranny of fixed viewpoints, dissolving the narrow confines that separate the intimate from the boundless.
An arrangement of subtle junctures where sonic reflections and their telling absence converge into an experience of attentive listening, over 38 minutes, the piano acts as an unerring guide, its quivering phrases recalling tentative flares in a distant firmament, while digital murmurs and atmospheric intonations conspire to obscure the once-clear boundary between perception and sensation.
By employing mobile phone microphones that rest like inquisitive archivists in forgotten alcoves, Atkinson transforms the very space of recording into a willing collaborator—a presence that perpetually rearranges the sound as it captures it.
The work’s centerpiece, "Thinking Iceberg," surfaces like an arctic reverie—a condensation of time into a form that is both expansive and evanescent, monumental and pristine, fragile and immense. Synthesizers pulse with a muted resonance that hints at the hush of frost-bound landscapes, while hydrophones apprehend water’s cryptic lexicon, articulating each barely recognizable syllable in a cool, measured accent.
Atkinson’s voice, scarcely audible yet insistently intimate, meanders through this world of sound as a delicate trace of memory—an understudy for the subtle imprint of human presence amid an enduring chronicle of ages. Here, the piano oscillates between a steadfast marker and a gentle echo, its recurring phrases forging a tenuous link that unsettles our certainties with every repetition.
At the heart of the music lies a rejection of absolutes. The acoustic and digital keys engage in a refined duet—aural silhouettes that converge and diverge like transient spirits caught in a shifting glow. In their interplay, the composition evades easy definition, slipping away like a dream that defies comprehension. Even the softest aural accents—a slight creak of a chair, the muted rustle of air—are accorded their measured prominence, each discreetly carrying its own understated grace.
In its entirety, "Space As An Instrument" reconfigures the static idea of presence in order to reveal its essence as a fleeting phenomenon that inhabites, albeit elusively, even the most quiet of enclaves, prompting a reconsideration of our convictions amid the relentless pulse of life, encouraging a sustained embrace of uncertainty and attentive wonder that asks us simply to be.
48. “False 01” by Zero Key
"False 01” by Zero Key AKA Izaak Schlossman is the debut release on False Aralia, a new Los Angeles-based imprint founded by Peak Oil label co-founder and music producer Brian Foote.
Kintsugi house is my term for beats that seem glued together from fragments of samples broken to unrecognizable shards and reconfigured to gold-veined augmentations of their formerly intact state, now further decorated with a precious, delicate, poetic intervention.
In this context, the skipping beats, bouncing on an anomalous surface of snatched sonic snippets and buoyed aloft by floating synth pads and windswept traces of distant vocals, could be said to be a radical evolution of the grainy microhouse vignettes pioneered by Matthew Herbert in his turn-of-the-century era, their affinity being a shared aesthetic of urban music constructed from the sonic detritus of club music: the percussion hovers in quantum suspension, neither fully materialized nor entirely absent—a conundrum rendered in sound; the distorted hiss of a high-hat punctuates the absent rhythm of a deleted kick drum track; the persistent time signatures come in and out of focus as if one is listening to a dancefloor mix through a single earphone; the distant swells of euphoric build-ups are heard fleetingly as if while driving by an open air nightclub; the deracinated vocal stutters, hums, sighs, interjections and exclamations are distorted beyond any linguistic recognition.
This is club music that thinks in riddles and speaks in dreams, music whose intelligence lies in its beautiful uncertainties, music that splits perception into its component mysteries. Schlossman cultivates his digital garden of frequencies with the patience of an astronomer mapping unknown stars, allowing rhythms their freedom to scatter like seeds in the wind. "Zero Key" exists in the space where questions become more valuable than answers, and every listening reveals new constellations in its thoughtful sky.
Each track opens like a book whose pages rearrange themselves between readings, offering new narratives with every encounter. The four iterations of "Zero Key" function as philosophical propositions, each one questioning the assumptions of the last. Melodies appear as brief theorems before dissolving into new hypotheses of rhythm and tone.
49. “Greed Gave Me A Lily” by Ike Zwanikken
In "Greed Gave Me A Lily," Melbourne-based Ike Zwanikken conjures a world where sound breathes with the quiet urgency of a question left unanswered. The album is a restless expanse of echoing electronic undercurrents, merging into an alchemical exploration of what it means to listen in an age where the digital and the tangible blur into one another.
In the second track, "Cain," a plaintive voice drifts like a shadow across a crepuscular threshold, neither fully here nor entirely gone, a spectral utterance exclaiming fragments of thought hovering at the edge of perception, commemorating the untimely moment when observation ends and the imagined begins, occupying the differential territory that separates what is heard from what is felt.
In the title track, "Greed Gave Me A Lily, Peace Gave Me No Chance," fragile vocal threads weave through a subterranean hum, creating a tension that is both unsettling and mesmerizing. This is not music that seeks to comfort or explain; it thrives in the space between contradictions, where beauty and unease coexist, the sonic equivalence of unruly vegetation sprouting from the cracks of abandoned industrial buildings, the hulking cement forms overtaken by the verdant glimmer of leaves rustling beyond the jurisdiction of architectural planning, asserting the dominance of unobserved, parallel, non-anthropocentric ecosystems.
The bass frequencies rumble like distant thunder, while the vocals shimmer like light on rain puddles, each element pulling against the other in a delicate balance. Zwanikken’s background as a mastering engineer is evident in the album’s deliquescent volatility, each composition feeling like an evaporating perfume, its notes forms shifting and evolving with each successive layer. A state of molecular liquidity is inherent in each sonic trace, as if the music exists in a state of perpetual flux, resisting scheduled rigidity for an act of constant negotiation.
"Greed Gave Me A Lily" does not shout but murmurs, operating within an aesthetic framework is not static; it pulses with a quiet vitality, its power lying in its restraint, like a flattering mirror, reflecting distortedly the complexities of our digital age without succumbing to its chaos. It is a work of quiet rebellion, a testament to the idea that music, at its best, is not a destination but a question—one that lingers long after the final note has faded.
50. “Archives 2024” by Various Artists
"Archives 2024" crystallizes a decade-long trajectory in experimental ambient music, marking the evolution of a label whose origins lie in the frustrations and creative possibilities inherent in contemporary music distribution systems. Founded in 2015 by Agustín Mena in Valencia, Archives emerged primarily as a platform for its founder's work (as Warmth / SVLBRD) but operated simultaneously as a response to systemic constraints within electronic music's publishing ecosystem - a deliberate intervention in what Mena perceived as an increasingly dysfunctional relationship between artists and traditional labels.
Mena's dual artistic identity informs the label's aesthetic coordinates, but more crucially shapes its organizational principles. His experience with the fractured logistics of music release schedules - where tracks languished unreleased or emerged altered beyond recognition - led to the Archives' founding principle: artistic autonomy coupled with curatorial precision.
This compilation thus serves as both documentation and manifesto, mapping the territory Archives has explored while suggesting future directions for experimental electronic music. It demonstrates how a label can maintain artistic integrity while navigating contemporary production and distribution systems, creating work that transcends genre limitations while fostering meaningful artistic development.
“Archives 2024” features an admirably cohesive and seamlessly continuous mix of elegant, harmonic and meditative sonic formations whose radiant splendour levitates like glowing clouds sailing across a brilliant sky, the luminous halo of their vaporous grace hovering above celestial choirs and orbiting distant galaxies, cumulatively amounting to a coherent aesthetic statement that runs continuously throughout the album, reflecting the label's distinctive philosophical positioning, which has consistently rejected the commodification of ambient music as functional sound.
Mena's approach privileges emotional resonance, seeking works that generate internal movement rather than mere acoustic pleasure, guiding the development of Archives over its first decade as a sustained critique of ambient music's commercialization. The label's output consistently challenges the reduction of atmospheric music to functional background sound.
51. “Atlas of Green” by Dialect
In "Atlas Of Green," Andrew PM Hunt—working under his Dialect moniker—casts aside realism to conjure magic by soundtracking an allegory where discarded devices and nature’s subtle murmurs conspire in a quiet, unexpected symphony.
Across a dozen intertwined pieces, a solitary young musician named Green wanders amid relics of past contraptions, devices, contrivances, and mechanisms, a future archaeologist meeting each fragment of this obsolete and forgotten apparatus with the unburdened curiosity of youth.
"New Sun," the opening piece, discloses a constellation of tones in which corroded cello strains yield to the gentle plucking of guitar, while electronic whispers and stray found sounds converge into harmonies that recast pastoral daydreaming into a quietly altered vision. In "Spiral Cartography" and "Overgrown Song," the soft call of whistling commingles with digital lullabies as nature and artificiality exchange quiet confidences. This delicate conversation finds its pivot in "Late Fragment," where processed vocal reverberations and the supple intonations of piano articulate a novel accord between distinct tonal substrate.
Compositions like "Green's Dream" and "Archaic Quarter Form" blend local murmurs with an air of expansive abstraction, transforming everyday sounds into visions that feel both intimately grounded and suggestively reimagined. In "Age & Rain" and the final track "Ancient Faith Radio," sparse percussion and a gentle guitar strum converge with distant transmissions, cherishing the inherent imperfections, each contributing a distinct impression to a collage of murmurs evoking histories both lived and conjured—the soft hiss of tape, the slight distortions of compressed digital signals, those errant pulses.
Far from yielding to abbreviated formalisms like a rustic idyll or speculative futurism, "Atlas Of Green" inhabits a realm of quiet ambivalence, its trembling contours defined by a perfect tension between acoustic folk insinuations reconfigured through electronic experimentation, a fragile union of yesterday and tomorrow achieved with graceful lightness.
In the gentle ebb and flow of motifs, the music intimates that recollections are continuously reassembled in the light of each new moment. Ultimately, the album enchants through its unpretentious resonance, a delicate affect that communicates directly and offers a measured reflection in an age where the past and present mingle in constant, uncharted conversation conducted under the surveillance of benevolent machines.
52. “Saana Sahel” by Colloboh
Colloboh’s *Saana Sahel* is a quiet defiance of expectations, a collection of sounds that sidesteps the predictable and settles into its own peculiar rhythm. Born in Nigeria and based in Los Angeles, Collins Oboh crafts an EP that feels less like a statement and more like a series of fleeting, luminous moments that are as much about adventurous texture as they cling to melodic priorities.
The opening notes of “Acid Sunrise” ripple gently, its cello-toned synths bending and stretching like shadows at dawn. There is no struggle here between the mechanical and the human, only a quiet conversation where jazz-inflected harmonies meet the hum of circuitry. It is not a song but a sigh, a breath held too long and finally released.
The stately affectations of “Pavane, Op.50” nod to the past without bowing to it, their Moog-inspired textures sounding like a reanimated ghost of electronic music’s history, but one that walks forward, not backwards. The collaboration with Mekala Session and Qu’ran Shaheed in “Mystic You” ushers a samba-inflected rhythm which gives way to the improvisational, free-jazz-inflected abandon of percussion bursts, brassy synth flourishes and ecstatic vocal ad-libbing.
In “Full Embrace,” Blankfor.ms’ piano patterns drift like smoke, while eye to eye’s vocals hover at the edge of perception, hinting at something softer, more intimate—a reverie that embraces the imperfection of even the most tender of emotional states. In “Arabesque No.1,” the music spirals outward, a delicate dance between the synthetic and the ethereal, as though the notes themselves are searching for something just beyond reach.
“Saana Sahel” is a map of an imagined world, a place of reconciliation where deserts meet coastlines and the boundaries between them blur into insignificance. Colloboh does not seek to pacify the tempest of these oppositional forces but lets them coexist, allowing them to formulate their own interactions.
Colloboh has crafted an album that feels both deeply personal and expansively universal, opening a window towards a musical world that invites us to listen closely, to lose ourselves in its sonic geography, and to find, perhaps, ourselves again in these borderless frontiers of equivocal marvel.
53. “Impromptu” by Julian Klaas
On Julian Klaas’s debut LP "Impromptu", the classically-trained German musician attempts a quiet rebellion against the tyranny of emotional absolutes, starting a whispered argument in praise of sentiments that exist between sadness and joy, their ambivalence unsung.
Improvising as he familiarized himself with an old Wurlitzer electronic piano, inherited from his sister, Klaas harnesses the instrument’s mechanical grace for something both fragile in its expression of mixed feelings and defiant in its sparse austerity. A dialogue about intimacy and loss can be eavesdropped between the precision of his melodic phrasing and the trembling impermanence of his compositional narrative.
Crystalline phrases arrive splintered, like vivid but disconnected images from half-remembered dreams, each track a fleeting impression of moments that slip through the fingers of recollection. In the opener "Island Theory," notes spiral outward, overlapping and hesitating, creating suspense along the flight path of their ascent and fractured return.
There is an insistence on the temporary, a refusal to let the ephemeral vanish entirely. Tape loops and glitches, those accidental scars of technology, are not polished away but embraced as placeholders for authenticity and evidence of process. Klaas’s violin training whispers through the compositions, not in grand gestures but in the careful balance of harmony and dissonance, augmenting the music in both deliberate and spontaneous ways, as though it were being discovered even as it is being made.
What emerges is not a grand “theory of everything” but a collection of small, luminous truths. "Impromptu" is a diary of the intermediate, the moments that precede memory—the quiet afternoons, the empty hallways, the spaces where nothing happens and everything lingers. Klaas dignifies these moments, signifying them with a subjective meaning that is both tender and unflinching.
"Impromptu" is an overheard conversation—with time, with memory, with the machines and machinations that both distance and connect us. It is a work of quiet audacity, a reminder that within impermanence there lies something worth preserving, found dormant yet dreaming in the faint murmurs humming between notes, a bittersweet indecisiveness bestowing a quantum of solace, whose comfort is meant to remain undefined, conveying a gloriously defeated serenity, like the elusive sigh of an evening sushed by falling snow.
54. “River Transmission” by TwoPine
In "River Transmission," TwoPine AKA Indiana-based Tayler File constructs an aqueous soundworld that simultaneously functions as environmental reportage, technological meditation, and hydrogeological archive. The album articulates a radical synthesis between electronic composition and river acoustics sourced from local field recordings, deploying an assemblage of acoustic guitar, OP1, and 8-bit synths to decode the Ohio River's complex soundscape.
The album's forty-minute duration maps TwoPine’s morning perambulations along Evansville's riverbanks, excavating layers of sound that span from the present moment back through ten millennia of Indigenous habitation.
In the work's architectural structure, individual compositions dissolve their boundaries, creating an uninterrupted flow that mirrors the river's own hydrogeological processes. The integration of environmental soundscapes recorded on-site establishes a complex mimetic interplay between electronic and organic sound materials. Particularly in "The Bottom & Resurface," avian vocalizations undergo an algorithmic transformation, transcribed as melodic shorthand that ignores distinctions between natural sounds and synthetic composition.
The technological apparatus employed - the portable synthesizers and recording equipment - functions as a translational interface, allowing for the amplification and transformation of typically imperceptible sonic phenomena. TwoPine's use of what appears to be zither, plucked cello, and shamisen alongside 8-bit electronics creates textural intersections where acoustic and digital elements achieve perfect equilibrium.
Within the broader repertoire of the excellent Aural Canyon label, "River Transmission" represents a significant advancement for the exploration of site-specific sound art, building upon the geographical investigations of his label mates Johnny Bell ("Field Trips") and Justin Sweatt (“North Texas Electric”).
Continuing to mine this vein of experimental interpretation that concentrates on metabolizing localized sonic lore, TwoPine's album expands the territories where ambient Americana becomes a medium for both environmental and historical documentation, manifesting both in the moment-to-moment details of the music and its broader philosophical implications.
The compositional methodology reflects a dialectical relationship between the artist and the environment, where the river becomes an active collaborator. As the liner notes suggest, "the river influenced the music, and the music reflected the river" - a reciprocal process of sonic transformation that generates new forms of acoustic knowledge from gurgling water, sibilant cicadas, afternoon breezes and birdsong, enhancing rather than corrupting the natural world's inherent musicality. This technological-natural synthesis achieves particular resonance in our current historical moment, offering what TwoPine describes as "a welcome refuge of calm and clarity in a chaotic time." (again, a quantum of solace)
Through its sophisticated approach to field recording integration, its deep engagement with questions of place and time, and its radical reconceptualization of electronic-environmental interaction, "River Transmission" opens new possibilities for environmental sound art while simultaneously suggesting new methodologies for documenting and interpreting the pastoral bliss that radiates from his chosen coördinates.
55. “Love Is Yes” by Love Is Yes
The dialectical relationship between elements in Love Is Yes's self-titled debut album reconstructs traditional notions of psychedelic folk, presenting a radical reconceptualization of how bucolic lyricism and a hazy electronic framework coalesce in a fragile ecosystem of aural enchantment. The Hague-based duo of Sander van der Toorn and Dax Niesten introduce new possibilities for folktronica, a fertile niche that has offered us many unexpected marvels of cross-pollinated hybridity.
The album's opening piece "What You See", a dreamy ballad whose lullaby-like sing-song floats by on a magic carpet ride of gently droning synths, their resonating timbre gliding in slow-motion, establishes an oneiric sonority that oscillates between diaphanous luminosity and deliberate obfuscation, setting forth the aural themes that reverberate throughout the album. Rather than simply juxtaposing stylistic signifiers, the work creates a synthetic space where Sander van der Toorn's careful sound design evokes the influence of Vashti Bunyan's unplugged intimacy and Morton Feldman's metric expansiveness, thus proposing a fundamental rewiring of the emotional and structural DNA immanent in both electronic and folk traditions.
"Cradle Song" and "Geluidsjager" exemplify a sophisticated approach to corroded samples and motorik guitar patterns that generate a haunted psychogeography, where memorable prophesies and prescient anticipations become indistinguishable.
This multiversal destabilization exists in a state of perpetual becoming, suggesting both the familiar and the novel, the comforting and the unsettling.
The album's sonic palette draws from an array of sources to illustrate euphoric vistas described through the filters of affectionate subjectivity, conjuring a fuzzy daydream of pastoral futurism, intimating stories about bucolic idylls complicated by an underlying current of displacement and technological mediation.
In the album's self-titled finale, "Love Is Yes," the duo achieves a remarkable consolidation of their various conceptual and aesthetic threads. The track functions as both a culmination and a new beginning, its structural austerity matching the sophistication of its emotional resonance. This minimalist approach reveals itself as a sturdy vessel for motivic sensitivity, where the repetition of a musical phrase serves to amplify rather than diminish the work's impact.
Through this debut, Love Is Yes establishes a distinctive artistic vocabulary that aligns with contemporary concerns about aesthetic perception, musical memory, and interpretative mediation while maintaining a deeply personal character, offerimg an inclusive vision of integration and technological synthesis.
56. “Forest Grimoire” by Andy Aquarius
The sylvan spells of "Forest Grimoire" by Andy Aquarius are the sonic equivalent of a philosopher’s stone, catalyzing an alchemical fusion of medieval mysticism and ecological consciousness. This mesmerizing collection of eight compositions, recorded in direct communion with arboreal spirits, represents a radical departure from contemporary music's commodified contextualizations, instead summoning apparitions that dissolve the conscious boundaries between instrumentalist, environment, and audience.
The opening piece, "Ein Vogellin," establishes a reflective serenity between gentle harp strumming and natural acoustics, where the resonating timbre of plucked strings becomes a nature sanctuary filled with avian counterpoint. This Arcadian idyll is continued in tracks like "Sylvarum Sylva" and "I Allen Tymae," where harp techniques imply sonic metaphors for ecological interconnectedness, each note becoming indistinguishable from the rustling leaves and windborne whispers that encompass it.
"Forest Grimoire" features a timeless improvisational flair through the incorporation of medieval Minnesang traditions, particularly evident in its engagement with ancient magical pedagogies while simultaneously subverting them – this grimoire's spells are cast not through arcane inscriptions but through the spontaneous orchestration of natural phenomena with stringed resonance.
In "Reverdie," a cascading arpège mirrors a cyclical sensibility that exists in defiant opposition to the accelerated linearity of modern existence, keeping the rhythm of an 'ecological time' where duration is measured by bird calls, seasonal recurrence and wind patterns rather than metronomes or digital clocks. "Draumkvedet" explores an unmediated acoustic space where the forest's sonic palette becomes an equal collaborator, asserting a philosophical rejection of digital audio's tendency toward temporal compression and spatial artifice.
Aquarius demonstrates a holistic immersion in natural frequencies that transcends mere technical virtuosity, achieving a state of deep emotional resonance where the distinction between poetic artistry and the natural world becomes philosophically untenable. Fittingly, the album's theoretical framework draws upon animist traditions while simultaneously engaging with contemporary discussions about environmental sound art and acoustic ecology. This synthesis creates a work that functions simultaneously as musical performance, environmental documentation, and spiritual practice.
The album's incorporation of medieval German poetic traditions, exemplified by the inclusion in the liner notes of a verse about life being an imaginary dream by Walther von der Vogelweide, provides a historical framework that amplifies its contemporary relevance. These medieval influences frame the music not just as aesthetic choices but as ontological interrogations that question dichotomies between human creativity and natural processes, culture and nature, composition and improvisation, performer and environment.
"Forest Grimoire" ultimately presents itself as a radical reimagining of what contemporary experimental music can achieve when it abandons the confines of traditional performance spaces and recording methodologies. By situating itself within the paradisical acoustics of a forest setting, the album is a sonic document that transcends simple categorization as either environmental recording or musical performance. Instead, it establishes itself as a revolutionary text that demands new modes of listening and environmental engagement, inspiring alternative modalities for human-nature interactions in an age of ecological crisis and defining an artistic mentality in favor of organic, environmentally-embedded modes of creation.
Through its alluring fusion of medieval mysticism, environmental consciousness, and experimental music practices, "Forest Grimoire" charts new territories in contemporary composition while simultaneously directing us towards ancient pathways as emergency exits from our current ecological predicaments.
57. “A gentle death / a sudden birth” by Blessed are the Hearts that Bend
In the quiet folds of the Essex countryside, where the rustle of leaves meets the distant groan of trains, Blessed Are the Hearts That Bend AKA English film director and musician Luke Seomore improvised, in a frenzy of inspiration barely lasting an hour, all the acoustic tracks that became the foundations of "A Gentle Death / A Sudden Birth," an album that breathes with the quiet urgency of memory and the soft ache of transformation.
The album begins in the raw, unadorned pulse of acoustic guitar strings, their vibrating timbre, reminiscent of John Fahey’s reserved folk gestures, trembling with the immediacy of a moment caught in midair. Yet, as the tracks unfold, they gather layers—strings swell, electronics hum and field recordings seep in like echoing fragments of a half-remembered dream, each reverberating iteration a ghost of its predecessor, an acoustic metaphor for what is lost but never forgotten. The album’s structure mirrors the way memory works: a fleeting impression, then a flood of associations, until the memory and awareness blur into a single, scintillating continuum of drifting meaning.
Childhood, with its unguarded wonder and unspoken sorrows, haunts these compositions. The artist’s grief for his dearly departed father becomes a lens through which the world is refracted, its colors sharper, its edges softer, in defiance of pain ossifying into silence, transforming sorrow into something luminous and alive, where nostalgia is not a retreat but a spark, rekindling of new flames from the ashes of the old.
The geography of the album is as much a character as the music itself. The Essex landscape, with its dirt tracks and creaking trains, is both backdrop and participant, its rhythms seeping into the sound. This is a place of thresholds, where the wilderness and the mechanical meet in a landscape of transition, shaped by the elemental forces of restlessness and searching.
Conjuring a reflective mood that lingers long after the final note fades. "A Gentle Death / A Sudden Birth" is an album of quiet revolutions, where the personal becomes universal, and the ordinary becomes extraordinary, not in grand declarations but in murmurs and sighs, in the spaces between notes, in the silence that follows each sound.
58. “Classical Soul Vol. 1” by Alexis Ffrench
In "Classical Soul Vol. 1," British pianist-composer Alexis Ffrench orchestrates an ambitious reconciliation between seemingly disparate musical chronologies, aesthetics and genres, aiming for a cross-cultural concordance where the richness of classical piano tradition intermingles with the visceral authenticity of soul music's golden age. This intricate dialogue is a radical reimagining of how musical heritage transmutes across generations, geographies, and social contexts.
The album's genesis lies in the intimate diaries of personal memory—Ffrench's exploration of his father's record collection becomes a point of departure for examining how musical artefacts carry cultural DNA through time. This hereditary musical transmission crystallizes in works like the opening track "The Way It Was," where the piano's solitary voice articulates a complex emotional grammar of remembrance unadulterated by nostalgia.
Ffrench's technical virtuosity reveals itself most compellingly in his treatment of soul classics. His interpretation of "Killing Me Softly" distils Roberta Flack's 1973 Grammy-winning exposition into a concentrated minute of piano articulation, demonstrating how compositional compression can intensify rather than diminish emotional resonance. Similarly, his rendering of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" preserves the original's sociopolitical gravity while encoding its spiritual message into a new musical encryption.
The album's flair for elaborate arrangement reaches its apex in "Soar," where Ffrench orchestrates an intercultural dialogue between his piano, Congolese superstar vocalist Fally Ipupa, and Kevin Olusola of the Pentatonix acapella quintet, their collaboration demonstrating how different musical traditions can converge without surrendering their distinct identities.
The deployment of felted piano in "Sö" and "Once" creates a sonic space of heightened intimacy that produces textural landscapes, allowing the instrument's internal mechanisms to become active participants in the musical narrative. Ffrench's virtuosic interpolation of Beethoven quotations in "Fate" boldly exemplifies how canonical works can be recontextualized within contemporary cultural dialogues, striping away historical accretions to reveal novel essences. The ravishing swells and rolling harmonies of "Everything Changes" similarly asserts Ffrench's spectacular capacity for cinematic orchestration, while his dual treatment of "I Say A Little Prayer"—first as an intimate piano sketch, later as a symphonic abbreviation—provides a masterclass in how musical ideas evolve through different instrumental configurations. The album concludes with "The Time of Your Life," an elegiac piano solo that transforms a wistful melody into a universal expression of overcoming loss.
Ffrench's refusal to be constrained by restrictive genre boundaries is as much of a political act as it is an artistic declaration, moving beyond the simplistic algebra of fusion equations towards an advanced model of cultural interactions that resonates with audiences across generational and cultural divides.
"Classical Soul Vol. 1" is evidence of innovation born from a deep engagement with historical materials through emotional maturity and benevolent revisionism, representing a musical achievement that illuminates how history might be betrayed by memory but only for the present to assert itself, ensuring that the future can be actualized.
59. “Any Light” by LOVING
In the verdant isolation of Vancouver Island, where ancient trees cast lengthy shadows across forgotten paths, LOVING's "Any Light" pierces the leafy canopy of hinterland silence like a ray of sunshine after the rain - unexpected, gentle, essential. The duo of brothers Jesse Henderson and longtime friend David Parry penned a record whose notes sparkle like dewdrops suspended at daybreak, at once elementary and magically fragile.
Their title piece "Any Light" opens the album with the hesitant brightness of dawn tentatively stirring after a dark, long night of too much dreaming. "Medicine" follows with buoyant strains and enigmatic verses decorate a tender space for mellow recitation serenaded by organ-led whimsy and jangling guitars. Likewise, in "On My Way To You" the warm timbre of an antiquated organ conveys the anticipatory longing of affectionate desire that smoulders at the end of fiery passion and the beginning of even more incandescent feelings.
The deceptively straightforward arrangements employ timpani, vibraphone, and slide guitar as distinct markers of a very specific aesthetic that I would dare to call baroque folk - a school of formally elaborate troubadours that includes the Kings of Convenience, the High Llamas and other such bands whose music is quite but not exactly rooted in singer-songwriter guitar-based traditionalism; in "Blue," the plaintive sigh of the slide guitar echoes the laconic confession of the refrain ("Oh so blue / Oh so blue"), while "Gift" and "Ask Directions" drift absent-mindedly, like moments watching the ephemeral wisps of smoke rising from a cigarette after sex, their sparse outlines serving as deliberate counterpoints to their assertive harmonies, affirming the fact that LOVING is a band whose discreetly gentle sound favours the modest murmur of a secret shared in reflective grace.
Tender in its winsome earnestness, "Any Light" dares to expose the vulnerability inscribed within the self—concerning love, meaning, and the elusive contours of interpersonal connection, those that shape the ambiguous "you" as it becomes a subtle cypher of desire and the shifting identity of human bonding.
"Any Light" speaks in hushed tones and subtle gestures, like a friend sharing confidences by firelight, at once declaratory and exposed, their personal treasures revealing themselves to patient ears, to those willing to sit in stillness until the music's quiet wisdom rises like mist from forest floors.
60. “Impromptu Session 1“ by Piotr Krępeć & Kris Górski
Guitarist Piotr Krępeć and pianist Kris Górski’s "Impromptu Session 1" is a miracle by appointment whose fluttering beauty glows with an unruly vitality, floating like a butterfly amid the surveillance drones surveying our soundscapes with digitized precision, flying along its sui generis, improvisational navigation vectors, blazing trails uncharted by remote-operated, quasi-sentient algorithms dissecting rhythm and polishing melody into glassy surfaces,
A 40-minute exhalation culled, without editing or re-recording (!), from an improvised six-hour session, the album features a felt piano and an acoustic baritone guitar unspooling phrases that are neither rehearsed nor revised but drawn forth as if from some eloquent wellspring of instinct. This is composition as the fragile yet ungovernable flicker of thought made sound—an offering unvarnished by the corrective hand of post-production, each note bearing with dignity the signature of its own moment.
The aleatory thrill of chance and skill liberates the spirit of acoustic wanderlust, an expansive language of sentiments that resists enclosure. Górski’s tranquil piano phrases, hushed by the gauze of its felt-dampened strings, glimmers with reflective liquidity against the baritone guitar’s brooding resonance, their companionship creating a sequential environment of coaxed atmospherics, where the air between the players becomes as vital as the notes themselves, plucked out of hiding from spiritual enclosures, their revelation capturing not only intention but accident.
Krępeć, his artistry honed on the crossroads of disparate musical dialects including classical concerts, pop as well as composing for film and cinema, plays with a vocabulary culled from distant geographies—the swirling narratives of Chinese ink landscapes, the fevered clatter of a city at dusk. Górski, attuned to the visual cadence of neo-classical composers and soundtracks, allows his piano to act as both frame and aperture, bending time and space so that the ephemeral can aspire to the inexhaustible.
The unpremeditated dialogue between them is fluid and intuitive, achieving a sustainable equilibrium between reticence and surrender, grazing and retreating like waves lapping against a placid shore.
Throughout "Impromptu Session 1," silence and sound blur at their edges, their ripples glistening, then fading, reclaiming music as an experience performed live, the circumstantial origin of sound adding yet another layer of volatility, daring the transient to confess its permanent nature once more, tracing the intangible, reminding us that music is neither the conquest of silence nor its obliteration, but a conversation with it—a hesitation, a breath, a space left open for something yet unnamed to enter and actualize its potential significance, as fragile and fleeting as that may be.
61. “Home Recordings 2018 – 2021” by Yara Asmar
Within a Beirut apartment, accompanied by a cat named Mushroom, Lebanese musician, puppeteer and video artist Yara Asmar conjures "Home Recordings 2018-2021", a sonic representation of marvelous revelations hiding within everyday moments.
Each track catalogues the quiet adventures of sound itself - toy pianos precociously imitate grand concertos, grandmother’s accordion breathes stories from a long-forgotten era, broken music boxes misspell words written in foreign alphabets.
"It's Always October On Sunday" greets the listener like a Sphinx without an answer. The toy piano writes equations in sunlight while tonal distortions decorate the air with curlicues blossoming at the edges of perception. Time bends into strange geometries here - October stretches infinite, Sunday refuses to end, and somewhere between them, a new calendar takes shape, a chronology of infinite introspection.
In "We Put Her In A Box And Never Spoke Of It Again," a waltz dissolves like sugar in water, leaving behind only the invisible yet decisive sweetness of a sparse arrangement, inventing thus a creative accounting of loss, where subtraction becomes its own method of augmentation via a distillation process that removes inessential distractions.
"There Is A Science To Days Like These (But I Am A Slow Learner)" proposes an alternative existentialism of domestic life, away from urban storm-and-stress. Asmar suggests that even mundane moments follow hidden formulas - not the kind you solve, but the kind you recognize like old friends trusted with the ritualistic comfort of habitual consolations.
"Sleeping In Church – Tape 1 – On A Warm Day I Turned To Tell You Something But There Was Nothing There" captures sacred acoustics through decidedly secular means - mobile phones and cassettes conspiring to trap echoes, of hymns, church bells and other acoustic effluvia of religious ceremony. Piano and synth create strange symmetries, while field recordings sketch maps of places whose consciousness exists only in liturgical configurations.
In "Fish Can't Tie Their Shoelaces, Silly" minimal strains of soft chords bloom into a haunted fairground melody played with vintage organ, in a manner at once rueful and nostalgic, as if the instrument is remembering, lamenting and its own unreconciled history. "4 Is An Okay Number" intercepts radio ghosts and static spirits, capturing the musique concrète of isolation, the spaces between signals, finds new vocabularies to speak on behalf of silence, a spoken monologue disappearing into barely audible hums and whispers, their human gravity intruding on the delicate fragility of the ongoing soundscape, perhaps asserting that all our attempts at connection are really just beautiful mistakes trespassing irrelevant contexts.
"Thanks For Coming", an all-too-brief postscript of sublime beauty, closes the album not with a period but an ellipsis, leaving questions unanswered, doors unlocked, possibilities uncounted, ending as it lived - in a state of perpetual wonder at the small miracles of everyday sound.
These recordings transform domestic space into a wunderkammer of minor marvels. Each track preserves something impossibly delicate - the sound of time passing in a Beirut apartment, the quiet conversation between instrument and air, the endless stories that happen between the stories we usually tell.
61. “Time Enough For Love” by Seahawks
Recorded after an unexpected and almost calamitous bout of flu during a holiday otherwise planned as a search for artistic inspiration in Los Angeles, "Time Enough For Love," is yet another stunningly beautiful album that marks the 15th year of a spectacular collaboration for the absolutely brilliant Seahawks, AKA the prolific British duo of Jon Tye and Pete Fowler.
Produced by Brian Foote, the album continues, elaborates and expands the lush richness of the finely honed Seahawks sonic palette, whose luminous radiance always pulsates within an intriguing spectrum of indeterminate frequencies, each sound levitating with perfectly calibrated weightlessness, teasingly hovering around the dreamier peripheries of blissful ambient, Balearic warmth, Kosmische spaciness and languorous exotica.
An intoxicating melange of conscious design and fortuitous circumstance shapes this album, inspiring Seahawks to metabolize the collision of intention and serendipity by invoking a synthetic dreamscape typical of Los Angeles, a visionary expanse beginning as an anticipated exploration of California's New Age heritage and metamorphosed through the crucible of happenstance into something far more nuanced—a fever-dream transmission that maps the territories between clarity and delirium, between the organic and the cosmic.
The album's sonic lineage draws from multiple reference streams: "Sail Across The Moon" exemplifies this synthetic fusion, its phaser-treated surfaces simultaneously evoking both retro-futuristic nostalgia and contemporary psychedelic processes. In "Like A Grain Of Sand," Rachel Sherwood's poetry conducts a technological séance, her words about children and birds transformed through electronic distortion into a commentary on perception itself. This technical mastery reaches its apotheosis in Purelink's closing remix, where Chicago's collective consciousness reconstructs the original's peaceful melodic structure through the prismatic lens of drum & bass dynamics.
Throughout "Time Enough For Love," Seahawks navigate opposing poles of experience: between illness and health, between intention and accident, between Los Angeles' material reality and its mythic dimensions. The resulting sonic document captures the city's paradoxical nature—its simultaneous existence as concrete urban sprawl and psychic dream space, rendered in sound through synthesizer technologies that themselves straddle the boundary between analogue past and digital present.
“Time Enough For Love” represents another kind of healing crystal, refracting California's psychedelic heritage through the prism of contemporary electronic music practice. The result transcends both retro-fetishism and futuristic posturing, function as both historical document and future projection, its eight original compositions mapping coordinates in an imaginal space where Los Angeles' material and mythic dimensions converge.
The sophisticated deployment of sonic aesthetics transforms personal experience—illness, recovery, displacement—into universal sonic coördinates, creating an aural cartography of consciousness that extends far beyond its immediate circumstances of creation.
62. “Prairiewolf” & 63. “Deep Time” by Prairiewolf
In the burgeoning atmosphere of Colorado's experimental music landscape, Prairiewolf's two exquisite releases—their stunning self-titled debut from 2023 and its most recent sophomore companion piece "Dream Time"—elegantly navigate the intersection where cutting-edge electronic innovation harmoniously blends with the bucolic serenity of American pastoral traditions.
With these two albums, the trio embarks on a revolutionary reconfiguration of sonic pathways, blending retrofuturist visions rendered in vintage electronica textures, the mellow ease of easy listening, the enchanting allure of lounge exotica, and the rustic charm of country music.
Heralding novel avenues for psychedelic music aimed at a discerning audience of very idionsycratic audio aesthetes, these are records created with a particular appetite for musical revisionism as a pleasure-seeking methodology.
Very representative of our century of disappointment, this species of listener seems to experience three distinct expressions of mnemonic longing: newstalgia, fauxstalgia, and anemoia, each offering a unique meditation on the interplay between memory, imagination, and desire.
First, there’s newstalgia, wherein the familiar patina of the past is deliberately reimagined as something both venerable and vibrantly new. Much as soft afternoon light subtly reshapes a well-known scene, newstalgia reclaims cherished relics—from the refined garments of bygone generations to the evocative strains of long-silent melodies—and imbues them with a modern sensibility that blurs the boundary between what was and what is, attempting a resurrection of memory through thoughtful reinterpretation.
Equally compelling is the concept of fauxstalgia, a yearning for moments we have never directly encountered—a quiet call from eras rendered vivid by collective reverie. Here, the past is not simply revived; it is reassembled through the prism of modern desire, where familiar images merge with distant recollections.
Yet, perhaps the most ethereal concept of involuntary remembrance is anemoia—the wistful ache for a time or a place one has never known, an improvisational form of creatively false memory. This longing is not anchored in personal history but emerges from the interplay of dreams and borrowed narratives, inviting us to wander through realms conjured by our imagination. In anemoia, the mind envisions a non-existent past, blending echoes of alternative memoirs with the gentle magic of possibility, a process through which every moment becomes both an account and a myth.
This unorthodox matrimony between invented legacies and flights of fantasy does not simply replicate the past; it distils spirit into forms that encapsulate both the melancholy of remembrance and the immediacy of the present. Newstalgia, fauxstalgia, and anemoia are subtle instruments through which we navigate the delicate balance between the remembered, the reimagined, and the yet-to-be.
Applied to music, these terms evoke yet another iteration of the hauntological school, a formerly marginal, now hugely influential ex-niche genre whose strange, uchronic soundscapes have now been evolving for almost three decades, spawning numerous excellent record labels, classic albums and beloved bands.
Emerging within this supra-temporal aesthetic framework, the distinctly gorgeous Prairiewolf sound primarily features Stefan Beck's prismatic guitar work, Jeremy Erwin's analogue architectonics, and Tyler Wilcox's foundational bass lines, leading compositions whose coherent harmonic context juxtaposes instrumental virtuosity with crystalline synthesizer textures against mechanical rhythmic elements.
Through their integration of diverse instrumental registers—from the electronic precision of the TR-09 to the irregularities of hand-played percussion and the trembling quiver of pedal steel—Prairiewolf achieves a remarkable cogency of unwavering continuity between aural pleasure and stimulating contemplation.
Their success does not lie in resolving the tensions between electronic and acoustic sound-making. It also does not lie in harmonizing American and European experimental music traditions or the abstract and concrete in contemporary composition. Instead, it lies in creating autonomous zones of manufactured authenticity. Each track establishes its own internal logic while contributing to a larger semantic project that enriches the dialectics of reimagined formalism and exceptional eclecticism.
Prairiewolf position themselves within a broader contemporary discourse on cultural synthesis as a form of resistance in experimental music production. They propose a third path which involves creating music of its own temporal and spatial logic, while still engaging with historical forms and contemporary realities.
64. “Stagdale EP Part 3” by The Hardy Tree
In the concluding chapter of her audiovisual literature triptych, by Clay Pipe Music founder, illustrator and musician extraordinaire Frances Castle orchestrates a remarkable synthesis of sound and story that transforms childhood wonder into ethereal music.
The Hardy Tree's “Stagdale Part 3” is the final EP accompanying the last installment of the eponymous graphic novel, transmuting the narrative energies of Castle's pictorial and literary narrative into crystalline electronic frequencies and spectral atmospheres.
Divided in three movements, each illuminating different aspects of Castle's fictional universe. the music is kaleidoscopic in its reconfiguration of phrases, motifs, licks and riffs into fluid, symmetric and tesselated aural mosaics as luminous and colourful as stained glass pierced by morning light. Buoyant electronic percussion shimmies beneath symphonic synthesizer lines that sparkle with anticipation, capturing the electric thrill of childhood discovery, a central theme of the story.
This fractal composition style mirrors the theme of intergenerational curiosity—how the past reaches through time to touch the present, leaving fingerprints in forgotten corners, evidence of a shared past that feels both ancient and startlingly immediate, their revelation resurfacing secrets and unraveling mysteries, like rain after a drought, washing away layers of accumulated dust.
Castle's triple role as illustrator, musician, and author demonstrates how art forms can illuminate each other, creating resonances that linger long after the last page is turned and the final note fades. Operating from a position of multidisciplinary strength allows assiduously precise calibration of these disparate artistic practices. Specifically, The Hardy Tree's electronic soundscapes amplify emotional frequencies, transforming a children's mystery into a multi-sensory exploration of time, memory, and discovery.
In completing her Stagdale trilogy, Castle has created something rare—a work that honors the mystery and wonder of childhood while speaking to the deeper currents that connect generations through art, story, and sound.
Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, exclusively for the Psychonaut Elite, Berlin, January / February 2024
Thank you so much!
thank you so so much!! such an eye opening and altruistic gesture