Tag: ambient

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Space Afrika – Regards

Space Afrika, the Manchester/Berlin-based duo of Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang, make raw, intensely detailed, visceral music with shades of ambient, trip-hop, techno, and modern classical, drawing spacious urban dubscapes from the contours of their city. Their new album Quiet Storm is the duo’s highly anticipated follow-up to their 2021 LP on Dais Records, expanding on its predecessor’s sound and scale in pretty much every way.

https://space-afrika.bandcamp.com/album/quiet-storm

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Astel – Liminal Crossing

Astel is a new alias from Addison Groove, also known as Headhunter, an artist whose work has shaped key moments in UK electronic music for over two decades. With Shards, he steps away from the rhythmic intensity of the dancefloor, turning instead towards stillness, atmosphere and a more contemplative way of listening. This belongs to the increasingly popular “producer who used to make techno bangers and now is too old to go to clubs and makes ambient” sub-genre, and is fast becoming my favourite.

https://biofieldrecords.bandcamp.com/album/astel-shards-biofield-002

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Windy & Carl, Optigan Conservatory – Timelines

Windy

Windy and Carl join fellow Michigan duo Optigan Conservatory for an album of blurry guitars, electric piano and synths, recorded with very little planning and, seemingly, a few sounds nobody remembers actually making. ‘Timelines’ is a lovely little stretch of deep-space drift, with soft chords slowly folding into one another and the whole thing hovering somewhere between ambient music and a half-remembered sci-fi soundtrack. Hazy, slightly spooky, very nice indeed.

https://windyandcarl.bandcamp.com/album/windy-carl-meet-optigan-conservatory

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J.WLSN, Liam Keenan – Teflon Blues III

In late 2024, J.WLSN and Liam Keenan recorded a short session with David Akerman at Lost Sound studio in Marrickville, Sydney. At the time, the pair were working as art and music curators at a major Sydney art museum. Both had long made music independently, but a collaborative record between them was overdue.

Country / The County is the first result of that collaboration, drawing on a shared love of longform, expansive and distorted sound. Built from subtle guitars, modular synth pads and sample-based loops, its reverberant compositions explore the landscapes and environments that shaped both artists growing up. Perhaps it’s lazy to compare this to Stars Of The Lid – not all drifting ambient needs to sound like them – but this has enough depth and emotional heft to justify it.

https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/country-the-country

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Patricia Wolf – Adapted For Extreme Conditions

I’m on on holiday tomorrow and blog posts are not going to be a major part of my itenirary, so I’m leaving you with this bucolic delight from Patricia Wolf. Yarrow is part of Music To Watch Seeds Grow By’s collection, marking the label’s ninth release and the third of Season Two, with each of the tracks acting as reflections on the life cycle of plants and their dynamic ecological relationships.

https://patriciawolf.bandcamp.com/album/music-to-watch-seeds-grow-by-009-patricia-wolf-yarrow

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zakè, Coppice Halifax – Regeneration Survey

Built entirely from source material supplied by zakè, Brian Grainger, working as Coppice Halifax, has somehow teased rhythms, melodies and entire compositions from recordings that contained no beats or obvious musical framework to begin with, uncovering possibilities that feel both surprising and strangely inevitable.

The result is Tree Grid, a collaborative LP that sits somewhere between reinterpretation and reinvention, never losing sight of where these sounds came from but constantly pushing them into unexpected territory. It’s also the first glimpse of what looks set to become a deeper collaboration between two artists whose approaches seem to complement each other remarkably well. If this doesn’t make my end of year shortlist I will be astonished.

https://zakedrone.bandcamp.com/album/tree-grid

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Danny L Harle & Doss – C’Mon

There’s a whole lot of interesting music out today, but I spent the morning listening to Sasha & Digweed’s seminal Northern Exposure mix which everyone’s currently losing their minds about thanks to the recently announced 30th anniversary Redux edition, so I’m perhaps more even open to progressive, trancey offerings than usual. Step forward Danny L Harle and his new Crystallise Divergence EP, which includes this floaty little gem in collaboration with Doss.

https://dannylharle.bandcamp.com/album/crystallise-divergence

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Function – City of Luz

Functions’s new LP Aeternum (Existenz) brings to a close a body of work that began with 2019’s Existenz. Written between 2016 and 2019 during an intensely productive period in the studio, the six-track release explores ideas of transformation and renewal, taking inspiration from the seven stages of alchemy. It also serves as a tribute to Sumner’s friend and longtime collaborator John Mendez aka Silent Servant. If there’s a track that encapsulates the record’s atmosphere, it’s City Of Luz. Running for close to 13 minutes, layers of synth and texture gradually emerge before dissolving again, sitting somewhere between ambient electronics and hypnotic techno. Just how I like it.

https://function-inf-ny.bandcamp.com/album/aeternum-existenz

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36 – 105.5 Wacky Fm

I’m biased of course I as pretty much love everything that 36 does, but I do think that even among a discography of almost pathological prolificness and quality, his latest album stands out as one of his very best.

Hardcore, Static: Pirate Transmissions From The North Of England, 1990-1994 is Dennis’s celebration of a unique period in the UK’s musical history, when primitive pirate stations run by enthusiastic kids delivered a continuous stream of experimental sounds to Bradford, Leeds, and the surrounding towns of West Yorkshire. Spread across four expansive tracks blending fragments of ambient, drone, jungle, uk hardcore and peppered with the spectral voices of long forgotten pirate DJs, the result is utterly compelling.

https://auxiliary.bandcamp.com/album/hardcore-static-pirate-transmissions-from-the-north-of-england-1990-1994

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Anthony Calonico – Gray Glow

Screenshot

This is taken from Spacious Heart the debut solo album from Los Angeles-based musician Anthony Calonico who I was introduced to last year through his work as part of the trio Total Blue. Spacious Heart is a collection of songs and instrumentals, all of them lush, and expansive, but it’s when he sings that the record really comes to life. There’s something about his voice that is just so inviting; timeless and yet familiar, as if he’s been unearthed and dusted off from a previous, purer time.

https://music-from-memory.bandcamp.com/album/spacious-heart