The Predatory Wasp
Mike Paradinas returns to Balmat with his new album 1979, the spiritual successor to his 2023 label debut 1977. 1979 explores a synth-heavy landscape of ethereal soundscapes, ominous crevasses, and strange, psychedelic fugues, and leans more readily into ambient-adjacent moods and textures than most of Paradinas’s more lively recordings as µ-Ziq on Planet Mu.
Klein’s sleep with a cane isn’t so much a “mixtape” in the conventional sense as it is a sprawling ambient dossier. She frames it as such herself – “an epic ambient tape” – but over nearly 90 minutes, the record travels through murmurs, ruptures, and confessional loops. It’s experimental, deeply personal, intimately bound to her London roots and a strong contender for ambient album of the year.
The Spanish composer and sound artist on the fragile solemnity of a late-period Low masterpiece.
The premise of One Track Mind is pretty simple: I ask artists to pick one track that means a lot to them – either something they’ve discovered recently, something that’s been with them for years, or one that reminds them of a specific time in their life or career – and tell me what makes it so special to them. I get to talk to the artists I love, and they get to talk about the artists they love. Love all round!
Spanish composer and sound artist Arvin Dola works at the intersection of music, cinema, and performance. His background in scoring for film and theatre informs a deeply textural approach, where sound becomes a vehicle for memory, emotion, and unresolved narratives.
His new LP O GHOST is his debut album release and is inspired by absence, memory, and the weight of unresolved time. Written in the wake of personal loss, it folds grief into a subtle kind of presence. Drawing on hauntology and shaped by Dola’s work in film and performance, the record blends ambient, drone, and disintegrating motifs that never quite land or leave.
For his One Track Mind selection, Arvin has chosen to highlight a track from an incredible album which also happens to be one of my all-time favourites.
Marta Forsberg returns to Warm Winters Ltd. with her new meticulously woven album Archaeology of Intimacy. Soothing, gentle, yet uncompromising and strikingly beautiful, the album sees the Swedish-Polish composer move away from more long-form compositions into what the press notes describe as “pop”, but I definitely wouldn’t. Closing track closing Dreamers is an almost operatic piece which combines clipped and heavily auto-tuned vocals, a string section and beautiful synth melodies to impressively hypnotic effect.
https://martaforsberg.bandcamp.com/album/archaeology-of-intimacy
There are so many interesting and/or brilliant albums coming out at the moment that I find myself with very little time to actually write about them. Hopefully I’ll dig out a bit more time next week, but for now – and continuing the ambient theme of this week – he’s a deeply soothing track from Malibu’s excellent new LP Vanities which landed today.
I’m not sure if “celestial ambient” is even a thing, but regardless, I’m really into it. Arvin Dola’s new album O Ghost is extraordinary and exactly the kind of ambient I love: grandiose, emotional, just the right side of melodramatic, evoking huge sweeping vistas or unfathomable cosmic spaces, bringing together the past, present and future into a single, gut-wrenching singularity. “Memory is a living relationship. It tells us more about who we are than about those who are no longer here,” says Dola. Sure, yes: but have you ever seen C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate? Cos this is what you’d be listening to while you did.
I don’t even know what this is really and I can’t find anything about it online other than that’s it a project of Luke Wyatt and Jessi Long, but it’s incredible.
The accompanying PR text for Joanne Roberson’s new album simply reads: “Blurrr was written in between painting sessions and also whilst raising a child”, which is appropriate for an album of such understated brilliance. Mainly comprised of Robertson’s mournful guitar and heartbreaking, spectral vocal, there are several collaborations with Oliver Coates – perhaps best know for his devastating score for the film Aftersun – including Always Were, which is just ludicrously good.
Danny L Harle is a man of many talents; from working with Charli XCX and Caroline Polachek to producing perhaps of the greatest modern odes to hardcore to his latest project Starlight Divergence a haunting ambient LP producer in collaboration with Dutch producer Torus. Years ago when I worked at a house music record label in London, people lol’d at me constantly for my love of trance. Well who’s laughing now, you pricks?? Trance is back baby; in myriad, evocative, interesting forms, and you’re saying the poster boy for house is this guy?
XENIA REAPER lands on Berlin’s Oscilla Sound with seven deft cuts, gently fusing the outer realms of spectral ambience and delicate breaks.
The Predatory Wasp 