Tag: ambient

Categories
Music

Khotin – WEM Lagoon Jump

Over the last decade or so, Canadian producer Khotin – or Dylan Khotin-Foote to his friends – seems to have been slowly deconstructing his own sound, moving from admittedly slightly off-kilter but still structurally recognisable house music, to increasingly stripped-down ambient and psychedelia. His new album Finds You Well is his calmest to date: at time playful, at other solemn, but rarely rising above a gentle murmur. WEM Lagoon Jump tips its cap quite considerably to the influence of Boards Of Canada with its stumbling drums and hazy, wandering, nostalgic synth lines, but nevertheless stands out as a highlight in a beautifully introspective release.

https://heart.bandcamp.com

Categories
Music

Anna von Hausswolff – Outside the Gate (for Bruna)

Anna von Hausswolff’s latest album All Thoughts Fly was recorded entirely on a pipe organ in a Gothenburg church, and the results are as baroque and dramatic as you would expect. At times furiously intense, at others calm and reflective, it’s not so much an otherworldly experience as it is a feeling of being catapulted back several hundred years into a dank and earthen past. Outside the Gate (for Bruna) is the final track: a soothingly meditative finale to yet another exceptional body of transportive music.

https://annavonhausswolffmusic.bandcamp.com/

Categories
Music

Sam Prekop – The New Last

Sam Prekop, longtime vocalist for The Sea

Chicago’s Sam Prekop is a singer and guitarist in The Sea and Cake – a jazz-inflected indie band that have released 11 studio albums since 1994 – and also puts out his own, highly varied, solo material. The New Last is taken from his latest album, Comma, arguably his most immersive body of work to date: a collection of instrumental electronica that ranges from the meditative to neon-flecked psychedelia. The New Last itself is gorgeous: all brightly glimmering tones and warm pads that softly wrap themselves around you.

https://samprekop.bandcamp.com

Categories
Music

KMRU – Why Are You Here

I am hungover AF today so here’s 15 minutes of ambient loveliness to help gently usher in your weekend. That’s all you’re getting. I’m going back to bed.

https://kmru.bandcamp.com

Categories
Music

William Basinski – O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow

Like his best-known work, The Disintegration Loops, O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow is about decay, memory and death, and not since the release of those groundbreaking albums has the focus been quite so stark. It’s the first single from his new LP Lamentations due for release in November, and might just be the most sorrowful piece of ambient I’ve ever heard, with fragments of strings and operatic vocals consigned to the depths of the abyss against a relentless wail of churning feedback loops. “Captured and constructed from tape loops and studies from Basinski’s archives, Lamentations is over forty years of mournful sighs meticulously crafted into songs” heralds the press release. Roll on November…

https://williambasinski.bandcamp.com/

Categories
Music

Loscil – Coasts

I watched The Lighthouse last night, so the sound of rolling waves at the start of Coasts immediately caught my attention. But while the film is a claustrophobic, paranoid, hallucinatory nightmare (but also really good, honestly), Coasts – from Loscil’s most recent EP Faults, Coasts, Lines – is expansive and soothing: more akin to a glassy lake than a churning sea. It’s ambient at its most tranquil and conciliatory and is really rather wonderful.

https://loscil.bandcamp.com

Categories
Music

Quicksails – Melrose Move

Quicksails is the recording project of Chicago-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Ben Billington, and Melrose Move is taken from his latest album, Blue Rise. Starting life as a relatively ominous, almost funereal three-note bassline, it quickly transforms into something celestial and expansive; like a fountain of glittering stars shooting upwards from the dank earth before gently fading into hazy-white oblivion.

https://hausumountain.bandcamp.com/album/blue-rise

Categories
Music

trayer tryon – new forever ft. Julie Byrne

new forever is the lead single from Hundred Waters producer and multi-instrumentalist trayer tryon’s forthcoming album of the same name, and it’s absolutely wonderful. Less restrained by traditional structures than much of his work with Hundred Waters, it drifts gently – at times recalling the crackling ambience of The Caretaker – with warped vocal textures complimenting beautifully shimmering piano lines.

https://www.instagram.com/trayert/

Categories
Music

Yo La Tengo – James gets up and watches mourning birds with Abraham (Wednesday)

Yo La Tengo’s latest release is the five-track ambient drone piece We Have Amnesia Sometimes, recorded with a single microphone placed in the middle of the trio. Not that you can necessarily tell that it’s been recorded in this relatively unorthodox way, although there is definitely an all-encompassing quality to the music here; guitars are gently twanged at random, or left to drift endlessly into meandering waves of static and reverb. James gets up… is probably the stand out, and certainly the dreamiest and most relaxing, but it’s worth committing yourself to the album’s half an hour or so running time, and becoming one with the majesty and awesomeness of the cosmos, dude.

https://yolatengo.com

Categories
Music

The Transcendence Orchestra – Hinge Caterpillar

I’m only two tracks into The Transcendence Orchestra’s new album Feeling The Spirit, and it’s already a pretty overwhelming experience. Sometimes ambient music can wash over you: enjoyable, but not necessarily something you’re paying much attention to. Hinge Caterpillar manages to be both deeply relaxing and compellingly intense: an experience that grips you throughout, albeit with a touch so delicate you feel as if you could be cast adrift at any moment.

https://thetranscendenceorchestra.bandcamp.com/