The Predatory Wasp
Dylan Henner has made some of the most enriching, soothing ambient music I’ve ever heard, so I’m very excited about diving into his new album. Also, it’s called performs Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby, so I’m anticipating being pretty fucking relaxed in about an hour’s time.
https://dylanhenner.bandcamp.com/album/performs-raymond-scotts-soothing-sounds-for-baby
Following their excellent collaborative LP Dolphin, UK jazz maestro Greg Foat and Venetian electronic luminary Gigi Masin join forces once again for The Fish Factory Sessions, an exclusive release for Record Store Day 2024. Also featuring the talents Moses Boyd on drums and Tom Herbert on bass, Sabena is an alternative version of the track of the same name from Dolphin; a beautifully poignant tribute to Masin’s late wife, with this new version even more delicate than its predecessor.
https://gregfoat.bandcamp.com/album/the-fish-factory-sessions
Glassy ambient from Karl Primo under his Lb Honne alias, taken from the new album present future / here there. I’d like to tell you more, but there just isn’t time.
https://projindigo.bandcamp.com/album/present-future-here-there
This blog is leaning ever more exclusively into ambient, so if you’re not into that – I’m sorry. But it’s hard not to when there’s so much good/weird/dreamy stuff around. Here, Not Waving and Romance take inspiration from Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’ on their third full-length LP Infinite Light, and the album’s title track is unquestionably its centrepiece; a ten-minute celestial epic to send even the hardest-lined of atheists quivering to their knees.
https://boomkat.com/products/infinite-light-e6c1ba09-0f31-4d2f-9708-2e7a5786ff69
It’s always nice to find an album that so unnerving I need a couple of breaks to get through it. Madeleine Cocolas’ latest LP Bodies set out to explore similarities between bodies of water and human bodies and to blur the boundaries between them, incorporating sounds of water Madeliene recorded on trips to the Australian coastline as well as creeks and waterfalls in Far North Queensland. Drift, with its bubbling, optimistic lead line, is probably the most accessible track. Elsewhere things get very intense very quickly.
This is taken from the Thom Yorke-composed original score for Daniele Luchetti’s film Confidenza, an adaptation of the Italian drama based on Domenico Starnone’s novel of the same name. The soundtrack LP sees Yorke working again with Sam Petts-Davies as well as the London Contemporary Orchestra alongside a jazz ensemble which included Robert Stillman and fellow The Smile bandmate Tom Skinner.
Given the artist and title of this, I’m not sure I really need to explain why I love it.
“How are you expected to put your hands in the air when you can’t even rise from your knees?”
https://3six.bandcamp.com/album/trance-anthems-for-a-sunken-generation
Wil Bolton is a composer, musician and artist based in East London. His work is inspired by place, memory, resonance and finding beauty in ruins, decay and the details and textures of everyday scenes. His latest album Null Point is dub techno meets Eno, blending gorgeous melodies and ambient textures with a more rhythmic approach than most of his previous work, with skeletal beats constructed from thuds, clicks and crackles sampled from a vintage 7” record of heart sounds as the backbone.
Sodium Pentothal is a rapid-onset short-acting barbiturate general anesthetic and the substance Stars of the Lids’ Adam Wiltzie used as inspiration for his latest album, Eleven Fugues For Sodium Pentothal; a suite of songs inspired by a recurring dream wherein “if someone listened to the music I created, then they would die.” Pretty bleak right! And he doesn’t stop there. “When you are sitting face forward on the daily emotional meat grinder of life, I always wished I could have some [barbiturate], so I could just fall asleep automatically and the feeling would not be there anymore.” If this all sounds overwhelmingly depressing, the music is anything but, with Dim Hopes especially building towards a climax that is without doubt closer to catharsis than to oblivion.
https://adamwiltzie.bandcamp.com/album/eleven-fugues-for-sodium-pentothal
Kilometre Club’s heartbreakingly beautiful ambient track Dividend is taken from a benefit compilation for FLAP (Fatal Light Awareness Program Canada), an organisation that seeks to protect migrating birds. Curated in part by TPW favourite Avi C. Engel and including several of their collaborative tracks with Bradley Sean Alexander, it’s Polar Seas’ 75th and final release and a fittingly contemplative collection of meditative tones and melodies.
https://polarseasrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/sky-within-us
The Predatory Wasp 