Tag: ambient

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Prins Emanuel – Ruach

For the next few weeks the newness of the music featured here will take a back seat as I trawl through the many (many) end of year list and discover everything I missed. But hopefully much of it will at least be as new to you as it is to me, so we can still be friends. Popmatters’ ambient selections are always especially strong, and so it proves once again as they’ve introduced me to this beautiful piece from Sweden’s Prins Emanuel, taken from him album Diagonal Musik II.

https://prinsemanuel.bandcamp.com/album/diagonal-musik-ii

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Traumprinz – extra life

Traumprinz / DJ Healer / whoever continues his annual tradition of releasing new music as we enter the festive season. This time it’s some additional material from 2022’s life, presumably recorded around the same time, alongside weltenbrände, which is an “associative prose poem” in German. So fairly niche, that one, but extra life at least is a welcome reminder that he’s still the undisputed king of emotional techno.

https://soundcloud.com/planet-uterus

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André 3000 – I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A “Rap” Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time

Who’d have thought we needed an ambient flute album from Outkast’s Johnny Vulture, but here we are.

https://andre3000.lnk.to/NewBlueSun

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Spencer Zahn – OST

Landing last week, Statues II is the culmination of a double album that began with his Statues I, released in August of this year, both of which follow his incredible collaboration with Dawn Richard on Pigments; one of the best album of 2022. Leaning hard into both ambient and jazz, OST is a fuzzy, celestial, faintly ominous delight.

https://spencerzahn.bandcamp.com/album/statues-ii

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36 – Blue Zone

Dennis Huddleston’s music has always been based around loops, and his latest album as 36, Ablyss, is the fullest expression yet of this obsession. The 21 tracks that make up the LP are not unfinished ideas, waiting to be fleshed out into fully formed tracks: they exist purely in their own terms, tools for drifting off and becoming completely detached. Or as he puts it: “Feel free to get lost in them whenever you need them.”

https://3six.net/album/ablyss

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Lukid – End Loop

I’m busy today, but this is lush and you should listen to it. For a more committed précis, see Boomkat’s excellent (as always) hype.

https://lukid.bandcamp.com/album/tilt

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Hinako Omari – stalactites

Hinako Omari’s debut album a journey… was one of my favourites of last year. Released last week her new LP stillness, softness… explores a new sonic range, and was mainly composed on her Prophet ’08, the Moog Voyager and UDO Super 6, an analogue hybrid synthesizer that creates binaural, 3D-simulating sound. The album is darker, more expansive and more overtly theatrical than her previous work, but still seems to exists in the liminal space between wakefulness and dreaming, with the brief but beautiful stalactites illustrative of its meditative tone.

https://hinakoomori.bandcamp.com/album/stillness-softness

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Mary Lattimore, Roy Montgomery – Blender in a Blender

On the strength of its final 30 seconds alone, Blender in a Blender would be one of my favourite pieces of music this year. A collaboration with guitarist Roy Montgomery, the track was first drafted by Lattimore during an artist residency program in UCross Wyoming, and later evolved over the duo’s pen pal correspondence. Montgomery’s chords emerge from the harp-induced haze in the outro, and are completely and utterly mesmerising. It’s taken from Lattimore’s new LP Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, an album so obsessed with nostalgia it could have been tailor-made for me.

https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com/album/goodbye-hotel-arkada

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Shine Grooves – Music For Sakura Blossom

“Triangulating liquid acid, deprivation chamber house, and the outer reaches of dub techno” Yes, please!

https://shinegrooves.bandcamp.com/album/watching-the-breeze

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The Orb & David Gilmour – Metallic Spheres In Colour: Movement 2

The 2010 collaboration between The Orb and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour has been “reimagined and remixed” as Metallic Spheres In Colour, and although my pretentiousness radar is on high alert with this one, I’m also intrigued. As Pitchfork sagely noted in their original review, “it’s an album designed to be listened to”, and I’m not entirely sure I can add much to that statement, other than to say this particular ‘movement’ sounds like a direct mash up of Sueno Latino and Leftfield’s Original. Is it good? I’m not sure! But listen below while enigmatically gazing off into the middle distance and decide for yourself.

https://burningshed.com/the-orb-featuring-david-gilmour_metallic-spheres-in-colour_cd