ambient track
Track: John Thayer explores percussive ambience and field recordings on the beautiful ‘Kites’
NEW YORK percussionist, audio engineer and all-round musical polymath John Thayer, fresh from two collaborative, cassette-only albums last year – Untangling The Ghost, on which he sparred with reeds player Stank Zenkov, and Mountain Rumors, in tandem with Craig Schenker – is not about to depart this grinding year of our lord 2021 without dropping …
Track: Slip inside the gorgeous, dubby blur of ‘The Visitant’ as Scottish ambient duo Cahill/Costello announce an enthralling debut album
KEVIN DANIEL CAHILL and Graham Costello, guitarist and drummer respectively, first set off on the path that would lead to them wedding as a musical act with an oblique and rapturous aesthetic when they met at Glasgow’s prestigious Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, at which Kevin was pursuing a classical music education and Graham, jazz; they …
Track: Ulrich Schnauss & Mark Peters drop the glimmer of ‘Hindsight is 20-20’, with a September completion of their three-album cycle in hand
HAILING from two great port cities – Kiel, on the German Baltic coast, in the case of Ulrich Schnauss, and Liverpool, in the case of erstwhile Engineers guitarist Mark Peters – these two musicians are united in a musical approach that’s always touched upon a hazy shoegaze from various exploratory angles and looks forward, outward. …
News: Hear a first track as Field Works announce a companion to the arboreally beautiful ‘Cedars’ entitled ‘Maples, Ash, And Oaks: Cedars Instrumentals’
BACK in spring we both reviewed and adored an album from Field Works: less a band, more a collective exploration of the various musics that cross over and find each other out on the edges of their respective stylistic disciplines, fuse, enter the wider sphere of the ambient, all overseen by Indianapolis multidisciplinary artist and …
News: The luscious, genre-defying electronica pop trio Afternoon Bike Ride announce a debut album for September; hear a first single, ‘Dog Years’, feat. Middle School
A MEETING of delicate pop like minds: musician-producers David Tanton (aka Rhoda/Tender Spring), Éloi Le Blanc-Ringuette (aka Thomas White), and Lia Kurihara (aka LIA) met on the fertile Montréalais music scene in 2018, began to share and mesh ideas, and formed Afternoon Bike Ride – and listen up, friends; they’re an absolute delight of hazy, …
Track: Clark releases ‘Suspension Reservoir (Air Version)’ – a new take from the mini-series, ‘Lisey’s Story’
WITH his first album for his new home Deutsche Grammophon, Playground On A Lake, now out in the world – and a far-reaching, ambitious record it is, too, spread over four sides – and it seems it wasn’t just the IDM cognoscenti who’ve been wowed. Also more than a little taken was Pablo Lerrain, the …
See: Matt Evans’ ‘Firn’, an evocation of geology, loss, piano and violin wound in tape decay, comes abstracted with VR visuals
THE LOSS of a life partner, an intimate; for many of us an unimaginable experience, and one that words would fail to convey, either in the expression of or the condolences to the mourning. Multi-instrumentalist and composer Matt Evans was left devastated by the death of his partner, Devra Freelander; and as the composer of the …
Track: Dau – ‘The Death Of Smut’: intimate, beautiful pump organ drone introspection for Spirituals
A MEMBER of rather fine instrumental quartet yndi halda alongside James Vella, whose album Sleep Through The Storm under his A Lily persona we received rapturously last October, Phil Self has emerged with a forthcoming mini-album of corresponding beauty and bliss under the moniker Dau, due out this very Friday. Whereas A Lily played with …
See: The spectacular, cellular-level abstractions accompanying the slow beauty of amiina’s ‘Beacon’
WITH music this beautiful, it’s so very good to see them back: the Icelandic quartet amiina, who’ve been away for half a decade, have returned to the fray with the musically beautiful and visually spectacular new single, “Beacon”, which you can watch herein. The song is taken from the forthcoming Pharology EP, which the band …
See: Bruno Bavota – ‘Apartment Loop #6’: a personal experience of lockdown captured in modular electronics
WE LOCKED the door; we waited. We waited, we combed the airwaves; we counted the days some more. The experience is nigh on universal, save those of you lucky enough to be reading in Taiwan, Christchurch, Auckland and elsewhere. Italy was caught by the pandemic earlier than many, and as it swept across the country, …