ambient
Album review: Group Listening – ‘Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works, Vol. 2’: essential ambient reworkings with a real sense of place
GROUP LISTENING is a pairing of two very fine Welsh musicians: Cardiff’s Paul Jones, a deft jazz and experimental pianist and arranger who first worked with his partner on this project, Stephen Black, on the latter’s fine and wonky Sweet Baboo project (and is there any kind of Welsh indiepop that doesn’t espouse those two …
Premiere: Michael Scott Dawson releases his love letter to skateboarding with visuals to the ambient guitar work, Two Solitudes
Out in April is the new album from sound artist and multi-instrumentalist Michael Scott Dawson, Music For Listening, out via We Are Busy Bodies. Inspired by a conversation with his 95 year old grandmother, and her observations of birds outside her window. This led Dawson to investigate recordings made several years ago which featured birdsong, …
Premiere: Mat Andasun releases the beautifully evocative ‘Synthetic Bliss’
Taken from his forthcoming synth / spoken word album ‘Full Circuit’, out on January 21st 2022 via Pretty Decent Music, Synthetic Bliss is the new release from British composer and producer Mat Andasun, and we’re delighted to be able to premiere it right here on Backseat Mafia today. Of the album, Andasun writes “This album …
Track: Drew Smith – ‘Whose News’ feat. Isla Craig: the Toronto scene brings us another gem of blissful, ambient synthpop-triphop
BESIDES his other bow-strings playing in Toronto power-poppers Bunny and the heart-hookin’ bubblegum fun of The Bicycles, Toronto’s Drew Smith also fashions a lovely ambient synthpop under his birth name: dreamy, fun, blissful, and very much of an effect with Montreal’s Afternoon Bike Ride. It’s sorta candyfloss brittle and ice-melt pure and futuristic and just …
Track: Roedelius & Story show us the beauty of four hands working in empathy on the nuanced piano duet, ‘Ba’
PEOPLE can often bandy about terms such as legendary and scion with a carefree laziness; but, when it comes to German electronic and ambient music pioneer Hans-Joachim Roedelius, now into his eighth decade with us, those epithets are both wholly apt and richly deserved. And with something around the 90-album mark in his catalogue since …
Premiere: Galán/Vogt unveil the hauntingly beautiful video for the mesmerising track ‘Hypnagogia’
Australian born, Paris-based artist Karen Vogt has blessed these pages in the past with her band, the magnificent Heligoland (see our interview and review of their last album ‘This Quiet Fire’ here and recent collaboration with She Owl here). She has now collaborated with ambient experimental composer Pepo Galán, releasing the album entitled ‘The Sweet Wait’ released last month. We are …
Track: Vanessa Wagner presents the first ever acoustic interpretation of the Enos’ ‘Celeste’, with an album following in March for InFiné
BRETON pianist Vanessa Wagner, who began her long romance with the piano aged 7 and who, earlier in her career, released albums tackling the works of Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Scriabine and Mozart, came to something of a crossroads in her musical development in 2016; that year she recorded a collaborative album with Leaf Records’ Mexican electronicist …
See: Disassembler – ‘Devotion’: right on course for lifting the ambient experience from lulling to profound
DISASSEMBLER is the nocturnal ambient playground in which visual artist, multi-instrumentalist and producer Christopher Royal King – whose work includes album covers for both Thrice and Deftones and videos for Adult Swim – comes together in a perfumed, ambient post-classicism with violinist and composer Christopher Tignor, in which they look to weave together current thinking …
News: Fusion supergroup Asteroid Ekosystem, with Ed Kuepper, Lloyd Swanton, Alister Spence and Toby Hall, announce their debut gigs in the new year.
The material composition of the Asteroid Ekosystem alone is stunning: Alister Spence is the leader of avant-improv group the Alister Spence Trio and touring keyboardist with Sunnyboys, The Aints! and Laughing Clowns, bassist Lloyd Swanton plays with jazz giants The Necks and the catholics, world class percussionist Toby Hall on drums and the legendary and …
Track: Niklas Paschburg pops the bubbly on a twin single drop: hear ‘Wing Rowing (K08)’
HAMBURG aesthete and composer Niklas Paschburg, who came into this year on the back of remixed single drops such as “Cyan” and “Little Orc”, in which the flow of his modern compositional piano styles were opened out in electronica by the likes of Mykah and Uele Lamore, is stepping out of AD 2021 in a …