ambient
Track: GoGo Penguin – ‘Totem’ (James Holden remix): expansive, swirling and hypnotic rerub paves the way for what’s sure to be the remixes album of the year
WITH their deliciously tempting new remix album GGP/RMX out in a month’s time, GoGo Penguin are just keeping them comin’; following the deeply energised MachineDrum retake on “Atomised” and Squarepusher’s stealthily head-melting inversion of “F Major Pixie”, the Mancunian trio have just dropped the blissful dream of “Totem”, as overseen by James Holden. Come listen …
Track: Masayoshi Fujita – ‘Bird Ambience’: the deft, spacious wonder of the marimba glimmers with delight
THE WONDERFUL Japanese vibraphonist, multi-percussionist and composer Masayoshi Fujita is all set to release a new album for Erased Tapes on May 28th which, if you like your experimental music powerfully layered, melodic, enrapturing in its nuance and depth, so should be a red-letter day in your diary. The album’s called Bird Ambience and Fujita has released …
See: Neil Cowley – ‘I Choose The Mountain’: solo compositional delicacy with love to Wim Wenders
BRITISH pianist Neil Cowley, who released a septet of albums sitting astride the point where jazz begins to shade into modern composition and ‘tronica over a period of ten years from 2006, has been on something of a musical journey. Having dissolved his previous combo, the Neil Cowley Trio, he’d seemingly fallen out of love …
See: The solarised dazzle of Dragon Welding’s ‘Scorched Sea’: a furnace extrusion of white-hot instrumental guitar
THE WOLFHOUNDS’ Andy Golding, one of the most potent wielders (welders?) of a guitar in operation in these tarnished isles today, is releasing only his second solo album under his anagrammatic Dragon Welding moniker in May, in which he sets sail into the possibilities of instrumental guitar. It’s gonna be an excellent journey, that album, …
Album review: Balmorhea – ‘The Wind’: Texas post-classical duo present a lovely set for Deutsche Grammophon
Balmorhea draw a line back in the tradition to the much-missed Louisville, KY outfit Rachel’s, who opted to take an idea and use whichever instrumental mix they found brought out the best of what they wished to convey. And The Wind roams freely and with precision across a spectrum from formal classical through a more pastoral take on the form and all the way out to ambient experimentalism, spoken word, found sound, with a unity and cohesion. It’s just a lovely, thoughtful record; complex in its simplicity
Album review: Chihei Hatakeyama – ‘Late Spring’: a halcyon, beautiful ambient journey
Late Spring takes elements of IDM, shoegaze, and drone, and fashions them together in an impressionistic, delicious fog, with a pretty unique pastoralist feel, alive in nature. It’s pretty much the only album I’ve ever heard that makes me reconsider such unassailable classics of the slow leftfield as Stars of the Lids’ The Tired Sounds Of … and Windy & Carl’s Consciousness and made me think: whoah there guys, these records are a bit … sharp-edged, right? Take it easy. Let it breathe. That halcyon. Late Spring is bloody, bloody beautiful.
SEE: The three-colour, macroscopic delicacy of Loscil’s ‘Vespera’ announces a new set of textural electronic bliss for Kranky
SCOTT MORGAN, the textural, amniotic electronic artist responsible for such deep, pulsing and fathoms-deep works as the sublime Submers and Sketches From New Brighton, is releasing the tenth album of his Kranky career in May. It’s entitled Clara, it’s a meditation on light and shade and decay, and you can watch the three-colour macroscopic video …
Premiere: Japanese Television release surreal and enigmatic video for the mesmerising remix of ‘Moon Glider’ by International Teachers of Pop.
Earlier this month, psych rock band Japanese Television released an EP of remixes of their much lauded 2020 EP entitled ‘III‘. The band collaborated with UK producers James Lavelle’s UNKLE, Gabe Gurnsey, James Welsh, Space Age Freak Out, and International Teachers of Pop for the EP. According to the band: During lockdown we thought it …
See: Patrick Belaga – ‘The Tunnel Is A Tower’: off-kilter ambience in which electronica plays against shadowy cello
AS YOU can pretty much deduce from the photo, Patrick Belaga isn’t your common or garden cellist. Classically trained, natch, he loves to bust out of convention – whether that’s collaborating with performance artists such as Wu Tsang, or scoring Lady Gaga’s Netflix documentary. Life – and music, and art – are for living. His …
News: Erland Cooper announces digital epilogue to his astonishing Orcadian trilogy; hear Bill-Ryder Jones’s rerub of ‘Haar Over Hamnavoe’
THE SUPERB ambient-psychogeographical triptych by Orcadian musician and composer Erland Cooper, Solan Goose, Sule Skerry, and Hether Blether – which themselves are receiving a gorgeous box set treatment, more of which below – is gaining an excellent addendum at the end of next month in Holm, a collection of variations, B-sides and reworkings by artists …