ambient

As part of my preparation for festivals, i invariably spend time beforehand with music that’s directly related either to where i’m going and / or to what i’ll be hearing. In the case of the recent World New Music Days, this involved revisiting a lot of music i encountered during …

For many years i’ve been a keen follower of the work of Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer, better known as Coppice, and have often written about their unique electroacoustic output. There are many things that draw me to it, one of the strongest being the way in which they create, …

The next freely available release i want to explore is Devotion, by US musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. It’s a 20-minute fantastical work that lives up to its title by suggesting varying forms of ecstatic focus.

A group that i’ve come back to time and time again over the years is Natural Snow Buildings. A duo comprising French musicians Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte, they mingle elements of folk, ambient and psychedelia. The result is a heady mixture that consistently falls somewhere between song, trance and …

Today’s piece of freely available music is by British ambient musician Daniel W J Mackenzie, aka (via some partial name reversing) Ekca Liena. November in Flight was originally released over a decade-and-a-half ago, on a bonus CD included in Mackenzie’s 2011 album Slow Music For Rapid Eye Movement. It’s a …

It’s surprising to realise i’ve not given US sound artist Colin Andrew Sheffield some attention for a long time. His 2008 album Signatures made it into my very first Best Albums of the Year way back in 2008, since when i have to admit to playing catch-up with his work. …

It’s been interesting to compare and contrast three recent releases all of which feature drone at the core of their musical language. (The music is long, so i’m going to keep this quite short.) Drone music tends to operate in one of two ways: either by establishing a literal fundamental, …

To begin my usual January focus on interesting free music, i’m returning to the ephemeral world of netlabels. Rural Colours appeared in 2010 as a tangential off-shoot from parent label Hibernate, which had begun the previous year. What distinguished them both from other netlabels was the fact that their releases …

In last year’s Advent Calendar i included Patrick Nunn’s instrumental arrangement of the Aphex Twin track ‘Nannou’; today i’m featuring another arrangement, this time Caleb Burhans’ acoustic take on ‘Blue Calx’, the only track on Aphex Twin’s classic 1994 album Selected Ambient Works Volume II to have an explicit title …

Over the last few years i’ve been more and more deeply impressed by the music of Icelandic composer and performer Bára Gísladóttir. First contact was at the Dark Music Days in 2020, when i saw her in action with Skúli Sverrisson, forming a complex double bass / electric bass soundworld …

One of my unexpected highlights of 2017 was the album Contemporary Jewish Music by Polish composer Stefan Węgłowski, a mesmerising sequence of electroacoustic responses to a variety of Jewish sources, utterly transforming them while retaining tangible links to their origins. His latest release, PHASE_1_4, makes that album sound like an …

It’s a good sign when, despite being a passionate believer in the maxim “less is more” in terms of a composer’s output, i still find myself feeling frustrated and impatient waiting for certain artists to create something new. That’s been the case very strongly with Vietnamese-Australian musician Carolyn Schofield, aka …

When it comes to drones, i tend to feel that each listener’s mileage doesn’t merely vary, but is often entirely unique. Nonetheless, from my perspective there are some nice things going on in Spectrum, a new two-track album from Netherlands artist Sietse van Erve, a.k.a. Orphax. The essence of each …

Let’s get static – or, at least, steady static. The latest collaborative work from Rohan Drape & Anthony Pateras, The traces of a mistake, the most simple one possible the reactions of even younger children, could be regarded as a development of the processes explored on their outstanding 2018 album …

A few years ago, in a book about ambient music that i co-edited with Monty Adkins, i wrote a chapter where i proposed the possibility of ‘meta-ambient’, the idea that a great deal of music not necessarily immediately heard as being related or even connected to ambient – as it …

It’s rare these days to find new additions to the sphere of ambient music that go beyond being merely extended, superficial, one-dimensional platitudes. So it’s been a relief to spend a mixture of active and passive time with Verdant, a recent album from US composer David Dunn, which taps into …

There have been numerous occasions when i’ve previously written about and celebrated the art of the remix. Remixes were an integral part of my developing musical taste and understanding at the start of, and throughout, my teens: i got into the habit of buying both the 7-inch and 12-inch versions …

Despite being located at opposite ends of the aesthetic / behavioural spectrum, i’ve recently been finding that two new releases pose the same questions about the distinction between long- and short-term listening. In the case of Arboreal, the latest album by Canadian musician Jamie Drouin’s alter ego Liquid Transmitter, this …