Despite its somewhat generic name, jazz trio The Setting have created something striking and quietly astounding on their self-titled debut album. The band, consisting of bassist and composer Eivind Opsvik, keyboard player Elias Stemeseder, and guitarist Will Graefe, have brought to fruition Opsvik‘s love of 1970s and 1980s synthesizer music, ECM solo guitar albums, and […]
Virga III continues the series established in the early 2020s by two of Eluvium‘s most purely ambient releases. Virga I was created following a temporary evacuation from the artist’s home due to a snowstorm, and Virga II emerged from a dream sequence during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to escape all the unspeakable horrors of […]
Since she started making music with a Buchla synthesizer in 1968 — an obsession that landed her a job actually manufacturing the machines, soldering iron in hand, until she saved up enough money to buy her own — Suzanne Ciani has embodied electronic music’s spirit of limitless possibility. Instead of imitating other instruments and conforming […]
While it sounds like it might be the work of some mysterious intergalactic orchestra, Unbalance is the work of two musicians performing with little to no advance direction. Brazilian experimental guitarist and composer Carlos Ferreira and Korean performer and composer Dasom Baek combined their adept skills in ambient/drone, avant-garde, musique concrète, and free improvisation to […]
This rather beautiful, unhurried recording is the work of guitarist and composer Chaz Prymek (aka Lake Mary) and musician and intermedia artist Matthew Sage, who also works with Chaz on their Fuubutsushi project with Patrick Shiroishi and Chris Jussell. Although the jazz stylings of Fuutbutsushi are absent here, the lightness of touch and delicacy of […]
Αυτό το Σάββατο, η συναυλιακή σαιζόν κλείνει με Grim Machine και CCCV από Αθήνα, σε ένα αυτοοργανωμενό live, κινούμενο προς πιο ηλεκτρονικούς και noise ήχους. Από τις 21:30. Τα έσοδα θα διατεθούν για τη στήριξη της υπόγας. ΑΥΤΟΟΡΓΑΝΩΜΕΝΕΣ ΔΟΜΕΣ ΕΝΑΝΤΙΑ ΣΤΗΝ ΚΥΡΙΑΡΧΙΑ … Continue reading →
LEVYT | Linda Fredrikssonin, Lau Naun ja Matti Byen kymmenen vuotta hioma teos vaatii kuuntelijalta valmiutta pysähtyä.
The post Hillittyjen ja kauniiden melodioiden taiturikolmikko antaa yhteisalbumillaan tilaa elämän äänille – arviossa Kiri Ra! appeared first on Kulttuuritoimitus.
Despite the fact that it includes the track “Winter, Don’t Let Go,” For Those Who Stay is very much an album of spring. More specifically, it’s about the emergence into spring after a long winter, which has been chronicled month by month, track by track by Hollie Kenniff. The first two singles appeared in December, the […]
The number of recordings that combine electronics with acoustic instruments and sounds picked up in the field (whatever that field might be) is proliferating by the day. Yet, as it could be expected, it is always a hit and miss affair, often depending on the ability of the artists involved to make a musical combination […]
“He has an energy to him like he’s floating,” Fratti said about Orcutt when she chucked his self-titled 2017 album, his first solo electric studio jaunt, on her Baker’s Dozen list for the Quietus. She’d stumbled over the record via a blog and immediately set about following the breadcrumb trail, picking through his blues deconstructions, […]
But a single listen to Heart Songs is required to recognize how natural a fit Cassie To is for Nat Bartsch’s Amica Records imprint. As the eight pieces featured on the thirty-three-minute album reveal, the Sydney-based To composes music possessing many of the same qualities that distinguish Bartsch’s own: heartfelt, intimate, elegiac, and harmonious neo-classical […]
Charles “Poppy Bob” Walker’s guitar compositions have a liquid, expansive cosmic Americana scope. The notes linger in pellucid backwashes and slide eerily between the known tones. Not much is known about the Yuma-based outsider artist, now apparently deceased, but his work on DOUBLE-WIDE —a nd on the earlier Dirt Bike Vacation — is a far […]
In the heart of Tunisia lies a giant salt lake called Chott El Djerid, or “Lagoon of the Land of Palms”. Measuring 160 miles across, the lake has been the subject of numerous works of art, most famously Star Wars, where it was used as a filming location in A New Hope. Although Chott El […]
After a decade of silence, Chloe Harris returns as Raica with an album that is garnering lavish praise. Chloe’s roots run deep – a veteran stalwart of the US and global electronic scenes – starting out working in record shops, to a wildly successful radio career, leading to establishing herself as one of the most […]
on the 16th of october 2024, i somehow heard about subvert, a planned co-operatively owned successor to bandcamp. free from the fear of venture capital jumping in and enshittifying the fuck out of it, owned and controlled by it's members.
i gegged right in, i was artist no. 72 in what is now 17,792 artists, 2,632 labels and 2,375 supporters across 120+ countries. (at time of posting).
during…
Previously known as a member of Afrobeat fusionists NOMO and for his introspective indie rock songwriting as In Tall Buildings, Erik Hall reached a new audience with his acclaimed solo recordings of minimalist works during the 2020s. Turning the genre on its head, he recorded Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians by himself, multi-tracking all […]
This cutting-edge experimental/ambient work was created after a long hiatus by electronic musician Roedelius, renowned as a pioneer of German experimental music, environmental music, and Krautrock, and Onnen Bock, known not only as an audio engineer for the Berlin Philharmonic but also for his work with Roedelius in the unit Qluster, and composer, arranger, flutist, […]
Blending modern beats with the sounds of nature for a one-night-only ambient session. For many, Kyoto is just a list of famous spots to check off an itinerary: the shining golden pavilion, the crowded bamboo forest, and the seemingly-endless vermilion gates. It goes without question that they’re beautiful, but they can sometimes feel like a […]
Midge Ure released A Man of Two Worlds, a new double album. His first album of new material in 12 years sees the former Ultravox frontman divide the offering into two parts. The first half, World One: Music, consists of eight instrumental pieces, while the second half, World Two: Songs, features eight ‘proper’ songs (with […]
There’s a current tendency among post-modern classical composers to paint their musical pictures, or compositions if you will, in darker overtones, but then, it just might be the mirror of the times we live in. Or, as a composer, you can devote a composition cycle to an inspirational friend and colleague who passed too early, […]
…remastered edition with bonus tracks. As the title suggests, Akira Kosemura‘s entrancing Polaroid Piano is a wistful meditation for minimal piano and field recordings, bleached out with old light. The glitchy electronics of Kosemura’s prior work are gone. The music is so hushed you can hear the action of the pedals, the keyboard shifting in […]
Music for Roads is a cross-cultural collaboration between Nordic jazz and indie folk/americana players, including Finnish trumpet player Verneri Pohjola, Finnish americana/folk band Tuomo & Markus, Finnish drummer Jaska Lukkarinen, French saxophonist Sylvain Rifflet and American guitarist and multi-collaborator Marc Ribot. The album is, for us at least, best described as ambient-americana, a term…
LEVYT | Väinö Karjalaisen ”environmental music” -teos Birch Bark Letter koostuu yhdeksästä pienestä ambient-teoksesta, jotka ammentavat vaikutteensa luonnosta.
The post Suuria syvyyksiä pienten pintojen alla – arviossa Väinö Karjalaisen Birch Bark Letter appeared first on Kulttuuritoimitus.
Ana Roxanne‘s second Kranky release is far more personal and emotionally direct than her previous recordings. While her earlier records could easily be categorized as ambient or perhaps new age, and had a certain element of playfulness along with their meditative qualities, Poem 1 is stark and unobscured, doing nothing to disguise Roxanne’s heartbreak and […]
Scattered notes seem to stretch time, their repetition and countless combinations evoking (or invoking?) the infinite iridescence of light that accompanies dawn — a ritual as inevitable as it is unpredictable. With his Musique pour le lever du jour, composed over two years and completed in 2017, Melaine Dalibert once described his aim as creating […]
Arcade Fire’s Open Your Heart or Die Trying, released for Record Store Day 2026, is a cinematic and ambient reimagining of their 2025 studio album Pink Elephant. Produced as a “score to an unmade film,” this experimental project strips away the band’s traditional indie-rock anthems in favor of meditative, synth-heavy soundscapes. The centerpiece is the […]
Haiku Salut are one of a kind and always have been from the moment their debut EP, How We Got Along After the Yarn Bomb, landed in the summer of 2011. Fusing elements of folk, classical, chamber pop, lo-fi indie, and electronica, the trio — Louise Croft, Gemma Barkerwood, and Sophie Barkerwood — have made […]
Fans of the darker side of modern musical forms, particularly Swans, have Jarboe somewhere in their minds and surely in their music collections. As a solo artist, Jarboe has made a series of career-defining recordings, 15 in all, before Sightings, her latest. Yet, it took her some eight years between The Cut of the Warrior […]
As this fourth release from electronic ambient-rock collaborators Craig Padilla and Marvin Allen plays, connections to two electronic legends suggest themselves. When Allen’s blistering guitar roars against his partner’s pulsating synthesizer-generated backdrops, those moments where Edgard Froese took up guitar to wail alongside his Tangerine Dream cohorts come to mind, and though the music…
Florian T M Zeisig is one of contemporary ambient music’s preeminent shapeshifters. The Berlin-based producer first made waves in late 2020 with You Look So Serious, a compilation of Enya edits that distilled the singer’s voice down to a distant emanation. Since then, he’s set his talents to throbbing neurodrone, skunky spiritual jazz, West Mineral […]