ambient albums
Album Review: Tapani Rinne & Juha Maki-Patola – Open: exquisite jazz electronica that restores and inspires.
Some records arrive that make you wonder if there is much value to writing about music. ‘Open’ by the Finnish ambient jazz partnership of reedist Tapani Rinne and composer/producer Juha Maki-Patola is one of those albums. Elusive, shivering with atmosphere, the immersive soundscape that the pair have crafted elevates listening beyond the incidental and reduces …
Album review: Matchess’s ‘Sonescent’: an irresistible flow of experimental, meditative drone recollection and conscious absence
WHITNEY JOHNSON has been releasing albums that explore gorgeous deep inner space in song and sound as Matchess for a number of years now. She began in 2015 with the downtempo ambience of Somnaphoria, vocodered vocals, clock-ticking beats, swirls and aural glitter to put The Orb to shame in the cosmic stakes. Since that blissful …
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 …
Album review: Jim Wallis & Nick Goss – ‘Pool’: immersive, ocean-going, pastoral ambience
MODERN NATURE might be flying under your radar, but the Bella Union band who’ve just one full-length and one-mini album to their name – 2019’s How To Live and last year’s Annual, respectively – are someone you should be wrapping your head around, especially if the post-rock pastoral brilliance espoused by Mark Hollis and Talk …
Album review: Joel Vandroogenbroeck – ‘Far View’: a curated, cosmic library set from the Belgian psychedelic scion
A MUSICIAN who ventured far in both life and his chosen creative form, Joel Vandroogenbroeck is maybe not a name that trips with ease from your lips; unless of course, you’re a proper head of the deep psych persuasion. For Joel was both the driving force behind and ever-present in the hard-psych voyagers Brainticket, whose …
Album review: Poppy Ackroyd – ‘Pause’: solo piano pastoralism excellently captures a life lived this past year
WITH four albums proper, so to speak, under her belt – Escapement and Feathers from further back last decade, and a brace for what’s now One Little Independent in 2017, an acoustic mini-album, Sketches and the full-length Resolve – we really haven’t heard nearly enough from Poppy Ackroyd in recent times; but then what with …
Album review: Afternoon Bike Ride – ‘Afternoon Bike Ride’: a magical future pop journey to soothe and seduce a frazzled mind
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, …
Album review: Cahill/Costello – ‘Offworld’: contemplative dubspace, ambient and post-rock shimmer that steps gloriously out of time
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 …
Album review: Bruno Bavota – ‘For Apartments: Songs And Loops’: protection against those days of lockdown in warm piano vignette and glorious modular sweep
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, …
Album review: Neil Cowley – ‘Hall Of Mirrors (Reflected)’: ambient piano is tripped further into leftfield on this excellent remixes set
THE REMIX album is a really interesting thing, a gathering of the tribes in a meeting place that’s arisen from the sphere of dance music, in which like minds bring their aesthetics and splice it with another’s; a trading, the one overlaying, informing the other, creating a new offspring. When it comes off in the …