ambient
Album review: UNKNOWN ME – ‘BISHINTAI’: a delightful, candy-coloured ambient trip
BISHINTAI is a delightful album, candy-colour bright, beamed from some offworld where fantastic cuboid furniture and hanging egg chairs are the norm; it will add a little brain-clearing wasabi to the most humdrum and dun day. If you’ve ever swooned for the Sushi 3003 and 4004 compilations; for Air at their most “Sexy Boy” cosmic and and most especially definitely, the bright retro-futurism of The Gentle People – then boy, is this album ever for you
Album review: Matt Robertson – ‘Enveleau’: analogue grandeur, ambience and acid
If old-skool British acid and ambient techno floats your boat, and let’s face it, it’s such a halcyon era for the genre, mostly never bettered; get yourself Enveleau. Maybe only the redoubtable Mr Hopkin is operating with this deliciousness in the field
JJJJJerome Ellis signs to NNA Tapes and shares the infinite music of ‘Fountain #3’
Composer, translator, poet, and performer, JJJJJerome Ellis has signed for Brooklyn’s curating imprint of the beautifully leftfield, NNA Tapes (a label which is also home to other artists we’ve delighted in in recent months, such as the absolutely gorgeous piano-meets-sounds of the world as it is aesthetic of Ben Seretan, and the brittle guitar experimenta …
KMRU – ‘Argon’: marrying Berlin ambience with Kenyan gleam in a masterful shimmer
DIVIDING his time between that crucible of leftfield musical innovation, Berlin, and Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, Joseph Kamaru has been self-releasing seductive music for a number of years now; his particular groove a textural electronica with wide vision that weaves together the expansive and delicate electronic musics issuing from the former, and field recordings …
See: Seefeel release a digital EP, ‘Reduct’, ahead of their May reissues; see the video for ‘Burned’
WITH their comprehensive (and wholly exciting for those of us who fell for their exploratory, dubby charms the first time round) reissue campaign for Warp under way and those later era albums and compilations due in expanded and remastered pressings mid-May, Seefeel have just dropped a digital-only EP of tracks from the archive, Reduct. The …
Album review: Tristan Kasten-Krause – ‘Potential Landscapes’: a debut quartet of potent longform drones
Tristan’s solo debut is a quartet of pieces that all head out from the same wellspring in different directions, different emotions; yet with a unity of feeling. If you worship at the altar of a well-executed drone-based record, then this one is mightily pleasing, if it doesn’t break new ground, it takes you for a different look round places you thought you knew and introduces them afresh. Classy
See: Ben Seretan – ‘Rain & Cicadas’: the piano in meshed susurration with the Appalachian rain
A FEW weeks ago we blissed into Sunday with New York songwriter and composer Ben Seretan’s absolutely luscious “Fog Rolls Out Rabun Gap”, the hero and protagonist of the piece at the piano and very much also in the world, his environment at the artist’s residency he was undertaking in the small community of that …
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 …