ambient
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 …
See: Ben Seretan – ‘Fog Rolls Out Rabun Gap’: beautiful piano and environment ambience from the New Yorker heralds an April must-have for NNA Tapes
BEN SERETAN, the New York composer whose song-based and folksy album from last year, Youth Pastoral, made massive waves Stateside – earning itself a spot in Pitchfork’s 35 Best Rock Albums of the Year list – and whose 2018 My Life’s Work was 24 hours long, recorded over three consecutive nights from sunset to sunrise, is …
Track: Afternoon Bike Ride – ‘Couch Party’: stunning ambient lo-fi pop from Montreal trio
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 they released their new seven-track EP, Skipping Stones, just …