Ambient / Minimal / Drone
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Varg2™ reunites with the elusive Chatline for ASMR for Suicidal Thoughts, a two-track document recorded live to tape in Västra Skogen, Sweden 2023–2024 for Northern Electronics.
The music is stark and undistracted — locked into a narrow frame where tension is not resolved, softened, or defused. Instead it lingers as a permanent condition. The pair allow little variation, forcing a confrontation with stillness, bleak repetition, and uncomfortably intimate flashes of sensation that never fully surface.
Noise becomes a brittle membrane rather than a wall, punctured by funereal melodic fragments that appear momentarily before being swallowed again. The atmosphere is saturated, airless, and unyielding — a sealed environment where the listener is held rather than guided.
The result is a stripped-back work of pressure, frost, and suspended time — not a “journey” or a narrative, but a fixed state of dread and charged quiet, captured with unnerving specificity.
Endlessness is a deep dive into the cycle of existence. The 45-minute album delicately spans 10 tracks with a continuous arpeggio playing throughout, creating an expansive, mesmerising celebration of life cycles and rebirth. Following Sinephro’s critically acclaimed 2021 debut album Space 1.8, Endlessness further elevates her as a transcendent and multi-dimensional composer, beautifully morphing jazz, orchestral, and electronic music.
The album was composed, produced, arranged, and engineered by Sinephro. Performing on the album are Sheila Maurice-Grey, Morgan Simpson, James Mollison, Lyle Barton, Nubya Garcia, Natcyet Wakili, and Dwayne Kilvington, joined by Orchestrate’s 21 string players.
how it thrills us, the bird's clear cry...
any cry that was always there.
children, playing in the open air,
children already go crying by
real cries. cry chance in. through crevasses
in that same space whereinto, as dreaming
men into dreams, the pure bird-cry passes
they drive their splintering wedge of screaming.
where are we? freer and freer, we gyre
only half up, kites breaking
loose, with our frills of laughter flaking
away in the wind. make the criers a choir,
singing god! that resurgently waking
may bear on its waters the head and the lyre.
The seven compositions on this album, written between 2022 and 2024, form a conceptual suite and an observance of the mental dances that we construct to understand acts of passage; the ways that we commune and memorialize and carry symbols back into the world beyond representation.
To this end, THE HEAD AS FORM'D IN THE CRIER'S CHOIR engages two references to the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, a collection of poems from 1922, and Claudio Monteverdi’s l’Orfeo, an early baroque opera from 1607. The myth of Orpheus tells the story of a musician who, grief stricken by the passing of his wife, Eurydice, descends to Hades to persuade the deity of the dead for her return. Along the way, Orpheus seduces those who would block his passage with the deeply lamenting music he conjures from his lyre. Hades agrees but with one condition: Orpheus is not to turn around and look at Eurydice until the pair once again breach the world of the living. Not surprisingly, as they approach the surface, Orpheus grows anxious and turns around to confirm Eurydice’s presence behind him, therein sending her back to the underworld forever. As the story goes, Orpheus then sings for death to take him away; with his wish finally granted by a group of maenads, Orpheus’ detached head and his lyre float down the river, continuing their mournful song.
For many years, I sought to largely separate my studio practice from my live performance practice, with the awareness that the unique limitations and possibilities of each domain were almost sacred to their individual characters. THE HEAD AS FORM'D IN THE CRIER'S CHOIR is a supplement of sorts to TWO SISTERS (2022) and ANTIPHONALS (2021), which were attempts to begin bridging this gap between the fixed electroacoustic pieces that emerge in the studio context and the somewhat open and slow-paced chamber writing that I do, in which each performance presents a new structure and in which each iteration offers the path to a new composition and deeper meaning. I am, as always, greatly indebted to the talented and incredibly sensitive musicians who appear on this album, many of whom are regular interpreters of my music: Andrew McIntosh (viola, Los Angeles), Mattie Barbier (trombone, Los Angeles), Lisa McGee (mezzo-soprano, Los Angeles), Pierre-Yves Martel (viola da gamba, Montréal), Eyvind Kang (viola d’amore, Los Angeles), and Rebecca Lane (bass flute, Berlin), Sam Dunscombe (bass clarinet, Berlin), Michiko Ogawa (bass clarinet, Berlin), M.O. Abbott (trombone, Berlin), and Weston Olencki (trombone, Berlin) of the Harmonic Space Orchestra (Winds). For my part, I again return to my favourite keyboard instruments on this album: Mellotron (in particular, the brass and woodwind samples that I so adore), electric organ (the Korg CX-3), synthesizer (the Prophet 5 and Korg PS-3100, which are both extremely useful in their tuning capabilities), and, of course, pipe organ.
There are four pipe organs featured on this album: a mechanical-action instrument built by Tamburini in 1968, located in the Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi of Bologna, Italy; an electric-action instrument built by Veikko Virtanen in 1969, located in the Temppeliaukio Church of Helsinki, Finland; a meantone mechanical-action instrument built by John Brombaugh in 1981, located at Oberlin College’s Fairchild Chapel in Oberlin, Ohio, USA; and, a mechanical-action instrument built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1864, located in the Église du Gesù of Toulouse, France. The organ pieces on THE HEAD AS FORM'D IN THE CRIER'S CHOIR focus more heavily on the instruments’ pedals as well as the textural variations made possible by the mechanical tracker actions that most possess. The Brombaugh organ at Oberlin College offered a particularly meaningful compositional opportunity both in its use of the meantone temperament that was typical of the early seventeenth-century organ designs it’s based on, and in its use of split accidental keys, which accommodate for the lack of enharmonic equivalence in an extended meantone system. ‘Possente Spirto’ is a loose conceptual reference to the aria ‘Possente spirto, e formidabil nume’ in l’Orfeo. As in Monteverdi’s version, my piece also emphasizes the use of strings and brass and observes a particular order in which they enter and exit, and also incorporates a sort of continuo framework. I depart from there to focus on a slow-moving chord progression and its variations in voicing, inspired by renaissance concepts of harmony as a vertical structure, set within a standard quarter-comma meantone temperament. The piece employs the same structure that I use in most of my chamber writing, where each iteration of a performance is slightly different, calling on players to respond in real time and engage in a more direct form of listening. Several different colours of interval are heard throughout: the typical meantone minor third of 310 cents, the wolf minor third of 269 cents, the wolf fifth of 738 cents, and finally the standard meantone major third of 386 cents, which is one of a few intervals that this tuning system shares with just intonation. As with essentially all of THE HEAD AS FORM'D IN THE CRIER'S CHOIR, this piece is also quite variable in duration. ‘Trio for a Ground’ continues this feeling of partitioned instrumentation, with the organ providing the continuo throughout and the choir handing off to a duo of strings. In this recording, I chose to work with baroque strings – the viola da gamba and the viola d’amore, the latter of which incorporates a set of sympathetic strings that exist entirely for resonance. ‘Res Sub Rosa’ was composed specifically for a wind quintet formation of Berlin’s Harmonic Space Orchestra, and employs a system of septimal just intonation as well as a similarly variable structure that allows the players some discretion in how the piece is shaped at any given moment and which encourages different harmonic and acoustic encounters in each performance. ‘Constants’ functions as an electronic counterpoint to ‘Res Sub Rosa’, substituting human decisions with the natural interruption and decay cycles of sound-on-sound tape delay to achieve a similar sense of pacing and unpredictability.
- Sarah Davachi, 2024
Masahiro Sugaya, a Grammy-nominated composer whose works have been featured in the Japanese ambient compilation "Kankyo Ongaku" by the US label "Light In The Attic," has received remarkable acclaim from overseas in recent years. The world's first reissue and first LP of the stage music "Sea Zoo" (1988), created for a stage performance by Papa Tarahumara, a performing arts group to which Sugaya belonged at the time!
Masahiro Sugaya has been active as a composer since the early 80's, studying under eminent composers such as Shigeaki Saegusa, Joji Yuasa, and Teizo Matsumura, and also worked as an arranger for NHK Educational TV's "Diary of a Junior High School Student" and for the guitar duo "Gonchichi". This album was produced for the stage performance "Sea Zoo" by the performing arts group "Papa Tarahumara," for which he has worked as a composer since 1987, and was released only in CD format at the time. This album was released only in CD format at the time, and its tracks were included in the Grammy-nominated Japanese new age/ambient compilation "Kankyo Ongaku" by the US label Light In The Attic, and the compilation "Horizon Vol. 1" was released by the US label Empire of Signs, which also reissues leading Japanese ambient artists such as Hiroshi Yoshimura and Inoyama Yamaland. Although there have been reissues of single tracks, this is the world's first reissue of an album, and the first release in LP format! The album includes "Grains of Sand from the Sea" (M2), which is a mixture of delicate piano and soft electronic sounds from "Kankyo Ongaku", and "To the End of the World" (M7), which is full of floating feeling with minimalist soft sequences from "Horizon Vol. 1", This is a historical masterpiece that evokes the essence of Japanese ambient music, which has been reevaluated worldwide in recent years!
Laurel Halo returns with an album of original soundtrack music, composed for the film Midnight Zone by visual artist Julian Charrière. Following the path of a drifting Fresnel lighthouse lens as it descends through the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone — a remote abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean, rich in rare metals and increasingly targeted for deep-sea mining — the film traces a descent into one of Earth’s last untouched ecosystems.
Charrière’s film reveals the deep not as void, but as a luminous biome teeming with fragile life: bioluminescent creatures, swirling schools of fish, and elusive predators. The suspended lens becomes an abyssal campfire, attracting species caught in the tides of uncertainty, their futures hanging in the balance.
Echoing this tension, Halo’s compositions evoke a sensory freefall, where gravity falters and light and sound flicker in uncertain rhythms. Midnight Zone is a sonic drift through the space between what we seek to extract, fail to understand, and must protect.
Halo’s score evokes the life that exists beyond our physical airbound capacity. The material features long, subtle passages of electro-acoustic ambient, drone and sound design, slowly flowing and unfolding with rich detail. The music, composed largely on a Montage 8 synthesizer and Yamaha TransAcoustic piano at the Yamaha studios in New York City, possesses an uncanny quality: that of synthetic waveforms being amplified and sung through the stringboard of the physical body of the TransAcoustic piano. Combined with stacks of violin and viol da gamba, the music on Midnight Zone possesses trace elements of a human hand in an otherwise sunken landscape. Patient, submerged, and alive. The album will be the third on Halo’s imprint, Awe.
The film is central to Charrière’s current solo exhibition Midnight Zone. The exhibition engages with underwater ecologies, exploring the complexity of water as an elemental medium affected by anthropogenic degradation. Reflecting upon its flow and materiality, profundity and politics, its mundane and sacral dimensions, the solo show acts as a kaleidoscope, inviting us to dive dee
- Track 1 presents the soundtrack of the 4.1-channel sound installation "Waterforest," unveiled in Kamimura’s solo exhibition at Hakari Contemporary, Kyoto, in the summer of 2025. Woven from sounds of water and ice, together with the natural environments that surround them, the work gathers voices of landscapes recorded across the world. Tracks 2–6 offer a series of unadorned field recordings selected and finely shaped from "Waterforest." - Exhibition Statement Hakari Contemporary is pleased to present "Waterforest," a solo exhibition by Yoichi Kamimura. Kamimura explores ways of perceiving landscapes through vision and hearing, combining environmental field recordings with visual elements such as drawings, text, and light. He creates sound installations, paintings, video works, and performances that have been presented in Japan as well as internationally. This exhibition focuses on soundscapes constructed mainly from field recordings Kamimura makes around the world during his residencies and travels. Key works include sound installations based on his experience of Shiretoko’s drift ice, Icelandic glaciers, the Amazon rainforest, Iguaçu (the world’s largest waterfall), springs in the Swiss Alps, the Lake Biwa Canal that flows beneath Kyoto, and ocean sounds recorded across the globe on nights that full and new moons occur. Alongside a low-frequency soundscape of flowing water that resonates throughout the space, a forest-like installation of images related to water—captured in the course of Kamimura’s journeys—is also presented. The exhibition is inspired by a sea of clouds Kamimura saw from a boat on the Amazon River. Known as the “Flying River,” this natural phenomenon occurs when large amounts of moisture evaporate from the rainforest, rise into the sky, form enormous clouds, and return as rain, symbolizing the Amazon’s ecological cycle. At the same time, this cycle of ‘water’ and ‘forest’ represents a natural process that effortlessly crosses the many boundaries created by human beings. In recent years, Kamimura has traveled through regions experiencing war and conflict, and has witnessed first-hand the escalation of violence and tensions arising from opposing opinions and emotions. Even when people appear to share an ‘anti-war’ stance, differences in individual backgrounds often lead to subtle divisions that are hard to reconcile. As a metaphor for overcoming such disconnection, Kamimura returns to the image of the majestic “Flying River” he saw in the Amazon. By linking the meanings of ‘water’ and ‘forest’ together in the title Waterforest, he seeks to express not opposition or division but connectivity and circulation, through the universal sensory awareness he has cultivated in different natural environments. Joining the exhibition as guest curator is Seiha Kurosawa, who previously co-organized the 2021 exhibition "Floating Between Tropical and Glacial Zones" with Kamimura—an exhibition that linked field research in the Brazilian Amazon and Shiretoko, Hokkaido, to explore new perspectives regarding the environment. Over several years, Kamimura and Kurosawa have continued a dialogue about emerging ecological thought which is also reflected in this exhibition. We hope you will take this opportunity to experience Kamimura’s latest work, which moves fluidly while aspiring towards a more universal and planetary perspective. - Drawing chiefly upon his field recordings, Yoichi Kamimura experiments with methods that draw upon sight, hearing, and other senses to perceive different scenes. His extensive body of work includes sound installations, paintings, video works, sound performances, and audio works - unveiled in venues both within Japan and abroad. With his field recording practice, Kamimura acts as an observer to the amorphous relationship between humankind and nature. Kamimura composes his sound installations by creating highly-immersive soundscapes, many of which draw upon our own biology to create unique sensory experiences. www.yoichikamimura.com
Backwoodz Studioz is excited to announce the release of Crayola Circles, a collaboration between rapper Fatboi Sharif and producer Child Actor. While both artists have long standing connections to Backwoodz, this album marks their first collaboration of any kind and breaks new artistic ground for all parties. Sharif’s previous album, Decay, released on Backwoodz in 2023, was a haunting experimental rap masterpiece, an acid trip in a mental hospital. On Crayola Circles Sharif trades menacing psychedelia for a simmering stew of blacklight expressionism, his verses slipping effortlessly through the swells and tides of Child Actor’s masterful production. No matter how uneasy the waves grow, Sharif is at ease, a truth teller whispering anti-riddles in your ear. This album feels like a new chamber for Child Actor, as well. The producer has been on an impressive run since dropping CINE- a collaboration with rapper Cavalier- on Backwoodz in late 2024. Child Actor has shown up in the liner notes of everyone from Navy Blue (The Sword & The Soaring) to Earl Sweatshirt (Live, Laugh, Love) to ELUCID (Revelator) to Open Mike Eagle (Neighborhood Gods Unlimited), to Ghais Guevara (A Quest to Self-Mythologize), amongst others. On Crayola Circles Child Actor’s production is dynamic, shifting and sliding into new phases and movements in an instant. The beats are full and knotty, leaning into jazz and folk, while remaining tethered to the tender minimalism that is his signature. It’s a difficult balance for any producer, and here it is executed perfectly, placing us in a world of wood and brass, cowhide and undersea piano. On any other record, this soundscape would steal the show — and it very nearly does — but Sharif’s command never wavers, ever in control; a lucid dreamer in an induced coma. There are no guests, no skits, and no interludes. There might not even be songs, instead Crayola Circles seems akin to a great river; singular, traversing forest and jungle, mountain and valley, running from mouth to endless sea.
“Morning Picture”, the work of 1984, became the pioneer of the trend of ambient music that flourished in the mid-1980s.
This work, in which he knitted all the songs by himself and confined a beautiful melody, was released by Klaus Schulze’s “Innovative Communication”at that time, and Floating Points picked it with his own DJ MIX, both domestically and internationally. It is being evaluated.
In recent years, the long-awaited recurrence of the masterpiece, which is recognized as a masterpiece of high-purity modern new age-ambient, and also as a representative work of Japanese Balearic.
*2025 reissue* Ralf and Florian (original German title: Ralf und Florian) is the third studio album by the German electronic band Kraftwerk. It was released in October 1973 and it saw the group moving toward their signature electronic sound. This work introduces greater cleanliness in the sounds and intensifies the use of electronic instrumentation, namely synths (Mini Moog, the EMS AKS and Farfisa), drum machines and, for the first time, a prototype vocoder. The formation thus approaches the stylistic code of the best-known works, starting from Autobahn, the latter considered to be the true debut of Kraftwerk. In 2008, Fact named it among the 20 greatest ambient albums ever made.
The Black Hill, The Glass Sky takes shape as a collective response to a text by art historian Eloise Bennett, rooted in ritual, voice, and myth and written in dialogue with Scottish folklore and the starkness of its terrain. Moving through imagery of ancient stone monuments and weather-worn landscapes, these works form their own mythology, tracing rituals half-remembered and gestures carried by land. Voice runs strongly through the album, often unsettled, as language loosens and drifts like weather. Voices masked by drone and tape noise, warped through vocoder, or reduced to bare resonance, gradually erode the sense of fixed narration. Instead, they appear in passing, more atmosphere than presence. Borrowing quietly from Virginia Woolf, voices surface as states of being; luminous, heavy, restless, or calm, shaping mood rather than meaning. Elsewhere, the work turns toward traditional and archaic instrumentation. Bells, whistles, zither, harp, and cello ground the music in older forms, their timbres carrying a sense of inherited presence. Electronic elements appear sparingly, used to thicken air and space, conjuring fog, expansive terrain, and the dream-like movement of light across water. What emerges is a slow, open, and haunted landscape, where sound acts less as narration than as echo and residue, marked as much by absence as by presence.
Last spotted on production duties for Yungwesbster’s ‘II’ as well as turns for Nostalgians and Dj Loser’s Magdalena’s Apathy.. Seattle-based Jaqueline Lawson aka Matryoshka shows serious emotional range on her debut album, channeling Burial, Shinichi Atobe, Space Afrika, Malibu and Surf Gang, seemingly all at once…. Matryoshka has already built a reputation as a producer for DJ Loser's Magdalena's Apathy imprint as well as work for the Nostalgians, an under-the-radar ambient rap collective featuring Yungwebster, Mdb, tnotsobad, Nopaprr and ogpra1. Her musical roots - dubstep, trance and hard dance - tell some of the story here, but she transmogrifies those influences into haunted, Basinski-esque memories like the gaseous traces and decelerated remnants of the club. On album opener 'Lifelover’, Burial's hazed interludes spring to mind, or perhaps the 4am cityscapes of Space Afrika's now mythical 'Somewhere Decent to Live’. Background ambiance simmers below Lawson's pensive FM pads, but once she establishes the mood, things take an unexpected turn with a pitch-bent bassline that might have been lifted straight from a 6LACK loosie, and a rhythmic pulse that traces the thin red line of Shinichi Atobe. If it's dub techno, it's a strand that hasn't been codified quite yet. 'Surface Tension' uses deep, Maybach Music-coded bass womps to twist through her skittering slow rhythms and sadcore pads. But it’s Matryoshka’s harmonic instinct that stands out; if you heard the airy 'otr' or 'fantasize' from Yungwebster's 'II' you'll know exactly what we mean, and she takes it even further here, weaving cinematic, languid harmonies that bridge the gap between Steve Roach and Future. Check 'Where the Dancers are Spinning' with its levitational, almost orchestral sweeps that Lawson counterbalances with thudding subs, or the brief title track, an Akira Yamaoka-style save room loop that dissipates into a dreamy, dissociated fog, for further proof. Then there's the second side's centrepiece 'Parted by the Sea', where a ratcheting Chain Reaction-style rhythm builds to a tense crescendo only to get splintered unrecognisably in the second half, its broken pieces pillowed by Lawson's billowing time-stretched chords.
Harold Budd's 1970 work The Oak of the Golden Dreams, known as an important turning point in his early minimalist and ambient music, has been reissued by <PAROLE>! Recorded in real time at the California Institute of the Arts on the legendary Buchla modular synthesizer, the work represents Budd's early musical explorations. The title track, “The Oak of the Golden Dreams,” is an improvisational modal performance using the Buchla as an electric organ over an unchanging drone, an approach that resonates with the work of Terry Riley and La Monte Young and embodies the characteristics of early minimalism This approach resonates with the work of Terry Riley and La Monte Young, and embodies the characteristics of early minimalism. The Oak of the Golden Dreams is an important record of the early days of minimalism and an essential work for understanding Budd's musical evolution, and one that can be compared to his later work to explore his musical journey and influences more deeply.
Mostra Collettiva by Complesso Gisteri—the elusive 1972 gem born from the inspired partnership of Alessandro Alessandroni and Oronzo De Filippi—returns to vinyl for the first time ever. Originally released in microscopic quantities and long considered a holy grail of Italian library music, the album has now been lovingly restored and reissued in its most faithful analog form.
Under the alias Complesso Gisteri, Alessandroni and De Filippi explored a warm, pastoral palette that distills everything collectors cherish about early-70s Italian soundtracks and library sessions. Alessandroni’s unmistakable guitar style—lyrical, shimmering, instantly evocative—sets the tone throughout, weaving effortlessly around De Filippi’s expressive keyboards, from rich piano passages to the crystalline touch of spinet and harpsichord, an emblematic signature of the era’s finest Italian productions. The duo enriches these intimate arrangements with flute flourishes and the ethereal vocal textures of Giulia De Mutiis, whose wordless melodies elevate several pieces into dreamy, almost cinematic vignettes. The compositions radiate joy and romanticism, painting images of pastoral calm, sun-dappled landscapes, and rustic Italian charm. A long-hidden treasure, rediscovered and made available to collectors and music lovers for the very first time.
Melody As Truth founder Jonny Nash returns to action with his first solo album in four years. Point of Entry, the Gaussian Curve member’s sixth solo set, builds on Nash’s recent forays into folk traditions (2020’s Poe, made in collaboration with Teguh Permana, and 2021’s Suzanne Kraft co-production A Heart So White), while delivering a clear musical evolution. Over the course of eleven mesmerising tracks, Nash points the compass gently inwards, casting aside any conceptual frameworks in favour of exploring an imaginative and idealised “personal folk music” that combines elements of traditional acoustic music with the producer’s richly immersive interpretation of ambient, a sound he has been developing for well over a decade. The album was created using a stream of consciousness approach to writing and recording, with Nash utilising his favoured instrument – the guitar, often doused in atmospheric effects – as a starting point. Throughout, his delicate and evocative playing takes centre stage, its melodic lines and finger-picked refrains painting aural images that resonate with positive yet contemplative energy. From the smudged acid-folk bliss of ‘Theories’ and ‘Eternal Life’, to the layered acoustic guitars of ‘All I Ever Needed’ and the delay-soaked, Durutti Column-esque ‘Light From Three Sides’, a wide variety of musical textures weave their way throughout the album. Point of Entry is much more than a mere ‘guitar album’ – it draws on a rich and diverse palette to achieve its purpose. The delicate saxophone work of ambient-jazz contemporary Joseph Shabason swells on ‘Ditto’ and ‘Light From Three Sides’. Cascading piano lines ripple through the crystal clear sonic waters of ‘Face of Another’, whilst echoes of Nash’s work with Gigi Masin and Young Marco as Gaussian Curve appear in the dancing synth sequences of ‘Ditto’ and ‘Golden Hour’. Nash’s reverb-laden voice also appears for the first time since 2016’s critically acclaimed Exit Strategies, used delicately throughout the album to conjure up a world of dusk and golden light. Combining the delicate human touch and naivety of earlier Melody As Truth releases with widened scope and vision, Point Of Entry is arguably Nash’s most complete work to date – an album that’s as much a statement of his “personal folk” vision as a future ambient classic.
Anichy & Lyemn reduce electronic sound to patient, glowing essentials: slow harmonic rhythm, canons, repetitive phrases and gently shifting layers, across two unreleased remix pieces that treat minimalism less as a genre tag than a way of feeling time stretch and fold.Tip! Rather than chasing maximal impact, Anichy & Lyemn opens in a low glow, letting electronic minimalism breathe through slow harmonic rhythm, canons and looping cells, as layers slide over one another in patient, hypnotic shifts that prize focus and detail over spectacle.The opening track takes its cue from the glassy, urban side of minimalism - the world of long, bright arpeggios, additive patterns and quietly insistent pulse that once colonised loft spaces, galleries and, later, cinema screens. Here those ideas are rerouted through contemporary electronics: stacked keyboard figures become soft-synth constellations, their outlines blurred by filter movement and subtle modulation. As the canons unfold, each entry is processed differently so that the same phrase appears as a series of related but not identical voices. The effect is like watching a skyline through passing weather systems: the architecture remains, but its emotional charge keeps changing.The second piece turns toward the earthy, process-driven strain of minimalism that grew out of tape experiments, hand-played percussion and non-Western rhythmic thinking. Instead of directly echoing that history, Anichy & Lyemn translate it into a digital ritual of offsets and micro-shifts. Short electronic cells - clicks, muted mallet tones, distant pads - are set running in overlapping loops of slightly different lengths, so that the resulting pattern is never quite the same from one minute to the next. Phase-like relationships appear and dissolve; accents migrate; what began as a simple lattice of pulses gradually thickens into a dense but breathable web of sound. Underneath it all, the harmonic pace remains unhurried, each change arriving like a new room opened within the same building.Crucially, Anichy & Lyemn is not a technical exercise but an emotional one. By committing to repetition and restricted materials, invite listeners to tune into nuance: the way a delayed entry in the canon can feel like an echo of a thought, or how a tiny detuning between layers can introduce a note of unease.
Repetition Study I: imagine being is an album in four movements by Australian musician and composer Megan Alice Clune. Recorded and performed using just voice, piano, clarinet, and pedals during her 2024 European tour (including the 2024 Meakusma Festival), Clune sculpts these four pieces on the edge of contemplation. Soft, vast, and sublime. The first in a series of works that explore musical memories and signifiers, Repetition Study I is built around remnants of existing songs. A trademark of Clune's compositional technique is that the musical elements that make up her music are far more upfront than what is so often common in today's contemporary music practice. Her music allows space for the listener to float amoungst their own associations, fantasies and memories as the chords loop and evolve in a manner that is more confounding than it is trance-inducing. Initially blossoming open in a very direct way, and changing minimally after that, the recognisable and the uncanny oscillate throughout. All elements are always present; the surprise is in their pervasiveness. A meditation on listening in the digital age, Repetition Study I draws tension and familiarity, boredom and fascination, the ritualistic and the mundane into a strange loop. This is minimalist music in its iconoclast form. Megan Alice Clune is a musician, artist, and composer based on Gadigal and Wangal lands, (Sydney, Australia). Her work explores the dynamic relationship between music, technology, the body, and temporality through composition, performance, and installation. Working with a unique style of contemporary minimalism, Megan delicately balances an elemental tonal palette that is both sparse and emotionally rich. She has released critically acclaimed albums on labels such as Room40 and Longform Editions, and creates music for a wide range of art forms, frequently working with leading Australian film-makers, visual artists, and choreographers.
Two Pianos and Other Pieces 1953-1969 collects the most experimental and beautiful works for multiple pianos from Morton Feldman’s formative years, exhuming scores rarely captured before - including “Two Pianos,” “Piece for Four Pianos,” “Piano Four Hands,” “Piano Three Hands,” and “Two Pieces for Three Pianos.” Led by pianists John Tilbury and Philip Thomas, the ensemble expands with strings, brass, and percussion, depending on the piece. This collection shines during passages of radical quietness, microscopic shifts in texture, and dramatically suspended time - hallmarks of Feldman’s search for an elastic music both shorn of narrative and dense in acoustic intrigue. Each piano work in the set privileges the instrument’s decay, color, and afterlife, using soft dynamics and open textures to lead performers into a phenomenological engagement, “as much about listening as playing.” Notes hover in limpid suspension; chords and clusters bloom and vanish in reverberant spaces. Feldman’s notational experiments with time - free durations, coordinated ensemble decay, unorthodox alignments - led him to invent forms where narrative is replaced by attention and depth is measured in the smallest changes of sound. Quietness is essential, but not the subject: the focus is on what sound does in space, how it transforms under touch, and how ensemble musicianship can dissolve boundaries between performer, score, and environment. The album stands as an essential addition to Feldman’s recorded legacy - a chamber adventure where collective listening, spectral nuance, and compositional radicalism shape every gesture. The performances are supremely sensitive, satisfying Feldman’s still-radical aims with restraint, clarity, and palpable intimacy. In these pieces, piano music reaches its apotheosis as exploration - of instrument, ensemble, and the outermost edge of musical time.
Point/Wave represents a rare confluence of precision and open inquiry, as Catherine Lamb’s composition for Cristián Alvear translates the enigmatic condition of sound into tactile experience. Commissioned by Alvear and realized on Another Timbre, Lamb’s score meditates on her signature just intonation, deploying the Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer to generate four environmental chords that breathe around the guitar’s modally tuned strings. The electronics hum and fade - reflecting timbral shifts from the ambient world even as their cycles remain unpredictable to the performer. What takes shape is both spectral and grounded. Lamb’s deliberate exclusion of fifth-based harmonics yields a palette unrecognizable to most ears: intervals built from the 3rd, 7th, 11th, and 31st harmonics inhabit the margins of conventional tonality, producing subtle microtonal undulations. The guitar, tuned to ratios outside standard temperaments, carves out harmonies less from assertion than from emergence, as each elongated cycle hints at an absent fundamental, which may manifest only in the mind of the listener. The score directs Alvear through open-string harmonics and sparse fretted notes, creating a microtonal lattice whose contours morph subtly with every gesture. Interaction with the electronics - sometimes sourced from processed field recordings - ensures that each performance is unique, anchored in dialogue with the environment. The result is a form Lamb calls “the long introduction,” reminiscent of alap in Indian classical music, yet in Point/Wave, there is no destination - only continuous unfolding. Produced by Giacomo Fiore and Lanier Sammons in a San Francisco studio, the recording prioritizes live interaction, using amplifiers to really make the electronics vibrate in space. Listeners are drawn into a quietly radical exploration: time dilates, the ear adjusts, and focus deepens as acoustic detail and ambient drift intermingle. Point/Wave stands thus as a testament to Lamb and Alvear’s devotion to the possibility that, as form recedes from necessity, attention alone can become an instrument of transformation.
Gondwana Records is pleased to announce ‘Interlude’, the second album from Estonian-born, London-based composer and pianist Hanakiv. Showcasing an expanded sound, the compositions trace a journey of overcoming the past, unfolding into a seductively unconventional style imbued with hope and a therapeutic quality. Existing in a liminal space between genres, Interlude , the second album from composer, pianist and now singer Hanakiv is as mysterious as it’s seductively unconventional, with piano, often prepared, only one of its elements, both analogue and electronic. First inspired by “those crystallised moments where time almost stands still, pain hasn’t yet fully set in, and happiness is still just a glimpse,” it provides, all the same, “a sense of hope that standing still is part of living.” Interlude’s range is further intimated by its contributors, including Portico Quartet’s Milo Fitzpatrick, who, as well as playing double bass throughout, co-wrote the refreshed long-term live favourite, ‘Intro’, and the eloquent closer, Stillness’. Also present are saxophonist Pille-Rite Rei, cellist Joanna Gutowska, violinist Gabriel Green, and PIKE on drums, helping capture the instances Hanakiv calls “in-betweens”. Unpredictable, unfathomable, candid and carefree, Interlude embodies flaws embraced as well as senses regained. This record is a product of creative and personal revelation, earned only when one’s true self.
The MerKaBa Brotherhood are Roman Norfleet (The Cosmic Tones Research Trio, Be Present Art Group) and Andre Raiah (Brown Calvin of Brown Calculus) The duo draw from esoteric texts, sacred imagery, and mystic thought, shaping sound into space, tone, and pulse. It's a spare and almost geometric record featuring Sax, keyboard and percussion. The album turns sound into a working language - textures as diagrams and melodies as signals. There is much to be learned and even more to be unlearned.
Grace & Raffaella is the first collaborative release by ML and Vittoria Totale. Over nine tracks, the album strikes a deceptively minimalist tone, taking in a ton of musical as well as literary references. An elegy on a journey back to the present, with all the hushed intensity of an informed fever dream, Grace & Raffaella has a magic-realist feel. Its vocal parts serve as loopy self-fulfilling prophecies. Cut off from the sun, the gorge grows darker. Using an electroacoustic sense of spacing, as well as abstracted current-day club influences, with scraps of background noise fading in and out, this album's use and treatment of a snippet-like narrative is its core aesthetic. A digital gleam drenches the spoken bits into instances of subtle surrealism. Like a kitchen sink drama stripped of all deadweight. We are on the edge of relinquishing all control here. Rip up your diary and let go of the language of the old ones. Grace & Raffaella is a seductive slice of modern hyper-pop that defines its own intentions over and over again.