Ambient / Minimal / Drone

'Apodelia' is Hotspring's second solo release on Mood Hut, and is partly a further exploration of song forms, studio techniques and instrumentation explored on 2020’s 'Obit for Sunshade'. 'Apodelia' explores lifting into revealing; scouring fidelities, playing with emotion, and improvising by night.

On New Year's morning, Cousin took a weary-eyed walk... ‘HomeSoon’ he thought, whilst cutting to the path by the Angophora Forest. As he made it down to the overgrown sidewalk, he caught a sudden sense of warmth from the surrounding flora. On closer focus, it was as if the plants and flowers had come alive...pulsing forward down the path as they bounced, smiled, and sneered all around him. Against logic, he was struck by an almost Garsonian desire to communicate with them. This feeling lingered, persisting through several studio sessions. The music written over this period makes up this EP. How directly this experience informed the music is hard to say. What effect it had on the surrounding plant life is even harder to tell… we do hope, however, through listening to it, you’re a little more tuned in to them.

The KLF's 1990's great album that created ”Chill Out” zone and grew up ambient techno.

Invisible Inc once again presents another incredible full-length album from the talented Double Geography. Following on from 2020's “The Indoor Gardener”, the new LP “Open Water” is bathed in a similar blissful atmosphere. Double Geography aka Duncan Thornley (one half of Weird Weather and studio engineer at MAP Studios), following the success of his debut album now presents his second album for Invisible Inc. Leaning towards the label's more ambient and laidback output, the album is themed around water, transience and escape and sounds as unshackled and free-flowing as you'd expect...you can almost feel the breeze in the air and the sun on your skin. There is a noticeable progression in the music from his previous releases, this time featuring several additional musicians to compliment Thornley's electronics with live instrumentation...adding a complexity and depth to each of these compositions and an overall 'organic' quality that makes these new pieces sound like quite a departure from the first album. Fretless bass, clarinet and saxophone decorate the music with refrains and melodies that have been enchanting our imagination even in their absence since first hearing them.

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

Musician haruka nakamura will be in charge of in-store music at several Tsutaya stores in Japan for one year from 2023 to 2024. All music will be newly written for the Tsutaya project. Based on the concept of a bookstore and the theme of “forest,” the birthplace of pianos and musical instruments, four albums will be produced through the summer of 2024 under the title “Blue Forest,” which is connected to Nakamura's hometown, Aomori. The first album, the first synthesizer-only music, has become a topic of conversation and has been well received by many listeners. The second album is a piano ambient world. It was well received by listeners with its long-awaited musical worldview. This work is a world of blue like the dawn, as expressed in the jacket photo by Rinko Kawauchi. This is the third work in the series and the deepest blue sound as if diving into the deepest inner voice. The total conceptualization of the Blue Forest series has also been developed into a beautiful binding that you will want to keep with you.

12" is Ryuichi Sakamoto's first original album in about 6 years, since "async" released in 2017. This is a collection of 12 songs selected from musical sketches he created as if he were writing a diary, and compiled them into a single album. The jacket was drawn by Lee Ufan, an international artist representing the "Mono-ha" school.

Roberto Cacciapaglia is an Italian composer and pianist who started out in the fertile Milan avant-garde scene of the 1970s, which included Franco Battiato, Giusto Pio, Lino Capra Vaccina, Francesco Messina, among others. After studying at the conservatory, he worked at RAI's Studio of Musical Phonology – an electronic music laboratory similar to NDR/WDR in Germany, GRM/IRCAM in France or BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Sonanze (Sonatas) is Cacciapaglia's debut album, a monumental work that was recorded over a two-year period and released in 1975 via seminal German label Die Kosmischen Kuriere (Ohr). While a "sonata" is traditionally performed by easily distinguishable instrumentalists (often soloist and accompaniment) and with repeated structural themes, Cacciapaglia flips this hierarchical form on its head – blending harpsichord, strings, brass and analog synths to create ambient mini-soundtracks.

As the composer writes in the original sleeve notes, "I am aware, unfortunately, that I am a few millennia late in how I would like music to be understood, which today I find diluted in its primary powers, in an era that is destructive of essential values. Precisely for this reason, I want to search for it in depth and not on the surface, perhaps alternating the knob of a synthesizer with a marranzano (mouth harp)."

Mixed in quadrophonic surround-sound under the auspices of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser (celebrated producer of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel), Sonanze remains on the fringe of Kosmische realms. Each movement explores hypnotic rhythms, intuitive arrangements, musique concrète techniques and a pure psychedelic awakening.

Roberto Cacciapaglia is an Italian composer and pianist who started out in the fertile Milan avant-garde scene of the 1970s, which included Franco Battiato, Giusto Pio, Lino Capra Vaccina, Francesco Messina, among others. After studying at the conservatory, he worked at RAI's Studio of Musical Phonology – an electronic music laboratory similar to NDR/WDR in Germany, GRM/IRCAM in France or BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Originally released in 1979, Sei Note In Logica (Six Notes In Logic) is Cacciapaglia's second album. While his debut, Sonanze, offers a series of ambient mini-soundtracks, Sei Note presents a singular, sinuous piece. The composition is based on a finite set of musical notes, yet this limitation is the point of departure for a grand tour of possible combinations and enthralling timbres (marimbas, strings, reeds and human voice).

Like Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians, the joyous experiment of Sei Note is grounded in constant variation. Often doubled by multiple instruments, non-repeating patterns are exquisitely layered, while electro-acoustic signals transform and further refract through visceral effects. Within this conceptual framework, Cacciapaglia does not so much juxtapose rigid dichotomies – acoustic vs. electronic, melodic vs. dissonant, simple vs. complex – as fuse them into an expansive whole.

What started as an inspired study in Minimalism becomes a bold feat of 20th century music. Sei Note In Logica is deeply sincere and, at the same time, quite playful. With one foot firmly planted in the past and the other steeped in technology, Cacciapaglia's influence can be heard in the work of Jim O'Rourke, Fennesz and Ben Vida.

kaoru inoue is a japanese veteran producer and dj since late 90’s. he has been releasing from his own label “seeds and ground” and some other labels like mule musiq,groovement. the original release of this album was released in 2013 in only japan. it’s a very own style mix of world music, field recording, ambient and electronic music. the album is started by minimal gamelan ambient “malam”,the second track “selva” is minimal afro brazilian house which reminds us early luciano or villalobos. third track “kamui fuchi” is electric jazz fusion house, fourth track “sphere” is like joan bibiloni in late 80’s. on b side,”etenraku” is avant-garde tribal break beats,”she was in ecstasies”&”escape dub” are typical his style balearic slow house. the album is closed with beautiful melancholic new age music “healing force”. this album is a timeless masterpiece for us.

Music From Memory is thrilled to introduce Dead Sound, the collaborative project of Marco Sterk (aka Young Marco) and Berlin-based pop-auteur John Moods. Both artists are no strangers to the label; Sterk forms one third of the trio Gaussian Curve, while Moods released the 2022 album ‘Hidden Gem’ with The Zenmenn. Their collaboration was both planned and spontaneous; Sterk initially reached out in 2022 expressing his desire to work with Moods. The pair finally got together in 2024 to produce ‘Into The Void’, an album that burst into life over the course of a few creatively charged days in each other’s company. Moods’ dream-like, emotionally charged music wears its heart on its sleeve; its very human vulnerability makes it a perfect match for Sterk’s strong sense of melody and textural sonic visions. ‘Into The Void’ carries these psychedelic traits in its DNA, but they exist layered deep amongst the shadows. Painting on a wide canvas that effortlessly skips between genres, the pair weave anything that inspires them into a truly unique tapestry; a bold attempt to touch at the beyond. Exploring the space between perception (level of the mind) and the nature of the universe (actual level of reality) seems traditionally like an impossible task. But there’s gotta be a time and a space for the profound and this album invites the listener to go deep, letting go of concepts such as love and opening oneself up to one’s own authentic journey. This transformative force of healing is a central theme of ‘Into The Void’, a path that is lined with light and darkness in equal measure. But, as Moods says, “do not skip the darkness, let that door open and swallow you. And maybe you’ll find, it's not as dark as you perceived at first."

Meditations best seller! A Japanese talent who attracts attention from all over the world. Commissioned work for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanagawa. Hiroshi Yoshimura, a composer who has made significant contributions mainly in the fields of environmental music design and contemporary art, released his last album in 2003, a collection of music for the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Contemporary Art in Hayama and Kamakura. The album contains four pieces for the opening and closing of the museums in Hayama and Kamakura respectively, and two "special versions" that incorporate waves and human voices. The tones blend casually into the art space. The wind blows over the hills overlooking the ocean. A time when the sun is slowly setting. The gentle and tranquil ambient sounds depict various scenes seen from the museum.

Keigo Tatsumi, also known as the bassist of Never Young Beach, a central figure in the Japanese indie rock scene, has released his first solo work, "AT US," on cassette. This original soundtrack was produced after he was in charge of the music for photographer Tomohiro Takeshita's photo exhibition "Across the United States." Drummer/percussionist Kazuhiko Masumura, known as a former member of "Mori wa Ikiteiru," participated as a percussionist. Takuro Okada, also of "Mori wa Ikiteiru," was in charge of mixing/mastering, making this a work with perfect backup!

boycalledcrow is the alias of Chester-based sound artist Carl M Knott (Wonderful Beasts, Spacelab). Knott, a former folk musician, uses his myriad acoustic influences to create unique, strange and beautiful compositions. We're excited to be able to bring you the latest wonderful album from Chester's boycalledcrow, after some superb releases for labels such as Mortality Tables, Waxing Crescent Records and Subexotic Records. Knott's music doesn't sit easily in any pre-existing genres, being at once strange and experimental, yet melodic and somehow comforting. His music is intimate and evocative, deeply personal, and manages to be both bucolic and yet totally 21st century, like Kraftwerk's robots dreaming of sheep. The songs and sounds on “eyetrees” are inspired by a rich family life and the wonderful times spent with his wife and kids, both at home and out in nature. Knott said of the album and its inspirations: “We enjoy spending time in the woods with our young children, creating stories about the "eye tree”. This tree, with thousands of eyes, watches over us and cares for us like family. We make fox medicine and cherish these blissful moments. The music reflects these times, seen through the colors of an old, fuzzy reel—orange, red, and yellow with blurred edges, like an old photo scorched by the sun. I feel a deep spiritual connection to the countryside; the hands of Arcadia cradle me when I feel sad. Some of the album was created during times of sadness when I felt death was close and the lines between worlds were blurred. This feeling—that anything can happen and that life is delicate and can be taken away in a flash—permeates the music. The song titles are stories and memories of my family, filled with hazy pinks, yellows, reds, and oranges. Wonky acoustic guitar, broken electronics, and a warm, otherworldly space."

HOME RECORDINGS (2018-2021) “Who is Yara Asmar and how does she make music so strangely beautiful? The 25-year-old instrumentalist-puppeteer lives in Beirut with her cat, Mushroom, and presumably that’s the feline’s shadow next to the artist’s on the album’s back cover. The warm light of that photograph and the quiet beach scene of an abandoned lifeguard’s station and an empty net tells you all you need to know. Home Recordings 2018-2021 is an assured debut album that builds an eerie tension out of dreamlike layers of isolation” Spectrum Culture "Tiny worlds expand and contract in the palm of Yara Asmar’s hand. These recordings are remarkable in their ability to command attention in the gentlest terms. There are stories to find on this album and new worlds to discover." Foxy Digitalis SYNTH WALTZES & ACCORDION LAMENTS “Melancholic drifts sound through the overcast skies of synth waltzes and accordion laments, infusing ageless melodies with a sense of falling backward through time. History is stitched through gilded aural silhouettes and elegiac drones. Asmar’s music is visceral. While electronics beckon beyond the sunrise stretched through a metallic shimmer, synth waltzes and accordion laments sticks with us while we remain lost in the hazy doldrums, always crawling forward tethered to our past lives. Highest recommendation.” The Capsule Garden “ …these tracks are a cushion against reality. Asmar creates music that unfurls in evanescent bliss, an invitation to a safe space both isolated and welcoming.” The Quietus “…a set that transmutes the instrument’s droning tones into a sweep of introspective, breath-catching moments of beauty“ Pitchfork, 30 Best Jazz & Experimental Albums of 2024

A rare collection of music that has been long awaited by Thaemlitz fans comes highly recommended by Meditations! He is a charismatic DJ, Terre Thaemlitz (=DJ Sprinkles), who has been active in New York's transexual clubs in the 90's, and is currently based in Japan, but travels around the world and continues to develop his artistic music with house music. He has been traveling around the world and developing his artistic music through house music. This is a best-of album that includes one-off compilation tracks as well as self-remixes related to his solo projects. Self-released on Comatonse Recordings, this 2-CD set comes in custom packaging assembled by the artist himself, and includes two double-sided insert cards (100mm x 100mm), a 4x4 panel poster insert (472mm x 472mm) printed on newsprint, and more. This is a great introductory title for this artist. This is a great introductory title for this artist. ....!!!

Viewing-ADMIT IT'S KILLING YOU (AND LEAVE) (SPRINKLES' DEAD END) (Excerpt)
Viewing-MEDITATION ON WAGE LABOR AND THE DEATH OF THE ALBUM (SPRINKLES'UNPAID OVERTIME) (Excerpt)

Dj Sprinkles’ debut full length album,continues with themes from 1998’s “Sloppy 42nds: A tribute to the 42nd Street transsexual clubs destroyed by Walt Disney’s buyout of Times Square” (a track recently featured on Ame’s “Coast2Coast” DJ mix compilation for NRK Records).

While the world celebrates the revial of New York House Music, constructing utopian fictions about the genre as it goes along, DJ Sprinkles retreats deep into the bowels of house. This is the rhythm of empty midtown dancefloors resonating with the difficulties of transgendered sex work, black market hormones, drug & alcohol addiction, racism, gender & sexual crises, unemployment, and censorship.

The title song of track1&2 is a real “strictly rhythm” house music. It’s a simple 4/4 beat with piano loop.maybe this is a real minimal house! Third track “Ball’r (madonna-free zone)” is a euphoric mid tempo house.this track reminds jan jelinek or larry heard.

Fourth track “Brenda’s $20 Dilemma” is a sequel of his fag jazz style.check the beautiful kuniyuki remix of this song(mule musiq 34). Fifth track “House Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own” is a classic new york house style.if you like the record of jus-ed or that kind of artist,you like this song.

Sixth track “Sisters, I Don’t Know What This World Is Coming To” is a one of the highlight song on the album. Actually this track is not 4/4 beat house but very emotional powerfull music. Seventh track “Reverse Rotation” is a deep and madness beautiful song.When you listen this song,you associate the music of theo parrish or pepe bradock.

Eighth&nineth track are main songs of this album. “Grand Central, Pt. I (Deep Into the Bowel of House)” is associated the sound of jungle wonz or virgo. but this song is filled with somthing sadness.check the story about this album from terre,you will see…. http://www.comatonse.com/releases/midtown120blues.html This album is for a real house music lovers.

視聴-Midtown 120 Intro・ミッドタウン１２０イントロ
視聴-Midtown 120 Blues・ミッドタウン１２０ブルース
視聴-Reverse Rotation・後戻り
視聴-Grand Central, Pt. II (72 hrs. by Rail from Missouri)・グランドセントラル駅　パート２（列車でミズーリ州から72時間）

Gigi Masin, a composer from Venice, Italy, who made a name for himself in the world through a major compilation work by . The limited edition work released with a photobook in 2016 will be reissued with additional unreleased songs! The long-awaited expanded reprint of the finest property created by <13>, a sub-label of the Italian experimental sanctuary , has been released. The best title, released as a homage to his hometown of Venice, and recommended as one of the most beautiful and impressive works by the legendary Italian minimalist. This is the first time for cassette / LP.

Part of a series of three new archival releases from Ndeya that showcase Jon Hassell and group in the late 1980s exploring a radical tangent on his Fourth World sensibility.

The Living City captures the Jon Hassell Group in September 1989 performing as part of an audio-visual installation inside the World
Financial Center Winter Garden in New York City, with Brian Eno mixing the band live. Eno had designed an audio-visual installation in the 10-story glass-vaulted pavilion, inspired by the hunting, ceremony, animals, and weather sounds of the Ba-Ya-Ka pygmy tribe from Cameroon gathered by Louis Sarno.

Jon Hassell and his then band, the musicians who had recently recorded the City: Works Of Fiction album, played in the Winter Garden Atrium over the course of three nights, with Eno mixing the band live with the installation sounds.

The audio presented here is an edited selection from the performance on the second night, available on vinyl for the first time, cut across four sides by Stefan Betke aka Pole. Gatefold vinyl edition includes download card and extensive sleevenotes.

The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 compiles an unheard, previously unreleased body of recordings by Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz, dissidents from diametric backgrounds who met during the heady days of Downtown New York in the 1980s. This collection reveals the creative and life partners’ radical shared vision of avant-garde pop in all of its boundary pushing freedom, combining Deyhim’s singular approach to vocalization, Horowitz’s invention of new musical languages, and touchstones of traditional music from around the world, creating a new music that ultimately retains a voice entirely its own. Mixed and mastered from the original multitrack reels, and pressed on audiophile quality vinyl, this album also includes a 12 page booklet containing liner notes, photographs, and unseen ephemera.

Tokyo deep house master Soshi Takeda returns with a long-awaited six-song sequel to 2021’s landmark Floating Mountains, surfing deeper into mystery, motion, and liquid dreams: Secret Communication. Recorded across 2022 and 2023 at his home studio with a unique assemblage of 80’s and 90’s hardware, the tracks cruise through a latticework of skyways on lush pads, bubbling bass, and blissed BPMs, dusted in sunrise acid and cosmic piano. His is a dance music of idyllic emotions and inner worlds, yearning for new horizons. Dramatic events overlapped with the album’s creation: “Wars broke out. On the other hand, my child was born. There were sad and beautiful moments in my life.” Secret Communication contains vistas, valleys, glimpses of lives unled, swirling above the grey noise of the city. From the jazzy daydream of “Can Imagination Transcend Distance?” to the sleek starlight house of “Rainstorm” to the farewell ecstasy of the title track, Takeda’s music touches and transports, a portal to places beyond. Fantasy and feeling, intention and inspiration, all become one: “When I listen to beautiful deep house, I feel a mysterious atmosphere. Dreamy scenes come to mind. I aim to create that sound."

Tokyo visionist Soshi Takeda’s second album took shape across eight months of the winter and spring, inspired by an iconic mid-80’s photography book of Chinese landscapes. Scenes of lantern-lit fishing boats on misty mountain lakes seeded a mood of hidden paradise, with ancient waterways snaking secret paths into the past. Recorded at his home studio using hardware synths and samplers from the 1990’s, the six songs of Floating Mountains (plus digital-only bonus track, “Deep Breath,” from the 2nd Life Silk compilation) evoke shrouded vistas of liquid skies and shining lakes, like some Li River twist on Balearic half-light house. Shades of cosmic drift and crystalline electronica ebb and flow within the nocturnal pulse, pagodas and pearls reflecting the waning moon: “I hope you can feel the cool and exotic atmosphere.”

The concept for and palette of Crystal Dorval aka White Poppy’s ‘Paradise Gardens’ trilogy first germinated in 2016 as a notion of “paradise music” combining new age, bedroom shoegaze, and bossa nova into “transcendental Tropicalia.” As she filled tapes of recordings exploring the idea, many of the songs gradually gravitated towards the hermetic dream pop her project is best known for, becoming the albums Paradise Gardens (2020) and Sound Of Blue (2023). Dorval describes these collections as a sort of “emotional purging or shadow work,” before arriving at “the state of inner paradise:” Ataraxia. As the third, final, and most purist realization of the original ‘Paradise Gardens’ vision, Ataraxia delivers. Nine instrumentals of nimble guitar, elevated bass, clean rhythm, and clear light, gliding like swans on a shimmering pond. There’s a sense throughout of playful tranquility, of serenades at sunset, of kisses of blissful Muzak wafting along a boardwalk. But behind the music is a patience, grace, and levity born of Dorval’s personal journey with spiritual healing that paralleled the trilogy. A process of transmuting pain into beauty, day by day, melody by melody, cleaving the darkness from the soul and re-entering one’s rightful home in the Garden.

Farmer and deep house producer Hiroyuki Tanaka aka Charles A.D. has been quietly cultivating his crop of live hardware dub techno and devotional acid since debuting with the 熱い海 (‘Hot Sea’) EP on Austria’s Dream Raw Recordings in 2017, followed by two long-form classics for Tokyo’s Umé label in 2019 (Inception) and 2021 (Dry Flower). His latest, West Pontoon Bridge, further refines Tanaka's composite of rhythm, repetition, and vanishing point electronics, shaded in what he calls “characteristic sadness.” Schemed and tracked across a half decade of studio explorations, the album moves through gradient landscapes of twilit trees, mossy waterfalls, and hidden temples shrouded in ocean mist. Named for a nearby Japanese landmark of boards laid across boats at the river mouth in place of a permanent bridge, the collection unfolds in a similarly improvised and panoramic sweep. Lean percussive systems crosshatched with bass, haze, liquid loops, and spatial FX, the album subtly accelerates as it advances, spiraling softly towards a strobing dance floor in a sacred grove.