Ambient / Minimal / Drone
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Across a remarkable run of releases in barely half a decade, London’s Loraine James has established her identity through a blend of refined composition, gritty experimentation, and unpredictable, intricate electronic programming. While titles released under her given name on the esteemed label Hyperdub tend toward IDM-influenced, vocal-heavy collaborations, James reserves her alias, Whatever The Weather, for a more impressionistic, inward gaze. On Whatever The Weather II, rich worlds of layered textures flow seamlessly from hypnotic ambience, to mottled rhythms, to cut-up collages of diaristic field recordings. The result is a uniquely fractured beauty, born from a compelling union of organic and human elements, processed through a variety of digital and analogue methods.
James titled Whatever The Weather pieces based on an innate sense of their “emotional temperature” at the time of recording, but she notes that often, upon revisiting them, they will feel somewhere else entirely on the thermometer; such are the whims of the environment. Compared to the album’s predecessor and its Antarctic imagery, though, Whatever The Weather II is a warmer outing, as signaled by the desert clime of its cover photo which is once again shot by Collin Hughes, and the package designed by Justin Hunt Sloane. Also common to both albums is the mastering work of friend and collaborator Josh Eustis (aka Telefon Tel Aviv), who lends his keen ear to James’ complexities, to craft a strikingly three-dimensional sonic experience.
“1°C” opens the album with James speaking through thick static, idly pining, “Bit chilly, innit… Can’t wait for it to be summer,” as a bed of granular tones and scattered vocal samples emerges. This ineffable mood carries through “3°C”, where high-frequency oscillations flutter across the stereo field, a vigorous, minimal kick rattles through a broken speaker cone, and spacious synth harmonies burst and fade into mist. “20°C”, the longest entry in the collection, daydreams through a din of conversation and minor-key chords, before blossoming into a series of glitchy, staccato percussion patterns. “8°C” rides a sole, wandering keyboard line adorned with minimal counterpoint. In these moments, James effortlessly draws order from a diffusion of ideas, and an air of playful spontaneity creates the common thread.
In discussing this project, James notes that the first Whatever The Weather LP (Ghostly, 2022) was created concurrently with Reflection (Hyperdub, 2021), and that there was some degree of stylistic cross-pollination between her two musical frames of mind. At the time, she shared her feelings on genre with Pitchfork’s Philip Sherburne, noting, “Yeah, I might look different from most people who make IDM, and I’m from a different time period, but I don’t really care about the term being negative or positive. I feel my music is IDM and I do my own spin on it, being inspired by other stuff and fusing it all together.” This go around, she dedicated several months of focused energy to the alias, and to the development of its distinctions: no collaborators, fewer beats, and a process based primarily on instinct and improvisation.
The album’s singular sound arises from James’ favoring of hardware over software, as her battery of synths is modulated, transformed, and reassembled through an array of pedals with few or no overdubs, effectively anchoring each arrangement to its precise moment of creation. The greatest effort in post-production was given to sequencing, on which the artist places the utmost importance; taken as a whole, the suite ebbs and flows with a fitting sense of seasonal flux and naturalistic grace.
The final act of Whatever The Weather II offers some of its most affecting moments, beginning with “9°C”, where the haunting echoes of children on a Tokyo playground break through intermittent bursts of static, steeped in a bath of off-kilter, bubbling tones. Here, James displays one of her many strengths: a fearless approach to sonic collage, elevated by ambitious experimentation and pacing that manages plenty of surprises. Never content to remain in the same sonic space for too long, “15°C” follows with soft pads and glistening countermelodies, abruptly joined by a jarring, cyclical rhythm that mimics a loose part inside a whirring machine. Like much of James’ work, it bears an internal logic that only makes sense in her hands.
Closing track, “12°C”, drifts from bustling human spaces into a concrete groove, weaving melody and texture into a truly unusual, soul-stirring fullness. In its final moments we hear, for the first time, a languid acoustic guitar and gentle, finger-tapped beat over her pitch-shifted voice, a callback that ends the album with wry ambiguity, and a hint of more to be found beyond the horizon. Whatever The Weather II is full of such passages, where formal composition appears like a film in negative, and conventions are upturned with wit, intelligence, and skill.
Cindytalk is the mercurial, expressionist outlet of Scottish artist Cinder. An evolution of her early 1980's Edinburgh-based punk band The Freeze, she launched the project upon moving to London, inspired by the crossroads of exploratory UK post-punk and early European industrial. Her work thrives on chance and transformation, collaging elements of noise, balladry, soundtrack, catharsis, and improvisation. After a series of celebrated albums for the Midnight Music label as well as collaborations with This Mortal Coil and Cocteau Twins, Cinder migrated to the United States, becoming involved with various underground techno collectives around the Midwest and West Coast. Subsequent relocations to Hong Kong and Japan further expanded Cindytalk's horizons, resulting in a fruitful partnership with Viennese experimental institution Editions Mego, for whom she released five full-lengths of swooning, granular atmosphere. 2021 finds her as engaged as ever, at the precipice of long-awaited back catalog reissues alongside multiple new works, guided by her lasting love of discovery and deviation: “new pathways always being uncovered.”
The 3rd album by Scottish industrial enigma Cinder aka Cindytalk began life as the soundtrack to an experimental film by English director Ivan Unnwin entitled Eclipse (The Amateur Enthusiast's Guide To Virus Deployment), and was originally slated for release via Factory Records' video division, Ikon. Inspired heavily by Alan Splet's eerily disembodied sound design in David Lynch's Eraserhead, the collection's 15 pieces seethe between field recordings, wistful piano vignettes, and lurking metallic haze – a hybrid palette Cinder characterized at the time as “ambi-dustrial.” Unfortunately Ikon collapsed on the eve of the project's completion so the film was never distributed, but the Midnight Music imprint repackaged Cindytalk's score as an LP in 1990 under the name The Wind Is Strong... (full title: The Wind Is Strong - A Sparrow Dances, Piercing Holes in Our Sky).
Long out of print, the album remains one of the most elusive and adventurous in the Cindytalk discography, a mix of musique concréte, haunted reverie, and desolate beauty. Even unaccompanied by their intended visuals, this is overtly cinematic music, conjuring forests at dusk and shadowed corridors, equal parts remote and reflective. Cinder cites a belief that “all sound is music,” which fully manifests here, utilizing tape hiss, ticking clocks, flicking flames, and distant whispers as evocative accents in tapestries of luminous negative space.
Although Cinder included the subtitle “A Cindytalk diversion” in the sleeve notes, The Wind Is Strong... is crucial to the project's canon, demonstrating the depth and versatility of her unique ear and intuition. She describes each album as a direct response to the previous one, and in that sense The Wind marks a bold break from the coiled song-oriented post-punk of 1988's In This World, venturing into unknown, unnamed terrain, and finding foreboding new futures to call her own.
LIMITED JAPAN EXCLUSIVE "Asagao" EDITION. Flora is an album that is listened to perpetually,
Passed on from one listener to another,
And the charm of the sound- and music-loving figure
known as Hiroshi Yoshimura,
Just might come drifting through.
Like the scent of a small flower.
—Junichi Konuma
Announcing the worldwide reissue of Flora, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s underrated work originally recorded and completed in 1987 and first released on CD in 2006, three years after his passing in 2003.
Flora is chronologically and stylistically a follow-up to Hiroshi Yoshimura’s acclaimed 1986 works Green and Surround, wherein Yoshimura continues to play with the ambience of sound and the sound of ambience, underscoring his mastery in the field of environmental music. Listening to Flora is like taking a stroll in a park, absorbing the colors and textures of the natural environment—flowers, insects, the swaying of the leaves—as Yoshimura often did at his beloved Edo-era park near his home in Tokyo. As Junichi Konuma describes in his liner notes, Yoshimura’s music “only begins to emerge as it exists at the intersection of passive and active.” Yoshimura's approach to sound and melody invites the listener to hear the intricacies of the music with intent, while simultaneously allowing the aural textures to exist as part of the background of our everyday life.
This reissue marks the first time the album will be available on vinyl (2LP, 45 rpm) and cassette, and includes liner notes written by music scholar Junichi Konuma and remastered audio by Grammy-nominated engineer John Baldwin. Reissue design and layout was handled by Tiffanie Tran.
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.
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!
“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.
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.
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.
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.
Viola Torros is more than a historical reference - it is an ongoing collaboration between Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang, centered around the research, arrangement, and interpretation of fragments attributed to the mysterious composer Viola Torros. While the project suggests an archaeological recovery of lost medieval works filtered through Arabic, Byzantine, and Indian modal traditions, the underlying narrative is a playful fiction - Torros herself appears to be a fictional construct, allowing Lamb and Chang to chart their own creative lineage and methodology. The first disc showcases intricate viola duets, blending drone-infused textures and sparse melodic snippets. These “augmentations” are designed to evoke the feeling of ancient music without directly imitating historic forms. Lamb and Chang’s approach is analytical but open-hearted: they highlight the simultaneous existence of cohabiting tones, shifts in intonation, and the delicate emergence of melody from within constrained harmonic frameworks. Supporting musicians - including Bryan Eubanks, Rebecca Lane, Annie Garlid, and others - add subtle color via electronics and voice, dissolving the boundary between composition and arrangement. The second disc steps into contemporary territory: Johnny Chang’s “Citaric Melodies III” is performed by Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble, an octet that blends winds and strings in a gentle network of sustained tension and release. Catherine Lamb’s “Prisma Interius VI for v.t.” completes the set with an immersive harmonic field shaped by her secondary rainbow synthesizer, cello, and layered viola resonance. Throughout the project, Lamb and Chang’s capacity for patience and depth comes to the fore. Their music is slow-moving but never static, alive to the spectral richness of just intonation and the performative possibilities of friction, resonance, and shared listening. By inventing and inhabiting the world of Viola Torros, they offer a model for reconstructing musical heritage - one that values poetic intuition over scholarly certainty and uses creative fiction to generate genuinely new musical experience.
Bach's 3 Sonatas for Solo Violin, arranged by Marc Sabat for two violins using Just Intonation tunings, together with three short introductory pieces by Marc Sabat.
"Ever since I first played solo Bach on my violin, I've been fascinated by how changing colours of differently tuned harmonic intervals shape and transform the music. In my compositions I make music using intervals found amongst the natural harmonic partials, an approach sometimes called just or rational intonation (JI). These are sounds that can be accurately played by ear, by carefully listening to how very small differences of pitch create beating, resonance, fusion, and reinforce combination tones. These subtle psychoacoustic interactions are at the heart of experiencing harmony, which is what my work is about.
As I came to work this way, I was curious if the approach I use in my own compositions could also be applied to Bach in a strict way, by composing the fine shadings of intonation according to JI intervals. Over the past 25 years, I kept coming back to this work, but it was the ongoing collaboration with Sara Cubarsi, beginning with a first meeting in Cat Lamb's studio in Berlin a decade ago, that led me to write and us to record the realisation documented on this disc.
I have added a second violin part to Bach's solo violin sonatas, music that began as sustained harmonic drones on mostly open strings and harmonics, but which gradually evolved into a kind of personal take on harmonic counterpoint, and became a gentle conversation between my own music and Bach's, finding my way by ear. It was very inspiring to collaborate with a composer who invented so many ways of exploring harmony, and to revisit the old question whether music that moves freely through many tonal regions needs a "well tempered tuning", or if it can also work in a microtonal re-interpretation using many different shadings of pitch.
Each of the three Bach "tunings" are preceded by a short prelude from my cycle "Streams barely in winter" (2019). These miniatures focus on particular intonations of the piece to follow." (Marc Sabat, May 2025)
Bryn Harrison writes music that deliberately disorients. The British composer—obsessed with "time, memory, and cyclic structures"—follows Feldman's lead, creating perceptual labyrinths where past bleeds into present and nothing stays quite where you expect. Towards a slowing of the past, a 45-minute tour de force for two pianos and electronics, achieves disorientation through sheer density: a whirlwind of notes that somehow maintains "delicacy and deftness of touch."
Mark Knoop and Roderick Chadwick—both veterans of Harrison's intricate demands—navigate this terrain with staggering precision. The piece descends inexorably, dropping two octaves over its duration while decelerating to half its original tempo. Pre-recorded electronic sounds (originally conceived as live electronics) run backwards, pitch-shifted and speed-adjusted, evoking what Harrison calls "feelings of immobility, redundancy or even complete stasis." Midway through, everything halts: a two-minute sustained chord in the electronics, a startling caesura that "changes everything while changing nothing save perception."
Marc Medwin, writing for Dusted Magazine, compares it to Radigue's droning palimpsests or Schoenberg's third orchestral piece: "The music teems with sonic undercurrent in a superficially static frame." Each note, he observes, is "suffused with color, each sonority a frequency kaleidoscope." Off Shelf notes how the music "hits different on each listen—and sometimes doesn't hit at all," making more sense as you sit with it, "much like the emotions it conveys."
Harrison explains his title's seeming contradiction: "Music is well placed to create distortions of memory or to confuse our sense of presentness, pastness and futurity. I particularly like titles that contain a sense of contradiction or impossibility." The work demands what Medwin calls "the encapsulation of concentric occurrence framing and framed by the static multidirectionality of memoried experience."
Knoop and Chadwick spent years preparing. "With a work like this, the devil's in the detail," Harrison notes. "The writing is highly textual and requires clarity and precision and a special kind of touch." They devised strategies for accented grace notes—gauging stress and emphasis across registers—and slightly off-kilter rhythms. The result, recorded at St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield, is what Another Timbre calls "extraordinary, virtuosic work"—music like "being caught up in a whirlwind, swirled round and round."
Medwin's conclusion: "The best way to come to terms with it all is to listen again."
Catherine Lamb captivates with three works for voice and strings, ascetically focussed on timbral thizz and overtones with minimalist but radiant results. Lamb is a noted composer and has collaborated with Eliane Radigue, Julia Holter and Phill Niblock among many others. ’parallaxis forma’ is Lamb’s first solo release since 2021’s ‘Muto Infinitas’ for Another Timbre, and features three works performed by Explore Ensemble and Exaudi Music Ensemble, under the direction of Nicolas Moroz and James Weeks, respectively. All works derive a certain sensuality from her personalised process working with layered phonemes, alternately set to string quartet, a mixed septet of wind, tuned glasses and electric guitar, and more simply layered and left floating in air. Her use of overtones is eerily spellbinding and sure to snag more curious ears. ‘color residua’ pitches a string quartet in asymmetry to Exaudi Music Ensemble’s voices - Juliet Fraser (soprano), Cathy Bell (mezzo-soprano), Michael Hickman (baritone) - in a four part movement where composite melody emerges between the singers and strings. The other work for voice and instruments, ‘parallaxis forma’ (2016) is more tentative - underlining the haunting overtones produced by Berlin-based Australian singer Lotte Betts-Dean. Although ‘pulse/shade’ (2014) sounds like a piece for multiple voices, it features Betts-Dean clear, solo enunciation of the phonemes layered into the release’s most enchanting piece, free like ambient music but with an ascetic rigour key to its appeal.
Ockeghem Octets continues Antoine Beuger’s radical series of ensemble pieces, starting from intimate duos and building incrementally to groups of twenty. In this installment, eight performers - including Ryoko Akama (melodica), Kate Halsall (harmonium), Ecka Mordecai (cello), Leo Svirsky (accordion), Seamus Cater (concertina), Sarah Hughes (e-bow zither), Harriet Richardson (flute), and Kathryn Williams (alto flute)- join in a practice of sustained listening and collective restraint. Beuger’s process asks all players to articulate very long, very soft tones, shifting the expressive weight from individuality to ensemble number: it’s their “being eight” that generates the music’s distinct acoustic field. The score divides into fifty pages; the recording captures twenty-five, each a sequence of subtle, indivisible harmonies. The ensemble’s progression is marked by gradual change: balances and colors move so gently that the music feels both static and breathing. Tones intertwine, overlay, and recede, the beautiful monotone occasionally breached by new instrument color or an especially tender inflection. Silence plays as crucial a role as sound, allowing sustained tones to bloom or fade on their own terms. Rather than pursue drama, the music investigates mutual attention, collective tuning, and a sense of coexistence in present time. Beuger’s aesthetic - deeply influenced by reductionist and Wandelweiser traditions - values the ineffable over the exclamatory, proposing that simple means can yield profound effects. Ockeghem Octets unfolds as both a meditation and a social practice, creating a sonic architecture for healing, listening, and non-hierarchical being. Simplicity here is abundant: the piece offers space in which musicians and listeners alike can encounter the fullness of musical experience - its balance, calm, and restorative power.