Ambient / Minimal / Drone

There’s no mistaking the sultry lilt of Eliana Glass—alternating between an offbeat, searching quality and her poignant, awe-inspiring range. Her piano playing also possesses this stirring push and pull between the otherworldly and painfully human—each melody its own unique, aching realm. Glass’ sparse, meditative music often captures, in her words, the “condensation of everyday life,” an image that suits the bittersweet, ephemeral, and abstract nature of her work. Glass’ debut album, E, arrives via Shelter Press, and not only is it a tender portrait of her lifelong relationship with the piano, it’s also a distillation of entire lifetimes into song.

The Australia-born, Seattle-bred, and New York-based singer-songwriter and pianist learned to sing and play piano by ear as a child. Glass took an immediate liking to her parents’ piano, frequently hiding underneath it and letting her imagination run wild. “I felt protected under the wooden beams, and I remember looking up at the legs, wires, and foot pedals and seeing the instrument in a new way—everything suddenly everted,” Glass recalls. “I like to think about E as recalling this memory in sound.”

Glass spent years learning jazz standards, and she also learned to sing in Portuguese after falling in love with Brazilian music. Glass studied jazz voice at The New School under teachers Andrew Cyrille, Ben Street, Jay Clayton, and Kris Davis, and she began singing in piano/bass/drums quartets around New York City. In the latter half of her studies, she started writing her own songs inspired by boundary-pushing artists like Ornette Coleman, Asha Puthli, and Jeanne Lee. During the height of the pandemic, she lived with her brother Costa (who now records as ifiwereme) and felt drawn to the piano again, and they wrote songs together for the first time. Then, over a four-year span, Glass teamed up with Public Records co-founder and producer Francis Harris (Frank & Tony, Adultnapper) and engineer Bill Skibbe (Shellac, Jack White) to record what became E in various studios in Nashville, Brooklyn, Memphis, and Benton Harbor, Michigan.

Glass’ experimental, improvisational works evoke the sensual minimalism of Annette Peacock, the joyful mysteriousness of Carla Bley, and the wistful intimacy of Sibylle Baier. Her reverence for leftfield jazz and free improv greats is evident, but it’s always filtered through her signature nascent, naturalistic sound. “Dreams” is a majestic take on Peacock’s spine-tingling 1971 track of the same name, “Sing Me Softly the Blues” is a minimal, arresting reimagination of Bley’s jazz standard with lyrics adapted by Norwegian vocalist Karin Krog, and “Emahoy” is a languorous tribute to Ethiopian pianist, composer, and nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou and her 2006 compilation Éthiopiques. Glass’ music rests on a tactile, mercurial sound and her vocal brawn and versatility. E’s slippery stabs of double bass and drums tickle the ear canal and accentuate the percussiveness of her distinctive low voice, which blends sonorous, androgynous poise with fluttering delicacy.

E also has an enigmatic electronic bent that heightens the blurry emotions of Glass’ songwriting. From background hiss and windy vocals to kaleidoscopic synths, these subtle, tasteful adornments often came from specialized analog equipment: a 1960s underground echo chamber, a Cooper Time Cube (essentially, the hardware equivalent of processing audio through a garden hose), and a 1940s AEA ribbon microphone. But that doesn’t mean E sounds dated—Glass’ songs bloom with a forward-thinking spirit and ultimately function as vehicles for her heady emotions and fragmented memories and dreams.

For E, Glass challenged herself to channel full lifetimes within each track. Astonishingly, the seductive opening song “All My Life” manages this feat with just its three-word title. Songs like this one, the breathy ballad “Shrine,” and the spare, folky “On the Way Down” brood over past lives and reflect on memories as if disembodied and viewed from above. From missed connections to retired nicknames (“Good Friends Call Me E”), there’s a pervasive sense of disintegration and a fear of lost time. Other tracks like solo piano-and-voice numbers “Flood” and “Solid Stone” engage in more elusive storytelling, marked by brutal imagery and timeless characters. Then there’s “Human Dust,” a tranquil, rhythm-driven rendition of conceptual artist Agnes Denes’ 1969 text—a quite literal summary of a life.

Eliana Glass has come a long way since daydreaming beneath a towering keyboard. Glass’ peculiar vocal alchemy and vivid piano saunters are masterful and wholly her own, and her forthcoming debut full-length is a gift of resonant beauty and rewarding ambiguity. She now performs around New York City with bandmates Walter Stinson (bass) and Mike Gebhart (drums), in addition to solo shows perched in front of a 1979 Moog Opus organ. Also an accomplished visual artist in her own right, Glass is firmly in control of her inspired visions, even if E is spiritually adrift—though that’s kind of the point. As a musician and an improviser, Glass is enamored by and an adept wielder of the search—for meaning, for sounds, for newness, for connection. And just like Krog crooned on “Sing Me Softly the Blues” in 1975: “Life’s so thrilling / if you search.” 

One of the universal experiences of life on Earth is staring, neck craned, at the cosmos. The vastness of one’s internal life meets the vastness of space, and in that moment those perspectives fuse in a state of wonder and curiosity. Space As An Instrument, the new album by French artist and musician Félicia Atkinson, invites listeners to explore the phantasmic landscapes created in such transformative encounters, when the mind is open and receptive to its environment. Like being absorbed by the immensity of the night sky, this music dilates the imagination and helps us to sit comfortably in the mystery of the ineffable. We are guided through Space As An Instrument by the piano, its a linear story told through restrained, iterative melodies that become entwined with the sounds at the music’s margins - a wisp of electronics, a pinprick of an enunciated consonant. They were recorded on Atkinson’s phone, which was placed next to the keys, or behind her, with the sound of the room bleeding through to give a sense of the place and time of the encounter. She describes these sessions as meetings where she and the piano commune to co-create these spiraling phrases and vaporous dissonances moment by moment. Complicating this dynamic is the presence of digital pianos, which exist in the surreal space of diodes and LED displays. They act as avatars of their three-dimensional counterparts: nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. Still, the inhabited world of people, water, and wind can be heard throughout Space As An Instrument. Often these recordings are integrated into the backdrop of electronics, or reduced to the sound of movements whose physical forms are obscured: the microphone straining against a forceful gust on “Sorry,” arhythmic footsteps traversing an invisible terrain on “Pensées Magiques.” These field recordings take us to the brink of synesthetic experience, allowing us to glimpse with our ear the topography of the imagination. But Atkinson’s music resists any kind of singular perspective on the scene, or any distinct conclusion. “It doesn’t explain anything,” she says, “but it translates the way I perceive it, somehow.” Atkinson is a polymath by nature, engrossed in a variety of daily artistic practices that nourish one another. In her garden, she performs the slow work of cross-species relationship building, cultivating an ideal space for introspection and further creation; many of the album’s vocal and electronic elements were recorded there. Poetry, which she prizes for its capacity to render the everyday tools of meaning-making more enigmatic, becomes folded into the music as well. She paints as often as time allows. One personal limitation Atkinson finds in painting, the rendering of perspective, has become one of her music’s defining characteristics. The vantage point of the listener is slippery and undefined, with sounds at once appearing gigantic and minuscule, distant and immediate. This phenomena is central to “Thinking Iceberg,” a 13-minute piece that was whittled down from an hour and a half performance, who remain only a ghostly presence on the album’s recording. Atkinson wrote the piece in response to Olivier Remaud’s book Thinking Like An Iceberg, in which the philosopher assigns agency to these massive, endangered objects and imagines how they might perceive their millenia-long relationship to humans. Stoic synthesizer tones percolate while water flows just out of the immediate frame with a disarming clarity and presence. As the piece crests, Atkinson’s whispered voice emerges softly, placed right against the listener’s left ear, contrasting with the billowing mass of sound that otherwise dominates. We emerge with a glimmer of awareness of how immensity and delicacy can coexist as time and humanity extract their toll. Félicia Atkinson says her music exists “on the verge of understanding and not understanding,” which often precludes such literal interpretations. But in that nebulous space there is humility and openness, and perhaps enough empathy to understand the consciousness of a massive, frozen chunk of water. With the listener’s perspective diffused into many different vantage points, how might that, too, become a vehicle for the development of compassion? As we listen, we encounter the wisdom that there is meaning not just in the experience of the sublime, that radical juxtaposition of limitlessness and intimacy, but also in the continuum of countless individuals that have taken the same journey.

和製コズミック・サイケ／アンビエントの秘宝。今年2月7日に逝去した日本の音楽シーンにおける最大のレジェンドのひとり、Magical Power Makoが、1993年に自主制作で発表した知られざる音宇宙『Next Millennium Vibrations』が、アートワークを新装し、リマスタリング仕様でCD再発！祈りのようなシンセサイザーの波動、メディテイティヴな旋律、そして内面宇宙を旅するようなスピリチュアルな浮遊感。クラウトロック〜ニューエイジ〜環太平洋の民族音楽までを呑み込みながら、誰にも似ていない独自のサイケデリックなサウンドスケープを形成。極私的な録音の中に潜む、未だ聴かれぬ「次の千年」の響き。まさに未来への密やかな手紙です。

more eaze and claire rousay’s collaborations are effortlessly joyful, their music evoking the warmth and respect they have for each other. Their bond goes back to their youthful hometown of San Antonio, Texas where they played in country outfits and noise rock bands respectively, and each pushed their music to extend beyond the traditions and conventions of genre. more eaze (the moniker of violinist/multi-instrumentalist mari maurice) and rousay have spent the past decade pushing boundaries, standing together at the vanguard of genre-shattering music that thrills and surprises with its vulnerability and creativity. no floor weds their prowess as sound designers and masterful skills as composers with their skills as acoustic instrumentalists. Eschewing the auto-tune inflected pop-psychedelia and found sounds of their previous collaborations, no floor is collage music as pastoral melancholia, a lush tour into their own version of Americana.

The duo’s ever-widening sonic scope is centered in their mastery of collage. Known for their extensive use of found sound and hyper pop escapades, maurice and rousay employ a more traditional compositional approach. On no floor the pair created their own elaborate sound world rather than manipulating field recordings. “It was a conscious choice to spend a lot of time making fucked up sounds and then figuring out how they could be beautiful in another context,” notes maurice. “With this record I had no idea what claire would do on each track, and we were both trying to match each other’s ‘freak’ in terms of sound design.” Movements across each piece uncover the ecstatic in nuance. The album’s gentle arc explores feeling with minute gestures and textural swells, carried by maurice and rousay’s enmeshed sonics. rousay’s ostinato guitar patterns and acoustic strums swim through tides of maurice’s pedal steel. Glitching electronics burble in dynamic fits as dramatic strings add waves of tension and release. no floor’s pieces are atmospheric, living biomes that breathe and grow with each passage, rewarding close listens with the revelation of its emotional core.

The five tracks that make up no floor were named for seminal bars in the pair’s shared history, or as the duo humorously refer to them, “Pillars of our debauchery.” no floor is an introspective reflection on the emotional turmoil of youth as much as it is a celebration of a camaraderie forged in that turmoil. Freneticism dances atop the placid textures of pieces like “kinda tropical” and “limelight, illegally”, embodying the playfulness that comes with reveling in kinship at a shared safe space. The more reserved “hopfields” and “the applebees outside kalamazoo, michigan” reflect the less familiar locales of their namesakes, the former a sumptuous special occasion that glimmers with soft light and the latter a slow roil of the uncertainty and strangeness that comes with touring as experimental artists in one’s youth. “As we moved from being very close together to living further away and being involved in different scenes, we had more serious conversations,” notes rousay. “In the past it was more plug and play, where with this record we talked about every aspect before and while working on it.”

The pieces of no floor are born of the deep connection between more eaze and claire rousay, built from strands of familiarity and surprise, the two buttressing one another as they push themselves as instrumentalists, composers, and artists to unexplored boundaries. The wordless timbral compositions retain the duo’s lyrical approach to their craft. Infused with melody, the pieces are collages of sound and emotion. no floor exemplifies the duo’s shared skills in unearthing new and exciting sound arrangements, evoking the warmth and affection of their friendship and musical fearlessness.

claire rousay is a singular artist, known for challenging conventions in experimental and ambient music forms. rousay masterfully incorporates textural found sounds, sumptuous drones and candid field recordings into music that celebrates the beauty in life’s banalities. Her music is curatorial and granular in detail, deftly shaped into emotionally affecting pieces. sentiment is a meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex. The album’s narrative arc is guided by delicate musical gestures and artistic vulnerability, audaciously synthesizing disparate and unexpected influences. rousay crafted the songs in various homes, bedrooms, hotels, and other private places, the feeling of time and energy spent alone radiating from each passage. The album is a collection of heart-rending, incisive pop songs that explore universal feelings with subtlety and remarkable vision. rousay’s vocals and guitar take center stage on sentiment. Her intimate, diaristic lyrics contrast with her mechanical-inflected vocal effects, emphasizing a powerful desire for connection, a deep yearning and a lingering sense of separation. The spare guitar playing and laconic tempo both drive the songs and exude a sense of resignation. Her delicate mastery of nuance draws on her explorative musical past that she, with sincerity and admiration, seamlessly interweaves into her adventurous textures and distinctive compositions. “I want to belong to the worlds and communities I look up to. Same as someone using a Fender guitar or dressing like Kurt Cobain. Emulate your heroes,” says rousay. From a sprawling math-rock duo, to an array of emo-inflected rock outfits to a hired hand in evangelical worship bands, rousay worked as a percussionist for over a decade before shifting her focus to the solo collage work she’s known for. sentiment folds those experiences into her compositions. rousay explains, “As the drummer in an evangelical rock band, it’s your job, with the singers, to manipulate the crowd. You start building on the drums and you know it’s one bigger chorus and then we’re out and you can see the tears, people just start crying. I still feel a version of that when playing my own shows now.” The album balances the poetic soul of her influences with a documentarian heart, rousay capturing moments of her life while living alone in houses across the country, learning to play guitar, and reconnecting with pop music. “I have been on a quest to communicate my feelings and ideas as clearly as possible lately. Pop seemed like the way to do that this time,” says rousay. The confessional nature of sampled fragments of conversation give her pieces a specificity and sense of intimacy that is both immediate and curious. rousay’s innate ability to conjure pure feeling from sound derives from her delightful embrace of pop forms, the vulnerability found in field recordings, minimalistic arrangements and innovative sound choices. The resulting songs of sentiment are as anthemic as they are breathtakingly personal. sentiment is blissfully, achingly melancholic, and an undeniably sensual listening experience.

Suntub’ is the second full length album from ML Buch, a double record of 15 pieces by the Danish composer and producer, entering further into the realm of electric guitars and layered vocals along with exploring new instrumental expressions. With an offset in open tunings on a 7-string Stratocaster, slide and fretless tablet guitars and deep-sampled virtual guitars, the album draws up narratives and locations in a distant time. Props like puddles, well buckets, bone barrels and flesh rags live in these scenes, suspended in air, drifting about, climbing stairs and ladders, all given life through guitar sensibilities and visceral vocals.

Suntub’ is the second full length album from ML Buch, a double record of 15 pieces by the Danish composer and producer, entering further into the realm of electric guitars and layered vocals along with exploring new instrumental expressions. With an offset in open tunings on a 7-string Stratocaster, slide and fretless tablet guitars and deep-sampled virtual guitars, the album draws up narratives and locations in a distant time. Props like puddles, well buckets, bone barrels and flesh rags live in these scenes, suspended in air, drifting about, climbing stairs and ladders, all given life through guitar sensibilities and visceral vocals.

Suntub’ is the second full length album from ML Buch, a double record of 15 pieces by the Danish composer and producer, entering further into the realm of electric guitars and layered vocals along with exploring new instrumental expressions. With an offset in open tunings on a 7-string Stratocaster, slide and fretless tablet guitars and deep-sampled virtual guitars, the album draws up narratives and locations in a distant time. Props like puddles, well buckets, bone barrels and flesh rags live in these scenes, suspended in air, drifting about, climbing stairs and ladders, all given life through guitar sensibilities and visceral vocals.

Deep, textural ambient pieces recorded on the Finnish island of Kimitoön by Brooklyn's Sontag Shogun and Finland's Laura Naukkarinen.

"When the trio of Sontag Shogun gathered at Laura Naukkarinen's home on the Finnish island of Kimitoön in the summer of 2019, they had not the slightest inkling that the world was about to change irretrievably with the onset of a long-predicted pandemic the following year. By the time their collaborative album, Valo Siroutuu ("The Light Scatters"), was released nearly two years later, the intimate and reflective nature of the work they had created together had taken on new meaning, resonating powerfully (and quietly) with a world in which the proverbial cracks in the wall only seem to be widening.

Päiväkahvit completes the story that began with Valo Siroutuu, featuring 9 songs from the original sessions as well as 4 interpretive reworks courtesy of Amulets, Fadi Tabbal, Post-Dukes, and Jeremy Young. Available digitally and in a one-time vinyl pressing of 300 copies, the album flows seamlessly from beginning to end, incorporating field recordings, tape, sublime vocal melodies, and a host of acoustic and electronic instruments. Richly textured and immersive, Päiväkahvit positively crackles with warmth and a sense of creative embrace.

"We invite the listener into the sauna, out to the garden and onto the trampoline, to sit by the water’s edge and to take a coffee in the waning afternoon light, and to stay as long as they like." – Jesse Perlstein

Lau Nau, aka Laura Naukkarinen, is a Finnish composer whose music is imbued with an idiosyncratic, finely honed sound world. Her palette consists of acoustic instruments, singing voice, modular synthesisers, reel-to-reel tape recorders and field recordings. To date Lau Nau has released ten albums on record labels in Europe, the USA and Japan and a large number of collaborative releases. Lau Nau is known for her music to films and multi channel sound installations. She was awarded the Finnish State Prize for the Performing Arts 2021 as a sound designer. She has toured abroad for over 20 years, playing in venues such as Super Deluxe in Tokyo, the Lab & Castro Theatre in San Francisco and Blank Forms & Issue Project Room in New York.

Sontag Shogun is a collaborative trio that makes use of analog sound treatments and nostalgic solo piano compositions in harmony to depict abstract places in our memory. Textures built from organic materials such as sand, slate, boiling water, brush and dried leaves, both produced live in performance and recorded to weathered 1/4" tape warm up the space between lush piano themes. All of which is abstracted coolly in the reflective digital space of treated vocals and a live-processed feed from the piano. Bringing us back, like a faded passing scent or any natural emotive trigger, but to where? The wordless journey there will inevitably be more revealing than the destination itself."

A certain post-peak revelry and shaky fidelity of memory triggers and recall underlies Sebastian Carghini’s subtly trippy debut bow for topo2, the label run by erstwhile Dekmantel programmer Bert de Rooij and home to upsammy and Windu.

With a compelling poetic quality Carghini seduces us deep into hypnagogic states of mind with the mercurial ephemerality of his ‘Ramble’ album, an idealised iteration of the peculiar, subtle sound he’s developed over the past decade for the likes of Second Sleep, enmossed/Psychic Liberation, and Total Stasis. 

Leading on in the steps of upsammy’s gently febrile ‘Strange Meridians’, and the featured flows of ‘Juxtapose’ by Wind, the 11-part suite chases a frayed thread of memory looping logic thru processes that appear to uncoil and re-stitch the strands into forms of smudged dub tech and decayed electronica shades away from Actress’s iridescent greyscale, the Peak Oil x False Aralia dubtech soul axis, or even the sounds Andy Stott’s machines make when he’s not listening. 

Earth heartbeating, spirtual jazz nodding, modern day mysticism & star gazing ritualism from Hu Vibrational aka musical polymath Adam Rudolph, aided by the cream of New York's esoteric instrument players who add a further culturally diverse twist to this already outernational journey through kosmische tribalism, universal resonances & Fourth World perpetuation.

Looking for some fresh and innovative soundscapes? Hu Vibrational's fifth album Timeless puts forth nine tracks of gorgeously rich and densely textured music. The spiritually intoxicating grooves of Hu Vibrational are the brainchild of Adam Rudolph , who calls them “Boonghee Music” —a cascade of world - inspired beats mixed with jazz, hip-hop and electronica. The result is music that thrives on the balance of simultaneously reaching backwards and forwards in time.

While Timeless finds Rudolph playing most of the instruments, he is joined on several tracks by some of his longtime associates: Norwegian guitar sound painter Eivind Aarset, drummer Hamid Drake, and several members of his Go: Organic Orchestra. Moroccan percussionist Brahim Fribgane and North Indian performers Neel Murgai (sitar) and Sameer Gupta (tabla) bring unique sounds that Rudolph weaves in to the compositional fabric. Hu Vibrational combines world music with electronica and improvised jazz to create music that is funky, spiritual, hardcore, and soothing.

With Rudolph employing his “organic” orchestrations, arrangements, and electronic processing to shape the compositions, he works with his musicians in his “sonic mandala” concept to build layers of percussion, electronics and otherworldly sounds. Beats are the core, and influences range far and wide , yet these influences only provide a foundation. “Orchestration is the key” says Rudolph. “In the creative process of making this recording, I was looking for new ways of balancing the rhythmic elements I use with innovative colorations. As Don Cherry used to say ‘the swing is in the sound’.

This audiophile LP was beautifully mixed and mastered by James Dellatacoma, Bill Laswell’s (and Rudolph’s) longtime engineer at Laswell’s Orange Studio. The gatefold album opens onto nine gorgeous pen and watercolor paintings by Nancy Jackson that, like the art of Robert Crumb, are both humorous and deeply philosophical. It is the second time Rudolph and his wife Ms. Jackson have collaborated, the first being the 1995 book and CD release The Dreamer, an opera inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s“The Birth of Tragedy.

Those primarily familiar with Rudolph’s recent releases with his 30+ piece Go: Organic Orchestra ,like their collaboration with Brooklyn Raga Massive (Ragmala, Meta 023) ,or his spontaneous composition trio with Tyshawn Sorey and Dave Liebman ( New Now, Meta 027), or even his 2021 electronic soundscape with Bennie Maupin (Strut Records) ,might find in the music on Timeless a whole other direction. But, as Rudolph states ,“With each release I try to do something I have never done before.” This is no small claim for an artist who has released over 35 recordings featuring his compositions and percussion work.

Besides leading his own ensembles, Go: Organic Orchestra and Moving Pictures, Rudolph is known for his work over the last four plus decades with innovators such as Yusef Lateef, Don Cherry, Jon Hassel, and Pharaoh Sanders among others

Rudolph was hailed by the New York times as “an innovator in World Music” and indeed his experience is long and varied; In 1978 he co-founded, with Foday Musa Suso , the Mandingo Griot Society, one of the first groups to combine African and American music and in 1988 he recorded the first fusion of American and Moroccan Gnawa music with sintir player Hassan Hakmoun.

Rudolph’s creative methodology and philosophy has been outlined in two books, Pure Rhythm (2006) and Sonic Elements (2022). The compositional concepts are applied in all his creative output: from his through composed string quartets to his newest Hu Vibrational release. Rudolph notes: “The underlying elements are the same, like a kind of musical DNA. They come to life in the context of the what it is I wish to express at the time it has nothing to do with style it has to do with the creative impulse what needs to be allowed to come forth in the moment.”

Adam Rudolph: keyboards, thumb pianos, merimbula, cajon, mbuti harp, mouth bow, vocal, slit drums, udu drums, wooden and bamboo flutes, double reeds, gongs, kudu horn, zither, caxixi, kongos, tarija, gankogui, bells, percussion

Alexis Marcelo: fender rhodes, organ (Hittin, Proto Zoa Gogo)

Brahim Fribgane: tarija (Oceanic)

Damon Banks: bass (Hittin, Proto Zoa Gogo)

Eivind Aarset: guitar and electronics (Serpentine, Timeless, Honey Honey, Proto Zoa Gogo, Psychic)

Hamid Drake: drum set Space, Oceanic, Hittin, Jammin, Proto Zoa Gogo)

Harris Eisenstadt: bata (Hittin, Timeless)

Jan Bang: sampling TImeless, Honey Honey, Psychic)

Kaoru Watanabe: nohkan flute (Proto Zoa Gogo)

Marco Cappelli: guitar (Hittin)

Munyungo Jackson: tambourine, shekere (Oceanic)

Neel Murgai: sitar (Hittin)

Sameer Gupta: tabla (Space, Timeless)

Leading figure of modern ambient Florian TM Zeisig drifts in adult contemporary neo classical space for a shimmering 2nd turn with Stroom, blessed by harp and saxophone from Róisín & Cathal Berkeley and Lia Mazzarri’s cello.

Fresh from minting his Angel R project with Aaliyah Enyo, and building on a handful of cherished albums on enmossed, including the ambient soundtrack to Berghain’s cloakroom, Zeisig curves back onto Stroom with an album of effortlessly lush floatation tank/massage parlour music (delete as applicable).

The spirit of Eno and pot pourri is strong on this one as Zeisig diffuses instrumental gestures into aerosolised synth tones with a gossamer touch that’s come to be expected of his work. It’s all super smooth and florid in the procession from new age waft on ‘Life’s a Spiral’ to the spiritual jazz whims of ‘Thank You Pharoah’ and chill out scenes of ‘Eternal Shore’ on the A-side.

There’s a possible tongue-in-cheek wit to the title and sentiment of ‘Diddy’s Lament’, and ‘Earth Loop’ lists off into powdered 4th world ambient bliss-out and a sublime closing couplet of the plangent sax to ‘Die Große Natur’ and ‘Embody Source Energy’ primed for touching grass from the comfort of your duvet.

New Environments & Rhythm Studies finds Andrew Pekler returning to the humid zones he explored on previous albums such as Sounds From Phantom Islands and Tristes Tropiques. Split between longer immersive compositions and shorter glimpse-like sketches, these 12 tracks feature new juxtapositions of Pekler's familiar palette of synthetic field recordings, warm, undulating electronic textures, shifting percussion patterns and serene melodies.

As with much of his recent work, Pekler's compositions here are structured around the beguiling effect of synthetic and non-synthetic sounds mirroring, mimicking and modulating one another. The teeming atmospheres within tracks such as Globestructures, Cymbals In The Mist or Globestructures: Option II are, despite their seemingly anthropogenic nature, entirely synthetic. Elsewhere, the lopsided grooves of Cumbia Para Los Grillos or Fabulation For K are derived from recordings of crickets and other insects which Pekler loops and uses to trigger electronic percussion – producing a pleasantly skewed rhythmic base for the fragments of melody which are layered on top. The six Rhythm Studies also follow the same principle – a playful interweaving of the organic and synthetic.

New Environments & Rhythm Studies is a further attempt to re-describe past tropes which laid claims to authentically represent music and sound from beyond the Western world (exotica, ethnomusicology, field recording) as undertakings of the imaginary.

Hometown to Come, the second full-length album by Minhwi Lee, is set to be released in November 2023. The eight tracks were written over a period of seven years after Lee's first album and loosely form a single story, contemplating how people who have lost their hometown can return. “What I had imagined from the title, Hometown to Come, was something forever delayed yet constantly approaching; however, upon repeated listens, it takes on a different meaning—a promise of hospitality being realized every day. Even if our places to meet disappear, ‘the song we sing today’ will remain. We will continue to grow, cross paths again, venture far away, and encounter more faces. And when time has passed and you, having forgotten me, ask about my smile or sadness, I will hum ‘the same song,’ cherishing it as a keepsake.” (morceau j. woo, sound designer)

SG is none other than Andrew Pekler returning to faitiche with an album of sentimental guitar escapism. For Lovers Only / Rain Suite features ten tracks made using only an electric guitar and a handful of effects pedals (plus some additional recordings of rain) and finds Pekler once again attempting to reconicile his tendencies towards kitsch, experimentation and minimalism. 

What does Pekler's pseudonym SG stand for? Sentimental Guitar? Sound Gallery? Shy Guy? Sad Gnosis? Saudade Glamour? Soft Goth? We don't know, but we asked notorious Chicago romantic Sam Prekop for his take on the album – his reply: It’s a wonder where the rivers go and far, how fast or slow. Just seconds to remember, who can forget, when you are lost. I think to recount every step, in both hands, eyes open, the clouds unfold, one two three. Every other step, just as well. Where the moss is soft, you know strong. How many hours, days? I could have been careful, did I forget? Never mind. Waking up, in these arms, where the rivers go, slow. One two three, one two three.

Re-release of Blue Chemise's debut LP, which originally appeared in 2017 as a limited private release of 105 copies. We are proud to make this much sought-after record available again on both physical and digital, with remastered sound by Christophe Albertijn and updated artwork, all true to the original intentions of, and in close collaboration with, the artist. ‘Influence On Dusk’ forms an idiosyncratic cycle of fourteen mysterious, sometimes uncanny electroacoustic compositions, a personal and subdued eruption of 'melancholy of the healthy kind’, suddenly here and suddenly gone… This is the second release on B.A.A.D.M. by the Australian artist Mark Gomes, following his equally atmospheric but more romantic 'Flower Studies' from 2021.

Meitei’s 2020 album 'Kofū' was the bold bookend to an expedition, where sounds were first navigated and then subverted in 2018’s 'Kwaidan' and 2019’s 'Komachi'.

All three albums were Meitei’s attempt at immersive storytelling, reimagining moments of Japanese history he felt were being washed away – not least by the unforgiving sands of time – through wistful compositions that stretched across ambient music, hauntology, and musique concrete.

When it came to finalizing 'Kofū', Meitei found he was left with over 60 fully realized tracks, bursting with ideas that fired in divergent, curious directions. Meitei was content with the 13 tracks he had selected. But when it came time to begin his next album, he found that it had been sitting in front of him all along. He realized his work wasn’t over yet.

Meitei sounds right at home celebrating the past he first reimagined in his previous work. The merriment is palpable in its first two tracks of 'Kofū II' – a loop of cheery whistling amidst the clanking of wood leads into strings, cricket sounds and flutes, all united in bustling harmony.

'Happyaku-yachō' is where it comes into focus. Pitch-shifted vocal samples roam around in the crowded sonic field. “My image of this music is that it expresses the vibrant mood of Edo's merchant culture,” says Meitei, “where old Japanese dwellings were densely packed together in a vast expanse of land.” The affair becomes bittersweet as the track leads into the desolate 'Kaworu', a compositional piece lifted from his 'Komachi' sessions – a final requiem to his late grandmother.

The album is bursting with spectral vignettes of wandering samurais, red lanterns, ninjas, puppet theatres, poets, even a vengeful assassin ('Shurayuki hime', known to Western audiences as ‘Lady Snowblood’).

'Saryō' is as elegant and refined as you would expect. It induces stillness in its repetition, with each synth note a brushstroke. It was inspired by a Sengoku-era tea house he once visited, designed by national icon Sen no Rikyū. Meitei tied it to the reaction he felt while poring over the ink paintings in his grandmother’s house. “The decayed earthen walls and faded tatami mats gave me an emotional impression,” he says. “And the cosmic flow of time drifting in the small room. I decided to put my impression of this into music.”

In 'Akira Kurosawa', an appropriately thunderous track, Meitei finds deep resonance in his vast filmography, which drew equally from Japan’s rich heritage and troubled circumstances post-WWII.

'Kofū II' is not a leftovers album, nor is it a straightforward companion piece. In this album, Meitei has his biggest reckoning with the Japanese identity yet. Over the years, he has attempted to peel back what he believes has defined Japan and its people. After seeking answers with three full-length albums, his fourth poses more questions.

If his first three albums inspired a sense of longing – or, perhaps inevitably, fed an irreparable nostalgia doomed to history – 'Kofū II' compels us to reassess our relationship with the past. By constantly looking back, are we ever afforded a clearer present? After capturing the “lost Japanese mood”, where does that leave its country in the modern world? Meitei offers no immediate answers with 'Kofū II'. It forces you to sit with its disparate moods, to meditate amidst the textured fragments.

'Kofū II' will be released on 180g LP, CD and digital format on December 10, 2021 (LP expected to land January 28, 2022) via KITCHEN. LABEL. Both LP and CD format are presented in a debossed sleeve with obi strip and include a 16-page insert with words in Japanese and English from Meitei, printed on premium paper stock with design by KITCHEN. LABEL founder Ricks Ang, and is mastered by Chihei Hatakeyama in Tokyo, Japan. 

London-based percussionist and composer Valentina Magaletti teams up with Japanese experimental electronic artist YPY for Kansai Bruises, an evocative exploration of cross-cultural sonic territories that bridges European avant-garde percussion with Japanese electronic minimalism. The album unfolds across eight carefully crafted tracks that document a metaphysical journey through Japan's Kansai region, where ancient traditions collide with hypermodern urban realities. Opening with One Hour Visa, the record immediately establishes its liminal character—caught between arrival and departure, belonging and displacement.

Magaletti, whose collaborations span from Nidia to Jandek, brings her signature approach of "strategically enriching a folkloristic and eclectic palette through endless listening and experimentation." Her percussion work here is both architectural and atmospheric, creating rhythmic foundations that breathe with organic unpredictability while maintaining an underlying structural tension. YPY's electronic contributions provide the perfect counterpoint—minimal yet emotionally charged, digital yet deeply human. Together, they create soundscapes that feel simultaneously intimate and vast, personal and universal. Standout tracks include the title piece Kansai Bruises, where field recordings merge with processed percussion to create an almost cinematic sense of urban wandering, and Float, which achieves a remarkable state of weightlessness through its interplay of subtle electronics and polyrhythmic percussion. The album's sequencing tells a complete story: from the initial disorientation of One Hour Visa through the nocturnal drift of Lantern Lit Run, the contemplative pause of Interlude for Fog Days, and the surprising warmth of closing track Pesto—a title that hints at the unexpected cultural fusion that defines this remarkable collaboration.

Kansai Bruises represents a significant evolution in transcultural electronic music, proving that the most interesting artistic encounters happen not in the comfort of familiar territory, but in the bruising, beautiful space between worlds.

When you’re running a label, a demo occasionally comes across your desk that makes you reconsider everything you thought your label was all about. For Balmat, such was the case with this stunning album from Stephen Vitiello, Brendan Canty, and Hahn Rowe. It sounds like nothing we’ve released so far—and that very otherness opened up a whole new world of possibilities for us.

Fans of ambient, experimental electronic music, and sound art will be familiar with Vitiello, a New York native, long based in Virginia, who has collaborated with a cross-generational list of greats: Taylor Deupree, Steve Roden, Lawrence English, Tetsu Inoue, Nam June Paik, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Pauline Oliveros, and many more. On labels like 12k, Room40, and Sub Rosa, he has explored a wide range of minimalism, microsound, lowercase, ambient, improv, and other styles. But this album is something different. It may begin in ambient-adjacent territory, but it quickly veers off, and it just keeps zigzagging, taking on elements of krautrock, post-punk, dub, and the groove-heavy interplay of groups like Natural Information Society and 75 Dollar Bill.

This stylistic turn is thanks in large part to Vitiello’s choice of collaborators. “We’re coming from three different schools,” Vitiello says: “sound art, art rock, and punk rock.”

Active since the early 1980s, Rowe—a violinist, guitarist, and producer/engineer—has played with, or manned the boards for, a frankly jaw-dropping list of musicians: Herbie Hancock, Gil Scott-Heron, the Last Poets, Roy Ayers, John Zorn, Glenn Branca, Swans, Live Skull, Brian Eno, David Byrne, Anohni, R.E.M., Yoko Ono, and many more. But he might be most closely associated with Hugo Largo, a one-of-a-kind New York quartet—two basses, vocals, and Rowe’s violin—that in the late 1980s helped lay the groundwork for what would eventually become known as post-rock.

Canty, of course, is the legendary drummer of Fugazi, the visionary DC post-hardcore group, as well as Rites of Spring before them, and, currently, the Messthetics, a Dischord-signed instrumental trio with guitarist Anthony Pirog and Fugazi bassist Joe Lally.

Vitiello’s trio first collaborated on First, a 17-minute piece released on the Longform Editions label in 2023. Second picks up where the freeform drift of First left off, channeling the trio’s exploratory energies into more intentionally structured tracks and—in a real first for Balmat—some almost shockingly muscular grooves.

“Sometimes my projects are more conceptually driven,” Vitiello says, “but I think this was more musically geared. I just wanted to open up the references and bring in an incredible drummer, bring in some melodies, and I’m sort of the center.” But his collaborators, he stresses, are “vastly creative in making anything I might suggest better.”

Like its predecessor, Second took shape in phases, shifting between improvisation and collage. Vitiello laid down the skeleton of the music at home, sketching out initial ideas on Rhodes keyboard and acoustic and electric guitar; he then fed the parts through samplers and his modular system, recording 10- or 20-minute jams. Once he had edited them into more structured forms, he hit the studio with Canty, who added not just drums but also bass and piano; finally, Vitiello took the results of those sessions to Rowe, who played violin, viola, electric bass, and 12-string acoustic and bowed electric guitar, and assisted in some of the final structuring and mixdown.

A few more surprises along the way: Reanimator’s Don Godwin, the studio engineer where Vitiello recorded with Canty, contributed what he calls “resonant dustpan”; and none other than Animal Collective’s Geologist, who just happened to be in the studio that day, sits in on hurdy gurdy on “Mrphgtrs1,” the album’s gorgeous, stunningly atmospheric drone closer. “I love these chance encounters,” Vitiello says. “Somebody I admire, a group I admire—that was an unexpected gift.”

An unexpected gift is a great way of describing Second as a whole: three veteran musicians venturing outside their usual zones and finding a new collaborative language together. The results can’t be neatly slotted into any given genre; they belong not to any given category, but to the spirit of conversation itself.

Salamanda and Tristan Arp lend effervescent reworks to key numbers off the gossamer-spun debut of ambient electronica by Singapore/London’s Yingtuitive, all flyaway strands of gamelan, flickering pulses and 8-bit circuitry given an emotive warmth and quiet strength...

“Singapore-born, London-based producer yingtuitive introduces herself with Letters To Self 寫情書, a deeply personal debut LP arriving on Will Hofbauer’s Third Place.

A classically trained pianist whose musical identity draws from Southeast Asian traditions, electronic experimentation, and diasporic reflection, yingtuitive crafts soundscapes that feel both intimate and expansive. The project is accompanied by two stunning reworks from esteemed creators: South Korean ambient duo Salamanda, known for their lush, meditative textures, and US artist Tristan Arp, celebrated for his organic, shape-shifting productions.

“Every musical moment in this album is essentially a letter to my self in some form…” - yingtuitive

Across eight original compositions, Letters To Self 寫情書 unfolds as a sonic diary, a search inward, a series of tender emotional missives to the self. Gamelan-inspired textures glimmer alongside field recordings captured in Singapore and the UK, while delicate, improvised piano passages echo memories of home. These elements intertwine with fragments of film samples and experimental electronics, resulting in tracks that glide through ambient, ethereal, and blissful terrains. It’s music that floats and envelops, as though nature itself had grown into sound, serene and rich in emotional resonance.

Written during a period of deep reflection, the album meditates on identity, homesickness, belonging, and the overwhelming noise of the world outside. Each piece feels like a still moment within chaos, a soft conversation between past and present selves, where harmony emerges from internal conflict. From angelic piano melodies to glitchy bursts of experimentalism, yingtuitive bridges her Singaporean roots and UK influences with blissful grace. Letters To Self 寫情書 marks not just a debut release, but the formation of a unique musical voice, gliding between cultural languages with honesty, vulnerability, and quiet strength.”

Quickly following March’s The Fool - our label debut - Sa Pa reveals his new album Ambeesh on Short Span.

Coming five years after In A Landscape, and nearly a decade since his debut Fuubutsushi, Ambeesh is a collection of Sa Pa’s unreleased work.

Written between 2014-2019, the album has been conceptually curated as a follow up to his FORUM debut. Ambeesh possesses the unique language and liveliness of ambient, layered field recordings, and dub techno found in those earlier records, with those seamless skydives through pressure formations that were found on the Enter Sa Pa mix.

These pieces have been crackling under the surface of Sa Pa’s released work to date and there’s little else that compares. It’s a cache of some of his deepest and most texturally thrilling music.

Singular in its combination of atmosphere; Ambeesh presses on the body at the right volume, and moves in thrust and riposte with the listener’s circadian rhythms. Sa Pa continues to dissolve the border between club-informed experimentation and intimate headphone listening.

Ambeesh marks the artist’s return to his homeland Australia and an exciting new chapter.

Minneapolis-born saxophonist Cole Pulice, acclaimed for the ambient jazz masterpiece To Live & Die In Space & Time, returns with a long-awaited new album on the spiritually rooted West Coast label Leaving Records. Celestial echoes of modern classical, glacial drones of profound stillness, and a radiant landscape where spiritual jazz and ambient music interweave—this is music that dissolves into the air, where even silence feels sonorous. Pulice’s horn traces ripples that linger long after the notes fade, offering a meditative expanse of emotion, memory, and time. A deeply introspective and prayerful work that resonates with the space between sound and silence.

A must-have for fans of Japanese environmental music such as Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa and Yutaka Hirose! Organic new age music that is swallowed by the beauty of nature that sways gracefully! Leaving Records is proud to present the debut EP by Green-House, a project by local artist Olive Ardizon. "The six tracks are based on the concept of "communication between plant life and the people who grow it. Based on field recordings that capture the sounds of water and the voices and movements of plants and animals in nature, this is a superb new age/ambient work that breathes an aesthetic synth sound that encompasses the beauty and serenity of the pull that is common in Japanese environmental music. Artwork by Michael Flanagan.

Froid Dub continues to explore its synth-lined slowed down digi-dub cave flooded with waves of echoes and acid bleeps. Bass lines and flanged delays sail over deep waters, seemingly barely disturbed by the minimal pump of the synth-wave vibe.