Ambient / Minimal / Drone

Pontiac Streator mints a solo debut for Brian Leeds’ (Huerco S.) West Mineral Ltd. label with a bouquet of plasmic ambient lobe strokers, dusted with the guest charms of Ben Bondy, Perila, Nikolay Kozlov, and Protozoa Project. Arriving as a more personalised pursuit of the genteel themes that bound his pair of albums with Ulla in 2018-19, ’Sone Glo’ portrays the Philly-based ambient avatar at his most slanted and enchanting with a sandman suite of late night ambient blissouts. It’s an effortless listen, lathering aqueous textures and wistful melodies into a therapeutic hush, blessed with a prized sensuality that has placed him at the bosom of the neo-ambient love-in over the past five years. A good handful of those ambient lovers chime into his sound here too, drizzling whispered vox and smudged hooks into his vaporous matrix with results that ooze across variegated strains of balmy to gruff ambient dembow with a deeply seductive appeal and mind-drift pathos. Streator steers clear of any tricks or stunts in favour of slow-burn textural depth and subliminal rhythmic hypnosis. He cuts straight to the heart on opener 'Atlas Obscura' with Protozoa Project’s soothing glossolalia suffused to a sloshing dembow groove that underlines the whole album’s subtle pressure changes. He patently cares for your downtime, gently EQ’ing the chakras with the tongue-tip lather of ‘Picture of the Woods’, and later placing Perila’s narration over liquid electro pulses on album standout ‘I Want Something’, while Ben Bondy lends a reverberant touch to ‘Purp Thread’ and Folder’s Nikolay Kozlov brings a thawed ambient thizz to ‘Heliacal’. Still, Streator is the inventive star of his own show, effectively doing for dembow what Kassem Mosse did with deep minimal house on the irresistible sway and heavy-lidded pads of ‘Ixora’, before liquifying limbs with the slinky roll of his instrumentals on ‘Surge XL’ and the eyes-down delicacy ‘Red Kings’.

Killer JPN New Age/Walearic! Shigeru Suzuki's alias works are back on LP!

This LP reissue is the most new age of Shigeru Suzuki's works from 1987, which debuted as a guitarist for Happiendo, produced many songs, and supported the Showa music history and new music scene.

The conceptual content, which advocates resort ambient with a graceful touch, has recently been reevaluated in the context of "Japanese Rarealic" ("Japanese mono" + "Balearic"). It is a well-known masterpiece that is popular both domestically and internationally. The music is provided by Tetsuji Hayashi, Mari Iijima, Kazuo Zaitsu, Hajime Mizoguchi, Meiko Nakahara, and Asami Kado.

Jake Muir’s by-now classic debut for sferic is a thing of spectral wonder; a luxurious set of gently phased and looped edits and field recordings based around gutted Beach Boys samples cast adrift in a sea of atmospheric shimmers. Followers of work by Jan Jelinek, Pinkcourtesyphone, Andrew Pekler or even Rhythm & Sound should be all over this one - a highly immersive exercise in blissed worlbuilding.

sferic cruise the best coast with Jake Muir, an artist and field recordist hailing from Los Angeles, California, who has quietly become one of the more interesting operators in this crowded field. His conceptual approach to sampling follows a lineage of artists at the very top of the game - from Fennesz’s re-imagined cover-versioning on his pioneering ‘Plays’ (also using the Beach Boys as source material), to DJ Olive’s quietly radical Illbient movements in the mid 90’s, to Jan Jelinek’s loop-finding heyday a decade or so later. Muir isn't so much interested in making sounds for mindless zoning-out, but instead evaluates the very essence of sound itself, in a way that feels like a microscopic view of the very fibre of popular music.

On ‘Lady’s Mantle’ Muir combines these elements with aqueous field recordings made everywhere from Iceland to the beaches of California with results that limn a wide but smudged sense of space and place. With fading harmonic auroras and glinting, half-heard surf rock melodies, the album is rendered in an abstract impressionist manner that suggests a fine tracing of in-between-spaces, perhaps describing the metropolitan sprawl giving way to vast mountain ranges and oceanic scales.

In effect the album recalls the intoxicated airs of Pinkcourtesyphone (a.k.a L.A. resident Richard Chartier) and Andrew Pekler’s sensorial soundscapes and even the plangent production techniques of Phil Spector and the subby sublime of Rhythm & Sound. For all its implied sense of space, there’s a paradoxically close intimacy to 'Lady’s Mantle’ which feels like you’re the passenger in Muir’s ride, and he patently knows the scenic route...

(Boomkat) 

2 rare historical recordings (1983 and 1986) originally released as single sides and gathered here for the first time. "Conductor might be my favourite composition and Life & Death Of Pboc might be my most sincere. Conductor was my first composed piece with no obvious reference points ... Life & Death Of Pboc was the second. these two compositions gave me the title Godfather of Dark Ambient."

Salutations signals a series of meetings, greetings, group assemblies and exercises along the invisible plane created through correspondence. This is the inaugural compilation of new music from RVNG, inspired in part by a collaboration with Adult Swim. The question of how similar we are arises in the simple form of contact, and how we choose to embrace the potential of that moment and one another. Through correspondence, we connect, communicate, and form community. At first, correspondents with one another, and through the processes of collaboration and transmission, we correspond to parallel and intersecting collective cores. This eternal network, perhaps informed (consciously or subconsciously) by some celestial or spiritual force, becomes a portal to practice social responsibility and an access point to a wider, inclusive universe of information. In turn, the network becomes a human phenomenon, as well as a potent demonstration of art and collectivism. As the world heals, and evolves through future changes, having this network in place provides a vessel to and grow / glow beyond our corporeal state.

Dance Ancestral is the latest addition to producer and keyboardist John Carroll Kirby’s fast-growing and distinctive body of work. Dance Ancestral sees the acclaimed solo artist teaming up with Canadian producer Yu Su for an album whose central theme is the “intuitive dance” we perform throughout our lives. More electronically focused than Kirby’s previous albums, the result is a vividly imagined yet eminently listenable instrumental record.

TIZIANO POPOLI - Sull’accordo mimetico
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SV30 / 1st time on LP Limited edition. Side A: 1. Sull’accordo mimetico - Parte 1 (28:00) Side B: 1. Sull’accordo mimetico - Parte 2 (28:00) Total time: 57 minutes Tiziano Popoli: Yamaha Dx7 synth, Korg MS1O-MS50 synth, Akai S900 sampler, tapes, FX.

 Recorded at home on Teac A 3440 4 tracks tape recorder, mixed on Revox 2 tracks. Sull’Accordo Mimetico (On the Mimetic Chord) dates back to the end of the 80’s. It was commissioned by the artistic director of the ParcoScenico Festival, held in Treviso, Italy. Since the area where artists and the public gathered after the Festival was located to a very busy street, Marco asked me for a sound installation that could work as some sort of a defensive barrier for the street noise. I suggested that my work, rather than hiding the noise, should aim to harmonize the disturbances coming from the street within musical structures and forms, without burdening or saturating too much the acoustic spectrum of the place. In this way, I thought about sonic veils, consisting of repetitive – but also light and discreet – harmonic-rhythmic structures. Since the Festival took place in a beautiful centenary park, I also integrated the music with natural sounds and animal calls, always as an attempt to bridge these sound events and the other materials that made up the composition. The human voice constitutes a central element in this musique d'ameublement project, as a constant source of memory of places and times – here with many references to traditional music for children. A pearl of ambient electroacoustic minimalism with field recordings components in which the nostalgia of Maestro Tiziano Popoli shines through in painting landscapes that slowly change to be seen with the ears. Nocturnal, emblematic, Lynchian.

»江戸 Edo« is a cosmic ambient experimental piece conceived in 1977 by Masashi Komatsubara and developed alongside with Hideki Matsutake (a.k.a. Logic System and reductively defined by many as the "fourth member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra"). As a true sound scientist, he pours all his efforts into this record, and aimed at the widest possible use of an electronic instrument that was at the forefront at that time — the Moog IIIc.

Cryptozoo is an animated feature-film drama, written and directed by Dash Shaw, featuring the voices of Lake Bell, Zoe Kazan, Michael Cera and Louisa Krause. The film won the NEXT Innovator Award at Sundance, and premiered internationally at the 2021 Berlinale. It will be released on August 20 in theaters and on demand. This is John Carroll Kirby’s first time bringing his talents as a composer and producer to film scoring. His score resists easy genre classification, melding together sounds from New Age, exotica, library music, and the sweeter side of electronic music, and makes for a perfect match with artist and filmmaker Dash Shaw’s vibrant animated feature.

Dry was conceived as a new journey among Vini inventions, through rarefied moods and subterranean streams of sound. The fifteen songs (lasting fifty-five minutes) were recorded in Manchester in 1990, Vini sits in on guitar and piano, while Mitchell is on electronic and acoustic percussion, other instruments such as the clarinet (played by Zinnia Mitchell-Williams, Bruce's daughter), harmonica, viola and keyboards are also featured on the session. Here, once again, Durutti Column 's music could be defined as half-way between melancholy rock and 'progressive' New Age.

Another Interplanetary Star Creature team up for a Chicago <-> Tokyo expedition across a fusional soundscape ranging from bossa nova lounge to pre-vaporwave exotica; new age city pop to minimal library boogie. June Chikuma is best known now for her ground breaking Video Game soundtrack throughout the late 1980s and early 90s, most notably the now cult-classic status Bomberman Hero OST for Nintendo. During this same period of the late , she produced many recordings for a wide variety of clients including Japanese Public Transit Commercials, Video Game Arcades and VHS Nature Documentaries. We reached out to June in 2019 with the hopes of combing her archives to present the modern listener base here on Earth. We selected a nice mix of tracks as entry point in June's work. These tracks have been rescued from obscurity, remastered and waxed up for contemporary universal enjoyment. Hear Chikuma & Co. interpret influence's from Kraftwerk to Steely Dan, Herbie Hancock to Eric Dolphy, and Composers Ali Sriti to Paul Hindemith across a legendary line up of hardware synths ranging from Yamaha DX7, Korg Polysix, Roland D-550, and Oberheim Matrix-1000.

¡ÆA sea of clouds casting silent shadows on frozen time A sky of flickering waters curling over the immense permanence Fractured light shrouded in mist dissolving into shaded pigment The frontier of solitude melting in the winds of patient eternity.¡Ç

Le Manteau D'Etoiles is the fifth album by Andrew Chalk & Timo Van Luijk, the UK/Belgium project of Elodie, and was recorded live in Leuven, Belgium in November 2012. The album is based on a live performance in Leuven, Belgium in November 2012. The four-piece ensemble includes Tom James Scott on piano and Jean Noel Rebilly on clarinet, two of Andrew Chalk's most recent collaborators. The deepening of each of the two core members in their solo works is also evident here, with the peaceful beauty of the water in "Cristaux De Lumiere," the simply transparent "L'Aurore," which needs no explanation, and "Le Manteau d' Etoiles," which whispers of Elodie's forest psychedelia. Etoiles," which transcended time and scene, one could not help but listen to the great big improvised picture scroll of light that transcended time and scene. The dignified wind and keyboard colors of the two guests were also wonderful. This is a great example of Elodie's ever-deepening and matured musical vision. This is one of the best works of this project.

A vinyl reissue of a 2016 cassette-only release by Andrew Chalk x Timo Van Luijk's unit Elodie, featuring Tom James Scott on piano. A beautiful work, ambient and avant-garde, but with the depth that only Elodie can bring to life. Limited edition of 300 copies.

Eclectic ensemble of 18 instrumental arrangements evoking an epic and existential 
soundtrack determined by the power of momentary destiny and reflective sentiment. 

Originally released on LP in 2014

This is the second album after the transfer of the company, which was released in 1995, and is a compilation of songs created between 1990 and 1994. The album is a work that encompasses the dichotomy and diversity of the Aphex Twin, with acid, noise, and broken beats that could be described as "drill'n'bass," while following the ambient, IDM, and hardcore techno of the early days. The album contains 12 tracks, including the single "Ventolin," which is a strong industrial downtempo explosion, and "Alberto Balsalm," a song that is often mentioned alongside "Xtal. 180g vinyl.

The long-awaited repress! The world's first compilation that covers the miracle of Spanish NEW WAVE-ambient-progressive music, the masterpiece of Finis Africae, and the footprints of 17 years!
This is a must-listen work with a number of spiritual, deep, afro and ambient spiritual organic grooves!

Spiritual Afro, NEW WAVE, Ambient Dance Music! A number of miraculous sound sources that include African music, contemporary music, natural sounds from NEW WAVE and field recording, and even jazz and folklore tastes from Spain. It seems that he was influenced by many music genres, but the music is a beautiful combination of ambient and spiritual extracts, and the track with the synthesizer has a new age that is similar to that of IASOS! Great content that would not have been possible without an aesthetic eye for sharp music. 16P booklet included. Commentary posted in Spanish / English / Japanese.

Equal parts Sheffield bleep, fractal IDM and interstellar ambience, Hyper Nu Age Tekno sees Taro Nohara (aka Yakenohara) plotting a star map on a faded rave flyer. Let the billionaires blast into orbit while you explore your inner space with Growing Bin.

From the LP's earliest moments, the whomping subs and crystalline chimes of "Space Debris", it's clear that we're a long way from Hamburg. Taro pilots this craft on a deep space exploration way beyond the run out groove, to a place where heartening chords herald a twin sunrise and any broadcasts are lost in translation. The polyrhythmic pulse of "Ill Ell" follows, its concentric chimes and rapid fire kicks summoning the teknoguild to a watery altar in the engineering department. Sticking with interstellar mysticism but taking a turn for the transcendent, "Baker Baker Paradox" spins Reich-ian repetition into a graphene gossamer embellished with chrome, crystal and shoegaze shimmer. The B-side begins on the observation deck, bathing in the beauty of "Celestial Harmonia"'s sci-fi exotica, before the entheogenic "Use Your Head" prompts a delirious dash to the holodeck. Laying serene pads over a techy 4/4, Taro turns out the most danceable and dreamy track on the LP. As ambient chords ring out into the aether and rhythmic pulses shift out of phase, "Airplane Without People" is the loading screen for your virtual fantasy, soon rendered through the woody percussion and spheric bass of "Music For Psychic Liberation". Leave your body behind as you pick mushrooms in a CGI forest.

Two sheets to the wind, Perishable, not tinned, Two hands the better, Wet weather and feather. Wilson Tanner come to shore with a new album of floating melodies, lightly salted. Throwing electroacoustic conventions overboard, Andrew Wilson (Andras) and John Tanner (Eleventeen Eston) recorded this new work aboard a 1950s riverboat with a resourceful array of weatherproof electronic instruments and a long extension lead. These eight compositions pull in a by-catch of maritime folklore; of Siren and Selkie, Seagull and engine oil slick. A change of course from their debut album 69 (Growing Bin Records, 2016), the ambient temperature drops as II casts out to sea in uncertain weather and returns to the safe harbours of Port Phillip Bay. The seafarers head out to My Gull’s poised optimism. The birds watch but do they listen? By the arrival of Loch and Key, the shoreline has dissolved completely, the boat floating in serene infinity as the rest of the world spins. Conditions soon take a treacherous turn on Killcord Pts I-III - a 12 minute odyssey that battens down the hatches as these sailors eye merciless waves and blinding ocean spray, jointly channelling Berlin-school electronics and sea legs. In the aftermath, the waterlogged bleeps of Idle survey the damage as our parched crew sound the distress signal and ultimately descend into delirium. Known for navigating individual courses as solo musicians, Wilson and Tanner’s collective storytelling is saturated in detail, buoying between tension and harmony. II modestly stands as some of both artists’ most accomplished material.

London-based keyboardist/producer Dan Nicholls (of Y-OTIS) introduces a new album project 'Mattering And Meaning' to be released by We Jazz Records on August 13th. Nicholls' music uses acoustic piano as its key element, transporting the instrument into new territories that sound remarkably natural and organic, whilst displaying a strong kinship with the world of abstract electronic music. The music utilises piano loops and field recordings as its key elements, forming what might be described on the surface as a fascinating ambient jazz record – but at the same time there's so much more at play here on deeper levels. Dan's music sounds at once otherworldly and immensely inviting. After years of unlearning and unravelling the knots of a music college education – moving from a career in jazz, via electronic music, to a heartfelt embrace with rave culture and the feminist and queer theories which have so challenged perspectives across many disciplines on the objectified world and the values of capitalism – Dan Nicholls has spontaneously reimagined his relationship to the piano, that edifice of the decaying foundations of european classical music. Here the emphasis shifts from the Work (as object) to the work (as activity). Recorded with only a mobile phone voice recorder, eschewing the gloss of high fidelity audio to embrace the problematic cyborg appendage of the i-Fone VI-$, these lucidly dreamed tracks, like notes in a journal, find their depth and form through quick experimentation and distillation – layering, stretching and collaging in ways that treat the piano as a textural element in the daily soundscape, spilling into, and going along with, regular activities with no ceremony or established system to the process. For Dan, this is as much a documentation as a therapeutic process, casting aside the dogma and seriousness of much artistic practice whilst embracing joy and improvisation in order to search for deeper narratives. The speculative imaginings of three revolutionary thinkers, Donna Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Barad, have profoundly shaped the conception of this album, which also emerged from a deep interest in human relationships to ecstatic practices and communalities which have been so eroded by imperialist/patriarchal/capitalist forces. The title, "Mattering and Meaning", is a meditation on the crumbling habitual delineation and separation of both objects and definitions, including our (ironically) self-destructive human thinking patterns which position us as objective observers, above and over the world rather than inside it, apparently separate from nature and from each other. Like the melodies and themes which permeate these nine sonic tales, inextricable but nevertheless present, our world and our species prove to be more enmeshed, interconnected and interdependent than the dominant rationalism would lead us to believe. This album is a humble gift to the listener, a proposition for inclusion in their own ongoing soundscape, the perpetual activity of listening and awareness.

Portals is an album of minimal electric piano improvisations by UK-based multi-instrumentalist & composer Robert Stillman. Inspired by American ‘new-age’ luminaries like Laraaji, Iasos, and Stephen Halpern, Stillman’s layers of playful, meditative electric piano figures, saturated by warm tape hiss & psychedelic delay effects, are occasionally accompanied by “found sound” field recordings, creating a compelling yet calming listening experience. Portals was recorded at home in Broadstairs, Kent during the winter of 2016-2017 & originally released on cassette in December 2017 by Orindal Records. Three subsequent represses followed, & Portals became the most repressed cassette release in Orindal’s 11 year history. This new vinyl edition, co-released by UK label KIT Records, is remastered by Matt Barnhart & includes bonus track “Portal 8 (The Stranger).” Here’s Robert Stillman’s original statement on the original cassette release of Portals: Portals is an album of multi-tracked improvisations on Fender Rhodes electric piano. The music’s repetitive structure is intended to encourage a state of ‘no-mind’ in the listener, acting as a gateway out of thoughts and into the present moment. Headphones are recommended for the ideal listening experience.

This unique work was released in 1982 as the final chapter in Brian Eno's Ambient series that began in 1978.

Deadstock cassette version of the masterful second album, released in 1992, which was hailed by All Music as "the commercial and artistic peak of the ambient house movement" and was #1 on the UK charts at the time. sealed with a small drill hole.

There’s a lived-in quality to the sound of Racine’s Amitiés. Named after the French word for friendship, the Montréal-based Quebecois artist follows an extended time spent indoors to contemplate what it means to be isolated and in one’s own body, while also staying connected. The album is a follow-up of sorts to Quelque chose tombe (“Something Falls”), released in February 2020 and a kind of accidental prophecy for the crisis that was to come. Amitiés disintegrates before your very eyes. Opening with a roughshod iPhone recording of Racine playing his parent’s harmonium, the creaky acoustics of "Mon amour je ne guéris jamais" slowly degrade into digital simulations of dreadful organic beauty. That track and the rest of the LP gives the feeling of an abandoned building; a sense of frayed, earthiness dusted with the wisdom of time. And yet, it’s almost entirely made from simulations. Clipped Native Instruments violin patches punctuate the churning atmospherics of “Arête coincée dans une amygdale”. The lonely gongs and bells of “Grosso” resonate in a gust of synthesised ambient. Vocal plugins and the very occasional YouTube samples of a recorded voice are sped-up, glitched, pitched and scrambled into indecipherability. These vocal apparitions rise and fall into the sonic ether like individual ghosts of human contact. They’re bold and expressive, deeply melancholy and yet full of the potential for joy and an awareness of life’s beauty. It’s in this dearth of social interaction—the heady psychosis of too much solitude—that Amitiés’s tone and mood lies. A score for the numb dissociation from internal chaos and alienation, the album’s sense of acute distress is assuaged only by the small network of collaborators and influences it draws from. Long-time friend and peer Justin Leduc-Frenette (aka Keru Not Ever) contributes drum programming to “Mon amour je ne guéris jamais”. A last-minute reworking of the untitled “Sans titre” by German duo Arigto matches the weight and timbre of Racine’s sooty post-classical soundscapes. Ultimately, Amitiés is a very human response to an inhuman environment. It’s an intimate homage to friends and the mysterious effects of distance, while somehow finding healing in hardship.