Ambient / Minimal / Drone

Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer who explores themes related to machine intelligence and object oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism.

Following 2017’s acclaimed 2LP “Patterns of Consciousness”, “Ecstatic Computation” is the new full-length LP by Caterina Barbieri. The album revolves around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artefacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately inducing a sense of ecstasy and contemplation. Computation is turned from being a formal, automatic writing technique into a creative, psychedelic practice to generate temporal hallucinations. A state of trance and wonder where the perception of time is distorted and challenged.

Equally nervous and ecstatic, the fast permutation of patterns can create a state where time stands still whilst simultaneously being in motion. Is this propulsive music moving forward or backward? As long as the perception of the present is constantly enhanced and refreshed in an endless sense of loss, re-discovery and the search for self-orientation this question lies mute aside the thrilling and perplexing moment of the matter at hand.

Double-LP version. The musical vortexes of Caterina Barbieri rewire time and space. Listening to the Italian composer and modular synth virtuoso has felt like traveling at light-speed and slow-motion all at once since 2017's breakthrough Patterns Of Consciousness. 2019's acclaimed Ecstatic Computation pushed even further with the lead single "Fantas". Far beyond any new age trope or modern synth trend, her music stands alone in its ecstatic intensity and cataclysmic emotional impact. Marking the debut album on her new label light-years, Barbieri now delivers her most profound work yet -- a journey through inner-space as vast as a universe and as intimate as a heartbeat. Spirit Exit is Caterina Barbieri's time machine, primarily composed with a modular synth rig she thinks of more like a mechanical fortune teller. Whereas previous releases were constructed on lengthy tours, capturing only snapshots of continually evolving works, Spirit Exit represents the producer's first album fully written and recorded in her home studio amidst Milan's two-month pandemic lockdown in 2020. It was during this extended isolation she found inspiration from female philosophers, mystics and poets spread across time, but united in their strength at cultivating vast internal worlds. St. Teresa D'Avila's foundational 16th century mystical text The Interior Castle, philosopher Rosi Braidotti's posthuman theories and the metaphysical poetry of Emily Dickinson act as thematic anchors throughout Spirit Exit. Spirit Exit crystallizes Barbieri's densely layered, blindingly bright synth arrangements while introducing stunning new elements that feel as if they've always belonged. Strings and guitar flawlessly thread into the composer's web of modular patches, while her revelatory singing voice often cuts right through them. Melodies remain Barbieri's great passion and obsession and on Spirit Exit they grow as large as planets before cracking into atoms. The sweeping "At Your Gamut" perfects the producer's dramatic, slow-burning openers, but in her first ever use of sampling, it later gets crushed, accelerated and unrecognizably transformed into the ghostly hook surging through "Terminal Clock". As the album closes on "The Landscape Listens" -- a song that approaches death with all the gentle grace of Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)".

French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms -- how even the quietest creative act ripples outward, a whisper with no fixed meaning. The Flower And The Vessel pursues this notion in a more literal fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour. She describes it as "a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy." Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself "What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?" The answer gradually revealed itself: "With small gestures: recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody." In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower And The Vessel. The album's 11 songs span whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences: Ravel's L'enfant Et Les Sortilèges, Debussy's La Mer, and Satie's Gymnopédies. There's certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks; melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut-up poems and interviews over delay-refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia. Much of Atkinson's discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, but The Flower And The Vessel ventures further into silence. Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, and marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene. Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and curation, but here Atkinson's synergy feels close to apotheosis, emotive but ambivalent, a ceremony of expectation and invisible forces. The 19-minute closing collaboration with SUNN O))) guitarist Stephen O'Malley, "Des Pierres," is one of the album's few pieces tracked in a proper studio, but it broods and burns with the same subliminal majesty as the rest of The Flower And The Vessel: an ember in amber, seeds planted in shifting sands. Original artwork by Julien Carreyn, mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering.

A re-interpretation so often comes from an impulse, even if subliminal, of one-upmanship – let me do better, wait ‘til you hear it my way. Sometimes though, and it happens too rarely, the cover is an act of devotion in which a musician’s humility produces something more beautiful than bravura could. When Erik Hall undertook his painstaking reconstruction of Steve Reich’s 1976 masterpiece of minimalism, “Music for Eighteen Musicians”, it was as much an exercise in modesty as ambition. With its repetitions and complex constructions, the piece makes great demands on stamina and concentration, and Reich himself advised that these challenges meant it should probably be performed with more than eighteen musicians. Hall, however, recorded every part himself in his small home studio, playing instruments he had on hand, in live, single takes. Here, then is the ambition. But here too is the modesty: by doing one section a day, one instrument at a time, he made his way through this monumental piece, building a faithful and loving re-creation, one sonic brick at a time. Xylophone becomes muted piano, violin becomes electric guitar and so it is that music for eighteen becomes music for one. “I didn’t want it to be distracting, or a gimmick,” says Hall, who’s loved the piece for as long as he can remember. “I wanted it to be true to the timbre and spirit of the original recording,” and he thought a great deal about, “how I would shape the tone of each instrument, to come across with the same impact that we know the piece to have.” His methodology, as with Reich’s piece itself, is workmanlike, and it’s from this humble and steadfast undertaking that something honest and radiant emerges. – Hermione Hoby

Pleasure For Music present a reissue of Gail Laughton's Harps of the Ancient Temples, originally released in 1969. Gail Laughton, born Denzil Gail Laughton (1921-1985), was an American jazz harpist. He worked in Hollywood, playing on many film and cartoon soundtracks. Originally released in 1969 on the small imprint Rapture the record has been produced by famous sound engineer Paul Beaver (Beaver & Krause, Lalo Schifrin & Orchestra) the man who introduced the Moog to Stevie Wonder and Frank Zappa. Standing on the verge of both modern classical and space age, the record featured the track "Pompeii 76 A.D." as heard on the movie Blade Runner (1982). Gail Laughton can easily be considered a forerunner of new age, as documented on the highly influential compilation I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age Music In America, 1950-1990 assembled by project manager Patrick McCarthy for Seattle based Light In The Attic. "The shimmering, ethereal quality of the harp sings out under [his] loving care."

Riki Hidaka + Jim O' Rourke + Eiko Ishibashi, a rare combination of musicians who represent the current domestic scene, present a delicate and bold music. The musical work "Oki Oishi" by Riki Hidaka, Jim O' Rourke, and Eiko Ishibashi consists of two 20-minute pieces based on studio sessions by the three artists.

Celebrating its one hundredth release, Black Truffle is honoured to present a major archival discovery: a stunning document of the only performance by the trio of Tony Conrad, Arnold Dreyblatt and Jim O’Rourke. Across a two-night programme organised by David Weinstein at legendary New York experimental venue Tonic in January 2001, Conrad, Dreyblatt and O’Rourke presented individual projects before performing a collaborative set each night, the first with members of Dreyblatt’s ensemble and the second the trio heard here. As Dreyblatt points out in the wonderfully informative and reflective liner notes written for this release, this was a collaboration across generations, reflecting the profound impact of Conrad’s pioneering minimalism on Dreyblatt and O’Rourke. Both Dreyblatt and O’Rourke came to this collaboration armed with a deep appreciation of Conrad’s music and the just intonation principles at its core, Dreyblatt having first encountered the incredible power of Conrad’s precisely tuned violin chords during his tenure as an archivist for La Monte Young in 1975, while O’Rourke had performed with Conrad in various settings since the mid-1990s (as well as admiring, reissuing, and performing Dreyblatt's music). The flyer for the concert promised ‘massive, ecstatic, pulsating overtones’, and the trio certainly delivered. From the moment this keening stream of bowed strings begins, it is clear, as Dreyblatt writes, that we are in ‘Tony’s sonic universe’, as massively amplified, slowly shifting combinations of precisely chosen pitches fill the room with complex beating patterns and ghostly difference tones. For more than twenty-five minutes, the music operates at a level of intensity comparable to classic recordings such as Conrad’s Four Violins, until the texture thins out slightly in the performance’s final quarter, allowing for the listener’s first recognition of the individual voices that make up this enormous, overwhelming harmonic edifice. The constant stream of bowed tones is broken by a beautifully rich pizzicato from Conrad on monochord, the sliding low tones and metallic shimmer of the other strings taking the set's final moments on an unexpected detour into spacious pastoral psychedelia. Though produced by three individuals known for their own distinctive bodies of the work, this is egoless music, the perfect expression of Conrad's desire 'to move away from composing to listening', to 'working "on" the sound from "inside" the sound'. Historically important and overwhelming in sonic impact, this release also serves as a moving tribute to Tony Conrad from two musicians profoundly marked by the example set by his art and life.

Recorded 2014 at Steamroom Tokyo This one is for B.F.

The first vinyl release from American artist Sydney Spann, Sending Up A Spiral Of well encapsulates Spann’s body of work thus far. On their music, which reacts to themes of family systems and care work, Sydney writes, “people who have done care work —nannies, sex workers, therapists, nurses— may possess their own musical knowledge, developed over time through particular modes of voicing practiced to achieve a desired outcome in their labor. Attending intimately to these ways of voicing and listening and bringing them into a sound practice could be a way to legitimize a less recognized kind of musical knowledge.” Sending Up A Spiral Of explores this unarticulated expression through sound and song. The titular piece traces Spann within some quixotic woodland, as if beginning inside of some urban fairy-story. Self-soothing singing quivers under dragging branches, peeling cement and other tactile grit. The work drops into a new proximity half-way through as electronic contours overtake the environment. Sine-tones smolder in a pulsating choreography, perhaps reminiscent of Richard Maxfield’s “Night Music” played at half-speed. The second section of the record depicts a series of five smaller portraits, expressed (or disguised) as lullabies. An oceanic humming permeates them. “Possession” and “Purposeful Evening” are the most song-like lullabies, with their verse-chorus repetition and melodic simplicity. Innocuous words “baby” and “honey” are encoded with deeper, often painful connotations. Sydney’s voice and vision for this album is ambitious, cloaked in the strains and contradictions of what love means in the nuclear family. A 16-page artist pamphlet of rubbings, photographs and sheet music accompanies the LP, along with a digital PDF of Spann’s thesis “Sending Up A Spiral Of: A Musical Epistemology Made Through Care Work.”

Donato Dozzy and Stefano Di Trapani plumb the kosmische void on 'The Black Sphere', an hour long session using turntables, electronics and brainwave generators for a deep dive into psychedelic, Cluster-inspired drone workouts and tripped-out Techno ballistics. Dozzy and Di Trapani are both experienced improvisors, and Mantenna was conceived as a sort of laboratory for impromptu studio and live electronic performance, using the location and its limitations to inspire and guide their work. 'The Black Sphere' was recorded at Klang in Rome, where Dozzy and Di Trapani not only had to perform with no pre-recorded or practiced elements, but also do so with gear they had never used before - always a chance for failure, always an opportunity for opening up creative wormholes. The side-long title track finds Dozzy and Di Trapani deep in the kosmische vortex, drawing on early Cluster by layering noisy oscillator drones into tripped-out textures, eschewing drums but not ignoring rhythm entirely. Playing off each other, the duo work like jazz players, allowing the sound to expand and then dip to near silence when necessary. Tones undulate like waves, slowly building into rough, ragged noise before dispersing into pulsing abstraction. It's not just a love letter to the '70s Berlin school, but a celebration of analog synthesis, toying with the physical sound of oscillators and cavernous echoes. On the flip, 'Hiranyagarbha' finds the duo programming rhythms using an arsenal of drum machines, opening with a pounding, bass-heavy kickdrum that cuts through a fog of analog screams before taking centre stage, morphing into a distorted, electroid throb that's not a million miles from Mika Vainio or Emptyset. The duo eventually pull back into a corrosive, circuit-bent acid session that peaks with a womping, stepped kick like some classic Plastikman fed through a broken pedal board, or just classic Dozzy, if you like.

“Eye Of Delirious” is a long-awaited debut Muscut release of Chillera’s band bass player Ganna Bryzhata — an Odesa-based artist. An ambient LP is a Smoothy Flow Sub Nautical journey that features elements of an industrial dub of Glowing Sirens of the Black sea. REVIEWS: Ganna Bryzhata’s ethereal, shape-shifting electroacoustic experiments feel equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. Some artists require a certain measure of distance to thrive. That’s the case for Ukraine’s Ganna Bryzhata, aka Bryozone. She’s best known as the bassist of Chillera, a trio of dub aficionados who developed a gently psychedelic style of space rock in their adopted hometown of Odesa, a port city on the Black Sea. The three once considered moving to Kyiv but ultimately decided that life in the capital wasn’t for them: “It’s great to come for a while, to feel the active movement, but it sucks up the energy,” they told an interviewer in 2019. “You need to be more self-organized to live there. We are still not able to bring this chaos to order.” You can hear that refusal to adapt to the rhythms of the big city in their instrumentals, in which Afrobeat basslines and surf licks churn as blithely as the tide, unconcerned with anything beyond maintaining the breezy vibe. A similar sense of willful isolation characterizes Bryozone. Bryzhata’s solo music is a world away from Chillera’s, trading their warm blues riffs and wah-wah twang for ethereal loops and icy, atonal drones. But both projects share a timeless quality. Chillera’s records sound like they’ve spent decades gathering mold in some beachside community thrift store; Bryozone’s output might conceivably have been rescued from the flooded basement of a mid-century tape-music studio. Perhaps even more than Chillera, Bryozone is bubble music, promising an insular journey into inner space. Bryozone’s music has changed considerably since her first two EPs, 2013’s ACID FROG DAY and Ifrit. Where those records remained tethered to familiar strains of lo-fi techno and ambient dub, Eye of Delirious, her debut LP, leaves such recognizable terrain in the rear-view mirror. Across 10 varied tracks, Bryzhata explores a series of mysterious, shape-shifting visions that feel conjured out of thin air—not so much the products of silicon and circuits as the phantasmal afterimages of lysergic dreams. The sea’s rhythms hold sway over the opening tracks. “Smoothly Flow” channels tidal rhythms into a swirl of watery synths and foghorn drones—loops upon loops upon loops, submerged in a thick, grainy paste of tape hiss. It’s eerie and emotionally blank, equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. “Sub Nautica” pairs a plodding 4/4 pulse and muted dub bass with rolling waves of synth; the influence of dub—a music of ocean currents and cultural exchange—speaks, perhaps, to Odesa’s historic identity as a mercantile city. “Ghost Tribe” and “Liminal Tribe” spin hand percussion through eerie tape effects, turning pitter-pat rhythms into insect chirps and alien soundscapes; they evoke the work of Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, and Muscut label head Nikolaienko, who similarly have reexamined vintage ethnographic phonography through an experimental electroacoustic lens. Some of these tracks aren’t “songs” at all—more like tricks of the light captured on foggy deadstock film. “Sequence One” arrays dissonant chirps and chimes into slippery arpeggios, somewhere between a circus carousel and a flickering asphalt mirage; “Glowing Sirens” and “Ambiency,” imbued with the otherworldly timbres of Sarah Davachi’s Vergers, suggest Aeolian harps, or long metal wires strung across a cavernous tunnel. The closing suite ventures furthest into the penumbra. The title track recalls the haunting expanses of Seefeel at their bleakest; “Fateful Torment” and “Ground Floor” are full of clomping footsteps and ominous electrical buzz, steeped in the doleful, otherworldly frequencies of mid-century explorers like Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Pauline Oliveros, and Else Marie Pade. These are the most difficult pieces on Eye of Delirious, but they might also be the most rewarding. Bryzhata’s coldly keening frequencies luxuriate in their desolate surroundings, making ghostly tendrils of feedback feel sumptuous. Resolute in their isolation, they offer an alluring glimpse of oblivion, a hand-delivered invitation to disappear. - Pitchfork, By Philip Sherburne From Odesa, sound artist Ganna Bryzhata evokes the hazy ambience of the "Black Sea Paris" The Muscut label, celebrating its 11th anniversary, describes its music of interest as ‘pseudo-archaeology’. On their website, you can see a fabricated photograph showing the uncovering of a cassette tape during excavation. Their releases focus as much on the music as the quality of the sound itself – how the equipment and methodology influence its texture and timbre, what are the side effects of the medium, and what the impact of analogue instrumentation would be. Looking at the catalog, you’ll find input on meditative structures, hunting loops, or specific archaic sounds. Nikolaienko uses a tape player and an old reel-to-reel recorder balancing musique concrète, loops, and pulsating motifs. Nikolaev makes mesmerizing synth passages, whereas Eyot Tapes incorporates cassette loops, spring reverbs, tape delays, and a modular synthesizer. As a result, they create hazy compositions packed with delay effects and reverbs, often based on swirling loops. Bryozone, the project of Odesa-based sound artist Ganna Bryzhata, follows a similar path. Until now, she released two EPs in 2016 but also plays bass guitar, creating psychedelic dub trips in the trio Chillera. Eye of Delirious offer transcends haunting and dreamlike landscapes to provide a peculiar tale. By its atmosphere, it’s difficult to disconnect it from Odesa, a sunny resort known as the Black Sea Paris or the ‘city of dreams’ as Charles King wrote. Bryzhata has recorded a heterogeneous album that sometimes draws a little on the ephemeral atmosphere created by William Basinski or Philip Jeck in their looping pieces. Her hazy ambient strands in ‘Smoothy Flow’ are reminiscent of the feeling of decay present in the music of the two mentioned composers, leaning towards monotonous impressionistic waves, as in ‘Ambiency’. In ‘Glowing Sirens’, the glitchy melody transforms into metallic ambient and creates a ghostly sound, mimicking something vaguely identifiable. ‘Sequence One’ reminds me of a stuttering record, a looped piece, an artifact that brings back memories. However, she does not fall into the obvious cliché of a hazy, indistinct, and impressionistic aesthetic – the neatly arranged compositions assemble into a diverse mosaic. She breaks ambient, dreamlike tracks with underlined beats. There is a moment of cracking the impressionistic suspension in the style of Deadbeat’s or Sun Araw’s dub synth beats, as in the pulsating trance of ‘Sub Nautica’. Sometimes it veers towards rhythmic, quasi-tribal forms as in ‘Ghost of Tribe’. Fortunately Bryozone is not singing and not going in a dream-pop direction – this is a non-obvious, evocative, in a way visual, and narrative soundtrack to the journey to the Black Sea coast. Or elsewhere in the middle of hot summer, as this album with scraps of rhythm, melodies, and hazy vision of sunny afterimages catch with a very impressive and suggestive story. - The Quietus, by Jakub Knera Ukraine’s Muscut keep ‘em coming with Odesa artist Bryozone’s bittersweet, subaquatic ambient fantasies for fans of Spencer Clark, Jürgen Müller, Pataphysical ‘Eye of Delirious’ is the debut album by Ganna Bryzhata aka Bryozone, who hails from the historic Black Sea port city of Odesa, and also plays bass in the band Chillera when they’re not making this type of beautifully detuned dream-food. Following in the glistening wake of work by Pavel Milyakov, Stanislav Tolkachev and Nikolajev on Muscut, the album arrives with no mention or implication that Europe’s most tragic war in a century is occurring in the background, as Bryozone proceeds to project 40 minutes of transportive music as elegantly alien as jellyfish. The 10 tracks are defined by a taste for curdled silicon and and elusive ambient contouring that lends the lushest, disorienting listen. Slipping in head first with the silty early AFXian pads of ’Smoothy Flow’ the set vacillates strains of dub techno and impressionistic ambient in an effortlessly enchanting flow from he sliding pitches of ‘Sequence One’ and the seductive harmonies of ‘Glowing Sirens’, to limn Atlantean creatures with Spencer Clark-like animism in ‘Ghost Tribe’. They tease beautifully buoyant ambience into more quizzical, queasy space on ‘Ambience’, and the likes of ‘Liminal Tribe and ’Sub Nautical’ recalls Cru Servers weirdo club slosh, before it shores up in a submerged ‘Ground Floor’ like an imaginary soundtrack to Ballard’s ‘Drowned World’. - Boomkat A dubby, subaquatic journey into the Black Sea. Share Bryozone has not been chilling in Chillera. The Ukrainian artist is a bass player in the band, who create wonderfully breezy music in spite of their hard work ethic. The trio was formed in Odessa and takes inspiration from surf rock and lo-fi indie, channelling the experience and lifestyle of a smaller port city. They've put out two EPs on the renowned Muscut label and organised a festival to bring attention to Ukraine's south. The sea is a core part of Chillera's identity, as it is for Bryozone. On Eye Of Delirious, the artist's first solo venture in seven years, she nearly perfects a specific type of aquatic beat previously heard on Ifrit, her ambient techno and dub EP from 2016 that carried over Chillera's beachy vibes. Listening to "Ghost Tribe" on Eye Of Delirious, a visual association pops up from my memory—a moment in an Armenian cartoon where a mermaid stares into the camera with her wide eyes. It's creepy, psychedelic, and captivating. On this track, beats bubble and Bryozone evokes an underwater civilisation where this kind of character could live. With "Liminal Tribe," she makes this realm even richer with rolling, spaced-out beats that create a whole universe of creatures. It's as if she's painting a landscape. Her synths roll like waves on "Sub Nautica" and cut like frigid, winter seawater on "Sequence One." She uses field recordings—or, rather, sea recordings—to add ambience, but it's her supple rhythms that are visionary. The album's simplest track, "Ambiency," digs a deep valley to enjoy the peaks of more adventurous tracks. I wish there was more of this contrast on the title track and "Fateful Torment," which stumble into the LP's climax with weighty, post-apocalyptic drums. On "Smoothy Flow" and "Ground Floor," Bryozone uses a decaying filter, like a dying gramophone, that ties the LP to the rest of Muscut's releases and nods to the label's archival work. Eye Of Delirious is a dynamic portrait of life under the sea and it's worth diving into. - Resident Advisor

“Eye Of Delirious” is a long-awaited debut Muscut release of Chillera’s band bass player Ganna Bryzhata — an Odesa-based artist. An ambient LP is a Smoothy Flow Sub Nautical journey that features elements of an industrial dub of Glowing Sirens of the Black sea. REVIEWS: Ganna Bryzhata’s ethereal, shape-shifting electroacoustic experiments feel equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. Some artists require a certain measure of distance to thrive. That’s the case for Ukraine’s Ganna Bryzhata, aka Bryozone. She’s best known as the bassist of Chillera, a trio of dub aficionados who developed a gently psychedelic style of space rock in their adopted hometown of Odesa, a port city on the Black Sea. The three once considered moving to Kyiv but ultimately decided that life in the capital wasn’t for them: “It’s great to come for a while, to feel the active movement, but it sucks up the energy,” they told an interviewer in 2019. “You need to be more self-organized to live there. We are still not able to bring this chaos to order.” You can hear that refusal to adapt to the rhythms of the big city in their instrumentals, in which Afrobeat basslines and surf licks churn as blithely as the tide, unconcerned with anything beyond maintaining the breezy vibe. A similar sense of willful isolation characterizes Bryozone. Bryzhata’s solo music is a world away from Chillera’s, trading their warm blues riffs and wah-wah twang for ethereal loops and icy, atonal drones. But both projects share a timeless quality. Chillera’s records sound like they’ve spent decades gathering mold in some beachside community thrift store; Bryozone’s output might conceivably have been rescued from the flooded basement of a mid-century tape-music studio. Perhaps even more than Chillera, Bryozone is bubble music, promising an insular journey into inner space. Bryozone’s music has changed considerably since her first two EPs, 2013’s ACID FROG DAY and Ifrit. Where those records remained tethered to familiar strains of lo-fi techno and ambient dub, Eye of Delirious, her debut LP, leaves such recognizable terrain in the rear-view mirror. Across 10 varied tracks, Bryzhata explores a series of mysterious, shape-shifting visions that feel conjured out of thin air—not so much the products of silicon and circuits as the phantasmal afterimages of lysergic dreams. The sea’s rhythms hold sway over the opening tracks. “Smoothly Flow” channels tidal rhythms into a swirl of watery synths and foghorn drones—loops upon loops upon loops, submerged in a thick, grainy paste of tape hiss. It’s eerie and emotionally blank, equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. “Sub Nautica” pairs a plodding 4/4 pulse and muted dub bass with rolling waves of synth; the influence of dub—a music of ocean currents and cultural exchange—speaks, perhaps, to Odesa’s historic identity as a mercantile city. “Ghost Tribe” and “Liminal Tribe” spin hand percussion through eerie tape effects, turning pitter-pat rhythms into insect chirps and alien soundscapes; they evoke the work of Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, and Muscut label head Nikolaienko, who similarly have reexamined vintage ethnographic phonography through an experimental electroacoustic lens. Some of these tracks aren’t “songs” at all—more like tricks of the light captured on foggy deadstock film. “Sequence One” arrays dissonant chirps and chimes into slippery arpeggios, somewhere between a circus carousel and a flickering asphalt mirage; “Glowing Sirens” and “Ambiency,” imbued with the otherworldly timbres of Sarah Davachi’s Vergers, suggest Aeolian harps, or long metal wires strung across a cavernous tunnel. The closing suite ventures furthest into the penumbra. The title track recalls the haunting expanses of Seefeel at their bleakest; “Fateful Torment” and “Ground Floor” are full of clomping footsteps and ominous electrical buzz, steeped in the doleful, otherworldly frequencies of mid-century explorers like Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Pauline Oliveros, and Else Marie Pade. These are the most difficult pieces on Eye of Delirious, but they might also be the most rewarding. Bryzhata’s coldly keening frequencies luxuriate in their desolate surroundings, making ghostly tendrils of feedback feel sumptuous. Resolute in their isolation, they offer an alluring glimpse of oblivion, a hand-delivered invitation to disappear. - Pitchfork, By Philip Sherburne From Odesa, sound artist Ganna Bryzhata evokes the hazy ambience of the "Black Sea Paris" The Muscut label, celebrating its 11th anniversary, describes its music of interest as ‘pseudo-archaeology’. On their website, you can see a fabricated photograph showing the uncovering of a cassette tape during excavation. Their releases focus as much on the music as the quality of the sound itself – how the equipment and methodology influence its texture and timbre, what are the side effects of the medium, and what the impact of analogue instrumentation would be. Looking at the catalog, you’ll find input on meditative structures, hunting loops, or specific archaic sounds. Nikolaienko uses a tape player and an old reel-to-reel recorder balancing musique concrète, loops, and pulsating motifs. Nikolaev makes mesmerizing synth passages, whereas Eyot Tapes incorporates cassette loops, spring reverbs, tape delays, and a modular synthesizer. As a result, they create hazy compositions packed with delay effects and reverbs, often based on swirling loops. Bryozone, the project of Odesa-based sound artist Ganna Bryzhata, follows a similar path. Until now, she released two EPs in 2016 but also plays bass guitar, creating psychedelic dub trips in the trio Chillera. Eye of Delirious offer transcends haunting and dreamlike landscapes to provide a peculiar tale. By its atmosphere, it’s difficult to disconnect it from Odesa, a sunny resort known as the Black Sea Paris or the ‘city of dreams’ as Charles King wrote. Bryzhata has recorded a heterogeneous album that sometimes draws a little on the ephemeral atmosphere created by William Basinski or Philip Jeck in their looping pieces. Her hazy ambient strands in ‘Smoothy Flow’ are reminiscent of the feeling of decay present in the music of the two mentioned composers, leaning towards monotonous impressionistic waves, as in ‘Ambiency’. In ‘Glowing Sirens’, the glitchy melody transforms into metallic ambient and creates a ghostly sound, mimicking something vaguely identifiable. ‘Sequence One’ reminds me of a stuttering record, a looped piece, an artifact that brings back memories. However, she does not fall into the obvious cliché of a hazy, indistinct, and impressionistic aesthetic – the neatly arranged compositions assemble into a diverse mosaic. She breaks ambient, dreamlike tracks with underlined beats. There is a moment of cracking the impressionistic suspension in the style of Deadbeat’s or Sun Araw’s dub synth beats, as in the pulsating trance of ‘Sub Nautica’. Sometimes it veers towards rhythmic, quasi-tribal forms as in ‘Ghost of Tribe’. Fortunately Bryozone is not singing and not going in a dream-pop direction – this is a non-obvious, evocative, in a way visual, and narrative soundtrack to the journey to the Black Sea coast. Or elsewhere in the middle of hot summer, as this album with scraps of rhythm, melodies, and hazy vision of sunny afterimages catch with a very impressive and suggestive story. - The Quietus, by Jakub Knera Ukraine’s Muscut keep ‘em coming with Odesa artist Bryozone’s bittersweet, subaquatic ambient fantasies for fans of Spencer Clark, Jürgen Müller, Pataphysical ‘Eye of Delirious’ is the debut album by Ganna Bryzhata aka Bryozone, who hails from the historic Black Sea port city of Odesa, and also plays bass in the band Chillera when they’re not making this type of beautifully detuned dream-food. Following in the glistening wake of work by Pavel Milyakov, Stanislav Tolkachev and Nikolajev on Muscut, the album arrives with no mention or implication that Europe’s most tragic war in a century is occurring in the background, as Bryozone proceeds to project 40 minutes of transportive music as elegantly alien as jellyfish. The 10 tracks are defined by a taste for curdled silicon and and elusive ambient contouring that lends the lushest, disorienting listen. Slipping in head first with the silty early AFXian pads of ’Smoothy Flow’ the set vacillates strains of dub techno and impressionistic ambient in an effortlessly enchanting flow from he sliding pitches of ‘Sequence One’ and the seductive harmonies of ‘Glowing Sirens’, to limn Atlantean creatures with Spencer Clark-like animism in ‘Ghost Tribe’. They tease beautifully buoyant ambience into more quizzical, queasy space on ‘Ambience’, and the likes of ‘Liminal Tribe and ’Sub Nautical’ recalls Cru Servers weirdo club slosh, before it shores up in a submerged ‘Ground Floor’ like an imaginary soundtrack to Ballard’s ‘Drowned World’. - Boomkat A dubby, subaquatic journey into the Black Sea. Share Bryozone has not been chilling in Chillera. The Ukrainian artist is a bass player in the band, who create wonderfully breezy music in spite of their hard work ethic. The trio was formed in Odessa and takes inspiration from surf rock and lo-fi indie, channelling the experience and lifestyle of a smaller port city. They've put out two EPs on the renowned Muscut label and organised a festival to bring attention to Ukraine's south. The sea is a core part of Chillera's identity, as it is for Bryozone. On Eye Of Delirious, the artist's first solo venture in seven years, she nearly perfects a specific type of aquatic beat previously heard on Ifrit, her ambient techno and dub EP from 2016 that carried over Chillera's beachy vibes. Listening to "Ghost Tribe" on Eye Of Delirious, a visual association pops up from my memory—a moment in an Armenian cartoon where a mermaid stares into the camera with her wide eyes. It's creepy, psychedelic, and captivating. On this track, beats bubble and Bryozone evokes an underwater civilisation where this kind of character could live. With "Liminal Tribe," she makes this realm even richer with rolling, spaced-out beats that create a whole universe of creatures. It's as if she's painting a landscape. Her synths roll like waves on "Sub Nautica" and cut like frigid, winter seawater on "Sequence One." She uses field recordings—or, rather, sea recordings—to add ambience, but it's her supple rhythms that are visionary. The album's simplest track, "Ambiency," digs a deep valley to enjoy the peaks of more adventurous tracks. I wish there was more of this contrast on the title track and "Fateful Torment," which stumble into the LP's climax with weighty, post-apocalyptic drums. On "Smoothy Flow" and "Ground Floor," Bryozone uses a decaying filter, like a dying gramophone, that ties the LP to the rest of Muscut's releases and nods to the label's archival work. Eye Of Delirious is a dynamic portrait of life under the sea and it's worth diving into. - Resident Advisor

As an avid believer that some songs shine only under the right circumstances Balduin doesn't shy away from weaving repetitive loops with patterns of ambience just to let some hands-up moments unfold every now and then. He doesn't like to think in categories. This approach is also reflected in his diverse musical productions. By reinterpreting genre-specific elements, discovering unheard soundscapes and with a good portion of nostalgia, he sculpts little stories that vibe on dancefloors and in living rooms alike. Following multiple appearances on labels like QC Records, Kompakt or his own GLYK imprint – DJ Balduin lands on KANN with a full lengths worth of downtempo, ambient and extasy inspired house cuts. Concrete Mimosa rolls out with 11 tracks to shine in full effect.

Properly stunning fever-dreamweaving on this new one from Zaumne, occupying an elevated space at the intersection of flickering dub-pop and ASMR soundscaping. If you’re into anything from HTRK to Malibu, Félicia Atkinson to Voice Actor, consider it a major life enhancement. For his Sferic debut, Zaumne enlists YL Hooi - a constant source of inspiration for many of us here, as well as Metoronori and the muted sax of Patrick Shiroishi. Loosely inspired by Baudelaire’s ‘Flowers of Evil’ (soft spoken extracts of which appear throughout), the album is a sort of exercise in escapism and sensual wandering. Throughout ‘Parfum’, faded pop is fleshed out with surreal elegance: all flickering neon and half-heard whispers suggestive of blurred late night fantasies; liminal, abstract, and highly evocative. Sounds hang in the air like incense, caressing the senses with an intentionality that's missing from so much landfill ambient. On opening track 'Voyageur’ he sets the scene with pastoral field recordings, dragging a pitched voice and elongated pads through a rhythmic throb that reduces dub techno to a faint knock. There are echoes of music from the fringes of the afterhours club scene too: Andrew Pekler's obscure imaginary landscapes, Jake Muir's druggy bathhouse vapours, DJ Lostboi’s balmy introspection. But despite a shared bleary–eyed aesthetic, Zaumne’s sound is more explicit and well defined, and with it brings a more acute emotional pull. When YL Hooi appears on 'Sorcières', her voice; drenched in reverb but absolutely crystalline, takes proceedings to a whole other level, reminding us of Natalie Beridze’s perennially overlooked ‘The Wrestler’ from her 2003 album for Thomas Brinkmann’s Max Ernst label; a sort of echo chamber dub perfectly re-imagined as dreampop. A whispered French vocal introduces us to 'Éther', a smoked cloud of looping synths and twinkling bells, and on 'Nymphes’ a wash of pads, wind chimes and waves lapping at the shore somehow manages to swerve all the associated schmaltz you’d imagine and instead gives us the same tingling sensation we had when we first heard Art of Noise’s ‘In Visible Silence’ at dusk, on a beach in the south of France, what seems like forever ago. There's a ritualistic quality to Zaumne’s music too, as if he's burning rare gums and mosses over smoldering coals in a remote Carpathian clearing. Hikari Okuyama, aka Metoronori, brings her pointed surrealism to 'Ombres', adding a softly spoken wonder to Olszewski's chimes, while Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Patrick Shiroishi contributes horn curliques to 'Prairie', ushering us towards the same sonic space inhabited by Bohren und der Club of Gore and Julee Cruise.

An astonishing debut album of ambient rap that stretches saturated 808 kicks over dissociated AutoTuned vocals and glyding, amniotic bass. Every track is rolled out in regular, fast, and slurred versions, slanted and enchanted to enhance a sense of sensual, blunted delirium that comes highly recommended if yr into Future, Young Thug, Lee Gamble’s new one, Lil B, Iceboy Violet, DJ Screw. It was only a matter of time before rap and ambient merged into a full syrup, something that’s been on the cards since Lil B appeared in 2010 on DIY label Weird Forest (home to Emeralds, Hair Police and Yellow Swans) with a truly eccentric braindump of stream-of-consciousness raps laced over totally anomalous ambient pads. Iceboy Violet took it further with 'Drown To Float' in 2020, granulating the edges of tracks from Lil Durk, Thugger and Gunna, and now Yungwebster propels the sound further into the blissed abyss, and in the process provides the Sferic label with its most essential release since Space Afrika’s ‘Somewhere Decent To Live’ album in 2018. Yungwebster’s debut sweeps up tracks recorded over the last couple of years, taking the signature crawl of Southern rap that guided cloud rap's first steps (look up Viper and thank us later), and dissolving it with Ambient froth, lean-hued ATL melancholy and YouTube/TikTok micro-clique self-expression. Yungwebster is here joined by Cali producers astarii, Tavo and 6rantt, Rxmer from the Netherlands, Alabama's Sasmochi, Chicago's Dielauryn, Smooks, Cominalone, Star, local rappers Agxny and Tnotsobad, and NY producers Kacie Free and Sonofadm, all of whom contribute to the album's waved atmosphere. Each track is deployed at diff speeds, often melting into a slowed-down redux, giving a nod to DJ Screw and acknowledging the Houston original's overwhelming influence on contemporary ambient-experimental styles. He speeds things up on 'Stay FOCUSSSS', paying attention to Florida's quicker pulse, heard in music from artists like Ski Mask the Slump God and Smokepurpp, before he fades into a regular-speed coda. Through each track, Webster works like a musicologist, presenting a wide-angled view of rap that's both nostalgic and forward facing. When he references Future's most inward material (think the soul-piercing 'Monster' finale 'Codeine Crazy'), he inevitably juxtaposes those feels with euphoric risers and psychedelic pads. On 'pull it to the side' he raps over asymmetrically Eno-esque waves and delicate, skeletal 808 Mafia-inspired rhythms. Even the commanding power of Imogen Heap (not only was she sampled on Lil B and Clams Casino's 'I'm God', but Lil B's The Pack bandmate Young L made an entire album from her voice in 2011 with 'As I Float') is referenced on the record's closer 'Coraline'. Circled by ethereal chorals, Yungwebster sings to the heavens, leaving trilling hi-hats to whirr into the clouds. Real mesmerising gear, a proper AOTY contender.

Yoshi Wada and EM Records presents the first-ever, world-premiere release of Earth Horns With Electronic Drone, recorded live in 1974. Combining four of Wada's self-made "pipehorns" (made from plumbing materials, over three meters in length), with an electronic drone tuned to the electrical current of the performance space, this is a lost masterpiece of early minimalism, placing Wada rightfully in the pantheon with La Monte Young, Phill Niblock, Maryanne Amacher and Alvin Lucier. Recorded live in Syracuse, New York, this recording captures the room-filling complex overtones generated by the ever-shifting interplay of the breathing horns and the constant electronic drone. This is a music of ritual hypnotic power, its heavy low-end mass and sense of change within constancy engendering a meditative transcendency. Earth Horns With Electronic Drone is the fourth and ultimate release in Em Records' Yoshi Wada series, a must for all fans of minimalism, heavy drones, ritual, mystery and world-shaking transcendence. From an original performance of almost three hours, the CD features a 77-minute excerpt. The full performance is also available as a 3LP set (162 minutes). From Earth horns to beyond the firmament: prepare to be elevated! Pipehorns constructed by Yoshi Wada; electronic equipment designed by Liz Phillips and Yoshi Wada; Electronics: Liz Phillips; Pipehorn Players: Jim Burton, Garrett List, Barbara Stewart and Yoshi Wada. 96khz/24bit digitally remastered, including a booklet with text in Japanese & English, and a reproduction circa-1975 Fluxus poster by George Maciunas.

The long-awaited reissue of Wada's 1985 LP Off The Wall, recorded in Berlin and originally released on the esteemed FMP-subsidiary SAJ label. A minimalist yet majestic monsterpiece ("massive," as Tom Johnson declares in his perceptive liner notes), Off The Wall features Wada and Wayne Hankin on bagpipes, Marilyn Bogerd on adapted organ, and percussionist Andreas Schmidt-Neri. The original album consisted of two side-long pieces recorded on successive days by Jost Geber, who captured the power and dynamics of the quartet without losing the meditative delicacy of the bagpipes and the intricacy of their interplay with the homemade organ (constructed by Wada), resulting in a slowly-evolving mosaic of combination tones and overtones. Simultaneously static yet changing, rooted and ethereal, homespun and alien, ancient and very modern, the music is created entirely with acoustic instruments but has "electronic" textures at times, yet is very warm and human, always pulsing, shifting and mutating. Em Records is pleased indeed to release Off The Wall for the first time ever on CD, with the bonus track "Die Konsonanten Pfeifen," a slightly earlier recording with Wada and Hankin on bagpipes and Kevin Newhoff on percussion, originally released as a cassette.

“YIAN” (燕), means swallow in Chinese, and is part of “Siew Yian,” the name given to Chua by her parents to preserve her connection with her Chinese heritage. Just as the migratory songbird lives between places, so did Chua, the artist living in the in-between of the English, Malaysian and Chinese cultures that make up her heritage. In the absence of Mandarin as a mother tongue, music became a way to express the parts of herself that couldn’t be described in words; “YIAN” emerged as a way to heal.

A deeply introspective and fully realized vessel of creative expression (Chua self-produced and engineered eight of the ten tracks), “YIAN” emerges as less an album than a worldview, a commitment to learning and uncovering one’s own selfhood honed over Chua’s lifelong reconciliation with her own personal history and identity.

Sacramento, CA duo Blank Gloss’s third album, Cornered, is an exquisite statement of pop ambient starkness, an album that oscillates between lush beauty and spare melancholy. It follows from their 2021 debut for Kompakt, Melt, an album that saw Morgan Fox (piano, synths) and Patrick Hills (guitar) aligned, loosely, with the cosmic pastorale of the ‘ambient Americana’ movement. Cornered feels like a significant step forward, though – by peeling back the layers of their music, they’ve revealed both its restful core and its solemn gravitas. It is unendingly lovely, but with something disquieting at its centre. Cornered was recorded quickly, over two days in December 2020. There’s nothing rushed or haphazard about the album, though; everything has its place, with each sonic element contributing profoundly to these nine miniature dioramas. It signals change, quietly but perceptibly, through the way the duo sculpts their material, building out of loose improvisations that morphed into songs. While there was no plan in mind when Blank Gloss settled into the studio, Fox recalls that “right away we realised that things were sounding and feeling a bit different than any of the sessions we had previously.” That difference can be heard in the increased amount of space Blank Gloss gift to their sound sources. Some of the most moving moments on Cornered come when Fox and Hills strip everything back – see, for example, “Crossing”, which sets pensive piano across a shyly humming drone and quiet arcs of guitar, recalling the driftworks of Roger Eno. Curiously, the album’s distinctive shape and mood develops, at least in part, from a change in instrumentation, with Hills using a MIDI pick-up on his guitar. “This resulted in making things happen a lot quicker,” Fox says. “It also helped create what I think is a bit more sombre, dark feeling to some of the songs.” Elsewhere, on songs like “Salt”, the piano tussles with flecks of guitar, single tones sent out to mingle with the stars, like Morricone at 16 RPM, while Cornered’s centrepiece, the eleven-minute “No Appetite”, lets long arcs of electronic texture breathe and sigh, tangling together in a cat’s cradle of bliss. Throughout, it feels as though the music is blossoming as you hear it, like watching time-lapse footage of flora in bloom. But perhaps the most seductive thing about Cornered is the sense you get, listening, that the music was something unexpected, a visitation. “It almost felt like we weren’t dictating where the music went and how it sounded,” Fox agrees. “We were just there in a room together in December and these sounds were happening, and we were lucky enough to be recording the process.”

Alva Noto’s award winning score for the 2022 German documentary film This Stolen Country of Mine directed by German filmmaker Marc Wiese features nineteen compositions to be released on NOTON in July 2023. The documentary film explores the question of a state’s sovereignty in the face of foreign powers. The film portrays Ecuadorian resistance fighters and journalists who oppose the sell-off of an extensive part of the country’s resources to Chinese investors. Alva Noto’s music subtly accompanies the struggle of a mountain village, immersing us into the film’s narrative and pathos. Across nineteen compositions, the music exposes and holds back when the images and statements of the protagonists speak for themselves, reflecting the dark shadows and the glares of hope of communal resistance. The documentary was the recipient of the German Documentary Film Music Award 2022.

RAMZi is returning home with these eight sonic quests, reanimating the dormant FATi Records, Phoebé’s own label. Feu Follets (Fire Sprites) are fireflies, flickering balls of light dancing in the dark shadows, found in fields, forests, chaparral, and scrublands, the many different landscapes of RAMZi’s whimsical adventures.

A refracted audiobook soundtracking the bathing culture of the Ottoman Baths in Budapest, cut-up from Dalia Neis’ metaphysical thriller ‘The Swarm’ ( The Elephants Press, 2023). theelephants.net/ephemera/the-swarm This is the fourth iteration of their Trans-Danubian odyssey, beginning in Dali Muru & The Polyphonic Swarm’s LP, before drifting into book form, radio show, and now audiobook. This audiobook is an updated, revised version of the original NTS show broadcasted in January 2022.

Rod Modell presents "Lanterns" - an epic journey through an evolving sonic landscape propelled by the churning momentum of reverb-soaked percussion. Red Lantern is an ode to the eerie red glow that once beckoned sailors to the port of Amsterdam - on one side, the gentle thud of a bass drum rolls beneath haunting yet uplifting pads whilst on the reverse, bubbling bass underpins echoes of a shoreline that shifts in and out of focus. Blue Lantern merges dub techno and ambient experimentation, showcasing Modell's impressive talents in sound design and the diverse influences that span his 25-year career as a musician. Warm, thunderous kicks rumble beneath restrained hints of percussion, creating an immersive soundscape allowing for music and space to envelop the listener, with the result both enticing and unsettling in equal measures. Words by Martin Gould.