MUSIC

Time and duration are core themes in the work of both William Basinski and Janek Schaefer, and this long-distance collaboration took a suitably long gestation of eight years from start to finish. In that time, our collective perception of time has at times become disorienting. “ . . . on reflection ” remodels that instability as an exquisite work of art – one that is unmoored by time or space. Limitation breeds creativity, revealed as an expression of minimalism and close focus. Deploying a delicate piano passage from their collective archive, Basinski and Schaefer weave and reweave in numerous ways, forging an iridescent flurry of flickering melodies. The sounds of various birds heard from late night windows on tour can occasionally be heard throughout, ricocheting off mirrored facades, reflecting on themselves as they continually reshape their own environments with song. “ . . . on reflection ” looks backwards, a bustling revelry of positive emotions heard through the aging mirrors of memory. It is a celebratory meditation where sound shimmers through time like the light of the sea’s waves glistening as it folds and unfolds upon itself. Created 2014-2022 between L.A. & London. Mixed at Narnia, Walton-on-Thames.

Heith is the alias of Milan-based artist and musician Daniele Guerrini who crafts a mesmerising and ritualistic subterranean soundscape, a resonant and eclectic collage of distinct sonic elements: from celestial percussion intertwined with jarring, mechanical oscillations to haunting vocals atop murky dubbed-out beats.Exploring the textures of consciousness through research into the ritual animism, he kept an omnivorous and universalist approach to cultural and sonic influence. This is central to X, wheel, Heith’s debut album and first release on PAN. It’s a deep dive into his creative and spiritual practice, one where art and life are inextricable. The Liars Tell..., on the other hand, feels like a kind of respite, a moment of meditation and pause from the fatigue of dimension-hopping. As if the traveller dismounted their carriage and, standing puzzled on a crossroad, listened to the echoes of distant places. Occupying a liminal space and letting thousand of contradictory tales form the lyrics to one unfathomable song.

‘Four Seasons in Kyoto’ marks the final chapter of The Kyoto Connection’s Ambient Japanese trilogy, following Postcards (2018) and The Flower, The Bird and The Mountain (2022). Like its predecessors, this album pays homage to the pioneering ambient and environmental music movements of 1980s and 1990s Japan. The album unfolds as the imagined soundtrack to life in a quiet rural village, where nature and tradition shape the rhythm of everyday existence. Across 15 evocative compositions, The Kyoto Connection captures the essence of Japan’s ever-changing seasons, weaving together delicate melodies and immersive soundscapes. With contributions from friends and fans in Japan, Four Seasons in Kyoto is both a tribute and a transportive listening experience from producer Facundo Arena, the composer and producer behind The Kyoto Connection. With Four Seasons in Kyoto, Facundo Arena continues his deep exploration of Japanese ambient and environmental music, blending his long-standing admiration for Kyoto’s cultural heritage with a sound that feels both nostalgic and timeless. While Postcards was an instinctive homage and The Flower, The Bird and The Mountain drew from real Kyoto field recordings, this final chapter in the trilogy leans further into the imagined, an intimate portrait of an unseen yet deeply felt Japan. Organic soundscapes and drifting melodies mirror the slow change of seasons, evoking the impermanence central to Japanese aesthetics. The result is a record that seamlessly bridges the natural and the synthetic, memory and imagination, a fitting conclusion to a journey that began with an algorithmic discovery and blossomed into a rich sonic world of its own. 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of The Kyoto Connection and also their first tour of Japan where they will be visiting Tokyo, Okinawa and of course Kyoto collaborating with local musicians and playing live. The album is pressed on heavyweight 180 Gram Vinyl with sleeve design by Bradley Pinkerton.

A long-lost live recording from 2005 by Shizuka, the legendary psychedelic band led by doll artist Shizuka Miura—whose cult popularity has only grown since her passing—and her husband Maki Miura, renowned guitarist of Les Rallizes Dénudés, Fushitsusha, and Ookami no Jikan. Released by UFO CREAtions, a new Beijing label carrying the spirit of P.S.F. into the present alongside imprints such as Black Editions, An’archives, and Eschogras Records. Captured at Tokyo’s Koenji U.F.O. Club in 2005, this long-hidden performance is an essential document for fans. Fragile gothic atmospheres, doll-like dreams steeped in girlish decadence, smoke-shrouded psychedelia in the direct lineage of Les Rallizes Dénudés, rustic incantations, and dreamgaze-like weightlessness intertwine to conjure a snowfield of phantom suns—nowhere and everywhere at once. Lo-fi yet radiating an uncanny beauty, this is a true hidden gem of neo-psychedelia. Limited to 100 copies.

Suishou no Fune, the solitary psychedelic band whose works have graced Important Records, Holy Mountain, and Japan’s avant-garde stronghold P.S.F. Records. True to their name—taken from a classic song by The Doors—they have long spun visionary and transcendent sound worlds. Now in stock: their 2024 double-cassette box set. Released on Love Share Dopamine (L.S.D.), a sub-label of Beijing’s rising UFO CREAtions, carrying forward the devotion to P.S.F. alongside imprints such as Black Editions, An’archives, and Eschogras Records. Recorded live at the sacred venue Kuroneko Sabō in Asagaya in April 2024, the performance moves from pitch-black P.S.F.–to–Ftarri-like free improvisation and silence, through the smoke-shrouded, decadent psychedelia in the lineage of Les Rallizes Dénudés, to drifting slow-psych like ripples across water, and even slow psychedelic shoegaze recalling Hallelujahs and Nagisa ni te. A definitive document of dense, multifaceted visions. Hand-numbered edition of 100 copies.

‘i,i’ is Bon Iver’s most expansive, joyful and generous album to date. If 'For Emma, Forever Ago’ was the crisp, heart-strung isolation of a northern Winter; ‘Bon Iver’ the rise and whirr of burgeoning Spring; and '22, A Million', a blistering, "crazy energy" Summer record, ‘i,i’ completes the cycle: a fall record; Autumn-colored, ruminative, steeped. The autumn of Bon Iver is a celebration of self acceptance and gratitude, bolstered by community and delivering the bounty of an infinite American music.The sales and accolades are well-known - multiple Gold albums, multiple Grammys, chart-topping collaborations and festival headlines. But even more significantly, with each release Bon Iver quietly shifts the state of modern music. From the boundaries of folk, to the rules of autotune, to production work for others, Bon Iver’s fingerprint finds its way across the mainstream every time. Vernon has always been a master collaborator, and on ‘i,i’ that desire becomes maximal, with guests ranging from Moses Sumney and Bruce Hornsby to Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Here, the music - and band, and themes, and creative space - are bigger than ever.

Praised by The Wire as “mystical, expansive and serene.” Oren Ambarchi—renowned Australian experimentalist, head of the influential imprint Black Truffle, and long-time collaborator with Jim O’Rourke, Keith Rowe, and Keiji Haino—joins forces with Norwegian guitarist Fredrik Rasten, known for releases on Edition Wandelweiser, Sofa, and Meenna, for this striking 2025 collaboration. Released on the adventurous Belgian label VIERNULVIER (home to Claire Rousay, Hieroglyphic Being, and Miaux), the album offers a newly composed score to Eduard Grečner’s 1967 Slovak cult film Dragon’s Return. Recorded live at the Videodroom Festival during Film Fest Ghent in 2024, where the score was premiered alongside the screening, the performance captures a singular moment of improvisation between sound and image. Interweaving 12-string guitar, voice, flutes, percussion, and shells, Ambarchi and Rasten conjure a soundworld at once folkloric and contemplative, suffused with the aura of ritual prayer. The result is a breathtaking evocation of a forgotten myth reborn in the present.

The self-titled album by Spool, the collaborative project of Berlin-based sound artist and ambient composer Florian T M Zeisig—known for his deeply moving Music For Parents, dedicated to his insomniac parents—and performer/artist Angel Paradise, has arrived via Somewhere Press. Glassy, delicate particles of sound drift like snowflakes through a quiet winter night, casting a gentle, ethereal glow. Layers of piano, field recordings, and microscopic synth textures unfold into a sound world suspended between memory and dream. Warm, intimate drones align with the rhythm of breath, while faint melodies linger like whispered thoughts. At times naïve, at times reverent in their embrace of emptiness, these eight tracks resonate with a profound introspection. A crystalline embodiment of contemporary ambient aesthetics—where silence and tenderness converge.

The 12th full-length by Pacific Northwest artist Liz Harris aka Grouper is a collection of songs spanning fifteen years. She characterizes Shade as an album about respite, and the coast, poetically and literally. How one frames themselves in a landscape, how in turn it frames themselves; memories and experiences carried forward mapping a connection to place -- 'an ode to blue / what lives in shade.' Songs touch on loss, flaws, hiding places, love. Deep connections to the Bay Area, and the North Coast, with its unique moods of solitude, beauty, and isolation -- a place described and transformed by the chaos and power of rivermouth, wild maritime storms, columns of mist that rise up unexpectedly on the road at night. Portions were recorded on Mount Tamalpais during a self-made residency years back, other pieces made longer ago in Portland, while the rest were tracked during more recent sessions in Astoria. Throughout, Harris threads a hidden radiant language of voice, disquiet, and guitar, framed by open space and the sense of being far away -- 'Echoing a lighthouse, burying the faults of being human / Into things that we project upon the sky at night.

Ruins was made in Aljezur, Portugal in 2011 on a residency set up by Galeria Zé dos Bois. I recorded everything there except the last song, which I did at mother's house in 2004. Iʼm still surprised by what I wound up with. It was the first time Iʼd sat still for a few years; processed a lot of political anger and emotional garbage. Recorded pretty simply, with a portable 4-track ,Sony stereo mic and an upright piano. When I wasnʼt recording songs I was hiking several miles to the beach. The path woundthrough the ruins of several old estates and a small village.The album is a document. A nod to that daily walk. Failed structures. Living in the remains of love. I left the songs the way they came (microwave beep from when power went out after a storm); I hope that the album bears some resemblance to the place that I was in.

"The third full-length release for Portland, Oregon-based Liz Harris. Harris might have achieved a significant fan base thanks to the whispering, near-ambient vocal crusades of her debut album Way Their Crept and its follow-up Wide, but those with a careful ear would have heard slightly more trapped beneath her fuzzy chain of effects. Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill marks a departure of sorts for Liz, which sees her turn down the fuzz boxes which caged (and to some degree defined) her sound and allows her voice to ring out above everything else. It is an album steeped in the world of dream-pop and far from shying away from the reference, Liz has instead grabbed on with both hands, creating an album's worth of perfect, left-field pop songs. Using delicate song structures which are at once both familiar and somehow alien, her vocals cry out hauntingly over stripped-down guitar lines and looped environmental recordings. These are the future soundtracks to love, despair and ultimately, hope." "This remarkable album is actually what I personally always wanted 4AD records to sound like, only they never quite delivered the hazy pleasures their beautiful sleeve art promised." --Pitchfork (8.2)

Am I ever gonna be the one? Do I ever wanna be with someone? Am I ever gonna be the one? Will I ever end up being someone?

Wave Field, released in 1995, was a departure from the first album into new composition methods involving the dirty textures of rock guitar, sounding in the open ears of many listeners (like Jim O'Rourke, who issued the disc in the US on dexter's cigar) as a synthesis of disparate elements — a nexus where Alvin Lucier, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and Eno blend together. Here, the clangorous potential of the guitar was emphasized, giving a metallic edge to the two extended pieces and "radio edit" coda. The jacket paid subtle tribute to My Bloody Valentine, which, along with the radio edit, suggested a harmony between musical directions as wildly disparate as minimalist experimental and rock. Today, such a paradoxical intent is more widely considered as a part of the artist's purview.

2024 Repress. Tokyo's Ai Aso is a Japanese psychedelic pop singer-songwriter whose work has a whisper-thin acid-folk quality to it. She started performing as a solo singer around 2000. Her solo work, infrequent collaborations with White Heaven members You Ishihara and Michio Kurihara, Yurayura Teikoku, and Boris bring a level of fragility and hypnotism to the stage, recalling lost memories, small flavors of Coil, and serial playing on the verge of evaporation. As for her recent activities, she has performed on bills together with Sunn O))), Boris, Masaki Batoh (Ghost), Touri Kudoh, Kim Doo Soo, Mark Fry, Simon Finn, etc. Cut by CGB at Dubplates & Mastering.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Emile Mosseri, and Ghostly will be making a donation from today’s Bandcamp Friday sales of their collaborative album, I Could Be Your Dog/I Could Be Your Moon to support reproductive rights via Noise For Now. "His music filled me with the urge to connect with the world," Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith says of Emile Mosseri. She first heard his work while watching the 2019 film The Last Black Man In San Francisco; just minutes in, she paused it to look up who did the score and wrote to him immediately. "I love Emile's ability to create melodies that feel magically scenic and familiar like they are reminding you of the innocence of loving life.” Those talents saw recognition in 2020 with an Oscar nomination for Mosseri’s original score to the film Minari. He was already a fan of Smith’s and became increasingly intrigued by her impressionistic process as they started to talk. "The music feels so spiritual and alive and made from the earth," Mosseri says. "I think of her as the great conductor, summoning musical poetry from her orchestra of machines." I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon, their two-part collaborative album, introduces an uncanny fusion of their sonics. Constructed using synthesizer, piano, electronics, and voice, this soft-focus dream world is lush, evocative, and fleeting. It finds two composers tuning their respective styles inward as an ode to mutual inspiration, a celebration of the human spirit and its will to surrender to the currents of life. Early into their correspondence, Smith and Mosseri realized they were neighbors in Los Angeles and met up for a few hikes. Their conversations led to a musical exchange over email. The exercise became a sketch, the start of their first song together, "Log In Your Fire,” with Mosseri finding flourishes in Smith’s cathartic synth lines to intonate and harmonize alongside. Lyrically, it's a beautiful, open-ended sentiment. "Being a log in someone's fire, to me, means letting go, and surrendering to that feeling," says Mosseri. From there, the pair composed a series of musical foundations, trading files from afar, nurturing the eventual expansion as the remote days of 2020 set in. Smith likens the collaborative experience to the exciting uncertainty of starting a garden, "doing what I can to facilitate growth while enjoying the process of being surprised by what will actually grow." In the summer of 2021, the duo finished work on the sequel, I Could Be Your Moon, expanding their musical language as the first part reached its September release. Songs from these more recent exchanges find them even more synced, forging into percussive and harmonic experiments, leaning further into their “unused musical muscles,” as Smith and Mosseri put it. A unified vocal presence emerged. “As the friendship grew I think we both learned how to support each other more and musically that was communicated through singing together,” adds Smith. Now taken as a full album set, I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon moves fluidly from track to track, panning through textural vignettes. Two roughly 17-minute halves, the set evokes the bittersweet sense of something too bright or rare to last, a short-lived glimpse into a golden hour. "Moon In Your Eye" sends a choral refrain skyward; we stay behind, watching it haze away in the heavens. "Brush" bubbles with Smith's characteristic wonder and curiosity, expressed in a flutter of horn-like sounds, leading into the album's central expression, its titular track. Above pulsing harmonies, in his tender falsetto, Mosseri repeats variations of the mantra, "I don't want to feel / lost anymore /I can’t make you what I am." He says the idea they are reaching for is more abstract and universal, "It could mean I could be your friend / buddy, I could be someone / something else, I could transform, I could be your companion, etc. What I like about it is it could change based on what that means to you, or what the word dog means to you." The orchestral march of 'oohs and ahhs' on "Blink Twice” could register as both triumphant and tragic. "Moonweed," strays closer to the latter, with low and slow piano keys guiding the alien hums of a starlit goodbye. I Could Be Your Moon, the second installment and side B of the record, opens with the striking “Green To You.” Depicting a dream or a need for renewal — to be new in the eyes of another, all excitement of seeing and being seen as imagined, idealized versions of ourselves — the song unveils the duo’s newly fused voice. “I only want to be green to you,” they sing, as an organ phrase swirls underneath. There’s a wistful sense that bleeds into instrumental “Amber” and continues across “Standing In Your Light,” a piano ballad-turned-mini-symphony that traces over feelings of remorse (“I was distracted / overreacted… come to your senses”). “Shim Sham” starts woozily in anticipation before flipping on a drum break, becoming the collection’s energetic apex; their hums dance with the beat, wordless yet undoubtedly expressive. Once introduced, the percussion stays and syncopates for “Golden Cow,” another radiant duet that reads like a playful plea, or a reminder to their creative selves (“slow down / be careful now / you’ve done this one before”). The record ends inside “Radio Replacement,” a swan song in the lineage of somber album outros; lyrically they reflect on past loves and the passage of time, personifying the music (“I would really love to be / your favorite melody / for a while”). There is a dreamy, elemental intention to this music, which Smith and Mosseri say came naturally, as they both embraced intuitive interplay throughout their creative back-and-forth. The stylistic threads of each composer are recognizable yet become more ambiguous as the album progresses, sewn into a singular vision. "I'm so grateful that my musical ideas could dance with hers with some grace and harmony," says Mosseri. Smith adds that this experience helped her "remember that music can be a connecting layer of friendship, especially in a time when the usual ways were out of reach."

FJLP-05 continues with Forest Jams recent trend of Japanese re-issues from the 90’s. This one is E.S. Island’s “Southwind from Hachijo” a deep ambient exploration that is more tribal and spiritual than prior E.S. Island releases. This was recorded on Hachijo Island featuring several traditional instruments with the bulk of the music being played by Eisuke Takahashi (R.I.P.) and Nene Sanae. Limited copies.

At the end of my armA finger, a thread, a vanishing pointWhere nothing can be seen and the air is movingAnnie A, the one-off collaborative project between Félicia Atkinson, Time is Away’s Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney, Christina Petrie and Maxine Funke, arrives on A Colourful Storm with a profoundly inquisitive, exploratory composition evoking questions of inconstancy and reconciliation, vastness and finitude, and the sometimes cruel deception of human perception. Who will conduct our dreams if we never wake?Annie A quietly observes and attempts to compartmentalise the answers. A geographically diverse yet determinedly like-minded ensemble, its seeds were sown during a spring night in London, where time on stage was shared and cherished by Atkinson, Time is Away and Petrie after years of mutual appreciation. Atkinson had found solace in Time is Away’s Ballads, Funke’s Seance and particularly the voice of poet and performer Petrie, whose remarkable delivery, first heard on Ballads, here drifts effortlessly from a wide-eyed stream of consciousness to crystalline sensory expression: “The wind is full of creases / It is shaking the weak threads in the cliff / The coast is releasing teeth and nails into the air”. It is the perfect accompaniment to Atkinson’s hushed tones - a sometimes textural, if not spectral, presence - spoken sensitively like a mother to a resting child, reflecting upon the forces of nature, the fragility of ecology and the surrendering of self to air, rain, and earth.Devotees of Atkinson’s practice will recognise the significance of the natural world in her work, her evocative sonic landscapes formed from a toolbox of keyboard, voice and materials collected from everyday life on the dramatic rocky coast of Normandy, as well as field recordings from places far and wide. She breathes life into liminal spaces, the sound of wind, whispers and the distant clatter of rocks conjuring visions of places both beautiful and eerily familiar. Petrie wanders curiously in these places. “First the Crocus” introduces her desirous cries above a wistful electronic signal, the alternation with Atkinson’s whispers suggestive of each other’s distant presence. “The wind that had not touched land, moving with the warm gyre of the sea / Is now touching land / And is beginning to draw the dust”. What is her fate when this wind touches land? The meeting of the other, the crossing of paths. Their voices, layered and dreamlike, drift and entrance each other with gossamer intensity.Interpreting and arranging the field of sonic accoutrements is Time is Away, whose weaving, layering and sensitivity to detail is likened to the meticulous assembly of an Anni Albers textile. The spirit of Albers guides the piece’s entirety, Petrie’s recounting of her loom and thread a symbol of endurance, vitality and seeking wonder in intricacies: “Every thread needs to pass through the eye of a needle before you begin / I keep wondering, I just keep wondering what will happen”. The piece concludes with a timely appearance by Funke, whose meditation on vulnerability confronts and surrenders herself to the enchanting natural world.

Delicate glitches drifting like particles, ambient textures rising like mist—West Mineral, the seminal imprint founded by Huerco S. and a defining force in the post-2010s “Dubient” movement, returns with another essential release. Sleepdial is the solo project of Denver-based experimental musician Luke Thinnes, known for his releases as Dubharp on 100% Silk and as French Kettle Station on Slagwerk. This debut LP offers a soundworld where blurred drones and error-like noise artifacts linger with echoes of nameless, half-remembered emotions. Navigating the liminal zones between loop and non-loop, structure and collapse, it gently scatters fragments of memory into Dubient silence. A crystalline document of dreamlike introspection—one that glows quietly within the contemporary experimental continuum. Mastered by Rashad Becker.

‘Halos of Perception’ releases on November 3, 2023 with a hyperreal film in collaboration with Chinese-Malaysian Australian video artist Tristan Jalleh. Drawing from Lerkenfeldt's field work and electroacoustic practices, piano, cello and tape loop arrangements light up lost chambers and underground histories in a patchwork of reflective musique concrète, instrumental composition and surreal cinema. The artist's sophomore LP on Shelter Press spotlights underground networks opening questions of reality, virtuality and perception through oral traditions, experimental AV composition and diary-like vignettes.

'Skinned' is the debut album from Danish composer, producer and singer ML Buch. After releasing her debut EP Fleshy in 2017 ML Buch is ready with her first full-length album Skinned that takes her expansive guitar work and catchy melodies to another territory. With her unique experimental pop and vocals that seem to slide into your ears as fluorescent liquid, ML Buch portrays the reality of intimacy in a digital era. Working primarily with synthetic midi sounds, the general love of songwriting and guitar music is ever present. The album comes with an extensive visual side in the form of five music videos acting as tableaus that echo the encounter between screens and skin and how the senses wriggle, flutter and weave in and out of our online presence and intimate lives. As if in search for something real, ML Buch takes the listener on the other side of the skin. Led by tender love songs like I’m A Girl You Can Hold IRL and Can’t Get Over You With You we journey through her throat and into her intestines, discovering a fascinating realm of shiny mucus and bile in flesh and yellowish colors. Panoramic images were captured by a small pill camera travelling through the body of ML Buch and act as extentions of the architecture of the music. This literal way of internalizing modern technology is symbolic of Skinned where eclectic instrumental compositions share the space with strong hooks and ML Buch’s spherical voice.

Following releases on Sähkö Recordings and The Trilogy Tapes, "Fever of the World" is the Soda Gong debut by Memotone, the nom de plume of UK-based multi-instrumentalist Will Yates. As a collection, it is both intimate and expansive, like the feeling of gathering one's thoughts before setting off on a long journey or committing to an irrevocable course of action. Throughout, Yates' talents as both player and sound designer are on full display, as are the sonic signatures that have come to characterize the Memotone catalog: low-lit, ECM-inflected noir; evasive and evolving loop-based accretions; and mellifluous mosaics of keys, guitar, reeds, and percussion. It is patient and focused music, built around production techniques and compositional ideas that have been perfected both in studio and in live performance over a period of several years. "Catherine, On Fire" sets the scene, one of two languid, longform selections, and develops slowly from a spare, harmonic-laden guitar loop into a bed of rippling textural ambience and woozy clarinet filigree. Later, "The Bus" and "When the Bakery Has What You Want and It's Cheap" conjure images of rain-streaked windows, fanciful baked confections, and grey skies broken finally by sunlight. Warm, generous, and comfortable in its own skin, this is music that reminds us that when it feels easy to resign ourselves to world weariness, we should pause for a moment and listen to the rustle of the leaves. The wind knows not to linger.

2024 Repress. Tokyo's Ai Aso is a Japanese psychedelic pop singer-songwriter whose work has a whisper-thin acid-folk quality to it. She started performing as a solo singer around 2000. Her solo work, infrequent collaborations with White Heaven members You Ishihara and Michio Kurihara, Yurayura Teikoku, and Boris bring a level of fragility and hypnotism to the stage, recalling lost memories, small flavors of Coil, and serial playing on the verge of evaporation. As for her recent activities, she has performed on bills together with Sunn O))), Boris, Masaki Batoh (Ghost), Touri Kudoh, Kim Doo Soo, Mark Fry, Simon Finn, etc. Cut by CGB at Dubplates & Mastering.

California-based keyboardist and composer Nico Georis, known for his ambient works created with biofeedback devices and intended “for plants,” returns with a luminous new album via Leaving Records, the spiritual heart of the West Coast’s independent scene. Delving deep into celestial realms of modern classical and new age, this album radiates with grace and compassion. Gently resonant piano tones, softly undulating synth layers, and reverberations that dissolve into space—each sound arrives as a prayer, a blessing, or the ripple of a memory devoted to someone unseen. A profound sense of calm and care pervades throughout, as if tending to the quiet growth of plants or listening closely to the cosmic order itself. A radiant and healing work of meditative beauty.

Welsh musician Aisha Vaughan presents The Gate. It is upon us to renew the deep-cut, heavy-weighted melancholy of Celtic New Age for 2024. New Age music from the Celtic/British Isles crossed over into the mainstream in the late 80s - notably with Enya (and her band Clannad), the perhaps now lesser-known instrumental Celtic harp music of Patrick Ball, and the slew of now mostly forgotten various artist compilations that saturated the New Age CD and cassette music market in the early 90s.

The Gate earnestly gives reverence to the landscape that she calls home (as cinematically portrayed consistently in Vaughan’s self-shot videos via her social media). Now living in converted barn in mid-Wales, Vaughan writes and records her music to red kites and eagles hunting in the mountains outside her windows. The notably welcomed layers of ASMR sound design and computer music production supplement the main instrument here - her voice - woven within campfire crackle, wind chime, cricket, bird, harp, flute, synthesizer pad & sfx, and new moon wolf howl to channel celestial guides conjured from her remote homeland.

Using composition as catharsis stemming from a traumatic upbringing where music was banned in her childhood household, and the inherent occult history that surrounds the art form, Vaughan does not shy away from precisely stewarding this particular - often still-overlooked - musical tradition through her generation’s ambient lens.
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