This is one of those records where I started to feel myself falling for it about a minute into my first listen, and was head over heels by about minute five. There’s this rather lovely delicate piano sound, you see. But then there’s this helicopter. And there’s just about birdsong. Then the piano builds in […]
Category: Music
This record was a surprise and a delight. The blurb I’d read about Emeka Ogboh had described him as a field recordist who’d had his work in art galleries, and I guess I was expecting something kind of austere. But bang on the first track, Lekki Aiah Freeway, and you’re hit with this awesome shuffling […]
There was a lot of hype when this retired Serbian steel plant worker turned modular synth ambient wizard hit the scene. I managed to resist it until 2018’s Above All Dreams, when I fell hard. Or rather, I didn’t, because there’s nothing hard about this music: better to say that I plunged deeply into its […]
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My albums of 2020
I’m not going to try to tell you here what 2020 was about. I mean, you were there, and you had your own experience of it, and there’s not much I can add. One observation that is, however, blogworthy, is that I wound up listening to a lot of drone music. And some ambient and […]
I didn’t know it, but I really needed this. There’s something very comforting about tucking into a hefty slab of crunchy Monolake loveliness, and this is 95 minutes of the good stuff. Not that this record doesn’t have it’s surprises. Sure, for much of the time we’re in familiar territory: skittering beats, sci-fi stylings that […]
It’s the best part of a decade since I last encountered Michał Jacaszek. Glimmer is one of those records I’ve been dead into, then kind of forgotten about, then been delighted to rediscover all over again. I seem to love it a little more each time around. I kind of fell in love with Gardenia […]
In my last post, I promised myself that the next record I write about here would have “proper tunes, or a proper rhythm, or maybe even (gasp!) both”. Well, here it is! It’s kind of fascinating to me how, twenty-plus years after it’s heyday, kids around the world are finding cool things to do with […]
I’m making a promise to myself, right here, right now: the next record I write about here will have proper tunes, or a proper rhythm, or maybe even (gasp!) both. I don’t know whether it’s something to do with All This Business that we’ve been having for the last few months, but I appear to […]
If you’re like me, then you’ll read that this record features Ellen Fullman on long string instrument and Theresa Wong on cello and electronics and you’ll immediately try to imagine what a long string instrument might be. Just how long are the strings you’re imagining? Pretty long? If you’re like me, then you’re probably falling […]
A promising debut LP from this Australian ambient artist. We open with In Her Hair, a big shimmering ambient synth number, and we close with Champagne Smoke, a rather lush strings-and-static melody-versus-noise track (spoiler alert: the melody wins on points). In between, things are decidedly more sparse: the title track’s thin, high-register drones almost play […]
