This is a short (28 minutes) but perfectly formed bit of intense atmospheric ambient. It’s made mostly of Kellough’s own droning string arrangements, field recordings (from Iceland and South Africa), and a bunch of processing. From the opening seconds you’d be forgiven for thinking this was going to be at the floaty end of the […]
Remember 2014, when new Aphex material (and new old Caustic Window, in particular) was really exciting? Remember 2015, when new Aphex material was kinda *shrug* and “whatevs”? Well, now it’s 2016, and perhaps I’m just about ready to treat new Aphex material on its merits, rather than harking back to the ’90s. Perhaps… Anyway, on this […]
Sam Shackleton’s prolific early singles career largely passed me by — I remember quite liking the Ricardo Villalobos remix of Blood On My Hands back in 2007, but that’s about it. In 2012, that all changed with his epic Music For The Quiet Hour, which absolutely blew me away (it still does). His main output since then […]
I was first drawn to this because I was curious about Jakobson’s Macro Cymatic Visual Music Instrument, a homemade construction which transduces the vibrations in water into sound (I won’t try to explain it any more than that, instead you should just go see it in action). Certainly there are some interesting sounds going on here, […]
Aw, now, this is kind of lovely. It’s techno at its most melodic and hypnotic. The tunes are front and centre of everything here, the beats sitting and the back and just gently propelling things along. In fact, it’s kind of pushing the line between techno and a kind of proggy trancy synth music. The […]
You may want to be sitting down for this one. Right from the start of the A-side (the 15-minute long How You Look When You’re Not Looking) we’re thrown into some seriously heavy ritualistic shit. According to the liner notes, Mueller “conceived” this (it’s hard to believe that it’s scored) and plays bass drums, voice, […]
Laraaji is an ambient / new-age old-timer who’s been playing music (and collaborating with Brian Eno) since the seventies. Sun Araw (aka Cameron Stallones) is a Californian experimentalist who looks like he probably wasn’t born then. But they have produced a wonderful, effortlessly natural-sounding improvised collaboration here. Stallones does some wonderfully loose work on guitar […]
One of the things I really like about the shonkier end of Chicago acid is the way it sounds like the producers are just barely managing to stop everything descending into chaos. It’s really evocative of one of those moments on the dancefloor where everything is going really messy, in a good way. (Perhaps that’s […]
In which Colin Stetson, as Eric Morecambe might put it, plays all the right notes — but not necessarily on the right instruments. This is a “reimagining” of the lovely lovely Symphony of Sorrowful Songs as part avant garde exploration, part drone metal intensity, part psychedelic wig-out, part 20th-century classical symphony (well, y’know…), and part […]
This is a superbly stately piece of ambient classical. It’s centred around piano and electronics, with a touch of strings (early music favourite the viola da gamba, I gather), brass, and tuned percussion. Köner thinks nothing of leaving a single piano note hanging for five or ten seconds, echoing into the ambient wash. From time […]
dogrando writes about some records 