The older I get, the less tolerant of excess I find myself. Which means that if you’re going to release a record that’s nearly two and a half hours long, you’d better have a good reason for it. Simply having a lot of stuff to get out isn’t enough; you need to be doing something […]
Tag: genre_ambient
This is a rather awesome and intense bit of ambient. Each track sounds like it has been spun out of a single moment of classical music: stretched, looped, processed, snap, crackled, and popped. The source material includes sacred-sounding choral music, avant-garde-sounding strings, organs. It’s powerful stuff, with a real glacial heft, but at its core […]
I have a bad habit of using Tim Hecker comparisons in this blog as kind of a lazy shorthand for a really full kind of ambient drone, the sound that fills the spectrum, fills the sound-stage, and fills every last cubic millimetre of your brain cavity with a giant pulsating fuzz monster. This is largely based […]
This one from William Jourdaine is super hard to categorize. According to the blurb, ‘the sonic material is all sourced from the field, with recordings captured in the forests and caves of rural Quebec, along with ex-urban “non-places”, and various waiting rooms’. This seems to have gone through a whole load of modular synth gear […]
Ahhhhh! Swans-chappy Norman Westberg has been playing with his guitars and his effects pedals and has come up with a lovely sort of ambient drone thing which immediately sweeps you away in a sort of floaty haze. Little plucked melodies drift in and out of the gentle waves of texture. It reminds me a little […]
When I discover a record I really like by an artist with a few releases under their belt, it’s tempting to go back and binge on their back-catalogue. I normally try to resist, having found that it mostly leads to disappointment, and often dilution of the pleasure of the music that kicked the whole thing […]
The buzz started with the 2016 retrospective album simply called Works. Abul Mogard had worked for decades in a steel plant in Serbia, and it was only when he retired that he bought a bunch of electronics, got tinkering, and started making music — trying to recreate the sounds of the factory, which he missed. Or […]
Christina Vantzou keeps us on our toes here. Glissando for Bodies and Machines in Space is all sighing voices and synthesized hums. Percussion in Nonspace is sparkling little number of delicate chimes. At Dawn is a generously-processed string drone number (the cello is by Clarice Jensen whose For This From That Will Be Filled I was […]
You’ll think I’m silly, but I almost didn’t want to listen this: I love Alva Noto, I love Ryuichi Sakamoto, I love Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sakamoto’s latest album was almost heartbreakingly perfect, and I didn’t want to be disappointed. Well, I’m glad I got over myself, because this is a magical and wondrous […]
Confession of ignorance time: Marc Barreca has apparently been a big noise (as it were) in electronic ambient music since the late seventies, but I’d never encountered him until now. I’m happy to correct that, though, because this is a beguiling piece of work: twelve tracks that hover tantalizingly between ambient (but they’re too structured […]
dogrando writes about some records 