This is a slightly strange record. From the very start, it plunges us deep into that bvdub world of swirling synth noises and droning strings, everything swathed in so much reverb that it feels oddly timeless, and for, yep, over two and a half hours, that’s where we’re going to stay. Somewhere deep in the […]
Tag: genre_ambient
Eric Thielemans has made a record using, it seems, almost entirely classical percussion instruments — but not in the way that you might expect. It’s light on the drums, preferring the softer sounds of xylophones, woodblocks, chimes, and I believe (though I wouldn’t swear to it) scraping noises made on the inside of a piano. […]
I guess that I was expecting James Leyland Kirby’s latest moniker to be doing something akin to the crackly nostalgia of his work as Leyland Kirby or The Caretaker. The links are there, but The Stranger is something altogether starker and more abstract, and it’s taken me a while to get my head around it. The […]
So, we have to start with the stories. Here’s the first story: In 2001, William Basinski came upon some tape loops of slowed-down recordings from radio which he’d made in the 1980s, back before he got (relatively speaking) famous in the ’90s. He decided to transfer them to digital, set the loops going, and hit […]
There’s a synth sound in some of Brock van Wey’s dub techno which is so organic it sounds almost human. This record is dominated by what seem to be real vocals, often abstracted to the point of sounding almost synthetic. There’s some wordless chanting, and some that might be church Latin (or might not), and […]
There are times when what I really need is to listen to some people playing guitar very slowly, swathed in fuzz and echo, accompanied by a light dusting of percussion which sticks to the top end of the drum-kit, all brushed cymbals. This does the job very nicely. A nice balance of melody and atmospherics, […]
Stephan Mathieu’s A Static Place is an exceptionally well-named record. He has a talent for letting notes play out for what seems like minutes or hours, leaving you wondering over the subtle interplay in the standing waves forming between two sounds. His source material here is Japan frontman David Sylvian’s 2003 experimental pop record Blemish. He spins […]
I have a big soft spot of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s experimental collaborations, with Christian Fennesz and in particular with Alva Noto. Here, his stately, deliberate piano playing is accompanied by droning guitar and electronic manipulation from Christopher Willets. It doesn’t have the single-minded intensity of the Fennesz work, or the wonderful contrast of precision and fuzz […]
This is truly awesome. The CD consists almost entirely of a single drone of strings lasting almost half an hour. There are smooth sawing strings, sharp jaggedy, there’s a repeated phrase of five ascending notes. There may be some kind of cymbals underneath, I think. It starts quietly, crescendos smoothly, and fades away again. Other […]
Mostly, this is the sort of ambient which contrasts pure electronic tones against warm old-vinyl static and an ambient synth which sounds like it’s struggling to stay in tune (and occasionally loses the battle). A couple of tracks break from this template: Brown starts out like a modern classical percussion composition, before introducing an effect […]
dogrando writes about some records 