Félicia Atkinson is one of those people who’s floated around on the edge of my consciousness for yonks without quite managing to register properly. Well, that’s all changed with this quietly brilliant record. It’s based around an electronic ambience or neo-classical drone. There are occasional sprinkles of melody (a reverberating jazzy trumpet, a piano, a […]
Tag: label_shelter_press
I really liked Rousay’s aptly-named A Softer Focus. She put out a slightly baffling selection of limited-edition cassettes and collaborations in the twelve months after that release, but this seems to be her first major solo work — and it’s a cracker. The basic formula is similar: classical instrumentation, electronic ambience, rather domestic-sounding field recordings, […]
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 […]
In my formative years, the term “new-age” was pretty much an insult. In Thatcher’s Britain, you could revel in the spirit of corporate greed or you could rail against it, but either way the concept of any kind of cosmic harmony seemed hopelessly naive. Well, times change, and these days secular spirituality is quite on […]
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 […]
I’m going to call this “environmental ambient”, a term I may or may not have just invented, and by which I mean that it strongly evokes a particular scenario — in this case, the Swiss Alpine setting of Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel Der Zauberberg (aka The Magic Mountain). It does this through a mixture of field […]
If I have one complaint about this album from (sorry) the less well-known half of Yellow Swans, it’s simply that at 31 minutes it’s too short. Otherwise, it’s magnificent. It’s primarily guitar drones and percussion, although for much of the first part of the record it sounds like the guitar is being bowed or scraped […]
dogrando writes about some records 