Tag: ambient
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
Twelve minutes is a respectable length for an EP, but with eight tunes on this disc they’re still pretty much crammed in, none of them clocking in closer to two minutes than one-and-a-half. If you think that makes this sound like a sampler, you’d be very wrong: although these bands…
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The Stargazer’s Assistant – Mirrors & Tides, Shivers & Voids (dark ambient)
There’s no easy categorisation for this music, no recognisable stylistic tag that readily contains it, but it evinces a coherent, clearly-stated set of aesthetic and creative values, an imagistic approach to the making of musical statements, that produces much the same clarity and precision of expression that can be found…
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Tom DePlonty – Music for Michael Skrtic (experimental)
The artist Michael Skrtic is not someone I know anything about, but his cover for this album of music dedicated to him is certainly an extraordinary piece of work. References to the man are few in cyberspace, but he is the co-author of a book entitled Selections from the Dream…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
Cassette mushes everything up and squeezes it together; on top of the warm, lush distortions naturally imparted by magnetic tape, the whole stereo recording is crammed onto half of a tape less than four millimeters wide. It takes some clever mastering to get a really spacious, clearly separated soundfield, but…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
We’ve all seen some pretty rough justice in the wake of global capitalism’s recent crises, but Greece has suffered worse than any other part of the developed world. The Figures Of Enormous Grey And The Patterns Of Fraud appears to be a response to these circumstances, although it’s too complex…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
A combination of electro-acoustic and programmed sounds are used here to create a sound that pays clear homage to African polyrhythmic percussion music, unpitched attacks mingling with sounds similar to idiophones or lamellophones, although they might come from almost any source. Then there are the synths, guitars and lo-fi samples……
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Opening with an extended skit inspired by John Carpenter’s Darkstar, it’s obvious from the start that this Strange Gibberish mixtape is going to be heavy on the humour. It’s also heavy on the creativity and experimentation, with some of the beats straying well into avant-garde territory. It’s far too diverse…
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Cyberchump – Flutter And Flow (ambient rock)
Cyberchump, according to their website, ‘is an electro-organic duo that explores aural soundscapes of rhythm and moment’. While my rarely dormant inner pedant is keen to learn what other kinds of soundscape might exist, this gives a fair sense of the textures to be heard on Flutter And Flow. The…
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Tim Risher – The Cracked Chimes (ambient)
Ambient music is usually associated with a certain set of characteristics; although dance music producers became interested in ambient as a source of inspiration, and whole stylistic zones have arisen around the combination of different dance genres with ‘ambient-type’ sounds, even to the extent that the term is frequently used…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
When we get to the fourth track, ‘Womb’, we learn that Cthulhu Detonator is capable of changing tack. There is still noise, in the sense of forcefully stochastic elements within the timbre of the music, but the principal sound is tonal, sonorous and enveloping. ‘Blinding White Light’ takes a similar…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
Positive vibes abound on this perfectly formed EP produced by the estimable Rich Huxley, whose main gig Hope And Social sits in exactly the same affective territory; clear-sighted optimism is the order of the day, and because the songs are notably lacking in trite sentiment or spurious closure the effect…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Sufficiently independent not to sound ‘indie’, yet aesthetically straightforward enough not to sound ‘experimental’, Neurotic Wreck’s schtick is a pretty accessible art-pop stew; a predominantly electronic production mashes up trip-hop, electro, shoegaze and other downbeat sources, into a melancholy and and carefully textured soundworld, freighted with nostalgia and regret. The…
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Paragaté – Spaceflight Pharmacology (ambient)
Possessed of a melodic simplicity that invokes naïvety, and a harmonic rhythm that deploys some erudition in the service of fairy-tale inevitability, ‘Friendship’, the brief G. Cook piano piece with which Tom DePlonty opens Spaceflight Pharmacology, is a scene setter. Quickly succeeded by a piece that might more readily be…
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The Echelon Effect – Field Recordings (post-rock/ ambient)
The development and inheritance of stylistic traditions is rarely as linear or orderly as is commonly imagined; the evolution of art seems to follow a process of cultural selection analogous to the biological processes identified by Charles Darwin. In art, as in nature, developmental processes diverge, converge, intersect and run…
Oliver Arditi 