Tag: ambient
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
This track, this EP, is a remix in one continuous utterance of the Hanetration EP Tenth Oar which I reviewed in my last roundup of short releases. Tenth Oar was divided into four tracks, while the Barren Waste EP I reviewed in the same roundup was called A unified idea…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
Too moderately paced to really signify as dance music, the opening track of this EP is, nevertheless, hella heavy. Building on accumulating layers of atmosphere, when its brutalist bass hook and simple kick pattern enter, it hits with an ominous compulsion as dark and deep as doom metal. It’s not…
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Barren Waste – NSE (ambient)
Barren Waste are a band of many guises. They first came to my attention as a metal band with a raw and uncompromising attitude to noise, and a willingness to explore harsh frequencies and creative dissonance, rather than slipping easily into the language of sludge or grindcore. They also, as…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Glockamole is a great name for a comedy hip-hop record. There’s clearly a lot of wordplay left in ripping the piss out of hip-hop’s tropes and clichés, but I have to say there are probably not many jokes left in it. It’s a well worked mine, especially gangsta rap, bearing…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
There’s more than a nod to dreampop and shoegaze in this music, but Lisa Masia and Marina Cristofalo are clearly too in love with the raw and ragged sound of a distorted electric guitar to tame it to the extent that might imply. Some of Wish You Were A Pony…
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Janne Hanhisuanto – Circles In 3D (ambient)
All music has an atmosphere. I’d go so far as to say it’s a central aspect of all musical meaning, although it’s obviously not the only meaningful element in music. Words, melodies, harmonies, rhythms, timbres and so on, all have their particular capacities, but the atmosphere of a piece of…
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Various Artists – Singles & EPs
The struggle. It’s a recurring theme in conscious hip-hop from the underground (for much the same reason that a lot of mainstream, mass-market hip-hop concerns conspicuous consumption). Life is hard for young people from urban areas, living with no privileges and few prospects; but here’s a form of art whose…
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TYLS – Pest-O-Flash (ambient/ noise)
This wetpussyallstars side project release is an experimental album, one which reinvigorates the musically abstract with a sense of the narrative and the representational, simultaneously blurring the distinction between electronic artist and electrician. Sounds that are abstract in a musical sense may at the same time, as here, be sonically…
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Paragaté – Stillness In The Mirror (experimental/ ambient)
Stillness In The Mirror is an album that effectively fuses a mechanical, or automatic sonic sensibility with a very organic, human one. That’s an interesting strategy in and of itself, but I don’t get the impression that this conceptual framework is the point of the music: the sounds on this…
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Robb Appleton – The Wood (ambient/ folktronica)
Robb Appleton is a harmonica player, and his diatonic harps are a prominent voice on this album, but The Wood doesn’t sound like a harmonica album. In fact, it sounds more like an album made by someone who decided to get a harp player in because they wanted that sound.…
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Simon Little – The Knowledge Of Things To Come (solo bass/ ambient)
Simon Little’s EP Rejectamenta, ostensibly composed of material rejected for inclusion on this album, was an interesting recording in its own right, and implied certain promises about the creative direction in which Little might be moving. I’m glad to say, he’s as good as his word. Before I even start…
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Word Or Object – They Shoot Horses, But Why? (dark ambient/ drone)
The cover of this release shows a dead horse still harnessed to the broken cart before which it met its demise. This is a different sort of horse shooting than that referenced in the title: this beast was (one presumes) executed for its usefulness to its killer’s enemy, or simply…
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lextrical – Deletia (electronica/ indie/ folktronica)
Deletia opens with ‘Lunchbox D’, which begins with an obviously electronic backbeat; this is joined a bar later by a saturated, analogue sounding synth melody, and simultaneously by a guitar. This sets the pattern for the album: it is a predominantly electronic construction, but it is a highly organic one,…
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pje – hidden stone (ambient)
The sound of pje can be uncontroversially described as ambient, but it explores a number of avenues under that rubric. ‘diffract’ has strong drone elements, while ‘scattered’ incorporates a strummed acoustic guitar pattern, and ‘memory key’ is characterised by percussive elements, in a beat that is never quite fully articulated.…
Oliver Arditi 