ambient
joe.muggs
It’s weird, right? We’ve somehow stumbled into a world where, for all we’re told that algorithms homogenise music, actually more people than ever are exposed to very, very odd and abstract soundmaking.There’s new age gong baths at even the most normie health spas. There’s a kajillion hours of “relaxation music” flooding streaming services from who knows where, a lot of it just drones and/or modulating white noise. There’s the sound design of scores by the likes of Hildur Guðnadóttir, Daniel Lopatin, Cristobal Tapia De Veer that reach millions in surround sound via movies, games and prestige Read more ...
joe.muggs
The history of experimental musicians from Europe and North America adopting Japanese aesthetics is … patchy. It got especially dodgy in the 1990s when every other electronica dork started flinging random kanji characters on their sleeves, writing soundtracks for imaginary Akira bike races and the like. And there are so, so many ambient producers who reference Zen gardens, minimalist interior design and bamboo flutes, you can’t go into a health spa without knocking over a pile of their CDs.Thankfully Catskills Mountains-raised, LA resident soundscaper Emily A. Sprague is a little bit more Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHBlack Lips Season of the Peach (Fire)Some of the many releases by don’t-give-a-damn southern US rockers Black Lips are of variable quality. They’re actual rockers, not Modern Music BA university graduates, so it depends where their wild heads are at. Their latest is a good one. Their garage instincts are intact, but they also render loose-limbed, fibrous versions of country music, southern soul and indie guitar pop. There aren’t many bands who could write a song with a chorus that runs, “I just want a prick of my own”, and make it a catchy new wave singalong akin to the best Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is a weird one: I do try and stay on top of pop culture, but for several years, Ethel Cain completely passed me by. You’d think I would have noticed a gothic bisexual Baptist trans woman achieving great enough success to be championed by Barack Obama, but no – until streaming algorithms put me on to her record Perverts, released earlier this year. It’s an incredible work of fathomlessly deep ambient and drone music, and I was baffled to see something so out-there clocking up millions upon millions of views, until I finally clocked her previous success. Though Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Silken ambience is the name of the game on this set from Icelandic composer-producer Olafur Arnalds and dreampop singer Talos, aka Eoin French, who tragically died in August last year, aged 36. Arnalds completed the album after his death.Talos' high, otherworldly voice is the dominant signature, from the opening title track with its heavy swell of strings at the high points, through to the spare piano and voice passages of “Bedrock”, a slow, melancholy piano ballad bathed in shimmering reverb and a chorus of voices. Talos’ delicate lone voice over Arnalds’ spare piano lines draws you in Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Despite being Mercury nominated, Bazza’s hardly a household name. Nevertheless, his debut album When Will We Land was highly praised by those in the know. I am definitely not in the know and am more or less a stranger to electro stuff – it can often leave me cold (Guetta can get off, quite frankly). But I know a good tune when I hear it.His career has been short and rather stratospheric and he’s the first to admit his head’s reeling. He played his first live show at Glastonbury two years ago, then sold out three nights at Brixton Academy and will be headlining at All Points East in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away called the late 1990s, there was a scene known as “big beat”. It consisted of club culture sorts making music closer in flavour to rock, and easier to drink beer to than house and techno.It gave us both Fatboy Slim and Chemical Brothers, as well as a thousand long-forgotten acts (with apologies to those still listening to Hardknox and Boom Boom Satellites). But perhaps the most intriguing artist was Death In Vegas. Their seventh album is Spartan, stern, crafted, enigmatic and dripping with Berlin-esque cool.Death in Vegas is now just DJ-producer Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHEmily Saunders Moon Shifts Oceans (The Mix Sounds)It’s de rigeur nowadays, if you love music, to love Joni Mitchell. She is, of course, a great soul, but her music never connected here. That said, I have a favourite Joni Mitchell song. It’s the 1975 number “The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines”. I also have a soft spot for the parent album, Mingus. Mitchell was accompanied on it by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Jaco Pastorius. A red hot line-up. Jazz fusion usually goes down like cold sick round here but Mitchell's foray is the exception to the rule. A decade ago Emily Read more ...
joe.muggs
I’ve got an admission: I never really got Radiohead, in no small part because of Thom Yorke’s singing. I appreciate his technical abilities and songwriting, and that a lot of people find his anguish cathartic, but the more he goes for it the more I switch off.Even in gentler and less rockist songs he tends to go for a keening sound that still jangles my nerves. Rather like Paul Weller (not someone I imagine he’s compared to very often) straining to express intensity seems to have become a vital part of his musical brand, but just like Weller, I infinitely prefer it when he sits back a bit and Read more ...
joe.muggs
The question of personality in abstract and ambient music has always been a fascinating one. Without conventional signifiers of expressiveness, and especially in the age of AI, it’s easy for people to think “a computer could have done that”. Indeed, there’ve been plenty of musicians from Brian Eno levels of prominence on down who have played with this, using algorithmic generation, anonymity and so forth as part of the project.That’s never been the case for Canadian musician Tim Hecker, though. The fact that this is a collection of extracts from Hecker’s recent film and TV soundtrack Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Ethel Cain’s Perverts is a dark and experimental follow-up to her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter. It takes listeners on a haunting journey through unsettling soundscapes that blend elements of drone, slowcore and dark ambient music.Exploring heavy themes like religious guilt, sexual shame and emotional trauma, Perverts is an intense and ambitious project that’s both captivating and difficult to digest. The album aims to combine dark, confessional storytelling with eerie, atmospheric sounds. But while there are moments of real beauty and emotion, the execution sometimes feels uneven and Read more ...
joe.muggs
I don’t really want to talk about this year. Genuinely.It’s been so horrific on the macro scale with deranged Fascism and the effects of rampant and undeniable climate change looming everywhere you look – and on the personal level I’ve been been bombarded with all the inevitable, arbitrary slings and arrows that life can muster, from multiple bereavements on down – that I’d very much rather just neck a load of tranquilisers and fine wines and resolutely enter my hands-over-ears, “lalalala can’t hear you”, era. And yet, and yet… life persists, culture persists, community persists, Read more ...