ambient
Graham Fuller
The Endless River, a contemplatively ambient opus comprising four pieces made up of 17 instrumental sections and a concluding song, is Pink Floyd’s second “last” album. Their first sign-off was 1982’s dreary The Final Cut, virtually a Roger Waters solo excursion that demonstrated, as did much of The Wall, how crucial to Floyd’s characteristic sound were Richard Wright’s lambent keyboards-playing and his gently yearning vocals, not least on the Meddle masterpiece “Echoes”.Ousted during The Wall sessions, Wright rejoined guitarist-lead vocalist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason for the post- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Declaring that your new album can help conquer insomnia seems, initially, self-defeating. If it induces such a calmness that potential listeners drift off to sleep, then there’s the potential it may never be heard in full. Yet this is what lies behind Matt Berry’s fifth album. It was written and recorded at his home studio in the small hours while he was suffering from insomnia. He wanted to create a music which would still his mind so set to devising his own therapeutic soundtrack. Music for Insomniacs is the result.Music for Insomniacs is neither the expected single drone or blandly Read more ...
joe.muggs
It seems that the gradual leakage of avant-garde-post-classical-call-it-what-you-will music from the rarefied environment of concert halls and into the spaces traditionally inhabited by alternative and club music is now inexorable. And violinist Aisha Orazbayeva is one of the instrumental (pun intended) figures in this move from trickle to flood. As one quarter of the organising team for the London Contemporary Music Festival (along with erstwhile classical editor for theartsdesk, Igor Toronyi-Lalic), she has helped bring Parmegianni, Schwitters, Radigue and other 20th/21st century composers Read more ...
joe.muggs
Bernd “Burnt” Friedman is one of the most relentlessly questing of experimental musicians. In over 30 years of making music and 25 years of releasing it, he has specialised in researching ancient, hypermodern and as-yet-undiscovered methods of soundmaking, including traditional and home-built instruments and the application of high-tech methodologies to established forms from around the world, in particular jazz, western club sounds, and African and Japanese styles.A tireless collaborator with a staggering array of other musicians, he has formed long-running partnerships with other genre- Read more ...
joe.muggs
The hip hop music of California has always been deeply stoned, and the wave of instrumental beats that have emerged from LA in recent years have taken this to quite some extreme. The scene around the Brainfeeder collective and Low End Theory club have, in fact, produced some of the most deeply psychedelic music of the 21st century, and Sam Baker aka Samiyam is one of the key figures within that.Baker's profile is relatively low outside the scene but he is a foundational figure within it, and his influence is subtly felt more widely: key UK label Hyperdub released an EP in 2008, and electronic Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In the video made to accompany “One Half”, Julianna Barwick meets her inner goddess in a deserted multi-storey car park. When she closes her eyes, everything that is ordinary melts away and is replaced by a landscape that is as colourful as the previous scene is monochrome.It is as good a visual metaphor as any for the sonic web spun by Barwick on this third full-length album, which is itself half a world away from the bedroom recordings that have characterised much of her work to date. For Nepenthe - a title which calls to mind the ancient Greek “drug of forgetfulness” used to wipe out grief Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Saint Etienne Present Songs for a Central Park PicnicThis is the perfect compilation for days when heat brings an enervation so overwhelming it’s possible only to bask like a seal flopped on a rock. Compiled by Saint Etienne, Songs for a Central Park Picnic’s 25 tracks capture moods of calm and wistfulness, something to help you take it easy. Yma Sumac’s swinging “Gopher Mambo” and Sammy Davis Jr’s “Bee Bom” are uptempo, but their relaxed groove won’t induce a sweat.The picnic kicks off with the definition of cool. On Vince Guaraldi’s “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” notes Read more ...
joe.muggs
If anyone in British music still deserves that rinsed-to-death term "maverick" it is Battersea-born "Dr" Alex Paterson. From roadie for postpunk industrialists Killing Joke in the early Eighties, he went on to work as an A&R then - originally collaborating with The KLF's Jimmy Cauty - formed The Orb in the heat of the acid house explosion to bring the world "ambient house". Inexplicably the loose collective, which has featured Berlin producer Thomas Fehlmann as a key member, became huge, their dub basslines and loony-tunes samples somehow encapsulating the psychedelic oddness of the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Some 20 years ago, a series of albums called Artificial Intelligence on WARP Records aimed to promote techno as home-listening music. They made up a frequently sublime collection, but unfortunately the word “intelligence” in their title was picked up by a movement through the 1990s that became known, horrendously, as “intelligent dance music” (IDM) and tended to the belief that intricacy and awkwardness made music somehow superior to that made with more sensuous or hedonistic aims in mind.Thankfully, in the wake of dubstep in the 2000s, the experimental and the danceable began to overlap Read more ...
theartsdesk
We're pleased to announce The Arts Desk is a media partner of the Denovali Swingfest London on 20 and 21 April at London's The Scala. It's a good match, as Swingfest and the Denovali label, like The Arts Desk refuse to acknowledge artificial boundaries between “high” culture, the avant-garde and grassroots electronic and club music.Denovali Swingfest has taken place annually since 2007 in Essen, Germany but 2013 sees it expanding to take in weekends in Berlin and London. The Scala event is headlined by Andy Stott, the Mancunian techno powerhouse who in recent years has tended Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The last proper Ulrich Schnauss album – there have been collaborations and pseudonymous outings since – was going to be hard to top. Goodbye, released in 2007, breathtakingly took shoegazing further out than ever before: although gossamer, its sonic depth inexorably pulled you in. Now, with A Long Way to Fall, the Berlin producer and remixer has finally returned, solo, under his own name. He’s moved on, but is as assured as before.Some of the collaborations between then and now took Schnauss into techno and drum & bass, elements of which cross over into A Long Way to Fall. Initially, the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Brian Eno’s latest is the musical equivalent of slow food: something to savour in a state of quietude and away from the stresses of accelerated time. The ambient genre of which he was a pioneer has, in other hands, drifted into a kind of quality Muzak, background music to soothe the nerves of restless devotees of speed. With a subtle palette of soft-edged keyboard and string sounds, laden with reverb, Eno manages to stop time, avoiding the inevitably predictable tropes of narrative development, and gently drawing the listener into the presence of the here and now.Brian Eno avoids the cosy Read more ...