Review: In late 2023, Tokyo-based musician Daigo Sakuragi moved to London where he revisited recordings made with fellow Japanese artists. Inspired by the city's energy and atmosphere, he crafted Togenkyo, a 28-minute fusion of early 2000s folktronica and contemporary ambient music that now comes as two long continuous pieces on one slab of vinyl. Layering immersive synth textures with spatial production, he grounds the piece in organic drum and bass grooves while a saxophone elegantly weaves through the soundscape. Togenkyo reflects an inner utopia that is attainable yet imperfect and is a comforting, meditative work.
Review: Few producers do the dub techno sound better than Rod Modell and on this second Atmospherica instalment, he shows why he is so revered. "Exploring The North" is dense and subdued, the hisses and crackles ebbing and flowing fluidly over a powerful sub-bass. "Pinewood Lodge" is more atmospheric and floaty, its chords flitting about like fireflies over a camp fire on the first night of autumn. Rounding out the release is "Shot Point". Immersive, hypnotic and ghostly, it washes through the speakers like waves crashing on a deserted beach at midnight. This is electronic music that is designed to get lost in.
Review: DJ F16 Falcon's music has always been tricky to pigeonhole, with the fast-rising French producer frequently fusing dub-wise rhythms and off-kilter beats with unusual samples, Tolouse Low Tracks style experimental electronics and melodic elements that doff a cap to tropical, new age and world music. Ici Commence La Nuit, his latest excursion, treads a similar sonic path, delivering unusual but wonderfully inventive and entertaining excursions. The most accessible and warming of the lot is colourful, melodious and bass-heavy opener 'Ici Commence La Nuit', though the sludgy, modular-rich pulse of 'Trip a La Mode de Quand' and thoroughly odd 'Clope Sucree' are equally as potent.
Review: Senking and DYL reunite after their notable collaboration back on 2020's EP Uniformity Of Nature, this time going long on their first full-length, Diving Saucer Attack. This new work spans a total of six tracks, two of which have been produced individually and so highlight their shared passion for dub-heavy and adventurous electronic music while also bringing out the subtle differences in their styles. The album opens with 'Six Doors Down', a track featuring throbbing bass and haunting synths while subsequent cuts like 'A7r380R' explore intricate soundscapes before culminating in the sombre closing piece, 'Not Just Numbers.'
Review: Scott Monteith is the Berlin-based but Canadian-born artist best known as Deadbeat, stepping out with new alias Ark Welders Guild. It is an audio-visual performance and recording project with Italian singer and curator Letizia Trussi, whom he met in winter 2021 and has since formed a strong creative bond. They work in Trussi's Rooms of Kairos studio and have already cooked up two album length pieces that come on Monteith's BLKRTZ imprint. Mons Clepsydra is the first and is an epic drone in four parts with string recordings permeating the moody, grainy, heavy atmospheres.
Review: Fresh from curating a fine compilation marking 25 years of his admirable DiN label, Ian Boddy unleashes the latest in a long-line of collaborative works. He's previously released joint studio works alongside Chris Carter, Erik Wollo and Mark Shreeve, amongst others and here is in cahoots with Parallel Worlds member (and DiN semi-regular) Dave Bessell. In true ambient fashion, Polarity boasts a two-part, near 52-minute title track: an evocative, creepy and slowly shifting fusion of modular electronic bleeps, vintage analogue synthesiser melodies, immersive chords and - for shortish blasts amongst the aural weightlessness - bubbling beats. To round off the album, the pair drifts further into deep space ambient mode via the Pete Namlook-esque 'Confluence'.
Review: Take it from us - you want to get to know Denovali Germany on an intimate level. The label has been putting out tearjerking contemporary classical and far-reaching electronic compositions since 2005, lays claim to its own festival of forward thinking music and generally doesn't put a foot wrong. Home to the likes of Electro Guzzi and Les Fragments De La Nuit, it's an imprint and then some, to put it mildly.
Dalhous' The Composite Moods Collection is another one for the ages - the kind of album that you're bound to come back to for years because each play through seems to reveal new layers and elements that may not have presented themselves immediately. While for the most part this is all ambient, there are elements here that take us into much more muscular and ferocious ends, from 'Everything Is Bleeding' to the cinematic tension of 'Open As A Glade Unfolding'.
Review: With an artist name like Dali Muru & The Polyphonic Swarm, and an EP title of Murmer of The Bath Spirits, the fact at least part of this record features a narrative about spiritual awakenings in bath houses, set to an eerie, atmospheric ambient soundscape, will surprise very few people. A 15-minute trip into the ether, noises and tones are as wet as they are warm, and the experience like heading out to uncover a faery land mystery.
Things get a little less specific on the appropriately christened 'Track 2', which moves us on from the dreamy quiet into a place that's more forceful, purposeful, harsh, perhaps even darker. Hypnotic loops set above staccato beats, grabbing hi hats and other elements as the track grows in ear worm qualities with each second.
Review: With 'Long Gradus', Sarah Davachi seizes the opportunity to take one idea and explore it from as many angles as possible. The celebrated composer and ambient artist is consistently investigating musical possibilities from a learned, authoritative perspective and so this latest project finds her expanding on an initial invitation to the Composer's Kitchen residency in the Netherlands. Fundamentally scored for a string quartet, Davachi's intention with the stirring, sustained tension of 'Long Gradus' was that it could be performed on a number of different instruments, and this expansive four-CD edition on her Late Music label presents the piece performed on woodwinds, brass and organ and choir and electronics alongside the fundamental string version.
Review: Sarah Davachi's latest record, The Head As Form'd In The Crier's Choir, is a septet of compositions, written between 2022 and 2024, that form a conceptual suite and album-length observation of the mental dances that we construct to understand acts of passage. Transient in both name and sound, this stunning, droning set of compositions will work as timely quellers for those currently in a migratory state of mind, literally and/or figuratively. Often basking in the impure associations evoked by pure harmony and tonality, all the pieces are slow-moving, suggesting a lowered existential frame rate. Drawing inspiration from the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice - in which Orpheus ventures into Hades while living, dodging the usual psychopompic rites applied to those who have actually died, in a wager with the gods to resurrect Eurydice, his love - Davachi's record is a worthy intertext, bringing stygian drones of egress - woodwinds and electronic stretchings most notably - to the theme.
We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners who may combine it with other information that you've provided to them or that they've collected from your use of their services.