Back catalogue: All genres

Review: Batu has proven himself hugely capable of making a wide range of music. He might be best known for his perfect techno designs but here delves further into the world of ambient. Across four tracks he explores a number of moods with painterly synth work that is detailed with gentle percussion, gorgeous keys, and in the case of 'Flown,' jazzy splashes of cymbal. 'Half Speed' is idk a slow awakening on a distant planet. 'The Fifth' brings more bright and energy synth motifs and 'Seams' is a soothing lullaby. A beautifully escapist listen.

Review: Royal Wavetable Mellodies & Old TDKs by Mexico baed artist Brainwaltzera is a perfect coming totters of the symphonic, the synthetic, the organic and the electronic. It's a record that could be a lost 70s classic as much as a new school homage to minimalism, experimental ambient and vintage synths. In fact, this is a selection of archive recordings in the artist's characteristically idiosyncratic style that we cannot get enough of. The collection of tracks are gorgeously native and innocent, with wispy melodies and retro keys all smeared and smudged into moving pieces of ambient that are beatless but dynamic.

Review: While Brown Fang (Jon Thompson and Henry Scott) have worked with Huw Costin as Torn Sail before, this tidy two-tracker marks the first time a record has been jointly credited to their two projects. Naturally, the Nottingham trio has pulled out all the stops to make sure that the release is as memorable as possible. They set the tone with 'Exit', a suitably gorgeous, sofa-ready shuffler in which glistening guitars, bubbly electronics and dreamy chords ride a warming bassline and sparse, minimalistic beats. On 'Endless', the three East Midlands-based friends explore their ambient inspirations, laying down an immersive soundscape that you'll want to get lost in again and again.

Review: Fresh from showcasing some of the buried treasure within Vasilu Stepanov and Vlad Dobrovolski's work as SAD, Glasgow 12th Isle crew has decided to deliver something undeniably fresh: a debut EP from Toronto scene stalwarts Cosmic JD and Jersua Leao as Bruxula. The EP is pitched as being sited 'somewhere between the dancefloor and the living room', showcasing an attractive fusion of electronic and acoustic instrumentation as well as Leao's Brazilian vocals. On side A the pair smother a warming, laidback mid-tempo groove with echoing jazz guitar and evocative vocals ('Pala Mo'), before delivering some woozy ambient stargazing in the form of the inspired 'A X'. Over on the flip, they bounce between Dubtribe-goes-ambient techno, slow-motion deepness ('The Bird on the Hell'), spacey ambient jazz ('Dark Farfisa') and meandering, melancholic ambient ('JD's Outerlude').

Review: The second album from Carla Oliver's solo ambient project, Badskin, the Aussie underground rock alumni ventures once more into the meditative plains of ambient, creating what can only be described as an album that is truly alive. The air rattling through pipes, the howling wind of the droning synth and the delicate percussion conjure a lone tree creaking back and forth in the night. 'Jourama' and 'Swimmer's Body' have a C418 quality to their evolving forms, though tracks like 'Blackwater' take a dark turn, and 'Critical Path' has a Kabuki theatre element to its screeching woodwind sections. The tone is otherworldly, flipping from comfort to unease at the flip of a switch. Oliver is a master at work.

Review: Music For Dreams label head Kenneth Badger was so inspired by the Tangerine Dream soundtrack to the classic Michael Mann film The Thief that he and Tolga Bo0.95yu0.95k from the Turkish band islandman decided to write their own soundtrack to an imaginary movie. They managed to write 10 tracks within 24 hours while imagining a film that told a story about two people stuck on the arctic ice cap where one tries to fool the other. Influences from Vangelis, John Carpenter, and Tangerine Dream all feature in what is a superb and escapist listen.

Review: Italian composer and modular synth wizard Caterina Barbieri makes a debut on the Light-Years label here with a profound work of ambient beauty. Known for her musical vortexes, she warps space and time with her compositions and has done ever since breaking through with 2017's double-album Patterns Of Consciousness. Spirit Exit again finds her start up her modal rug and get to work in her home studio amidst Milan's two-month pandemic lockdown in 2020. It's a personal work that "takes inspiration from female philosophers, mystics and poets spread across time." The transportational sounds are as complex as they are emotive from front to back.

Review: Italian composer Caterina Barbieri has enjoyed a walloping career so far as a contemporary experimental electronic music composer and producer, in part thanks to her rather mind-melting explorations in computational and generative methods, which have aided her creation of icy, god-playing deconstructed 'scapes. It was hardly expected she'd stop at her Mego debut Ecstatic Computation or the more recent Spirit Exit, though, and now comes the curt six-track statement Myuthafoo. A new effort via Barbieri's own label light-years, this one was actually written at the same time as her debut, and contains an array of modular-modelled sequences in similar fashion, backed up by intensely spiritual augmentations (such as ultra-deep reverb and clever portamentos) on the production end.

Review: The Ninja Tune renaissance has been underway for around a decade now, with the UK imprint, founded by Coldcut way back when, firmly cementing its status in the techno, rave and future bass world post-millennia. So good is the heavier end of the stable output we really needed Julianna Barwick to come along and remind us of the imprint's more delicate moods. Known for her deep compositions that look to celebrate, explore and consider the human voice in its many facets, 'Healing Is A Miracle' is a perfect calling card for the artist in question. Utilising a spine-tingling vocal range, and taking us directly into worlds where sound itself is a form of art, not just when arranged, the record was apparently born from an improvisation session on her looping equipment, which in turn directs the construction of the individual tracks. The serene but complex, minimal but layered and heavily textured work of a synth siren.

Review: Portland-based Kevin Palmer tucks himself away in a shed to make his music, so the myth goes. Wherever he makes it, he has always cooked up something special in the in-between electronic worlds. Now he lands on Blundar with a brand new album on numbered and heavyweight translucent green vinyl that offers up 12 tracks of ambient, dub and downtempo experiments which are at times intriguing and cosmic and others laid back and beautifully lazy. Each one is deftly detailed with myriad synth sounds, and atmospheric motifs and they all add up to a perfectly deep, dreamy and immersive listen.

Review: Any new release from reclusive Norwegian ambient colossus Geir Jennsen is cause for celebration. The Petrified Forest was inspired by a 1936 movie of the same name, the plot of which revolves around a world-weary British writer meeting a fellow idealist in an isolated diner in the middle of the Arizona desert. Jenssen's music has always been cinematic in tone - think widescreen visions with multiple related movements, sitting somewhere between icy loneliness and comforting homeliness - so it's little surprise to find that The Petrified Forest regularly hits the mark. Evocative, atmospheric and quietly melodiousness, it's a mini album chock full of brilliant downtempo electronica.

Review: Two years after Marc Richter released his most widely available album Back To Comm album, Alphabet 1968, on the ever amazing Tape imprint, he delivered another landmark with Earth. Originally, the music was conceived to accompany two screenings of the video Earth by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen. First commissioned for the Sydney Festival 2011, the visual work was scored by Melbourne's Oren Ambarchi for the grand unveiling, but then toured the planet, with different musicians invited to reimagine the soundtrack for different locations. Germany's Black To Comm was enlisted for Berlin and Krakow, and as the smart money was always on, he offered up a strange, beguiling, abstract but highly visceral score. Almost impossible to describe, at once witty but incredibly sad, troubling and intriguing, traumatised but honest, it might be the perfect accompaniment to a film in which several frames are dedicated to landscapes piled high with human corpses. Following the two live performances, the producer opted to make these 'tunes' his next record, which is now finally getting a reissue.

Review: When Black To Comm's staggeringly powerful Alphabet 1968 first landed, rather confusingly in 2010, it stood out on a burgeoning ambient and drone landscape for several reasons. Firstly, it was rather short. Certainly in comparison to similar sounding releases of the day - less than 45 minutes. Secondly, it managed to cram, or rather delicately introduce, myriad sub genres and styles within the relatively brief run time. Each track comes across as though it is autonomous, yet the collection really needs to be explored as a whole to get the full impact. So while 'Trapez' has this stunning, purposefully naive quality to it - like a music box fed through various levels of distortion, chimes straining through the muffled playback - preceding number 'Forst' is this grand, palatial overture of refrains and background marching drums, taking up a full quarter of the entire album on its own. Elsewhere, 'Traum Gmbh' brings fret and chaos to the equation, shrill notes invoking horror movie scenes, while 'Musik Fur Alle' invites us into an aural realm that owes much to candlelit folk tales.

Review: Brooklyn's Tyler Gilmore, aka BlankFor.ms, has released on Works for Tape and Piano, a full-length on Puremagnetik and has remixed The Cinematic Orchestra and Para One. Here he drops a new album on Mystery Circles that comes on hugely limited red vinyl. Once again it showcases his richly textured, emotive ambient music that is all made using his collection of analog synthesisers, an old spinet piano and degraded tapes. His experimental techniques result in some truly moving and impactful ambient that stays with you long after it has finished playing.

Review: Incredibly powerful stuff, Blazing Worlds - AKA Justin Wright & Grant Corum - recorded their self-titled latest album over a long summer in the US Midwest. Evidently inspired by what conditions were like, the official release information here opens with a reference to J.G. Ballard's landmark science fiction, The Drowned World, which, for all intents and purposes, could become a reality in the next few centuries. A planet so scorched lagoon waters that have flooded cities seem to burn by midday, there's a sense of rising temperatures about this truly hallucinatory album. Drone, ambient, use whatever label you prefer, this feels like you're either orbiting the sun itself, or looking out on lands that have long since succumbed to desertification, wondering when the scorching dunes might give way to some place more liveable. Atmospheric, futuristic, and deeply effective.

Review: Those of a certain vintage may remember Blue, an IDM and ambient techno duo who released a string of pleasingly otherworldly EPs and albums in the late '90s. The Path of Least Resistance Meets The Point of No Return marks the duo's return to action after 22 years, albeit via a set of tracks originally intended to be released as an ambient album back in 2001. These updated and reworked versions are apparently different to those in their archives, but that doesn't matter; what's on offer is becalmed, otherworldly, often unusual and uniformly emotive, with highlights including the squelchy bass and elongated organ chords of 'Spacepport', the Pete Namlook style ambience of 'Ava X', the deep space symphony that is 'She Found The Colours' and the becalmed brilliance of 'Crystalline Form'.

Review: Chase Smith aka the W.T. Records and Apartment associate and documentary filmmaker Christa Majoras are back as brainwave research center with their second full length, Mosaic. Once again the sonically inquisitive pair mix up analogue synths with electro-acoustic experiments, epic and adventurous soundscapes and plenty of raw texture, hooky pop melodies and innocent rhythms. Along the way the duo take influence from their heroes including Ennio Morricone, John Carpenter and Kraftwerk on a record that was laid down in the back of Smith's synthesizer repair shop. It's an absorbing listen once more from this increasingly vital pair.

Review: The late Joanna Brouk's legacy as an electronic music pioneer is a mysterious one, given her rejection of industry conventions in favour of a more heartfelt connection with her craft. Her run of new age releases in the early 80s were landmarks of the genre, and now Numero Group are reissuing one of the finest of them now. Sounds Of The Sea originally came out in 1981, and it's never been reissued since. Making its first ever appearance on vinyl, this captivating, mysterious album remains wholly out of time and place, existing in its own sphere inhabited by flute, drones and whale song alike.