Review: Hardanger is a collaboration between Mariska Baars, Niki Jansen and Rutger Zuydervelt. Named after Jansen's Hardanger fiddle, the album expands on Baars and Zuydervelt's established chemistry after beginning as Jansen's improvisations with Baars adding vocals and guitar, all later shaped by Zuydervelt into two long-form tracks-one an electro-acoustic collage, the other more meditative. Baars blends ambient and folk and is known for collaborating with artists like Peter Broderick, while Jansen is a folk violinist and Zuydervel's prolific output as Machinefabriek is well worth checking as are his film scores and collabs as Piiptsjilling and Fean with Baars.
Review: Allan Gilbert Balon's debut full-length album, The Magnesia Suite, released by Recital, is a mesmerising and enigmatic work that fuses avant-garde jazz, experimental sound collage and intimate vocal experiments. A Guadeloupe-born composer and visual artist, Balon brings a deeply personal and cryptic narrative to this album, weaving together disparate sonic elements into a beguiling and surreal journey. Opening with 'Stella Maris', the album immediately wrongfoots the listener, blending organ drones and twisted chorals that evoke a subversive take on sacred music. Tracks like 'Lustras' introduce grotty tape recordings, shortwave transmissions, and Balon's slow-motion piano playing, creating a bizarre yet haunting sense of prayer. This patchwork approach, full of field recordings and mysterious sounds, captures a feeling of coastal tranquility and exploratory reverence. The standout track, 'Pleuro Delez Waltz', which initially caught Recital's attention, blends Balon's idiosyncratic piano style with disorienting wails and unconventional percussion. The album concludes with 'Ogadia', where ragtime-influenced piano meets distant saxophone, resolving the outsider-jazz soundscape. The Magnesia Suite is an album of surprising juxtapositions and textures.
Sounds From An Unforgettable Place #1 (UV remix) (2:48)
Unspeakable Visions (3:48)
Review: Dutchman Banabila's second studio album on Knekelhuis once again affirms his status as a boss-level operator among ambient music fans. The eleven-track record explores soul-stirring, krautrock-tinged, and avant-garde electronic landscapes that are all rooted in emotive expression. His compositions feature ethereal voices in the form of fictional characters chanting in a language of their own creation, resonating with a captivating essence that transcends linguistic boundaries. The record also showcases Banabila's mastery of sonic textures as he weaves a narrative of layered complexity and emotional depth while some tracks like 'Rattles' hark back to his earlier work on Knekelhuis.
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.
Bendik Giske - "Fantas For Saxophone & Voice" (7:16)
Kali Malone - "Fantas For Two Organs" (10:23)
Walter Zanetti - "Fantas For Electric Guitar" (7:30)
Jay Mitta - "Singeli Fantas" (12:11)
Baseck - "Fantas Hardcore" (4:46)
Carlo Maria - "Fantas Resynthesized For 808 & 202" (7:32)
Kara-Lis Coverdale - "Fantas Morbida" (7:53)
Review: Caterina Barbieri is an Italian modular goddess. Her 2019 album Ecstatic Computation was opened up by the majestic 'Fantas' and now it gets a whole new lease of life with this bumper package of variations. Each artist was personally chosen by Caterina and told to do whatever they wanted with the source material. The results are beguiling from the off with Evelyn Saylor, Lyra Pramuk, Annie Garlid & Stine Janvin going for a loopy, multi-layered vocal version that is constantly ascending to heaven. There is more calm from Kali Malon who keeps it strictly ambient and Carlo Maria approximates peak time melodic techno but from a much more artistic rather than narcotic point of view.
Review: Mark Barrott's Everything Changes, Nothing Ends is a heartfelt journey through life, loss, and love. Released on Anjunadeep Reflections, the album follows his 2023 record Johatsu and sees Barrott channelling his grief into a meditative, moving collection of tracks. Written during his wife's illness, the album reflects the overwhelming sense of isolation and sorrow he felt following her passing in January 2023. "It became my way of coping," Barrott shares. "Coming back to an empty house after a day at the hospital, music was my only comfort." Across Everything Changes, Nothing Ends, Barrott weaves together orchestral, ambient, and jazz textures. Each track, like an audio diary, captures specific emotional moments from those final weeks. There's a tenderness to the arrangementsipeaks of intensity balanced by gentle, soothing passages. Far from simply wallowing in grief, the album embraces acceptance and gratitude, focusing on the beauty of life and its fleeting nature. The result is a deeply personal, genre-blurring record that showcases Barrott's unwavering creativity over a career spanning nearly four decades.
Review: Originally recorded in September 1982, September 23rd would likely not recognise the DUMBO neighbourhood of Brooklyn in which it was conceived. Post-industrialisation, the area became known as a hotbed for artists due to the inexpensive loft spaces up for grabs, but today has been gentrified thanks to its position - Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass. One thing that hasn't changed in that time is just how spectacular William Basinski's pieces are. Comprising two parts, original piano sections played by close friend and world famous drag artist John Epperson (AKA Lypsinka) were recorded onto a handheld cassette machine, before being fed through a Frippertronics loop and feedback loop tape delay system, with incredible results. Rich, strange sonic textures, beautiful but fleeting moments of melody and a depth that sounds like you can dive into it.
Review: September 23rd is the debut release of William Basinski's new Arcadia Archive series and it features a previously unreleased gem recorded in September 1982 in his first loft in Brooklyn's pre-gentrified DUMBO. This early work, derived from a high school piano composition, evolved significantly after Basinski recorded it using a portable cassette deck on a piano owned by his neighbour, John Epperson at 351 Jay Street. Initially unimpressive, the piece transformed through Basinski's use of the John Giorno/William Burroughs cut-up technique and Frippertronics loop system to yield remarkable results. This discovery adds a captivating layer to Basinski's nearly five-decade career.
Study For Tape Hiss & Other Audio Artefacts (12:01)
Apparition 5 (2:14)
Review: Selected from a decade of recordings, this release showcases Bass Communion at its most experimental and texturally rich. Tracks are layered with analogue imperfectionsitape hiss, wow and flutter, static noiseithat are transformed into haunting soundscapes. The mellotron, buried beneath layers of imagined rust and dirt, adds an eerie, organic depth to the fragmented drones and spectral noise. The carefully constructed album feels like an excavation of forgotten sonic artefacts, with each piece offering a narrative rooted in decay and texture. Pressed on 2xLP, this is a striking addition to the Bass Communion catalogue, perfect for fans of sonic exploration.
Review: A narrative. An odyssey. The journey of a lifetime. As the world locked itself away and the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, Battaglia stepped into the record studio and evidently fired up the ignition rockets. Travel in the literal sense may have been off the cards, but Season One certainly transports the listener through a deep and complex sonic tapestry, telling a tale of struggle from fear into hope and onto something altogether unique and new and enlightened. Plenty here has been inspired by the aural work of John Carpenter and Tangerine Dream, to name but two influences, but ultimately where Battaglia is taking us feels resolutely new. More so, tangibly unchartered. Out to the farthest reaches of the known galaxy and back again in a stunning collection of strange and beguiling electronic business.
The Ballad Of The Witches' Road (True Crime version) (1:41)
The Ballad Of The Witches' Road (Sacred Chant version) (3:12)
The Ballad Of The Witches' Road (Lorna Wu version) (4:41)
The Ballad Of The Witches' Road (Cover version) (4:40)
The Ballad Of The Witches' Road (Nicky version) (0:48)
The Ballad Of The Witches' Road (Agatha Through Time version) (2:29)
The Ballad Of The Witches' Road (Pop version) (2:33)
The Ballad Of The Witches' Road (Score version) (1:23)
Agatha's Theme Score (2:09)
Billy Kaplan Score (2:38)
Rio (Love & Death) Score (4:29)
The Coven March Score (2:49)
Tricks & Trials Score (1:56)
Salem's Seven Score (5:02)
Magick Medley Score (1:29)
Review: The new Disney+ TV miniseries Agatha All Along sees Kathryn Hahn reprise her role as Agatha Harkness, a central superheroine and witch of the Marvel Comics universe. A sequel to the live-action miniseries WandaVision, Agatha All Along charts Harkness' travails of escape and persecution, in a contemporary magic realist narrative blending witch coven and superhero themes. Here the soundtrack to the new series appears in tasteful and fitting fashion and in LP format, featuring such well-chosen as 'Hava Nagila' by Traditional, 'Visions' by Plastic People, 'Season Of The Witch' by Donovan and 'Heads Will Roll' by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Review: Science, Art And Ritual chronicles the musical journey of Kingsuk Biswas, known as Bedouin Ascent. Growing up in Harrow during the 70s and 80s, Biswas was influenced by David Rodigan's dub shows and the post-punk experimentation of the era. His eclectic tastes spanned punk, free jazz, noise, and Indian Classical music, which he fused with his ever expanding record collection. By 1987, his music prefigured what would become techno and gave rise to this album which was released in 1994 by Rising High Records. Science, Art And Ritual now celebrates its 30th anniversary with a deluxe 3LP reissue featuring restored tracks and some bonus new material.
Review: We're starved for two-sided 12"s in the world of ambient music, but Chris Madak aka. Bee Mask has refreshingly graced us with one this week. It should be said that there's Skee Mask and then there's Bee Mask; the latter is far more unsung, undeservingly so. Madak's music is abstract and cerebral enough to have lent him credo enough to have released on the likes of Weird Forest, Spectrum Spools and Room40. But this latest reissue, 'Versailles Is Not Too Large Or Infinity Too Long', hears him plunge the ethereal heights for the US label Unifactor. Originally released on cassette on Chondritic Sound in 2008, these pieces deserve the renewed attention and the fresh laying to wax, since they're not 'regular ole' ambient cuts in the slightest. Unafraid of indulging the high end freqs, Bee Mask fleshes out a mood of uncertain, urgent bliss - sizzling, crunching and soaring the drone, as if its maker were a modern Icarus flying too close to the sun.
Review: Berlin-based Italian drummer and composer Andrea Belfi has long been known as a true sonic explorer. His immersive soundscapes stretch space, time and texture and that's the case again here with new album Eternally Frozen. It was composed for drums, a three-piece brass ensemble and electronics, percussion and synthesizer and makes use of an ancient compositional technique where "an initial melody is imitated at a specified time interval by one or more parts, creating illusionary never-ending musical journeys." It's an endless cascade of timbre and tone that undulates like a distance hilly landscape and leaves you in a state of mindfulness like no other.
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