Back in stock: Ambient/Drone

Review: Mika Vainio's "Olento" is one of the key albums from his fine discography and now, finally, it is available on vinyl for the first time. The sophomore album first landed in 1996 and laid down a new blueprint for minimal techno that has rarely been bettered since. The album is also a fine summation of the Finnish artist's sublime and singular style - icy ambient tundra that are vast in scale but minute in detail, warped synth oscillations that sound at once futuristic but also somehow like field recordings from a lonely part of the arctic circle, and brain melting sine waves that lock you in a trance. Essential.

Review: Director Max Kestner's documentary film portrait Copenhagen Dreams is a tribute to the Danish capital. That also happened to be the place acclaimed composer Johann Johannsson was living at the time he was asked to score the movie. As always he does so with real aplomb and devastating emotionality. This now classic soundtrack features celestial keyboard sounds, emotive string quartets, clarinet, subtle electronic and plenty of melodic magic that both swells and breaks the heart. Academy Award winner Hildur Gudnadottir plays on the soundtrack with various other of Johann's favourite Icelandic talents.

Review: "I would beg listeners both animal and human to allow these beautiful landscapes I've created in collaboration with Mark Nelson to sing and speak and weep for themselves. Please. Forget about words. Just LISTEN," says Kramer of this latest exploration of sounds less familiar. Meanwhile, Nelson quotes the legendary Arthur Russell for his take on things: "If I could convince you these are words of love, the heartache would remain but the pain would be gone". The Chicago-based composer and performer certainly summarises this listening experience. There's pure bliss running through these serene ambient, almost New Age-style tracks, but within that a certain reflective sadness. Crystalline melodies refract and develop, ebb and flow, at times making pure harmonies, in other moments more atmospheric refrains. They make us long for things that were or may be, although there's still space here for taking stock and acknowledging what is.

Review: First released 22 years ago at the turn of the millennium, Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil has been described as one of Coil's most "mind-altering creations"; given the fiercely experimental and often otherworldly nature of their catalogue, that's some going. The album, which has now been fully remastered, was one of the first things Coil recorded following their relocation to Weston-super-Mare, and sonically it's as bleak, windswept, and barren as the town itself seems out of season. It's full of droning tones, modular blips, metallic melodies, slowly shifting ambient textures and musical motifs that lap in and out like waves. Furthermore, the album's standout moment, the near 14-minute 'I Am The Green Child', is like some mutant, experimental sea shanty crossed with a hypnotic ambient-industrial raga.