Back in stock: Ambient/Drone

Review: After a recent string of EPs and mini LPs, it's a pleasure to hear Biosphere tantalizing drones and ambient loops across a full-length. The Hilvarenbeek Recordings are a perfect encapsulation of the man's sound and vision, forever iterating his subtle sounds to paint rich and vivid portrays of the world and of his surroundings. The new album, one of his best to date, comes to life thanks to the amalgamation of field recordings, raw talent, and a pensive outlook on the world. A constant thirst for applying sound to vision, and vision to sound. Wonderful, as always.

Review: ***B-STOCK: Product has light surface marks/scratches, but otherwise in perfect working condition***


The 1990s was arguably the first 'golden age' of ambient - a time when the inherently atmospheric and laidback style not only exploded in popularity, but also became the post-club soundtrack of choice for a whole generation. This personal survey of the 90s ambient scene from journalist and author Jon Savage does a good job in gathering together a representative selection of genuine gems and overlooked classics, drifting between the bubbly, deep space brilliance of Richard H Kirk's Sandoz project ('Limbo'), bleeping ambient house ('Calm' by 2 Cabbages on a Drip), early progressive house (React 2 Rhythm), electronic psychedelia (the tabla rhythms and swirly noises of Rapoon), ambient blues (Underworld), IDM (U-ziq), and glacial, slow-motion bliss (Biosphere).

Review: "As a long-time fan of soundtracks and library music, I was thrilled by the opportunity to see just how much emotion I could compress into the brief connecting links that would augment a furtive kiss, a painful psychic vision, or a breeze across the bones of a scorched landscape," says Timmi Meskers, the North Country, New York-based artist behind Garden Gate. "The first glimmer of Magic Lantern flickered over the kitchen sink, if memory serves. I was cleaning up with a dear friend, author Roan Parrish, and we were discussing how we could collaborate creatively. "Our first idea was that she would share prose to inspire my themes, and inversely, I would share a few original themes to inspire her writing. Before we knew it, what started as a handful of stories and songs, damp with soap suds, ended up becoming a fully scored audiobook anthology." In practice, that sounds like achingly beautiful compositions packed with a sense of wonder and mystery, adventures and experiences waiting for a narrative, blissed out stargazing scores and spectacular ambient movements.

Review: The solo project of Swedish musician Sofie Herner, Leda is an experimental project mainly dedicated to roomy, claustrophobic freakouts, fashioned out of a distinctive form of guitar playing, among other tinkerings. Now a well-known name in the Gothenburg scene, Herner's proximity to her local DIY underground is abundantly clear. It feels just as reflective in the sound of her latest project here, Neuter, which sounds like a gargantuan woodwork project subsuming a collective consciousness. Building off the natural footprints trailed by not only her former output, but also her involvement in bands like Neutral and Enhet For Fri Musik, this LP comprises nine tracks of minimal guitar loops, layered oppressively with doomy vocals, all-encompassing percussion, and other oddball instruments. Movements one through nine guide us through uniquely dour worlds, all with the utmost creep factor.

Review: Arv & Miljo's new album delves into radical environmental activism and draws from the Swedish Plogbill movement's early 90s actions alongside Earth First! and Earth Liberation Front. Mixing monologues, interviews, protest songs, and site recordings with raw kosmische synth music, the pair crafts a mesmerising audio collage. Chaotic yet harmonious, disorienting yet soothing, the album reflects dedication, passion, and the spirit of change. Originally a limited CDR release in 2021, it quickly became a highlight in Arv & Miljo's discography. Now on, Jorden Forst offers a multi-faceted journey through environmental activism and the human spirit's resilience.

Review: Mysterious techno artist Rrose presents their first ever CD release, and their second full-length project to date. Following 2019's Hymn to Moisture, Please Touch features 11 slippery slinkers, flaunting Rrose's penchant for hypnotics and minimalisms; the likes of 'Spores' and 'Spines' refuse to indulge too many novel sounds, preferring to allow their more immersive textures to rattle and ricochet over each mix, producing a delugey wash. Thematically, the LP deals with themes of touch, intimacy and embodiment, doing some of the work to bridge the schizophonic gap that's remained open since the dawn of recorded music.

Review: Multi-award winning composer and viola maestro Astrid Sonne is an artist you won't forget in a hurry. Freewheeling between the somewhat regimented, or at least highly intentional world of electronic music production and the looser, more open-ended possibilities of experimental contemporary classical, melding both together in a place which is deceptively close to pop, she runs on improvised sections and meticulously crafted arrangements alike, in ways that feel truly natural. Following her acclaimed 2021 long form, 'Outside of Your Lifetime', with another beauty on Escho, one of many standout alternative imprints active in her native Denmark, Great Doubt is perhaps her most radio-playable effort to date, and yet musically it also embraces some of the most varied influences. From loop-based hip-hop to surreal court music, patient string-focused ambient, to leftfield drum machine pop.

Review: Poetic Hovering Synth Tinkerer.

Review: Ilian Tape's ITX Series provides another opportunity to sink into some deeply escapist ambient and drone soundscapes from the usually dance floor-focused breakbeat and techno label. MPU101 has served up a few of these EPs before and they always find them coax plenty of magic out of their analogue machines. 'TEAM 700_76' is a nice and bleary-eyed post-Blade Runner soundtrack, 'BLOCK-1_2AREA666' has a darker undercurrent of menace, 'TrailerparkBeauty' brings some twinkling celestial keys and 'Sunset Memories' closes on frazzled chords that speak of heat damage from a scorching sun.

Review: While Ben Frost's work has long been marked out by deft-touch dark ambient, experimental instincts and clandestine aural textures, he's always thrown in surprise excursions and drawn on musical inspirations that other like-minded producers would fear to embrace. This latter characteristic comes to the fore on Scope Neglect, his first solo set for six years. Remarkably, it utilises the moodiness, weight and ten-ton guitar licks of metal - played by Car Bombs guitarist Greg Kubacki and bass-slinger Liam Andrews of My Disco fame - as a starting point. Frost naturally puts these through the sonic wringer, combining them with his own skittish, IDM-influenced beats, dark ambient soundscapes and razor-sharp electronics. The results are unusual, impressive and emphatically enjoyable, sitting somewhere between timeless electronica, Nine Inch Nails and experimental metal.

Review: Dino Sabatini returns to his own Outis Music label with another mesmerising selection of deep electronic sounds that seem to take plenty of influences from dub, downtempo, ambient and trip hop. The open has a creeping melodic sequence that is forever subtly shifting and brings a sense of eeriness to the smooth and unhurried dub rhythms below. 'Inenarrabilis' is then a double quick flurry of tiny synth loops and trippy effects then 'Plena Lunae' allows you to breathe once more and sink into a vast dub soundscape. 'Ego Experior' shuts down with some paranoid baselines bubbling up through a slowly churning groove. Some quality work here for sure.

Review: This is a special cassette tape version of the recent album from zake, one of ambient's most prolific artists, alongside From Overseas on his own Past Inside The Present label. As always it is an almost impossibly deep ambient selection that once again finds him exploring fresh and always emotionally moving musical territory. Demain Des L'aube features eight tunes that convey real melancholia and have a gently persuasive sense of movement. Each one is vast in scale and sweeps you up and sinks you into the grainy lo-fi pads, wispy melodies and distant string-based sombreness.

Review: Since the mid 1990s electronic explorer and sound designer Ryoji Ikeda has amassed a vast catalogue of releases. Some of these, though, are either hard to find or were only released on certain formats - hence this release on Sahko. It gathers together two lengthy compositions from early in his career that were previously only available on CD. Our pick of the pair is gorgeous A-side 'Luxus 1-3', a stunning, 16-minute suite from 1995 debut album 1000 Fragments that fuses deep space ambience with the orchestral musical cycles of American minimalism and plenty of gently mild-altering effects. Flipside 'Space', which first surfaced in 1998, is a ghostly piece of haunting sound design in which distance sub-bass tones struggle to break through a dense fog of creeping chords and digital watch bleeps.

Review: To tie in with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings, Brian Eno has decided to put out a new edition of his decidedly spacey 1983 ambient album "Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks", which started life as the soundtrack to a long-forgotten documentary about NASA's space program. The edition is rather special, not only because it contains a remastered version of the original set created by Eno, his brother Roger and regular collaborator Daniel Lanois, but also because it contains a second disc of previously unheard material. This is not old, though, but rather brand new recordings - described as "new interpretations of the film soundtrack" - made by the Lanois and the Eno brothers late last year in a similar style. In a word: essential.