Back in stock: Ambient/Drone

Review: The irrepressible Past Inside The Present is back with the second in a trilogy of tape loop experiments from T.R. Jordan. This is the limited and hand-numbered CD format and is another cohesive piece of this three-suite puzzle. All of the music was made by the same materials and methods and was all made in "a concentrated period of inspired experimentation with no energy wasted." The artist calls it a form of "musical composting" and the music is full of a sense of musical grace and elegance, peaceful pads and sonic versions of pastoral scenes like flowing rivers and mossy rocks under beautiful wispy clouds.

Review: Following a run of superb collaborative releases - including sets created with Ana Stamp, Suzanne Kraft and his old pal Gigi Masin - Jonny Nash has finally got round to recording a new solo album. It's his first lone LP for four years and draws as much from his love of folk and acoustic music as the immersive sound worlds of ambience. As a result, his usual lilting, effects-laden guitar textures, stretched-out synthesiser chords and immersive electronic textures rub shoulders with finger-picked acoustic guitars, pedal steel-inspired motifs, strummed chords and echo and reverb-laden snippets of his own voice (a sonic ingredient he has not used for some time). The results are as magical and mesmerising as you'd expect, with Point of Entry crashing straight in to the list of Nash's strongest releases to date.

Review: Experimental musician Leyland Kirby has been skirting round the edges of electronic music since the tail end of the '90s, delivering curious concept albums under a dizzying variety of pseudonyms (The Caretaker, The Stranger, Billy Ray Cyrix, Butcher Claws and Bored in Columbia, amongst many others). Here he dons his familiar V/VM alias for a discordant trip into drone territory supposedly inspired by fading memories of the last throes of early '90s outdoor raves. In truth, there's little in the music - a typically hissing, dystopian fusion of murky textures and becalmed electronic tones - to justify the concept, but it matters little. Kirby is a master at creating vaguely spooky, industrial-influenced soundscapes, and The Death of a Rave (A Partial Flashback) only enhances his reputation.

Review: The limited 7" edition of Marine Eyes' latest full-length ambient record 'To Belong' hears a distilling of the original fourteen-track record down to just four selections. Though every track on the digital version of the album works in its own right, the choice on offer here - 'Hushed', 'Of The West', 'Bluest' and 'Call & Answer' - are particularly deserving of the study on wax. Something static, nigh time-crystalline is achieved on the B2, with its held root note evincing something of the quality of an infinite dream; the A1 recalls some mix of DJ Healer, Malibu or David Motion with its three note tenor-pad lilt; the A2 gets at the best of both worlds, sounding like a paradisiacal bathhouse vision set in slow motion; the B1 is the tensest, opting for a moodier key, but its reversed guitar taps and sustained choir-synth working in a no less lachrymose aesthetic.

Review: What does it mean To Belong? Cynthia Bernard aka. Marine Eyes only begins to scratch the surface of this question on her latest ambient record (yet leaps a great deal forward in wrestling with it nonetheless), following up her prior effort 'Chamomile' with a distinctly beauteous fortnight of forenoon drones, all of which spur the realization that "belonging is everywhere and nowhere". Belonging is indeed a kind of ephemeral longing of being than can only ever be partly grasped, attained. Through its looping washes of warmed, brackish, padded backwash - not to mention its many bass-undergirded angel choirs - the likes of 'Timeshifting', 'Bridges' and 'Mended Own' stand out as such revelatory highlights, all contributing to an incredible album of sonic diaristic reflection, in which every sound sticks out clearly yet plays its proper part in a humble, rose-smelling gestalt.