Juno Recommends Ambient / Drone: April 2022

Review: At this stage in his career, Jon Hopkins should be able to do whatever the hell he likes. After proving his synaesthetic abilities throughout the 2010s - with masterpieces like 'Light Through The Veins' and his last album 'Singularity'- it's clear this climactic electronica artist knows no bounds. Now he debuts a new full guided meditation-style LP documenting his ketamine-fulled revelations realised in a remote Ecuadorian cave. Relinquishing beats and drum sounds, this is a fully ambient affair from Hopkins, and routinely features soothing, sampled vocal snippets from the late yogi and guru Baba Ram Daas, as well as collabs with producer and psychedelic ceremony guide East Forest.

Review: Merrin Karras' 2020 foray into extended compositions combining his Berlin School tendencies and expansive ambient is finally pressed-up on cloudy transparent 12". Remastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri and featuring revisited art by Noah M / Keep Adding.

Review: Chicago's International Anthem serve up another high-grade contemporary jazz album, this time Recordings from the Aland Islands. It is the result of a journey to said islands in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland that Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia made in 2017. As they learned about the land, the concept for this record was devised. It opens with hazy, dream-like sounds and takes in plenty pastoral sounds that easily bring to mind images of the romantic woodlands, moss covered boulders and forest floors of the islands.

Review: Night Songs is the latest record from awakened souls, the Los Angeles based husband and wife duo- James and Cynthia Bernard (marine eyes). In the Spring of 2021, they found a good night's rest was more important than ever to help them through pandemic days of schooling kids from home and balancing work and life. After going on an evening walk, James and Cynthia would write in their bedroom studio and test the evening's songs out for sleep. Even prior to being together, they both loved searching for just the right album to calm their minds at the end of the day. Night Songs is their combined version of a sleepy evening record, exploring slowly evolving loop-based ambient primarily using bass guitar and vocal textures. The tracks which ultimately made it on the album helped them relax enough to go to a place where thoughts fade.

Review: 'Dwell Time' focuses on the moments in between. Expanding on Satie's Furniture Music, which explores the role of music as a backdrop, Dwell Time explores the moments in between active and passive listening. A sound that maintains a unique balance of properties can start as an active relationship that slowly dissolves into the background and accompanies a listener over its course. The Dwell Time signal remains completely analog, utilizing homemade tape samples and hardware synthesizers to encourage the listener to move between the different states of listening. Produced by Rafael Anton Irisarri and Mastered by Taylor Deupree.

Review: On his previous outings for Craigie Knowes, Fred Shepheard AKA No Moon has proved adept at wrapping punchy electro rhythms and crunchy breakbeats in immersive, deep space ambient chords, psychedelic acid lines and enveloping pads. On Spins Parities & Multipolarities, he further explores the latter portion of his trademark style, largely removing the beats in favour of weightless, meditative electronic soundscapes rich in emotive chord sequences, drifting pads, intergalactic electronics, atmospheric field recordings, blissful melodies and pleasing nods to the similarly framed aural world of Global Communication. The results are gorgeous, occasionally grandiose and always alluring, with more than a few nods to Pete Namlook and ambient techno outfits like MLO or Higher Intelligence Agency.

Review: Fairfax is an intriguing and beguiling album of masterfully quiet artistry. Remastered by Lawrence English and featuring brand new artwork, this new edition reveals an all new side to the American artist Nate Scheible's dark, dramatic and meditative sounds. It starts with some unsettling spoken word and then turns into glitch ambient soundscapes with eerie vocal sounds, haunting harmonies and more of those spoken words adding a very real narrative. It is an album of isolation, or uncertainty and one that make you confront the powerful spoken ideas that tell of less than perfect times.

Review: Norwegian-Mexican artist and producer Carmen Villain was born in the US, so has a pretty global sound and wide sphere of influence. Only Love From Now in Small-town Supersound is her fourth studio album and is another beguiling and tightly woven tapestry of atmospheric sounds, field recordings, woodwinds, percussion, samples and synths. Elements of forth world, dub and ambient characterise the grooves and make for a deeply immersive world of steady rhythms, hypnotic melodies and mysterious sonic artefacts. At times loopy, at others loose and improvised, it is an essential listen once more.

Review: Night Songs is the latest record from awakened souls, the Los Angeles based husband and wife duo- James and Cynthia Bernard (marine eyes). In the Spring of 2021, they found a good night's rest was more important than ever to help them through pandemic days of schooling kids from home and balancing work and life. After going on an evening walk, James and Cynthia would write in their bedroom studio and test the evening's songs out for sleep. Even prior to being together, they both loved searching for just the right album to calm their minds at the end of the day. Night Songs is their combined version of a sleepy evening record, exploring slowly evolving loop-based ambient primarily using bass guitar and vocal textures. The tracks which ultimately made it on the album helped them relax enough to go to a place where thoughts fade.

Review: 'Dwell Time' focuses on the moments in between. Expanding on Satie's Furniture Music, which explores the role of music as a backdrop, Dwell Time explores the moments in between active and passive listening. A sound that maintains a unique balance of properties can start as an active relationship that slowly dissolves into the background and accompanies a listener over its course. The Dwell Time signal remains completely analog, utilizing homemade tape samples and hardware synthesizers to encourage the listener to move between the different states of listening. Produced by Rafael Anton Irisarri and Mastered by Taylor Deupree.

Review: Redscale and Greyscale label founder and dub techno production don and master DJ Grad U takes us on a killer trip here into widescreen worlds of ambient sound. The textures are lo-fi and fuzzy around the edges as per most ambient albums, and the synths are heady and smeared to perfection. Some pieces are filled with a subtle sense of hope and optimism, others are more darkened drones that turn you in on yourself, but all of these tracks are fantastically realised and immersive pieces of ambient art.

Review: Richard Fearless is back on his Drone label with a logical follow up to his 2019 solo album Deep Rave Memory. The Death In Vegas chap has been exploring plenty of interesting paths in recent years, and his label has become a hub for evocative and provocative electronics from the likes of D'Marc Cantu and Container. Now he's presenting a second long player slipping into redolent nostalgia for time spent under strobe lights, albeit nostalgia for parties yet to take place. You can hear subtle hints of loops and grooves worming their way through Future Rave Memory, but this is primarily an ambient excursion populated with billowing clouds of melody and texture, subtly haunting but ultimately cosy and comfortable to lose yourself in.