Juno Recommends Ambient / Drone: October 2022

Review: Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto dropped this one first back in 2006. It was the third collaborative album between the ambient maestros and the third installment of V.I.R.U.S.'s five albums series. It was remastered last year and now gets served up as a reissue alongside three all-new pieces, namely 'City Radieuse', 'Veru 1', and 'Veru 2'. The first of those was written for a short cinematic essay in 2012. The album centres around the pano with padded bass and electronic frequencies adding extra depth and texture. It is another classic in their oeuvre.

Review: Despite the title sounding like an archive collection, 1994 is actually the debut album from OKRAA. It has an emphasis on live performance and makes for a gorgeously immersive and even evolving listen from the aways excellent A Strangely Isolated Place label. All four pieces are over with minutes but they are worthy of their playing time for the way so much unfolds in such engaging fashion. Synths are cold and innocent on 'Ola De Luz' while 'Heartless' is more textural, dark, heavy in its mood. The title track is another heavy and introspective one while 'Plasma' has a more optimistic feel that lifts the spirts.

Review: Known for her minimalistic electroacoustic music, pianist, organist, and composer Sarah Davachi always stands out on the ambient-drone shelves. While many working in these fields are concerned with function as a primary focal point and route to form, Davachi's output is packed with immediate musicality, perhaps due to her penchant for using more traditional orchestral acoustic instrumentals and then giving them the modern treatment.

Hence her rising to become one of the most (rightly) fawned-over and respected practitioners in the scene. Two Sisters is a case in point in terms of her overall approach, a collection of tracks that sound utterly timeless, atmospheres created in a way they have been for aeons and yet what's here would have been impossible to realise even just a few decades ago.

Review: A Strangely Isolated Place presents a collection of tracks made by longtime friends and frequent collaborators Luke Entelis (Viul) and Thomas Meluch (Benoît Pioulard), combining their enchanting soundscapes for maximum effect. The album is inspired by the isolation and uncertainty the Covid lockdown caused - "Konec" is Czech word for "end," and refers to the devastating transformation that Luke and Thomas' home city of New York underwent during the pandemic. The finished tracks began as short synth sketches by Luke, with the two friends developing them into fully fledged ambient masterpieces while reflecting on a time spent in lockdown, collaborating to create a series of strangely beautiful interludes and "a sense of vitality breaking through the immediate surrounding dread." Judge for yourself, but in our eyes, it's a job well done.

Review: Tenka aka Meitei and Berlin-based, Japanese scent designer, Ryoko have combined to make a scent that complements this new album from Tenka. It is well worth finding it if you can. The album itself is his first since his trilogy series and once again establishes him as a leading voice in the contemporary electronic scene of Japan. Hydration finds him looking to "work without the boundaries of theme, storytelling or audience expectations" and spent many hours in nearby mountain forests to find inspiration. That plays out with colour, sound, smell, humidity, touch, atmosphere and taste all colouring the grooves.

Review: During the 2000s, Christian Fennesz was on an astonishing run of form, creating and perfecting a trademark sound where fractured shards of heavily processed sound and distant field recordings cloaked slowly evolving ambient chords and melodies - many created using heavily effects laden guitars - in a weightless, mood-enhancing sound soup. Every one of the albums he released in this period are worth a listen, but 2008's Black Sea - which has finally been reissued on vinyl in freshly remastered form - is undoubtedly one of the most accessible and intoxicating, if only for the subtle exoticism and deft nods to Balkan and Turkish musical culture hidden amongst the waves of enveloping sound. It's an ambient masterpiece all told, and one that should be in every horizontal music lover's collection.

Review: Initially out as a cassette back in 2016, the Bblisss' label opening release - Bblisss - flew out of our charts the minute it landed and has since then been a golden chalice for many contemporary ambient lovers. Its previously unknown crew of artists have nailed a formula, it seems; one that successfully blends the very best and most relevant sounds from ambient, new age and...the tropical end of the percussive domain. The air is hazy and mood is dreamy, with tunes from the likes of Pendant, DJ Paradise and Enamel all providing us with an ethereal atmosphere that goes way beyond one-note drones. This is deeply rich electronic music with a heart and soul. Just the way we like it. Be quick as these will NOT hang around for long...

Review: Mister Water Wet is a great example of an artist who really is doing things on their own terms. Based out of Kansas City, not necessarily the first place on your lips when it comes to cutting edge electronic sounds, the producer and DJ is a centrepiece of a small but highly active community of boundary pushing minds that create these ambient-ish tracks that have one foot, if not a hand and half their heads, in clubs.

Significant Soil exemplifies this, but don't take that to mean tunes here belong in and among beats and late nights. Nevertheless, alongside abstraction, experimentation, silence - or at least the space between noises - there are definite rhythms, suggestions of what could be, and a sense that could be anything. Far more coherent than these genres often offer, brass meets white noise meets dainty pianos recorded through fizz and crackle, tangible tempos and time signatures running beneath sound-as-texture.

Review: picnic charmed all and sundry with their delicate, elegantly cracked ambient electronics upon first emerging in the last year or so. Tied to the Australian Daisart label, they make a welcome return with a follow-up record which expands their sound into intriguing electro-acoustic realms, with some prominent piano and found sound elements merging with quivering granular synthesis and swirling atmospherics. If you loved the first, self-titled album, you're guaranteed to love this one too, even more so because the sound has moved on without losing its fundamental character. And if you're new to picnic, don't delay in getting some of this exquisite ambience into your life.

Review: PAN is not a label to stick to strict formulas, and so this new compilation feels like a natural move for a name that's been going so strong for about five years. Mono No Aware features all of the imprint's best and brightest, brought together over sixteen diverse sonic experiments of all sorts and sizes. Yves Tumor gracefully steps up with placid waves of ambient, Helm cuts and dices through tenebrous caverns of noise, and even Bill Kouligas himself features with a chilling selection of noise shreds.

Review: Never heard of Zoroastrianism? Nothing to do with Zorro, this ancient religion is still practiced by a comparatively small number of people today, and has its roots on the Iranian plateau. Hugely overlooked in the modern world, not least given its incredible influence over may of the tropes we associate with recognisable creeds - heaven, hell, good, evil - here M Geddes Gengras and Psychic Reality pay homage to the history of what might be Western Asia's most mythologised and yet misunderstood nation, while also introducing modern sonic elements and effects.

The result is something that's unarguably original. Ambient work that is vivid and transportive, it's highly rhythmic stuff from start to finish, with tracks like 'The Incremental Spirit' taking that format to the nth degree, while the likes of 'Wilde Pastures' break with a more abstract idea of what these sounds can be.

Review: Mark Peters returns with his second solo album, which is just as accomplished as its predecessor, but approaches the listener with a much wider lens. Whereas before we had a work that was spectacular in it smallness - purposefully insular sounds inspired by a trip back home to his Wigan birthplace, only translated through a psyche machine - here the vista opens up dramatically into stargaze-worthy pieces of ambient rock that could almost rub shoulders with contemporary classical.

While inspired by North West England, in many ways the grand overtures here would be more suited to score visuals showing the Big Country expanses of vast wildernesses in the US, South Africa, or Australia. You can feel the skies above never ending as the twinkling, subtle but highly evocative melodies wax and wane through our very conscious.

Review: An idiosyncratic new release from LA-based minimalist Richard Chartier aka. Pinkcourtesyphone, in what might best be describable as a project consisting solely of earthy dark ambient sonics. The four 10-25 minute long drones from 'Problematic Interior 3' through to 'She Who Controls' consist almost entirely of dirgic drones, operating almost solely in the lower register and with the occasional crackle of soil or stone layered on top. With each piece born from a slew of tape-based compositions made around ten years ago, 'Shouting At Nuance' stands the test of time through sheer simplicity. 'Alternatory' is our fave.