Music From Memory Holland Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Once again, Music From Memory has dug deep for inspiration. Very few will have come across the original 1987 pressing of Ich Traume So Leise, a long-forgotten collaborative album that brought together trumpet player Heinz Becker, songwriter Karl-Heinz Stegmann, and poet Isabel Zeumer. Predictably, though, the tracks which the Dutch label has chosen to reissue are exceptionally good. "Mein Tanzlied", for example, features Becker's meandering trumpet lines and Zeumer's eyebrow-raising spoken word vocals seemingly drifting over an intoxicatingly funky, mid-80s dancefloor groove, while "Dir" is a seriously atmospheric chunk of beatless jazz poetry. Flip for the Balearic electro-funk of "Der Schnupfen" and the languid, new age ambience of "Abends".

Review: A fantastic introduction to a Japanese electronic artist who has simultaneously influenced many while flying well under the radar, Gaia: Selected Ambient & Downtempo Works presents a deep dive into the world of Dream Dolphin, a producer who began releasing music under this moniker at the age of 16 and was brought up on classic Italian songs before discovering the likes of PIL, Yellow Magic Orchestra and The KLF. Amazingly, even thought there's a good chance you'd never heard of her before now, Dream Dolphin, also known as Noriko, released a staggering 20 albums in just eight years, and 18 of the tracks from that catalogue are here now. The vast majority never available on vinyl before, they span IDM, ambient, downbeat, trance, organic experimental and more, making this a real trove.

Review: Habitat Ensemble is a new musical collective that is led by musician Marius Houschyar and this is their self titled debut album on the delightful Music From Memory. The group has roots in the south of the Czech Republic where, we're told, outsiders and creatives have been meeting at a summer school since the 1990s. It was in the summer of 2022 that this group came together, inspired by the idea of exchanging the down cultural and musical ideas through music. They first started out with a series of multidisciplinary workshops which then blossomed into this full length - a fusion of jazz, ambient, world music and experimentation that is organic and enriching.

Review: Offering a gentler approach than his previous releases on R.I.O. and brokntoys, Philipp Otterbach comes to Music From Memory with an album of inward ambient reflections in which the guitar takes centre stage for the first time. Otterbach's sound is broad and inquisitive, folding field recordings and snatches of speech in amongst dexterous synth lines and expressive guitar, creating a thoroughly satisfying, mellow trip through beatless pastures. The predominant mood is a hopeful, upbeat one, although shot through with a playful surrealism which keeps things interesting rather than one-dimensionally pleasant. It's as rich a listening experience as you'd expect from a Music From Memory release.Alexis 'Lex' Blackmore.

Review: Phoebe Guillemot's world-building as RAMZi has yielded us a plethora of exquisite albums since she first emerged in the tape-oriented scene around 2013. She's gone on to helm different projects, tour the world and generally blossom as a singular and gifted artist. After a string of self-released LPs, she's popped up on Music From Memory with one of her most refined works to date. Hyphea unmistakably belongs in the RAMZi-verse, full of the same mystical, softly shaped flora and fauna which makes her music so inviting, but there's also a sense of structure and purpose here which suggests she was honing her expressions - a natural progression for an artist who can make electronic music sound so very natural indeed.

Review: Having introduced Spanish ambient pioneer Suso Saiz to a wider audience via last year's superb Odisea retrospective, Music From Memory has scored a new album from the long-serving musician and composer. Rainworks was recorded over a two-month period in early 2016, and sees Saiz evocatively joining the dots between Jonny Nash style guitar-led ambience, gently undulating, piano-driven mood pieces, evocative collages of found sounds and field recordings (see opener "From Memory & The Sky"), and ghostly, effects-laden ambient. He also finds time to pay tribute to Steve Reich style American minimalism on the cyclical brilliance of "They Don't Love Each Other".

Review: It's the seventh studio album from Suso Saiz, and the Spanish producer has never been on better form. Once again raising the musical bar, expanding into new ambient territories. Or, as he puts it himself: 'A body vibrates producing a sound that reaches another body and makes it vibrate and generate a new sound that makes another body vibrate that generates another sound...

'Imagine an infinite orchestra of bodies multiplying their sound vibrations creating the symphony of RESONANT BODIES. Resonance as a principle of COMMUNICATION; sound as a builder of ties and interrelations between men.' Take from that what you will, we're going for slightly different terms - tracks here are serene but never background, beautiful and thought provoking, a work of art that doesn't need to shout for attention, and instead invites you in deeper by the minute.

Review: The Music For Memory label has invented its own little scene over the course of the last decade. It's a mature and moving world where modern classical, ambient, downtempo, Balearic and plenty of in between sounds all come together in soothing harmony. To mark the occasion of its tenth release, the label has put together this superb double album overview of what it does - all the usual artists you would expect feature from Joan Biblioni to Jonny Nash to Gigi Masin and it all adds up to a perfectly escapist collection from this top draw label who sadly lost co-founder Jamie Tiller earlier in the year.