New releases today: Modern Classical

Review: UK ambient artist 36, whose real name is Dennis Huddleston and peerless American ambient producer Zake return to their Stasis Sounds For Long Distance Space Travel collaboration on the latter's Past Inside the Present. This ambient masterpiece offers glacial drones and delicate textures that drift like solar winds and evoke the vast calm of deep space. As always, it is layered music crafted with care and restraint that demands deep listening and provides a heady space for stillness and inward reflection in our overstimulated world. It's a meditative, cosmic journey that transcends ambient norms and is rich in subtle harmonics and emotional nuance and makes yet another standout from the tireless Zake and 36.

Review: UK producer Trevor Huddleston aka 36 and the Indiana-based Past Inside The Present label's head Zake return to their Stasis Sounds For Long Distance Space Travel project, a universe that suspends the listener in time across glacial soundscapes and a general sense of cosmic awe. Soft, slow-moving drones and textural washes drift like solar winds through the vacuum, suggesting the boundless calm of deep space. The production is rich, gentle with tonal shifts and barely-there harmonics that evoke both distance and intimacy, wonder and melancholy. It feels like music beamed in from the edges of the known universe. If you fancy a contemplative journey from the edge of Earth's thermosphere into the unknowable beyond, tune into Stasis Sounds on your best headphones.

Review: Cate Brooks continues her elegant exploration of imagined geographies with a suite of glacial, slow-blooming compositions that feel suspended between reality and dream. Built by the British musician primarily on Synclavier, Prophet and 808, these pieces evoke the hush and expanse of a far northern landscape with uncanny clarity-despite Brooks never having visited the region that inspired it. Tracks like 'Like Breathing Statues' and 'Aspect from the Window' suggest weather systems forming in slow motion, their textures layered and precise but never clinical. 'In the Blue Hour' moves with a quiet internal rhythm, almost ecclesiastical in tone, while 'Polar Night' closes the journey in dusk-lit stillness. There's something deeply solitary about the whole record-each sound shaped and weighted, but never forced. Brooks's background in synthesis lends a tactile, handmade feel to every element, creating something less like a travelogue and more like a lucid dream of place.