ambient / noise / experimental

Usually I'm not very wild on reissues but in some cases reissues are an excellent way to make sure the music does not get lost. That is almost what had happened to this one. Initially released as a handout promo tape in 1995 'Mutus Liber' is now finally available on CD, thanks to EE Tapes. According to sole member Steve Cammack, most of those tapes have been lost by now. It was a collection of live recordings, released two years before Dieter Mûh's first official album. But now, so many years later, the compilation receives a new life, and I think ambient noise fans will appreciate that.

Because yes, ambient noise, constantly balancing on the edge between both genres. With six lengthy tracks, Dieter Müh creates odd sonic trips with an industrial feel. Opener 'Empty Mirror' immediately delivers that immersive yet haunting set of drones and noises while 'Decoding The Ritual Of Frequency drives on deep droning bass lines, almost tangible. 'Ibruksin' is a minimal yet captivating piece, surprisingly somewhat of a breather after its intense predecessor.

If you want references, try acts like Zoviet France, Taphephobia, Predominance, Luasa Raelon and perhaps a milder version of Brighter Death Now. The great thing about this album is that it's actually well varied. I've heard many ambient noise albums over the years and most of them are quite similar. Here, it's different. Each track has its own set of soundscapes and drones, which clearly distinguishes them from the others. Of course, all still well within the range of the genres.

So there you have, a solid and nicely arranged ambient noise trip, almost twenty five years old but still massively relevant today. If I were you I wouldn't hesitate to get your hands on a copy of this gem.


​Serge

psychedelic rock / garage rock / stoner rock

experimental / jazz / drone / ambient

Ormo Records

doom / stoner rock

drone / ambient / experimental / noise

Attenuation Circuit

electronic / techno

bandcamp

drone / doom / shoegaze

ambient

equanimity. Those twenty minutes of Sublime Silence contain healing and reposeful sounds which are welcome in this over-stressed society we live in. If you are into this kind of meditative sound creations, there is a lot to discover from this artist on his Bandcamp page.

ambient / dark ambient

Dark and melancholic ​moods change into spacey ambient tonalities, sometimes kittenish, other times filled with doom. The world of Sílení is covered with alienated sounds and moods. This is an excellent piece of work. Dark ambient lovers, if you listen to Sílení’s Long Forgotten Bowers, you will get hooked. We sure did!

dark ambient

Mother Destruction above standards in this genre. The album is a varied piece of work caught in a deep haunting, emotional prison. Sacrifice and dedication are translated in penetrating sounds and choruses. The nightmare never seems over in this pungent journey of hellish fires. 
Another quote from Empty Chalice: ‘… the lost ones are retracing the path of the oldest fairy tale: coming home’. Well, we did come home and we still feel home between the moods and vibes of this wonderful dark ambient recording.

dark ambient

Winter Light

over a ten year period. Nimh is active since 2001 and has already more than twenty physical albums released. Sound chasers will be pleased and excited with the multi-layering of soundscapes, field recordings, voices and the experimental manipulations of samples this album contains. The sustained drones create darkened and emotive moods. Beyond The Crying Era is an outstanding soundtrack for a SF/horror movie that does not exist. It’s time to dig deeper in Nimh’s music history. Speaking about a discharge!

dark ambient

the world of Anantakara. We’ve noticed psychedelic influences appearing in the mysterious structures of  the tracks. The eight adventurous ambient pieces on Momentum Lapses are filled with a variety of lovely compositions and moods. Rumors told us that this album will be released on CD in the future. Anantakara stands for “ to make infinite” in Sanskrit. In some way this album does.

Serge (1-6)
​Patsker (7-11)

ambient

The biography mentions: "Guitars, synths, samples and field recordings processed by two expats lost in Brussels." I guess there are worse places to get lost in. Brussels is a lively city with more musical entertainment than students skipping school to protest climate change. 

'Maps Of Reason' is yet another sweet gem, released by Krysalisound (their first on vinyl). With four tracks, ranging between eight and eleven minutes, Tropic Of Coldness; the the duo of Gutman and La Placa, delivers an excellent and soothing ambient album, driving on minimal soundscapes, immersive loops and a calm, serene atmosphere.


I think it's safe to say that 'Maps Of Reason' is a classic ambient album. Gentle layers of sound float in and out in perfect ambient tradition. I guess it's no surprise when I mention acts like Eluvium and Stars Of The Lid or people like Harold Budd in this review. Opener 'The Beauty And The Meaning' is a genre highlight, a perfect piece of music for people who wonder what ambient music is all about, and also a possible fan favorite for ambient aficionados. 

The rest of the album drives on similar elements: minimal, abstract and soothing. 'The Loss Of Empathy' brings me to people like Aidan Baker and Stratosphere, with their guitar based soundscapes which seem to go on forever. Still, tiny variations make this music interesting and captivating. Perhaps that is the main message in this beautiful album: create a nice sonic trip that invited the listener to be explored again and again. In that, Tropic Of Coldness definitely succeeded.


​Serge

electronic / ambient / space music 

Solar Walk II is an album released on March 21, by Russian electronic space music artist Dmitriy Redko, better known by the alias Astropilot. A marvelously imponderable, graceful album, that salutes and revitalizes the introspective cosmogony of space ambient music with a vividly expansive harmonious and dilated layout, this album is a fantastic state of the art work, that comes to aggregate a whole new conjuncture of elements into a wider and more diluted sonorous paroxysm. With a calmer, serene and profoundly abstract splendor, its perfunctory wonderful grace exposes a simple atmosphere, that can be felt as dynamically as it is exposed over an imponderable and magnificent layout of authorial playfulness, revealing slowly a wonderful horizon of sensible majesty. 

The music of the album is amazingly beautiful, primordially elegant, relaxing and graciously sophisticated. Aligned with sensitive musical parameters that innovates the mordacity of its own splendid and peaceful fugacity, Solar Walk II uncovers an ocean of spiritual amazement and rapture that liquefies at the axis of its impenetrable realm of everlasting density; everything becomes involved in a dense hemisphere of sound that defines a new type of perception for the essential vitality of conscience. And as the sound evolves, you become more and more fascinated, until the perception of the colorful universe around you dilutes into an infinite grace of extremely satisfactory and energized nothingness. 

Seventy-nine minutes long, the record has nine extensive tracks: 1) Gravity Free;
2) Inverted Worlds; 3) Hidden Planet; 4) Languor 2.0; 5) Earth-Moon; 6) In The Middle;
7) Betelgeuse; 8) Night Meeting (Verges Of Time); 9) Sanctum; a marvelously great album with a style of its own, Solar Walk II is a sensational space ambient opera, that overcomes the glory of its own methodic structure. Despite a general linear simplicity, there is so much reverberating grandiosity inside the parallax of the sonorous flexible tenacity of this work, that its preponderant sensibilities creates an entirely new universe of detached splendor, that captivates the conscious perception of sound without the dissolution of its mostly unified atmosphere.

A glorious album that displays a genuine and deeply cohesive sense of artistry, Solar Walk II is one of the most beautiful albums I have heard on the genre. With a consistent and firmly conceived musical style whose strength departs from a salutary perception of lucid beauty, Solar Walk II reveals itself as one of the most splendorous and fascinating albums ever released in the history of progressive space ambient music. For enthusiasts of the genre, it’s an epic moment of celebration, without any exaggeration.   



Wagner

electronic / ambient / psychill 

Mindspring

Eschew is an album released on March 8, by American independent record label Mindspring Music. An electronic music project of musician Kri Samadhi – better known by the alias A Pale Void –, on this marvelous album, the artist is truly inspired to showcase the expansive potential of a very personal style of space music, loaded with a modest degree of tempestuous dissonances, renewed by an imponderable and majestic conjuncture of dense harmonies, that display the sonorous virtues of latent echoes, eager to disperse throughout an endless and lugubrious universe a sensational platform of genuine artistic restlessness, that seems consciously desperate to revitalize the obscure vicinities of a vast array of creative possibilities within the genre. 

While the style of A Pale Void is drastically diluted in the peripheries of mostly calmer and serene melodies, the sound is predominantly vague, opaque and dilated at the epicenter of its sensibilities. With beautiful and peaceful tonalities that ostracize the gentleness of quiet and discreet thoughts, the sonorous style prevalent on Eschew is elegant, though ordinary and predictable to a certain degree. Nevertheless, there is a hidden grandiosity present in the harmonies, that effectively highlights the somber nuances of its most relevant qualities. 

With seven tracks – 1) My Love For You; 2) The 11th Hour; 3) Dragontree Rituals; 4) Eschew; 5) Immense Subtlety; 6) Palace of Dreams; 7) Rivers; –, this album presents some beautiful harmonies that ostensibly filters the grandiosity of its own genuine artistic ambitions, something that becomes evident in the title track, a wonderfully magnificent space ambient sonata, whose cohesive sonorous unity navigates over the ocean of a sagaciously effusive and abnormal creative axiom, that rejuvenates into the graceful sensibility of its virtuous horizon of splendor the latent ambivalence of an ambiguous and isolated nefarious rhythm, that desperately wants to conceive in the interior sentimental placidity of life a dark galaxy full of emptiness and solitude.  

An intriguing album that has bizarre, but profoundly authentic sonorous virtues – relevant enough to aggregate an innovative set of elements into the genre –, Eschew is a sensible, sinister, technical and methodic album, whose fearless, fugacious and underground experimentalism definitely highlights its proverbial qualities, that are lucid and meticulous enough to create a dense and pristine musical layout, whose ambivalent textures conceives an entirely new and desolated universe, that effectively instigates a projective and inspirational talent, wise enough to completely innovate the space ambient music genre, with a whole new set of amazingly pungent and sinister elements. 


Wagner

electronic / ambient / progressive / psychill

The Invisible Sun is an album released in March 29, by Serbian electronic music artist Branko Stojiljkovic, best known by the nom de plume Argus. An exceedingly imponderable, vast and effusive album, whose consistent and omnipotent atmosphere extends over diluted realms of gracefully harmonious and abstract infinities, the music of Argus filters and rejuvenates psychedelic elements in a delightful and wonderfully methodic prism of colorful algorithms of splendorous patterns, displaying an organic synergy of dynamic sonorous proclivities, that overemphasizes the exceptional fluidity of a fantastically elongated creative tissue.  

With nine tracks – 1) Questions; 2) Holy Smoke; 3) The Invisible Sun; 4) The Forest Sings; 5) You Are The Power; 6) Clouds; 7) Aurora; 8) On a Lonely Path; 9) Sadness; – the album is a veracious and genuine psychedelic journey throughout a marvelous spectacle of sounds, whose gracious sensitivity revolves around a vivacious ocean of serene and peaceful melodies, exposed in an expansive scale of revolving tenacity, that compresses the constrained essence of its own reasonable, introspective and gregarious grandiosity.   

With a lucid creativity that departs from the diluted tenderness of an infinite dispersive soul, the sound that irradiates from this album is a profoundly instinctive humane cosmogony, whose arbitrary exasperations are projected from the fertile grounds of its own originally distant musical sensibilities, although the amazingly beautiful compositions that are appreciated the entire time anticipates the fragmentary vitality of a gracefully pungent ordeal that unveils a formidable parallax of creativity, unable to stop at the pragmatic level of a splendorous and highly innovative versatile excellence.  

A formidably lancinating, cohesive and spectacularly fascinating psychedelic electronic music album that doesn’t fear being radically innovative and vastly different, The Invisible Sun is a colorful mosaic of perceptive sounds, whose immensely overwhelming and gracefully diligent style circulates within the vicinities of a cosmic dissidence, in a furiously creative turbulence, virtuous enough to reinvent a type of music that can understand the summary of its own objectives. A fantastic album whose original qualities basically creates a new sonorous diagram, The Invisible Sun is an audacious, pioneer and intuitive work of art, that defies genre boundaries and creates its own musical parameters within a diluted, but constructive dynamic of sound. 


Wagner

ambient / experimental

Tipi Token

Scandinavia has, despite the low populated areas, an enormous source of talented musicians in diverse genres of music. The vast and rough nature inspires skilled artists creating mind buzzing sounds. Arne Borgan is a Norwegian graphic artist and musician who explores de boundaries of electronic music.

Arne Borgan works with analog modular synths adding a rich pallet of electro-acoustic sounds to his music. Asterion is an on ambient based concept incorporating elements of field recordings and soundscapes. The Norwegian works  across numerous of mediums with complex audio installations to accompany his graphic works. Arne Borgan is also half of the Improvising live-electronics duo Cloudbilder, based in Oslo.

The music is intensely built up. The ravel of audio recordings are drowned in a bath of experiment guiding the auditors into a wilderness of sounds. This unusual approach contents deep layers  of transcending complexity without becoming gruel. Asterion was constructed from 80 recorded improvised sessions. The result is a very interesting configuration of tracks.

With a brave view on the concept, the electronic artist generated a daring piece of adventurous work in electronic music. These eleven stunning pieces show a variety of mystery, nervousness, melody and distortion mixed into miscellaneous moods.  We can’t deny the feeling that Arne Borgan drew a new path with this original and stunning piece of electronic music. 

This awesome release can be purchased on CD and digital format the  Bandcamp page.

​
Patsker

ambient / experimental / improv

bandcamp

The Unexplained Sounds Group comes up with another unusual and murky gem. Seriously, I have no idea where Raffaele Pezella keeps finding these artists. Not that I mind. After all, thanks to him, my hard disk is slowly filling up with digital drones and strange soundscapes.

Many of his releases accompany me during the writing process of my new book and in that, this three track album by Cloudwatchers is not an exception. With a gloomy atmosphere and an experimental yet immersive sound, Cloudwatchers have create a slowly meandering album.


CloudWatchers is an experimental electronic music group, focused on musical improvisation and formed by Andrés Alonso, Iván Cebrián, Coco Moya and Jaime Munárriz. The list of instruments might be even more interesting: electric guitar, amplifier, bass, digital & analog synths, sampler, laptop, audio & midi processors and vocals, plus an array of effect pedals. The gear-fetishist in me is already drooling. Yet, of course, the most important thing about all this equipment, is what they do with it, and believe me, what they do is pretty damn neat.

Three tracks: ten, eleven and over twenty minutes long, all improvised along minimal percussion, neverending drones and soundscapes while the guitar calmly narrates through dreamy solos. 'Piece 1' feels like a long and hot journey through a desert. 'Piece 2' adds an industrial feel through slow electronic beats and harsh samples. Yet, there are also the chanting vocals, adding something shamanic to the whole thing.

A heap of possible influences have come up while I was listening to this album. From a modest version of free jazz to Godspeed meets Ashtoreth meets Autechre meets Troum meets Zoviet France. I don't know, I'm just pleasantly surprised by this album, which brilliantly closes with the lengthy 'Piece 3', a perfect example of the sheer beauty caused by talented musicians doing what they love. If you're into experimental ambient and mild, jazzy drone works, this surely is your cup of tea.


​Serge

ambient / post rock

Moving Gently Towards an Ending is an album released on March 15, by American ambient music project Startle the Heavens, from Birmingham, Alabama. One hour long, the album has fifteen tracks: 1) Moving Gently; 2) The Sun Will Rise Without Me; 3) Against The Current; 4) Delicately Falling; 5) Without Destination; 6) Warmer Now; 7) Our Fleeting Youth; 8) Drifting; 9) Embittered Winter; 10) Fading Beauty; 11) Bury Me There; 12) Damp Violet; 13) Quiet Birds in Circled Flight; 14) Vibrant Bodies; 15) An Ending; a very beautiful album, with a splendidly peculiar and serene style of its own, Moving Gently Towards an Ending is a majestic work, that presents to the audience a succession of marvelous and gracefully conceived expansive cantilenas, that humanely shifts between the everlasting melancholy of a perennially diffusive existence, and the resignation of a life diluted in the tempestuous clouds of an eventful and lugubrious emptiness.  

The gracious melodies and the colorful guitar lines brightly dilute a scale of harmonies that delightfully expands its horizontal tonalities over solid precipices of omnipotent placidity; with a consistent serenity that never dissolves in the vacuum of its own dynamic splendor, the sound never becomes stagnant, nor monotonous. A virtuous and sensible originality departs from an increasingly elegant and coherent style, that definitely finds its way over a sonorous platform of liquefying and sober passion, whose intrinsic beauty demands from the synergy of its own meritorious grace the simplicity of gloriously sentimental anthems, dispersed in the horizon of a palpable fragility. 

With a sensible and characteristic style, whose splendor contemplates the vicinities of its own vivacious and salutary grandiosity, the music of Startle the Heavens displays an imponderable calmness, whose majesty naturally spreads throughout its soft, but cohesive sonority. With a methodical expansive layer that establishes its own authorial patterns over the musical tissue, Moving Gently Towards an Ending – in a general evaluation –, certainly deserves to be described as an impressive and deeply resonant album, true to its veracious and inherent intentions, radically defining original principles for the genre with which the artist develops so brilliantly.

Despite its extensive length, Moving Gently Towards an Ending never exasperates the listener, whatsoever. Gracefully exposing a series of marvelous, delicate and smooth melodies in a playfully gentle and sensible artistic conjuncture, the musicality displayed on the album has an imperative soul whose pungent consistence aggregates genuinely creative and audacious elements into its deeply expansive sonorous universe. Definitely, this is a lucid, sincere, sensible, resonant, delicately harmonious and quintessential ambient music album, whose honest, direct and illuminating qualities will thrill the enthusiasts of the genre.  


Wagner

ambient

Thresholds is an album released on March 1st, in partnership between Saso – a veteran Irish duo integrated by composer Jim Lawler and sound producer Ben Rawlins – and musician Kevin Corcoran. With twelve tracks – 1) Origins; 2) Covenant; 3) The Cabin; 4) Inner Light; 5) Elements; 6) The Tower; 7) Absence; 8) Invocation; 9) Shadow Work; 10) Cascade; 11) Black Sea; 12) Beyond Endings – this album is a primary example of pragmatic sound minimalism done with dynamic and cohesive proficiency. With a gracious serenity that permeates the consistent efficiency of the melodies, Thresholds reveals itself an intense and sensible album, that definitely showcases a clear and lucid perception of sound, as well as the importance silence can play in between the notes. 

With a beautiful and virtuous elegance that slowly ingratiates itself into the infinity of a microcosm that surrenders lyrically at the strength of a vortex of imponderable gracefulness, the melodies, despite its general simplicity, has an undeniable and spiritual density, that escalates into a solemn platform of superior abstract artistry. Delivering harmonies that gradually penetrates into the expansive realms of your sensitivity, this creative team of musicians know how to properly explore space, introspective ambivalence and the elasticity of sound, to create something gracefully pungent and delicate, yet delightfully extraordinary, that majestically conceives and displays with honest sensibility an isolated domain of solitude and calmness. 

Although the album can be perceived as relatively stagnant at some points, this is something inherent to the genre, and definitely, an integral part of its beauty. Thresholds can be described as a very technical and methodic work, whose consistent sound investigates profoundly the general restlessness of the human soul, in a sonorous context of placid and diffuse melancholy. 

A very idyllic and poetic work, Thresholds has an organic essence, whose qualitative excellence follows the diligence of its impressionistic and meaningful overview. Exceptional at some points, the minimalism present in the work is something to be highlighted; the moderate audacity revealed by the creatively omniscient atmosphere delivered by some of these songs decipher not just the human nature as it is –  inside its fundamental abyss of desperation and infinite melancholy –, but contemplates the sentimental fragility that resides within our soul. Definitely, this is one of those albums whose sound integrates a concept beyond the ordinary measurements of music. 


​Wagner