drone / ambient / post rock / shoegaze

The Dutch Norwegianism Records label was founded and shaped by Dead Neanderthals duo René Aquarius and Otto Kokke. Both artists couldn’t find the time to continue with the label (lots of music projects). New owner Hans van der Velden is now taking care of the label that is specialized in releasing noise, free- jazz, drone, grindcore, power-electronics and other weird stuff for the masses. Hans van der Velde is also the initiator behind the alternative music event Hans Festival taking place in Diepenheim Holland.

In fact thisquitearmy needs hardly an introduction. Canadian experimental guitarist Eric Quach (thisquietarmy) and Belgian drummer Tom Malmendier joined forces.  Both musicians met at Beauté Soniques festival in Namur (Belgium) for a Hypnodrone Ensemble gig in the fall of 2016. They got fueled by continental travel stories and meetings through the underground scene. Tom Malmendier is a self-taught drummer who is interested in the sound, more than in the pure technique of the instrument. Playing with sounds and to improvise became a great part of his work as a musician.

Steppe is a collaboration of two artists melting their talents and improvisations into a mix of guitar drones and soundscapes submerged  with enormous variations of drumming and percussion. Tom Malmendier ‘s work on this recording shows not only intensive pieces. His percussion also flirts lightly on the surface between the deep drones and effects of wizard Eric Quach. The varied atmospheres combined with the intense drumming make Steppe an interesting and worth listening piece of work. Guitarist Eric Quach shows again that he is a master in creating drones from another dimension. 

Tom Malmendier rattles like a carpenter the guitar drones of Eric Quach into a solid and strong sound construction. The frenzied walls of sound have depth and are filled with the dynamic input of the Belgian drummer. Steppe is a vigorous and unpredictable release with surprising atmospheric vibes. We consider Steppe one of the better co-operations thisquietarmy already did.

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Patsker

ambient / experimental / drone

Rapoon returned once more to the Winter-Light label with the last part of the Mercury Rising Trilogy, Sol Laude: Mercury Rising 3. Robin Storey’s new feel, that of a more off world spacious ambiance, was extended in the album Sol Laude without losing its own identity. The out of the box approach of this electronic music recording grasped us immediately by the throat. 

A dark claustrophobic soundscape emerged from the first tunes through the headphones (yes, this is headphone music). Vast structures of blackened cavities filled with sounds of unknown cosmic origins  create a filmic science-fiction world. Mysterious sounds and voice-like effects convey tranquility with relieving fairy tale bliss. The ethno and jazzy modus operandi combined with neoclassical sound structures left us with a new interstellar and sensational feeling. 

The trilogy began in November 2017 with Sanctus Equinox, which was then followed by Offworld OP1 Equs (http://www.merchantsofair.com/albums/rapoon-offworld-op1-equs). On Sol Laude the thoughts and visions of Robin Storey are transferred into musical experiments which sting the brain cells like soft needles, stimulating a mind melt with the music and moves the listener to strange off worlds. The impressions transferred by this recording are overwhelming. The most impressive part is A New Sun, a twenty minutes long track with echoing industrial drones and piano parts that conceive emotions of sadness and emptiness colored with subtle neoclassical melodies. 

Rapoon is a living spaceship traveling like a comet into deep space and collecting fragments of precious and drifting remnants of the past and the future. This third part of the Mercury Rising Trilogy is a wonderful and stimulating trip filled with electronic soundscapes, classical arrangements and majestic choral bursts. Rapoon’s creations contain the afflatus of a genius. Sol Laude is an exceeding piece of exploring electronic music and makes the Mercury Rising triptych a unique and mind blowing work. We already know what we want for X-mas…

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Patsker

electronic / ambient

Exosphere Music

Interactivity is an album released on September 24, by Exosphere, a sublabel of Synphaera Records. The work of a masterfully cohesive and skillfully mininalist electronic music artist known as K. Markov, the record has five tracks, all of them more than twelve minutes long. They are: 1) Mind Control; 2) Interactivity; 3) Grand Illusion; 4) Reverse Evolution; 5) Inner Alchemy; with expressive, sensible and overwhelmingly graceful and sinister melodies, the music of K. Markov is primarily engraved by majestically obscure tonalities, that get lost in a cosmogony of dehydrated harmonious indulgencies, that play with the dense and diffusive atmosphere of its own dispersive, abrasive and suggestive style. 

With an ascending, imperative and methodic musical style — whose horizontal vicissitudes alternate between the horizon of its own liquid harmonies and the temporal rationality of its own elemental serenity —, Interactivity immediately reveals itself to be a groundbreaking, genuine, affirmative album, that plays in the space of its sonorous resolutions the demands of deliberately diluted clinical textures, whose resonances perfectly dilapidates the dynamic synchronicity of its discreet catalyst nature.  

Despite the fact that — at least in some moments — the artist falls in ordinary and predictable musical territory, its impossible to deny the prominence of the greatness, the accuracy and the originality of his style, that invariably prevails throughout the album; cultivating beauty in shape and also in the epic length of the songs, each track seems to be a surreal psychological journey towards a distant, fantastic and undisputed universe, where light and sound defines in the vividness of its colossal tenacity the organic tenderness of its pluralistic vitality. In fact, each song sounds like an anthem to the glory of the universe, a personal testimony of striking authenticity, that transpires in the strength of its genuine sonorous graciousness the effective sensibility of an introspective paradoxical beauty, forever lost in the tempestuous darkness of the cosmos.   

Undoubtedly a marvelous album — that has all the necessary elements precisely aligned to make it outstanding —, the original vitality and the spectacular creativity of the artist has crafted an exceptionally formidable and expressively genuine work of art. Interactivity reveals itself to be a marvelous record all the way through, with a mordacious display of sinister overtones, that definitely makes all of its sonorous devices to feel arbitrarily real, at least in our most audacious, unpredictable and turbulent dreams.  


​Wagner

ambient / drone

Anarchist Mountain is a mountain in British Columbia, Canada, near the United States border with Washington state. On the other hand, Anarchist Mountains is Jordan Christoff and Stefan Christoff. The two brothers are originally from Macedonia but living in Canada. Glad the internet exists because gathering info about these two ambient artists was not an easy job. The modest duo is also involved with several other music projects and visual artists.

Macedonians starts with Organ, a twenty-five minute long ambient soundscape based on looping organ-like sounds. The sound waves take you away from civilization into the wild with its filmic mood. Tension is slowly built up together with the looping speed in this prolonged creation. Noisy field recordings and effects were added in the background. The artists prefer to use only synthesizers, organ, various hardware effects and field recordings.

The second track Mountains At Night is a more mysterious trip. Drones are mixed with field recordings, meditative synths and ambient guitar vibes. A beautiful pallet of sounds causes a tranquilizing atmosphere which continues on 30 05 2016. This piece is based on guitar loops with a ritual touch and experimental effects. The buoyant soundscapes on Three end this remarkable piece of work.

Our research told us that Stefan Christoff collaborated on releases with various artists from the Montreal improvisation scene, like Sam Shalabi, Peter Burton and the multi-instrumentalist Brahja Waldman from New York. Jordan Christoff is active as the second half of the ambient duo PJS (with Patrick Dique) and creating calm ambient and live-improvised organic drones with Michelle Mostacci in the project Saturn's Daughter.

Anarchist Mountains is an experienced duo that made us listen to a fine and well balanced recording of ambient music with experimental inputs. Headphones are required to have this deep listening trip. Macedonians is also available on a limited edition CD on the label’s Bandcamp page.

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Patsker

electronic / ambient

There are two projects called Nevel. To avoid confusion: there is the Dutch black metal band Nevel (which released almost at the same time their one track album Leven) and we have Bart Van Meulebroeck’s Nevel. This producer and DJ has been active in the Belgian and international electronic underground scene for 20 years. The Hageland is his debut release under the name Nevel. 

The Hageland is an existing region situated between the Belgian cities of Leuven and Diest. This attractive hilly region with varied landscapes, such as plains, hills and opulent forests was the inspiration for this double CD. All 20 tracks (10 per CD) are named after streets and places in The Hageland and contain field recordings from the region.

The first CD (The Hike) contains more up tempo tracks referring to the electronic music of the nineties. Down tempo and minimal techno are mixed together into stimulating sounds. The tracks are accessible without being too commercial. Nevel uses female vocals to give the music a more mysterious vibe. The happy ambiance gives comfort and has a dreamy effect. CD 1 will be welcomed by the fans of Orbital, Boards Of Canada, The Orb and Horizon 222. This is a catchy IDM CD.

The second CD (Cooldown) is more modest with slow enigmatic ambient and noisy electronica. The tracks are provided with a dark edge and coloured with field recordings. We thought we were listening to Aphex Twin while receiving those weird electronic waves of Baybosweg. Nevel  succeeded to take the moods of his lonely misty morning walks in his music. The music on the Cooldown CD is filmic and decorated with beautiful peaceful ambient sounds.  Doodbroek and Stort show the darker side of Nevel, ending this ambient trip with a murky mood.

Nevel surprised us with a wide-ranging double CD stuffed with a diverse library of electronic music. CD2 is our favourite because of the intense floating varied ambient that took us to the green and hilly Hageland and beyond. This impressive release is limited to 300 physical pieces and is a must have for electronic music lovers.

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Patsker

post rock / ambient

Constants is an album released on July 19, by English post rock/ambient musical project Message To Bears, artistic nom de plume of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jerome Alexander. Relatively concise, the record runs for little more than forty minutes, and has eleven tracks: 1) On Reflection; 2) Raining Whilst She Sleeps; 3) Pull Apart; 4) All We Said; 5) Rescue; 6) New Air; 7) Away from You; 8) Small Light; 9) Convalescence; 10) We All Were Swallowed By Sleep; 11) Nowhere; with a very smooth, tranquil and serene musical style, the harmonious layout designed for the project displays a sonorous virtuosity that is intrinsically functional, proverbial and elegant. Definitely, Constants doesn't disappoint, despite the fact that the album can be quite predictable. 

With a singular sensibility that really knows how and where to insert correctly preciously conceived melodies, the paroxysm of the harmonies is never frozen or doubtful; its colorful tonalities know precisely where they should be, sometimes going for an instinct of creative vitality, to properly fulfill its sonorous potential. The simplicity of treatment in what concerns the general evaluation and dynamics of the rhythm line is also another major point of strength and convergence for the work.  

Constants is a simple album, but its melodies were conceived with passion, enthusiasm and sincerity. Displaying a degree of commitment and seriousness that expresses all the singular virtuosities of the artist responsible for this marvelous work of art — Jerome Alexander —, its easy to understand the essence of his musical proposal, as well as the profound intensity that underlies the existential glory of his splendid creativity. 

In a general evaluation, while you can't expect too much innovative features on this album, Constants never disappoints, not even for a second. This Message To Bears release — despite its striking simplicity — or maybe, precisely because of it, is a marvelous, poetic and graciously beautiful album, that qualifies serenity as a fundamental virtuosity for the genre, absolutely essential for elegance and refinement to be achieved with renewed glory and majesty. 


Wagner

ambient / electronic

Consisting of nine tracks, this recent release by Fourth Dimension – titled Ubique – is a restless, though graceful collection of exceedingly expansive space ambient symphonies, whose fundamental elements rely on the dense and dispersive convergence of brilliantly agglutinated and eruptive harmonies, whose intrinsic musical consistencies depart from sensitive, narrow and diluted sonorous peripheries, that discreetly revolves around the eagerness of its own perfectly sculpted style.

With a sensible complexity, but displaying at the same time a subjective simplicity that honors the beauty of its elegant and proverbial atmosphere, the qualities exhibited by the artist reflects purely introspective virtues, whose formidably delineated melodies wander throughout its own volatile and gradually dehydrated peculiarities. As the sound  evolves, its graciously translucent and sober musical tonalities becomes more effusively crystalline, hermetic and discreetly delightful. 

With an amazingly pleasant sound – very easy to appreciate and to enjoy – you can deliberately lose yourself in this fantastic ambient masterpiece, whose splendorous musical narrative displays a genuine, sagacious and intrincate sense of artistic majesty, as well as a coherent and experienced degree of technical proficiency. With an intriguing sense of originality, whose lucid creativity consciously tries to conceive something entirely new, which is successfully achieved with this album, Ubique, track after track, showcases a subtle, but concomitantly spectacular level of versatile and splendid musical sensibilities, that overwhelmingly dissipates a sound that surpasses the general ordinary boundaries of the genre very easily. 

A wonderful work of art that certainly will please all enthusiasts of electronic space music, Ubique, by Fourth Dimension, is a magnificent masterpiece, where each track has its own imperative and distinct  sonorous identity, yet the work in its entirety is perfectly integrated into an elegant and vibrant atmosphere. The amazingly singular and amorphous harmonious contingencies present on this work deliver to the listener an impeccably resonant and cohesive musical universe, that definitely deserves to be qualified as a milestone of the genre. 


Wagner

space ambient / dark ambient

An album released in June by Exosphere, a sublabel of Synphaera Records, Syzygies — a record by an electronic music artist working under the pseudonym Spinnet — has seven tracks: 1) Unitary; 2) Decoherence; 3) Vicious Walks; 4) Secant; 5) Transcendence; 6) Centroid; 7) Large Scale; with very slow, sometimes somber and gradually surreal expectations, the music of Spinnet is a marvelous, though condescending, lugubrious and vertical descent into darkness. While the music is pragmatically technical, and overtly simple in its structural tonalities, the work is amazingly efficient, and definitely delivers to the audience a spectacularly dense and cohesive universe of melancholic shadows, that abruptly conceives a deleterious universe of anxious cosmogony, that stretches the expansive and diluted tissue of the sound. 

A very good work — that departs from a minimalist and very technical musical sensitivity —, Syzygies is an album whose sonority relies mostly on the hazardous atmosphere created by the artist, that discreetly delivers a style that psychologically plays with the listener, in a very intelligent perspective. With a more simple, but expressively lucid style, that grows from within its own introspective darkness, this work is a primordially sensible, refined and sinister musical effort, whose elementary conceptions and creative urgencies will easily captivate enthusiasts of the genre. 

While the sound promotes a growing uneasiness within the listener's mind, its grotesque, but elegant nature progressively saturates the space on which its bizarre, but very original organic style is conceived. Delivering a space-oriented paradigm that aspires to the higher and more genuine qualities of the genre, Syzygies definitely is an album that stands out by the virtues of its eccentric features and sinister uniqueness, although in a way the sound is very homogeneous, despite displaying in several passages a brilliant versatility that revolves around pragmatic and cohesive musical tonalities. 

Despite the fact that the album is relatively concise, Syzygies is a primordial and very beautiful work of art. With an intricate atmosphere — that really circulates over the dense universe of its own sinister demise —, the dehydrated darkness that comes out of this marvelous sonorous conjuncture of pervasive and dispersive symphonies defines a new creative system for the genre, that discreetly showcases a more proficient and somber method of musical sensibilities, designed to rearrange dark ambient elements in a more enigmatic, plural and cohesive consistency.   


Wagner

progressive trance / electronic / ambient

With a virtuous, elegant and very expressive sound, the delightful atmosphere conceived on Gaia is definitely a gentle invitation to travel beyond the imaginary horizons of the psytrance subgenre of electronic music. With a consistent and expansive, though pragmatic and dynamic sonorous layout, this album presents itself as a very diligent and creative work of art. Departing from general ordinary harmonies, gradually, the neutral, but abundant horizontal melodic components that constitutes the bulk of this work becomes involved in a vivacious, but discreet musical configuration, whose vitality revolves around all the majestic elements that are present throughout the whole album. 

Sixty-nine minutes long, the album has eleven tracks: 1) Endless Road; 2) Dreamland; 3) Earthbound; 4) Ring of Clouds; 5) Magic; 6) Breathe; 7) Light; 8) Frozen (a song by the Driftsetters, with an Unknown Reality Remix); 9) Simple Things; 10) Oneness; 11) Soft Transition; with a somewhat lethargic, though gracefully cosmic musical style, the artist delivers to the audience a symphony of unlimited pleasure, whose formidable degree of artistry subtly surpasses the ordinary boundaries of the genre, and astutely explores a more transcendent and splendorous creative paradigm, that effectively dilutes melodies within a colorful timeframe, without interrupting the ventures of its placid cosmogony. Though the artist, Ralph Freund, basically explores the general common ground virtues of psychedelic electronic music, the overall qualities present on this album certainly exposes its primordial grace to more intrinsically somber patterns of introspection. 

Evidently — to enjoy this album —, you must really appreciate this type of music; otherwise, you may become somewhat bored. With this written warning in mind, its primary concern is to emphasize the prominent qualities of this album, whose elemental uneasiness rely on its crystalline surface, that slowly dilates to become progressively more synthetic and flexible. As the sound evolves and reaches the center of the digression of its tempestuous sonorous axis, the melodies ostensibly become more vivacious and perennial, though the calmer atmosphere that fluctuates over the general balance of the style dissipates gradually, in the same way its quintessential harmonies are conceived.   

While this album is not that original, its definitely marvelously conceived, and exposes with a modest degree of sensibility a genuine sense of originality, which hangs gently in the breeze of its formidable and overtly consistent calmness. An interesting work of art that deserves to be appreciated, Gaia, by Unknown Reality, is undoubtedly a very gracious and sensitive work of art, that aggregates a beautiful coalition of sounds directly into the anatomy of the genre. 



Wagner

ambient / electronic

Owann is worried. State of Mind is the third release of Owann (Johan De Paepe), expressing his vexations about the visible climate changes the Earth already faces today. As a mountaineer and photographer for several decades he was able to witness the shrinking of the Alps glaciers with his own eyes. These observations and other issues (caused by humanity) resulting this fickle climate, became the inspiration for this album. 

On his previous CD, Eternal Return, this Belgian electronic artist made a very philosophical inspired  recording. Eternal Return was to our opinion one of the best Belgian releases of electronic ambient music in 2016. We were at first a little skeptical about State of Mind, because of the sensitive topic and the high quality of his previous production. 

But no the less, State of Mind is a journey in thought and humility to honor our planet, holding eight pieces with affections that need to be heard.  The ambient waves are expressively loaded with deep emotional sound effects. Owann starts with sad vibes on the first track The Time Is Now. The listener is instantly aware about the state of Owann’s mind. The tangible tensions of awareness emerge like dark clouds suffocating our only home in this vast universe.  A slow piano guide us through the colorful soundscapes of A Sacred Place carrying deep melancholic tunes. The music speaks to the mind with drifting sounds of despair and hope. 

Varanasi is filled with mixed emotions and voices producing an ethnic atmosphere. This track was composed and performed together with the British ambient guitar player Cousin Silas. Varanasi represents human life and a call for action to make sure these mumbling voices of humanity won’t fade away in a possible critical future. The album ends with The Blue Planet, a stunning ambient ode to Earth, floating on bewitching soundscapes and Berlin School sequences. State of Mind is an overwhelming emotional and philosophical release that grows with every listening trip. Our state of mind after this journey: silently thinking.


​Patsker