ambient / black metal / experimental

Mosaic – a word for a stone puzzle picture comprised of hundreds of colored stones that only makes  sense when looking at the whole picture. Band names should not be overestimated but with Mosaic from Eastern Germany the name is really a namesake. This album is as much medieval market square as it is modern black metal auditorium, as much ritualistic wooden-ness as it is metallic clang in the modern world. There are lyrics that are as simplistic as “Come on!” but there are also lines where famous poets are quoted and their words interwoven with those of mastermind Martin van Valkenstijn. 

Martin is not only the composer and singer for Mosaic, he’s also a multi-talented guy who plays the majority of the instruments on the record himself – some clearly old-fashioned and medieval like the Nordic lur, others as normal as for example the bass guitar. He also recorded the field recordings for the record which is to be released soon via Eisenwald Tonschmiede and which shows a very cleverly arranged mix of black metal and medieval scants. 

However, van Valkenstijn doesn’t like being alone in the recording studio so he invited numerous guests including his wife or genre reps like Werian-drummer D.E. or Empyrium’s Schwadorf. Those artists comply with his line of thought and his wish to deliver another blackened medieval folklore record that hardly faces competition this year because of its brilliant songwriting, for example in “Ambrosia XIX” when simple bagpipe sounds are interwoven with deep chords and enchanted vocals just before the modern clever singular drum kicks set in and the track flows into a totally different direction yet never forgetting where it started. 

One might argue that for a band so obsessed with lyrics the vocals are too far in the back of the mix but at the same time it should be noted that they can be read off from the lyrics sheet so that you still get an impression of Martin’s love for literature which he also displayed on All Saints’ Day publishing a musical cover of Georg Trakl’s poem “Allerseelen”. But on the other hand one should note his musical vision: His music is part of a ritual, sung around a fire by the bard. 

The idea of a mosaic is on full blast here as every bit of a song is as well-structured as the others. Martin van Valkenstijn is really able to set another stone into his very personal mosaic giving us a brilliant collection of new songs. 


Thorsten

electronic / space ambient

Exosphere Music

Woodland Structure is an album released on October 27, by Exosphere, a sublabel of American Synphaera Records. Work of British-based space ambient sound artist Sean Costello — under the alias Isostatic —, Woodland Structure is a formidably serene, magnificent work of art, whose delightfully pleasant, sometimes lethargic sonorous atmospheres conceive a world of homogeneous tranquility, where everything is made to renew calmness as a primary element of reality, but without renouncing to the exhilarating power of sensible harmonious dissonances, that reinvigorates the dispersive fragrances of the melodies, to be perceived as a distinct degree of colorful vitalities.  

With eight tracks — 1) Canopy; 2) Woodland Wakes; 3) Hollow Oak; 4) Falling Leaf; 5) Glade; 6) Sycamore Seeds; 7) Ash; 8) Woodland Sleeps; — the general anatomy of the music is simple, but full of vitality and splendor; with a creative guideline that can be as profusely versatile as discreetly diffuse, the artist's proficiency is displayed on the technical sensibilities and stylistic expansion of the melodies, that anticipates the major horizontal distinctions between the restless boundaries of the harmonies, and the serene formalism of the musical tonalities, that imperceptibly converge to make the sound more dilated, cohesive and clean, as the essence of its consistency gradually becomes more and more defined. 

The salutary serenity of the harmonies dive deep into the dark realm of its sonorous vicissitudes; but with an impeccable technical disposition, Isostatic delivers to the listener a more virtuous version of reality, that is entirely subjugated by the proverbial sensibilities of sound. With a subjective system of dispersive possibilities delineated by an intricate pattern of smooth sonorous cosmogonies, the musical diagram established by the artist can be perceived as being somewhat restricted, given the structural standards of his continuously expanding atmospheres; nevertheless, the abstract tensions subtly dispersed by his diligently sculpted harmonious configurations deliberately increases the value of his spectral dissonances, that grow over the renitent distensions of its own dense and dynamic vastness. 

With amazingly crafted tracks — that reverberates over the vicinities of its own splendid and serene, but distinctive and protuberant densities —, Woodland Structure, by Isostatic, is one of the most marvelous, pungent and genuinely sensible records recently released by Exosphere. With a vigorously impeccable and consistent, but at the same time soft and organic atmosphere, Isostatic conceives a delightful world of personal solitude, where everything that is human is celebrated in an introspective realm of purely existential fugacious light. 


Wagner

experimental / electronic / dark ambient / ambient / noise 

Nostalgie De La Boue

The world is all that is​.​.. is the most recent release by German electronic underground experimental noise artist Hans Castrup. With six tracks — The concept of sinking, Popular imagination, Full of used notes, Paradox difference, Clarification of geometry and Upon a hill —, on this work, like his previous albums, Hans continues to dive deep into a realm of lugubrious, melancholic and sinister sound experiences, where he clearly heads towards a stylistic direction of impious, responsive, nihilist and fatalist demise. Each and every album released by Hans Castrup seems to be the perfect soundtrack for a H.P. Lovecraft horror story. 

Already in the first track, the dense, epic and monumental The concept of sinking, we clearly see that the artist — deliberately or not — establishes his creative efforts towards a prominently dark ambient musical cosmogony. With pulsating, almost afflictive sonorous reverberations, the sensitive pluralism that emanates from the expansive and digressive agonies that subtlety comes out of these tracks certainly makes this album one of the darkest in the artist's discography. 

Nevertheless, there is also a lighter side in the music — albeit ostensibly dispersive —, that sounds as a more discreet, reasonable, proverbial uneasiness allocated in the background, that ocasionally flirts with our projective sensibilities, gracefully establishing an harmonious pattern that can be as decisively obscure as it is delightfully stimulating. 

The music gradually reveals itself as it is: as complex — in the darker depths of its relentless and dissolute darkness —, as it is majestically simple and objective, in the way it calmly delivers its pungent and uneventful dimension of poingnant mortality smoothly to the listener. Just as impressive is Hans' remarkable ability to progressively reinvent his music with more diluted elements, while never losing his virtuous and graceful sonorous identity. 

With the conception of an exceedingly dense, cohesive and robust musical atmosphere, it looks like Hans Castrup has crafted The world is all that is​.​.. as a pervasive parallel dimension destitute of acessible colorful sensibilities, whose mandatory elements are all indebted to a relentless and abrasive sonorous tissue, made entirely of an unforgiving, infinite and ruthless demise. 

As the perfect sonorous background for a surreal hallucinatory black and white alternate reality — like the ones shown in old sixties television anthology series like The Twilight Zone and One Step Beyond —, the music conceived on this marvelous album by Hans Castrup transports us to a whole different, more diluted, arbitrary and conspicuous diagram of existence, where the fugacious ephemeralities of life seems dormant, because they were never what they seemed to be, in the first place. 

Your sensitivities will be all confused, before they would be entirely configured in a completely different sonorous perception, diametrically opposite to what you had expected. In the end, The world is all that is​.​..  is a fantastic descent into a world of gloom, solitude and demise, without any possibilities to return. 


Wagner

drone / ambient

Sietse Van Erve is already more twenty years active as Orphax and runs the Moving Furniture Records label that is specialized in experimental and electronic music. Circles, his last drone recording, was played live for several years in various forms and growing into a new direction. Van Erve’s found his biggest inspiration in the drone and minimalist work of Eliane Radigue. 

Life Circles has no beginning and no end. This thirty-six minute drone can be played endlessly and dislocating the receiver’s grip of time awareness. Orphax whirring drone patterns have a property to liquefy the surrounding world and intensify the listening experience.  The recordings were made in London and Birmingham, the first one in a relaxing state, the second with uprising tensions. Both registrations were melted together into a strange emotional journey.

To drone or not to drone? Well, at the first listening adventure of Life Circles, the humming sounds had a lack of depth.  Once we used our headphones, the strange world of Orphax was audible and the obvious purpose of the artist was in reach. Life Circles demands a certain input and an open minded view from the listener. 

This sonic adventure will be candy for the ears of the drone lovers, to others this will be only sound. By all means we favorite this recording and enjoyed the sonication of our brain cells. Let us drone again on the endless circles of life. This recording is available on cd and digital formats on the Moving Furniture Records Bandcamp page.

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Patsker

electronic / ambient / post rock

I know, I 'm getting behind on all the albums coming in to review. I'm afraid due to a whole number of different circumstances, some of those releases will eventually get lost in the pile but there are some beauties I definitely want to check out and recommend. Surely, I don't want to miss out on those amazing releases from Sound In Silence, which, throughout the years, have become one of my favorite labels. Their output has been one of an exceptionally high quality, not only because of their stable of talented artists but also because of the recognizable artwork and packaging. So, even though this album dates from July, I need to write about it.

Of course, Wil Bolton is no stranger to Merchants Of Air. For over fifteen years, Wil Bolton has been creating sonic works of art, mostly situated in the ambient scenes. 'Surface Reflections' is his glorious return to Sound In Silence, after the highly acclaimed album 'Whorl' in 2014. Once again, Bolton treats us to enigmatic pieces of music. There are five tracks on this album, good for forty-four minutes of soul warming ambient and blissful meditation. The album opens with the lingering 'Shrouded', which can best be described as a lengthy soundscape.

'In The Air Of The Morning' is a bit more playful but still remains on a gently, soft level. This one comes with an appropriate title as well. You can almost hear the city wake up. You can almost see men and women dragging themselves to their day jobs. In fact, this tune is where I decided to add "post rock" to the set of genres. Although you cannot compare this to bands like Explosions In The Sky or Mogwai, this music has a similar, narrative atmosphere in which you can easily loose your self into.

Even though it mostly follows its predecessors' example, 'Shallows' nudges more towards the noisier side of the ambient spectrum. It seems to drive on static noise, with vague samples and melodies interfering. Something similar can be said from the other tunes, with closer and title track 'Surface Reflections' being the absolute highlight. Soothing yet a tiny bit uneasy, calm yet somewhat impending. That is the music you can find on this excellent album. Ambient fans will know what to do...


​Serge

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