Back catalogue: Ambient/Drone

Review: Current scene favourite Nils Frahm teamed up with Icelandic multi-instrumentalist Olafur Arnalds on three breath taking excursions through lush ambient textures on "Stare" as a surprise release back in 2012 for label founder Robert Rath. "A1" features Frahm's entrancing irresistible melody over some gorgeous all-consuming strings and glacial soundscapes courtesy of Arnalds. "A2" with its heavenly, transcendental beauty has just got to be heard while "B1" explores darker territory with its excavating soundscapes accompanying the most hauntingly delicate cello notes. Exquisite!

Review: The notes we were sent with this new entry into the Ilian Tape ITX Series read "Mushroom Tea Garden Ceremony". It is indeed a rather occult and freaky ambient oeuvre that will have you hallucinating and second guessing where dreams start and reality ends such is the wooziness of the music. It is smeared with odd samples - a sad string, a window creaking open, a distant horn, so is hugely evocative both emotionally but also in terms of the mental imagery it cooks up as it plays out. We don't really know much about NIMU, but this release has got us wanting more.

Review: The young but auspicious Amplify label is back with a four fearsome techno EP. Normal Stage is at the buttons and heads out on a warm and dreamy dub techno vibe that soon soothes your soul. 'FV2' is another eight-minute plus dub excursion that quickens the pace but is no less smooth and supple, while 'FV3' brings some airy and organic melodies up top that drift about with a curious charm. 'FV4' shuts down with the most masterfully empty dub of the lot - a wide open space in which to lose yourself and all your woes.

Review: For the second release on New York City's Peace Anthem Records, Annie Garlid
Aka UCC Harlo - a viola player and singer from Connecticut, living in Berlin - joins NY Graffiti for what the label so eloquently described itself as 'Ketamine-paced grooves, baroque miniatures, hazy-humid sonics, and dub inflections'. On the A side, you've got UCC Harlo serving up the minimal atmospherics of 'Let's See' awash in shimmering FM synth aesthetics, followed over on the flip by the evocative breaks of 'UN' by NY Graffiti, not to mention each of them delivering a remix of the other's track.

Review: Iceland's Olafur Arnalds (Kiasmos) and German multi-instrumentalist Nils Frahm team up again for some breathtaking excursions in classical/ambient crossover bliss. Frahm's sombre piano passages gently dance over Arnalds' serene soundscapes and eerie field recordings on this bittersweet and emotive journey. What was meant to be a one hour video recording of the duo in action turned out to be an eight hour long improvisation session and these are some of the segments of the wonderful marathon recording. We particularly enjoyed the gorgeously haunting electronic soul captured on "23:52" where those analogue synth strings just rise and rise to an epic climax.

Review: Lewis and Void take themselves out of their own stylistic realms on this Full-On album in order to explore new and unique collaborative worlds. They are both known for their work on Editions Mego and for pushing noise, abstract and ambient boundaries, seeking out their own voices in the extreme ends of the spectrum. They fire ideas back and forth at one another here in order to find a dialogue with their tools - guitars, synths, euro rack modular systems, voices, samples and outboard processing. It is brutal and playful in equal measure with wild new shapes, sounds and textures coming at you thick and fast.

Review: Last Spring, long-serving electronic experimentalist Norm Chambers (otherwise known as Jurgen Muller and Panabrite) was diagnosed with a rare form of sinus cancer after a period of ill health, During the time he spent waiting on news from his doctors, Chambers recorded what he thought would be his final sonic statement - an album called Facets that he rushed-out digitally. Here it lands on wax, alongside the happier news that so far Chambers' treatment has been a resounding success. Musically, Facets is a little more unsettling than some of the artist's work, with his usual fluid and dreamy ambient sounds being joined by angular and off-kilter beats, strange sounds and unsettling electronic rhythms. It's a formula that makes for interesting and occasionally intense listening.

Review: Named in honour of an experimental silent movie of the early 1920s, Polish duo Nanook of the North are a unique proposition: a collaboration between composer/violionist Stefan Wesolowski and electronic musician/guitarist Piotr Kalinski that defies easy categorization. Heide, the pair's second album, was recorded pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and its' musical blend of effects-laden ambient electronics, simmering strings and acoustic guitar motifs was reportedly inspired by "wildness and untamedness". It's a genuinely brilliant, ultra-atmospheric affair that uses repetition magnificently (a nod, we'd argue, to American minimalism) and benefits from guest contributions from mezzo-soprano Margarita Slepakova.

Review: Ceremony Of Seasons drops its first two releases in quick succession and after Ross Gentry's inaugural ambient wine pairing, Brett Naucke now repeats the trick. He has written this lush ambient long player "to be paired with Conjured In Shadows, a Mendocino-grown, carbonic macerated Nouveau wine from the 2022 harvest." It is a superbly organic soundtrack with found sounds and plenty of evocative designs all bringing to mind a warm day outdoors on 'An Open Secret', celestial skies on 'A Glass Touch' and autumn melancholy on 'Private Life'. The flipside explores the rest of the season with icy melodies and candle-lit sounds that evoke hymnal solitude.

Review: Brooklyn-based Rachika Nayer broke the mould with her startling 2021 debut, Our Hands Against the Dusk. She then proved that was no fluke with follow-up release, Fragments - more a collection of songs rather than an LP per se - and by 2022 had cemented herself as a darling of the chin-stroking music press with Heaven Come Crashing, a record that could not be more beautiful if it tried, but one which also manages to leave us feeling like something has had a huge impact on our lives. For the most part, Heaven is a blissful electronic album that pays homage to silent zeitgeists of nightlife culture - 6am walks through empty city streets with chosen family, moments of strange stillness, depth and quiet on a dance floor. But all that climaxes on the closing titular offering, which explodes into a symphony somewhere between DNTEL, Explosions In the Sky, and LTJ Bukem.

Review: A Beautiful Place label founder Noha (also head of Panick Panick) offers up his latest slice of sonic wonderment with The Abyss Between A&B. Hailing from Italy's great capital, Rome, but having lived in New York for some time, once that's clear you can't help but hear a mixture of old world musicality and modern - or indeed futuristic - production happening across this startlingly good, rather different electronic effort.
Comparing the first and second tracks alone is enough to prove this, with 'Today' and its beautiful beatless harmonies invoking a kind of ancient mystery, while the dub-stepp-y 'Kudos Kid' feels very much born in the clubs and streets of our time (while also nodding to another synth gem, Elektro Guzzi). From there, things continue to flit between those two worlds, combining lush soundscapes with infectious and often slightly off centre percussion, making for one of those outings that can make you move and dream.

Review: Johnstown, Pennsylvania isn't the first town on everyone's lips when it comes to deep dive electronics. But then, sadly, most people still don't seem to have encountered Nondi. Better known to some of those who have as Tatiana Triplin, the US producer and head of the 'net label HRR has developed a cult following for her experimental takes on some already quite leftfield electronic genres: breakcore and footwork, alongside Detroit-hued techno. What's remarkable about all this is the fact she confesses to only really having direct experiences of these genres online, as oppose to amid the sweat and frenzy of the situations they were first intended for. While this might lead some to assuming her work lacks authenticity, nothing could be further from the truth - it's all so authentic because the interpretations are entirely hers.

Review: Nosaj Thing's fifth studio album, 'Continua' - his first full-length excursion since 2017 - earned plenty of plaudits when it first appeared on streaming platforms in the autumn. Listening to this belated CD edition, it's easy to see why. Warmer, deeper and dreamier than much of his work, it begins with the picturesque pianos-and-ambient pads of 'Continua' and ends with the drowsy, slow-motion electronic dream pop of 'Different Life' with vocalist Eyedress. In between, he shuffles between deep, breakbeat driven dreaminess ('My Soul or Something', with KAZ), chopped and screwed aquatic soul (the serpentwithfeet-sporting 'Woodland'), gently jazzy ambient soul ('Grasp', which features a trio of guests), ethereal hip-hop wooziness ('Look Both Ways' with Pink Siifu) and impeccable ambient pop (Panda Bear hook-up 'All Over').

Review: Steven Stapleton is Nurse With Wound. Originally a band, sometimes abbreviated to NWW, since 1978 the English act has explored a range of dark and brooding styles, including industrial, dark ambient, drone, and noise. Well known for sound collages - usually pretty intense in nature - influences come from the dada and surrealist art schools, cabaret music, John Cage, The Beach Boys, Krautrock, and Musique Concrete. She & Me Fall Together In Free Death is, in this instance at least, the highly anticipated reissue of the landmark album which proved just how good NWW is at all forms of song craft. Work here edges into the eerier end of Liars collaborating with Tom Waits' at his most experimental and that's really clutching for reference points. Quite unlike anything else you'll buy today, we promise.

Review: The latest Nurse With Wound release takes a deep dive into Stephen Stapleton's arhives and returns with a radically expanded version of 1990 set The Ladies Home Tickler, a typically eccentric and out-there blast of sonic surrealism crafted from tape loops, spoken word samples, weird noises, fractured electronics, and shards of bass, synth and guitar. In this edition, the original album's two lengthy tracks ('Duelling Banjos' and 'Registered Nurse') come accompanied by six previously unreleased cuts recorded during the same sessions, but previously unreleased. While one of these is an alternative take on 'Registered Nurse', the rest are increasingly wild and pleasingly freeform soundscapes in Stepleton's distinctive style. An essential purchase for dedicated NWW fans.

Review: A Monster's Expedition + Earlier Adventures is a double disc collection of music from four different video games (namely A Monster's Expedition, Sokobond, Cosmic Express and A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build) all composed by Eli Rainsberry, Allison Walker, Nick Dymond, and Priscilla Snow. Each one is utterly unique to the game and each one comes laden with beautiful soothing atmospheres delicately coloured with ponderous and whimsical melodies that will distract you from whatever you are doing they are so gorgeous. This is music to get lost in and it comes with superbly serene artwork from Andre Rodrigues.

Review: Joseph Shabason, Matthew Sage, and Nicholas Krgovich form a harmonious triangle, both musically and geographically. Hailing from Toronto, Colorado, and Vancouver respectively, they converged at Sage's barn studio nestled at the foot of the Rockies to explore their shared talent for finding beauty in life's mundane moments. Shabason, known for blending late 80s adult-contemporary and smooth jazz aesthetics into ethereal soundscapes, joins forces with Sage, who combines instrumental prowess with synthesis and field recordings to evoke the natural world's whimsy and profundity. Completing the trio is Krgovich, whose observational poetics add a relatable touch to their calm expressionism. Their collaborative album, warmly Shabason, Krgovich, Sage extends the wry and melancholic micro-miracles established in their previous works.