Back catalogue: Ambient/Drone

Review: Past Inside The Present go big with this Winter 2022 Deluxe Boxset across three cassette tapes. It's a superb showcase of the talents on their roster and includes a collection of music made by Italian composer Sofia degli Alessandri-Hultquist aka Drum & Lace between 2016 and 2019. There is also an album by London-based Will Bolton which finds the "beauty in ruins, decay and the details and textures of everyday scenes" and an album from People Galan and David Cordero which saw the pair send sound fragments back and forth over the internet and develop them until they both liked what they heard. It all adds up to a brilliant snapshot of some of ambient's best current practitioners.

Review: There are immersive experiences that inspire artists to do great things. Then there's Aboutface heading to the Wampis Territory, in the Peruvian Amazon, to live with the local community, learn a little of how they live and their relationship with the Lungs of the Planet, capturing field recordings collaboratively with those people, and trying to articulate their world through an electronic-organic deep dive album. After you've got over the jealousy about how life-changing that trip was, let's focus on the fundamentals. This is seriously escapist stuff that seems to have been made using every root, branch, and animal encountered during those weeks. The synthesised elements are audible, but take a backseat to what was and is actually there. Or here. Quite unlike anything we've heard this year, it's a stunning way to raise awareness and support for Indigenous-led conservation and initiatives trying to stop illegal deforestation and ecocide.

Review: Sydney-based friends MP Hopkins and Mary MacDougall bring a haunting edge to folk music here. 'Weeds' is like lo-fi horror film music with tape-recorded radio static giving a foreboding atmosphere. 'Clay Graffiti' sounds like a post-apocalyptic ghost story with the spoken word conjuring images of landscapes tormented by wind and life dissolved. The group clearly have a knack for sequencing and the finer details of what makes a great album. After the intense end-of-the-world feel of the track that closes side A, Side B opens with 'Yellow Rose', which feels like spring; lyrically, in the bright piano, guitar and through the vocal timbre. It gives a sense of renewal that wouldn't have the same impact if it wasn't for the harsh winter feel of the track before it. But don't mistake this for anything twee - experimental folk is taking over the underground cultural zeitgeist and Warm Currency are an important part of that. This is the band's third release on the Horn of Plenty label and it's a solid follow-up to Returns (2022) and Live at the Petersham Bowling Club (2023).

Review: This project began in 2018 when Jonny Campos was on a break from playing guitar with Grammy-winning Lost Bayou Ramblers and recorded ambient pedal steel passages at Kirkland Middleton's house. The resulting tracks are named after vanished Southern Louisiana waterways and evoke a sense of impermanence. The music flows like a dream, slipping into consciousness as a serene, meditative experience or a deeply resonant one. The album first came digitally and on cassette via Nouveau Electric Records in 2020 but now lands on vinyl thanks to DFA.

Review: London's Loraine James has built her signature sound through a mix of refined composition, gritty experimentation and intricate electronic programming. Under her Ghostly International alias Whatever The Weather, she explores emotional temperature and environment. Her second full-length offers a warmer tone compared to its predecessor by moving from an arctic cover photo to a desert scene. Mastered by Josh Eustis, the album blends hypnotic atmospheres and rhythmic textures with diaristic field recordings. The lead single, '12-C,' weaves melody and texture into a soul-stirring groove and is exemplary of James' imaginative and genre-defying approach.

Review: "One might thus regard the Welsh rarebit as a Machine in which a process is applied to the conditioning and perception of the world of bread and cheese." Suffice to say, John White might not have had the same ideas about what constitutes Machine Music back in 1976 as you do today. This is also the first time we've ever managed to get a reference to Welsh rarebit into the first line of writing about a record, so everyone is learning something today. "The Machines" White refers to are the individual tracks themselves, all recorded between 1967 and 1972 and all comprising different combinations of a thing. Six pairs of "bass melody instruments" made 'Autumn Countdown Machine', different permutations of "the articulations 'ging, gang, gong, gung, ho!'" comprise 'Jews Harp Machine'. And 'Son of Gothic Chord' is crafted from the sequential chord progression of four keyboard players, spanning an octave. Conceptual experimental and wildly imaginative stuff on the borderline of electronica, abstract, mathematical and something otherworldly.

Review: Adam Wiltzie is an American-born, Belgium-based ambient composer, sound designer, film soundtracker and one half of A Winged Victory For The Sullen. His latest album-length suite was inspired by two things: a recurring dream in which people die after listening to his music, and a fascination with sodium pentathol, a barbiturate routinely used as a general anaesthetic. It's a kind of musical exploration of - to paraphrase his label's accompanying press release - tiptoeing between beauty and oblivion, or sleepiness and wakefulness. Mixed by Loop man Robert Hampson and featuring strings recorded in Budapest, the album ebbs and flows majestically, with billowing orchestral moments nestling side by side with creepy ambience, immersive and dream-like soundscapes, simmering melodic motifs and the kind of arty but enveloping fare that reminded us a little of the Orb and Robert Fripp's mid-90s FFWD project.

Review: 'No Beauty In The World' is a reflection of how in a world so cruel we can find beauty, with its music bouncing between beautiful ambience and piano loops, modular synth melodies to darker textural and feedback driven drones. Unlike other wounds records where the fluidity of the entire album tells a story, 'No Beauty In The World' explore various sonic possibilities and territories. This is a culmination of over 2 years of writing and recording, constantly driven by the uncertainty and darkness in the world that we live in. Despite it all, the sonic arc of the album gives us something to hope for, maybe there is beauty in the end. The record was engineered and mixed by Diogo Strausz (Far Out Recordings) in France and mastered (digital and vinyl) by Lawrence English (Room40). The record features collaborations from guitarist Carlos Ferreira and drummer / synthesist Phillip Stosberg.