Ambient / Drone

Review: Those with a passion for early new age music should know all about Iasos, a California-based musician who has been serving up deliciously meditative ambient and new age albums since 1975. Here he offers up a new edition of his sought-after 1978 set "Angelic Music", a warm, dreamy and luscious blend of slowly shifting chords, sustained notes and slow-burn melodies that increase in prominence as each of the two 30-minute tracks progress. Interestingly the versions showcased here are longer than the edited versions initially released, with the flipside - where recordings of crickets rise and fall around swelling synthesizer chords - being our pick of a very strong pair.

Review: Way back in 1975, two albums slipped out that would effectively establish the synthesizer-fired "new age" sound. Arguably the more important - and better quality - of the two was "Inter-dimensional Music", the debut LP from California-based musician Iasos. Here reissued on vinyl for the first time in a decade, the superb set combines drowsy ambient chords, gentle organ melodies and other subtle instrumental flourishes (bass guitar, pedal steel, lazy electric guitar solos) with field recordings of lapping waves, babbling brooks and so on. While new age would become a bit of a cheesy cliche in later years, "Inter-Dimensional Music" is a superb collection of drifting, meditative tracks that soothe and seduce the senses.

Review: IHVH is the duo composed of Mark Van Hoen of Locust fame, and violinist and fellow Touch artist, Zachary Paul. This is their first album together. Entitled, "The Agnostic", this album is an electro-acoustic excursion of sorts into the often obscure worlds of mystical religions of our times. The Kabbalah, the Indian mystics, the Christian church...the moods of these belief systems and more, and their sounds as well, are sampled and referenced throughout these 10 tracks. With a mix of real instrumentation, including the violin playing of Zachary Paul and the cello, bass and viola played by guest musicians on some of the tracks, and the many electronic treatments created by Mark Van Hoen including the sounds of insects, African drumming, liturgical droning, and classical and operatic samples...this portentous and mysterious, at times dark, but overall spiritually absorbing album is an imaginary voyage into the realms of Agnosticism, and it's insinuations into the other major religions of the world.This is the listing is for the limited edition 12" lathe cut record version of The Agnostic. It comes in an edition of only 70 hand worked copies. Please be aware that this deluxe, lathe cut record version listed here has 7 tracks on it. Both the CD and digital versions have an extra 3 tracks on them. Each of these high quality, clear, hand cut records with its 7 tracks comes in a beautifully modified, heavyweight recycled chipboard jacket. On the cover of each jacket is its own uniquely original, tipped on, industrialized and hand collaged 100+ year old religious images from a book illustrated by master Gustave Dore. The engravings have been collaged/modified with hundreds of painstakingly hand cut, equally ancient industrial engravings of gears, machine parts, chains and other suggestive pieces, all cut out with scissors and knife over a period of days. Flip this collage up, and underneath is the textual credit sheet, archivally printed on fragile vintage paper of an equal age. On the back of each record jacket is a modified chart from a book on ancient mystical religions, also printed on the same old paper to match, and each is surrounded by extensive hand stamping created with a vintage set of French symbolist rubber stamps. Each record with its high quality, printed center labels comes in a black polylined inner sleeve, and the entire package comes in an outer heavyweight poly sleeve. As usual, the lathe cut records were hand cut in real time by Michael Lawrence at Bladud Flies, in Wales, UK.

Review: Ludvig Cimbrelius has many different aliases to exercise different musical interests, but his work as Illuvia really stands out thanks to its canny blend of jungle and electronica with ambient. Following plentiful digital releases for labels like Hypnus, this marks the first outing on vinyl for Illuvia, finding a natural home on A Strangely Isolated Place. The combination of raging but artfully submerged breakbeats and expansive drone pads is expertly managed here, sounding at once glacial and furiously kinetic. Like the concept of atmospheric jungle taken to the extreme, this is a unique approach to genre fusion that works beautifully.

Review: When Inhmost made their debut on Greta Cottage Woodpile in 2015, we remarked on the quality of their picture-perfect tributes to the cosmic, soul-warming sound of 1990s ambient labels such as Fax and Apollo. "Everything Is New", their belated second album, takes a similar widescreen, retro-futurist approach, with the publicity-shy duo delivering impeccably crafted, exceedingly atmospheric workouts that variously doff a cap to Global Communication ('Aurulia'), Pete Namlook (the quiet and contemplative 'Break Down'), Space Time Continuum ('Deeper Thoughts'), the Irresistible Force ('Sleep Walk'), Ninja Tune's almost forgotten N Tone label ('Spectrum'), and the more ambient end of Richard H Kirk's Sandoz project (the warm and wonderful 'Sometime For Time').

Review: Japanese duo Inoyama Land's "Danzindan-Pojidon" is a cult experimental ambient classic from 1983. It has been reissued a number of times but always sells out fast, and for good reason: it's a beautifully crepuscular, pastoral musical landscape with sustained minimal synths hypnotising you with delicate keys bringing oriental flavours to gently propulsive ambience. It's organic, environmental and new age music with none of the cliches and will bring a smile to you face as well as warmth to your heart. "Glass Chime" is a particularly standout track of real melodic joy, while "Mizue" is gorgeously melancholic.

Review: Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita have been working together as Inoyama Land since the late 1970s, periodically delivered fine ambient albums that are rarely seen outside of Japan. Yet the bulk of their work has been commissioned pieces meant for theatrical shows, museum displays, sound installations and Japanese buildings (what is known as "environmental music" - a higher class of piped-in lift music, basically). It's these unreleased commissioned pieces that are showcased here. They're really good, too, drifting between chiming new age bliss, creepy electronic soundscapes, and the kind of blissful, electronic-meets-acoustic fare that has always been a hallmark of Japan's vibrant ambient scene.

Review: A subtly appealing tape in a pink cover with an imposing artwork of highly erotic nuances: this cassette, originally promoted as "Candy-Coloured Sex-Shop Electronics", is the absolute gem of Internazionale's discography and is clearly destined to become a timeless modern classic. Together with the track "The Charnel House", included on the compilation Ny Dansk Romantik, the excellent craftsmanship of Elegy For The Victors quickly evoked the loyal admiration of listeners worldwide who were captivated by its charm. This earned the Danish artist a cult status and established him as an accomplished composer. The ambient music with an industrial flair of his earlier releases becomes organic in Elegy For The Victors and acquires life: a life depicting gorgeously melodious passages which tell a story of happy sadness or of sad happiness. Such narrative is constructed by means of a lo-fi but majestic and emotionally charged sensitivity, gentle waves of haunting loops, cinematic samples and sweet maritime sounds which will hypnotise you. This is the long-awaited remastered vinyl reissue with a new artwork which, beautifully and more appropriately, captures the melancholic essence of a masterpiece of rarefied elegance.

Review: Long players from L'estasi Dell'oro, D.A.R.F.D.H.S and Kartei signalled a move into artist albums from Dutch label Field that felt wholly right, and they've scored a real treat again in securing this Cold Radiance LP from Japanese artist IORI. Known for a potent brand of deep techno that has seen releases on Semantica, Prologue and DJ Nobu's Bitta label, Iori Asano is offered the chance to explore something different on this, his second album. Encourage to dabble in more explicitly ambient and experimental composition, Asano positively revels in this creative freedom for an eight-track album he himself likens to an "aerial sci-fi movie soundtrack." The gravelly sonic tones of opener "Transmission" sets the scene for what turns out to be one of the most enjoyable ambient techno albums of 2016 so far.