Back in stock: Ambient/Drone

Review: Director Max Kestner's documentary film portrait Copenhagen Dreams is a tribute to the Danish capital. That also happened to be the place acclaimed composer Johann Johannsson was living at the time he was asked to score the movie. As always he does so with real aplomb and devastating emotionality. This now classic soundtrack features celestial keyboard sounds, emotive string quartets, clarinet, subtle electronic and plenty of melodic magic that both swells and breaks the heart. Academy Award winner Hildur Gudnadottir plays on the soundtrack with various other of Johann's favourite Icelandic talents.

Review: Analogue synth spooks rejoice, Pye Corner Audio is back with further explorations of the sweet spot between nostalgic fuzz and circuit-borne futurism. Ghost Box is a spiritual home for Martin Jenkins' flagship project, and he continues to edge out the scope of the Pye Corner sound without derailing the fundamental atmosphere. On The Endless Echo, warm, pulsing melodics set to eerie keys abound, and there's a fine balance between gorgeous ambient atmospheric pieces and sinewy, danceable rhythms, but Jenkins manages to sound fresh and inspired even while reliably holding true to the overall project aesthetic.

Review: Experimental musician Leyland Kirby has been skirting round the edges of electronic music since the tail end of the '90s, delivering curious concept albums under a dizzying variety of pseudonyms (The Caretaker, The Stranger, Billy Ray Cyrix, Butcher Claws and Bored in Columbia, amongst many others). Here he dons his familiar V/VM alias for a discordant trip into drone territory supposedly inspired by fading memories of the last throes of early '90s outdoor raves. In truth, there's little in the music - a typically hissing, dystopian fusion of murky textures and becalmed electronic tones - to justify the concept, but it matters little. Kirby is a master at creating vaguely spooky, industrial-influenced soundscapes, and The Death of a Rave (A Partial Flashback) only enhances his reputation.

Review: Following a run of superb collaborative releases - including sets created with Ana Stamp, Suzanne Kraft and his old pal Gigi Masin - Jonny Nash has finally got round to recording a new solo album. It's his first lone LP for four years and draws as much from his love of folk and acoustic music as the immersive sound worlds of ambience. As a result, his usual lilting, effects-laden guitar textures, stretched-out synthesiser chords and immersive electronic textures rub shoulders with finger-picked acoustic guitars, pedal steel-inspired motifs, strummed chords and echo and reverb-laden snippets of his own voice (a sonic ingredient he has not used for some time). The results are as magical and mesmerising as you'd expect, with Point of Entry crashing straight in to the list of Nash's strongest releases to date.

Review: After a two-decade interlude, Jim O'Rourke's Moikai returns with Spectral Evolution, a major new work by Rafael Toral. Making his name in the mid-1990s with influential guitar drone platters like Sound Mind Sound Body and Wave Field (both reissued by Drag City in recent years), Toral has never been one to rest on his laurels repeating past glories. In the early years of the 21st century, Toral began his "Space Program", a 13 year investigation of the performance possibilities of an ever-expanding set of custom electronic instruments, played with a fluid phrasing and rhythmic flexibility inspired by jazz. Dedicated to honing his skills on these idiosyncratic instruments, Toral founded his Space Quartet, where his mini-amplifier feedback integrates seamlessly into the frontline of a classic post-free jazz quartet rounded out with saxophone, double bass, and drums. Since 2017, Toral's work has been entering a new phase, often still centred around the arsenal of self-built instruments developed in the Space Program, but with a renewed interest in the long tones and almost static textures of his earlier work; he has also, after more than a decade, returned to the electric guitar. Spectral Evolution is undoubtedly Toral's most sophisticated work to date, bringing together seemingly incompatible threads from his entire career into a powerful new synthesis, both wildly experimental and emotionally affecting.

Review: The limited 7" edition of Marine Eyes' latest full-length ambient record 'To Belong' hears a distilling of the original fourteen-track record down to just four selections. Though every track on the digital version of the album works in its own right, the choice on offer here - 'Hushed', 'Of The West', 'Bluest' and 'Call & Answer' - are particularly deserving of the study on wax. Something static, nigh time-crystalline is achieved on the B2, with its held root note evincing something of the quality of an infinite dream; the A1 recalls some mix of DJ Healer, Malibu or David Motion with its three note tenor-pad lilt; the A2 gets at the best of both worlds, sounding like a paradisiacal bathhouse vision set in slow motion; the B1 is the tensest, opting for a moodier key, but its reversed guitar taps and sustained choir-synth working in a no less lachrymose aesthetic.

Review: What does it mean To Belong? Cynthia Bernard aka. Marine Eyes only begins to scratch the surface of this question on her latest ambient record (yet leaps a great deal forward in wrestling with it nonetheless), following up her prior effort 'Chamomile' with a distinctly beauteous fortnight of forenoon drones, all of which spur the realization that "belonging is everywhere and nowhere". Belonging is indeed a kind of ephemeral longing of being than can only ever be partly grasped, attained. Through its looping washes of warmed, brackish, padded backwash - not to mention its many bass-undergirded angel choirs - the likes of 'Timeshifting', 'Bridges' and 'Mended Own' stand out as such revelatory highlights, all contributing to an incredible album of sonic diaristic reflection, in which every sound sticks out clearly yet plays its proper part in a humble, rose-smelling gestalt.

Review: The irrepressible Past Inside The Present is back with the second in a trilogy of tape loop experiments from T.R. Jordan. This is the limited and hand-numbered CD format and is another cohesive piece of this three-suite puzzle. All of the music was made by the same materials and methods and was all made in "a concentrated period of inspired experimentation with no energy wasted." The artist calls it a form of "musical composting" and the music is full of a sense of musical grace and elegance, peaceful pads and sonic versions of pastoral scenes like flowing rivers and mossy rocks under beautiful wispy clouds.

Review: Mika Vainio's "Olento" is one of the key albums from his fine discography and now, finally, it is available on vinyl for the first time. The sophomore album first landed in 1996 and laid down a new blueprint for minimal techno that has rarely been bettered since. The album is also a fine summation of the Finnish artist's sublime and singular style - icy ambient tundra that are vast in scale but minute in detail, warped synth oscillations that sound at once futuristic but also somehow like field recordings from a lonely part of the arctic circle, and brain melting sine waves that lock you in a trance. Essential.

Review: "I would beg listeners both animal and human to allow these beautiful landscapes I've created in collaboration with Mark Nelson to sing and speak and weep for themselves. Please. Forget about words. Just LISTEN," says Kramer of this latest exploration of sounds less familiar. Meanwhile, Nelson quotes the legendary Arthur Russell for his take on things: "If I could convince you these are words of love, the heartache would remain but the pain would be gone". The Chicago-based composer and performer certainly summarises this listening experience. There's pure bliss running through these serene ambient, almost New Age-style tracks, but within that a certain reflective sadness. Crystalline melodies refract and develop, ebb and flow, at times making pure harmonies, in other moments more atmospheric refrains. They make us long for things that were or may be, although there's still space here for taking stock and acknowledging what is.

Review: This collaborative album from Rob Modell (Deepchord) and Taka Noda (Mystica Tribe) presents a brand new and compelling East-West dialogue in the mode of noir ambient dub. It also provides ample opportunity for these two greats of the genre to take a break from the monikers and operate under their own names - reflecting this one's specialness. Unlike the straight-up kick-centric and transcendentally meditative focus of either artist's solo releases, the pair have here conjured up something entirely beatless and a little more melodically advanced. Expect hurt, rainsoaked, and swamped soundscapes over a long four pieces.

Review: For their latest must-check full length, Swiss ambient and jazz enthusiasts WRWTFWW have offered up a timely reissue of Satoshi Ashikawa's previously Japan-only 1982 album "Still Way". In some quarters it's considered a triumph of Japanese minimalism - an ambient set that was equally as inspired by Erik Satie as Brian Eno. The sounds are sparse, atmospheric and alluring, with simple harp, vibraphone, piano and flute motifs taking it in turns to rise and fall across the soundspace. It's intricate, soft-focus and hugely poignant, evoking memories of similarly lauded sets by Ashikawa's countrymen Hiroshi Yoshimura and Midori Takada. In other words, it's sublime.