New releases this week: Ambient/Drone

Review: French outfit Chateau Flight have spent two years in the studio making music, playing around and experimenting and now the fruits of that work are presented on this new album La Folie Studio. It is full of the sound of analogue machines conversing and the artists themselves speaking through their darkened basslines or eerie pads. Occult worlds are crafted, ambient soundscapes are cooked up and leftfield cosmic explorations occur throughout a journeying album full of a wide range of emotions. This lovely record features guests on the odd track such as Johnny Nash on guitar, Cosmic Neman mumbling on 'Mange', John Cravache playing 'his special organ" and Bony Bikaye singing on 'Esika Molimo Ezali'. It's an occult world of left of centre sound that will keep you coming back for more.

Review: Colin Dunkerley, aka the artist Lapsed Pacifist, navigates the world as a sound engineer by day and leaves little time for his own music. He has plenty of accolades for his work from a niche audience for his productions under the alias Negative Neutron but for years wanted to pursue a more dark ambient route. Finally, he has made time to indulge his own music-making endeavours and now presents Hypatia, an album that materialised over an extended period. It features field recordings and audio loops processed through his modular setup and takes inspiration from Marco Polo's imaginary cities and rather mirrors Dunkerley's creative journey as it evokes memories of cold, distant places and the emotions they stir.

Review: Prince Istari's earliest memories are of his mother playing the tranquil melodies of Erik Satie's pieces on the piano. Skipping school, he'd bask in the sun, absorbed by the serene tunes and years later in 2024, rediscovering his mother's sheet music sparked a creative resurgence. He transformed them into dub versions, crafting a tapestry of sound, and each piece's form dictated its direction, evolving from heavy dub to delicate piano and synthesiser blends. The finale, a relic from his past as Istari Lasterfahrer, features a distorted recording of his mother playing Satie to complete the circle. This special record comes in limited quantities of just 200 copies.

Review: Los Angeles-based Canadian-American experimentalist Claire Rousay has made a name for herself due to her unique approach to post-rock-inflected ambience built off of primitive DIY field recordings captured on a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder, resulting in a curious form of emo musique concrete or "emo-ambient". Following on from a myriad of collaborations, projects, and singles, Sentiment marks her first full-length to put her usually hidden voice front and centre; utilising auto-tune to craft emotive hyper-folk musings delivered with androgynous hues. Described as a "meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex"; Rousay uses fractured narratives and one-way conversations to deliver painfully relatable, often uncomfortable musings, smothered beneath layers of droning reverb, monotonous acoustic plucking, and everyday sounds almost too familiar to pinpoint. The end result is the musical equivalent to our inner monologue at its lowest ebb, nattering incessantly while the world moves on around us, while sonically, it's the culmination of all Rousay's experimentation thus far, yet simultaneously more fearless and fragile.