Kranky US 黑胶唱片和CD

Review: A curveball for the ambient artist, 'No Highs' represents the longtime Tim Hecker's focus on the present state of the world. Compared to the textural blissouts of his earlier work, the clue for the meaning of this album is in the title. 'No Highs' is rather bleak and unsettling, reflecting the polluted and chaotic state of many parts of the world - all of it if we continue on the same path. Hecker's usual sonics are replaced with distortion, noise and dissonance, using electronics, saxophone and strings. Not intended to soothe or distract, as is often assumed with much 'ambient music', this is an album that succeeds in confronting and challenging instead.

Review: Second time around for Scott Morgan AKA Loscil's seventh album, Coast/range/arc, which first hit record stores way back in 2011. It's an album worth revisiting - or checking for the first time, for that matter - since it offers a near perfect distillation of the ambient producer and sound artist's now trademark sound. Full of beautiful, icy and slowly unfurling compositions that tend towards the meditative, the set is notable for Morgan's seemingly innate ability to craft immersive soundscapes out of a mixture of hazy drone textures, gaseous electronic chords, soft-touch melodies, atmospheric field recordings and simmer, near cinematic musical movements. This reissue also includes the previously unheard 'Black Tusk (Descent)', a deliciously woozy piece of Biosphere-esque arctic ambience.

Review: Lawrence English's album Colours of Air on Kranky finds him hooking up with fellow composer loscil aka Scott Morgan. The pair find a perfect sweet spot between their respective backgrounds as they work up absorbing ambient sounds from a collection of recordings of a century-old pipe organ that lives in the Old Museum in Brisbane, Australia. The source recordings were then processed, transformed, and elevated into these absorbing soundscapes where timbre, spatial fluctuation and swelling drones all sweep you off your feet. It is a truly original and captivating piece of work.

Review: A fresh, atmospheric sound is proferred by South Carolina singer and producer Nancy Blues in the form of her latest vinyl LP Exit Simulation, in which she cuts through the intertwined hazes of childhood memory and personal psychogeography to produce a veritably ultra-ambient dust cloud of sound in 13 tracks. At its core, the album trickles faintly forth from the watershed that is neo-soul - multi-layering her voice; harmonizing; pitting honest, raw rimshots-n'-crackles against contemporary stylistic cornerstones like lo-fi and night-bussy ambient electronica - all to evoke, convincingly, the mood of stasis in which she finds current solace in her current home of Charleston. Evocative of having found a newfound time and place to reflect, Blues conjures up the weekends of her youth, spent mesmerized at the ambient music of the slow-paced devotionals performed by the local Oklahoman church band.

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.