Review: Using only a guitar and the occasional synthesiser, this two-track debut album is a visceral experience, with the record quickly pulling us into a listening world thick with uncertainty, unease and disorientation. At times, the experience is just plain chilling, with some of the more crystalline moments on 'Track 2' invoking the sinister melodies of a 1970s horror movie soundtrack. Amazingly, these aren't the darkest sections, either. The feeling of doom is omnipresent throughout, with distorted noises nodding to the clank and screech of old rusted metal, or simply the strange sounds that come with being in the house alone at night. Environmental recordings are interspersed, which only adds to the sense of not quite being alone in this place. A moody, highly compelling ride that sends shivers down the spine for both musical and atmospheric reasons.
Review: We're starved for two-sided 12"s in the world of ambient music, but Chris Madak aka. Bee Mask has refreshingly graced us with one this week. It should be said that there's Skee Mask and then there's Bee Mask; the latter is far more unsung, undeservingly so. Madak's music is abstract and cerebral enough to have lent him credo enough to have released on the likes of Weird Forest, Spectrum Spools and Room40. But this latest reissue, 'Versailles Is Not Too Large Or Infinity Too Long', hears him plunge the ethereal heights for the US label Unifactor. Originally released on cassette on Chondritic Sound in 2008, these pieces deserve the renewed attention and the fresh laying to wax, since they're not 'regular ole' ambient cuts in the slightest. Unafraid of indulging the high end freqs, Bee Mask fleshes out a mood of uncertain, urgent bliss - sizzling, crunching and soaring the drone, as if its maker were a modern Icarus flying too close to the sun.
Review: Back in 2005 we might not have predicted what a phenomenon Ghost Box would become. In the years since, the label has become a beacon for the hauntological exploration of Britain's inherent oddness creeping just below the surface. Julian House's graphic design is a huge part of the label's artistic merit, and it figures his music as The Focus Group follows a similarly aesthetically rigorous direction. There's a pastoral collage quality to Hey Let Loose Your Love which takes you right back to the 70s, with beautiful musical passages offset by surrealist samples and unexpected diversions into the recent history of these wyrd isles.
Review: Gnac is a project composer Mark Tranmer started in 1990 and The Echoes on Departure is his seventh album with this alias. He says he started this one soon after he finished his last one, Afternoon Frost, in 2021. It is a more electronic record than that one with some of his favourite chord progressions "and a few new ones." There is also the addition of a human voice on two tracks with Kathleen Stosch of Constant Follower on both Bittersweetness' and 'Until The Heart Stops.' Both are evocative centerpieces for this most lovely piano-led baroque waltz.
Review: High concept and absolutely beautiful don't always fit together in a sentence. Enter St. Swithin's Day Storm, a record which in one way is to the point, but in almost every other completely wild and unique. Working with weather research scientist Nigel Meredith, the pair recorded the sounds made by a geomagnetic storm in space, on a day in June which, according to folklore, is supposed to decide the rest of summer's weather. Captured via the Halley VI Research Station's low frequency receiver, those moments of cosmic disruption, including chorus emissions, which, when played back, resemble birdsong, along with Meredith's explanations of such phenomena and its effect on Earth, then form the basis for a stargaze-worthy ambient journey that feels out of this world.
Krispy Kat Whack - "Live At The Lube Room" (26:32)
Review: "The Next World Sound Series is a collection of work by contemporary sound artists working in long form instrumental composition and translated to the tangible medium of vinyl. These modern day offerings capture the analog quality and experience of last century electronic recordings, presented to you with today's technological advances in home playback, for your environmental listening pleasure." Or so say heads at the iconic and truly enigmatic label Dark Entries of this latest addition to their catalogue. A collection of work that spans the strangely frantic sci-fi tones of 'Oberenginen 0930' to the almost monastic drone of 'Soma', dubbed and muffled drums and vocals on 'Lixsm', club-ready broken beats of 'Destruct', and the evocative futurist refrains and samples of 'John Gore'. As expansive as it is exploratory and adventurous, you'll need to set aside some serious listening time for your first play here.
Review: Rings Around Saturn (Rory McPike) returns for his latest full-length album after 2018's self-titled brokntoys debut, moving on from self-definition to explore a new concept, that of 'All Things Shining'. The LP touches on ambient, electroacoustic studies and filmic/VGM composition, but outside of these references, it stands as a beautiful suite of songs, effortlessly evoking a palette that seems to burst and ooze with a mood of jubilance and hope. Fans of hedonic calculators like Barker will similarly pleased at its use of trance dispositifs, but which are yet lent a glossier, rainmaking vibe ('Sphereology'), while later cuts go on to evoke idyllic Hellenic hallways and walled paradisiacal gardens, with a vocal-angelic edge.
Review: Raison d'etre is Peter Andersson and Troum is Stefan Knappe and Martin Gitschel and between them they take a deep dive into subterranean worlds on this collection of amenity works that was recorded between 2011 and 2014. This is the first time they have been pressed to wax and we're delighted about it - the grainy pads and crystalline synths that cut through the foggy mire sound so much better on wax. Each of these pieces is an ever shifting tapestry of icy noise, luminous drones and guitar-driven melodies with a ghostly quality. It's a devastatingly impactful work from these dark ambient maestros.
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