Tags: New Age

Review: Night Songs is the latest record from awakened souls, the Los Angeles based husband and wife duo- James and Cynthia Bernard (marine eyes). In the Spring of 2021, they found a good night's rest was more important than ever to help them through pandemic days of schooling kids from home and balancing work and life. After going on an evening walk, James and Cynthia would write in their bedroom studio and test the evening's songs out for sleep. Even prior to being together, they both loved searching for just the right album to calm their minds at the end of the day. Night Songs is their combined version of a sleepy evening record, exploring slowly evolving loop-based ambient primarily using bass guitar and vocal textures. The tracks which ultimately made it on the album helped them relax enough to go to a place where thoughts fade.

Review: To truly understand what's happening here you first need to know the background. Snowflakes Are Dancing is the delightfully evocative and - let's face it - wonderfully endearing title of Isao Tomita's second studio album. But this isn't really the Japanese musician's own work. Instead, it takes the arrangements of Claude Debussy, particularly the French composer's so-called 'tone paintings', and splashes new colour across the palette by way of some modern toys.

So while the guy who wrote the notes did so in the midst of industrialisation in Europe, his interpreter from the Far East worked on those tunes at a point in time when modernism was in full swing, and marching forward so quickly the future was already in sight. Using a Moog synthesiser, still then very much an experimental toy, and Mellotron, the result is an electronic overture worthy of the best sci-fi scores.

Review: Craven Faults follows up a trio of sold-out EPs starting in 2020 with a second full-length album. It is another record that moves the artist's story onwards with fantastic analogue electronic sounds that take us across the north of Britain, all viewed through 100 years of popular music. Standers again finds him honing his craft across meticulous tracks that paint vivid pictures of everything from Norse influences to piano drones. It is bleak but beautiful experimental music with a storytelling narrative and absorbing undercurrent.

Review: A new one from American ambient artist City Of Dawn (real name Damian Duque), 'Transient Lounge' is a short EP-length collection of soothing pieces aiming at a simple intention: a peaceful and healing atmosphere for the listener. The theme is apt, since the album's inspiration-striking allegedly came at a time when the artist and his family needed to get away and find space to adapt. The LP's natural blend of guitar, piano, space delays, synthetic pads, and field recordings - a rightfully well-trodden combo - forms an echoic journey into the heart of the human condition, perhaps recalling inspirations like Bvdub or Celer.