Tag Archives: ambient

Robert Dallas Gray – Missals (Self-Released)

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Part of the practice of making music involves arriving at and maintaining a sort of coherence and continuity – a heuristic that defines personal rules and parameters, however loosely. These parameters can always be pushed outwards or arbitrarily compressed, but the shape of things needs to make sense, over shorter and longer spans of time and collections of work.

Missals represents something of a suspension of my own rules; it has its own internal language, although it exists in a dialogue with the other records.

There are some obvious entries in the lexicon – some technical, some iconographic. Every track uses my Dynacord tape echo; the overall shape of the record is a cycle; influences are left as pure colours, rather than elided and absorbed.

It is a (rather compact) concept album, in short, and a way both to get some musical ideas off my chest and to kick some of my personal parameters outward a little. Its conceit allows me to take the devotional aspects that seemed to emerge on The Vallum and push them as far as I can within my own worldview.

Missals is presented with heartfelt thanks to Kris Boyle for his extraordinary accompanying video works, and to LADYfingers for their beautiful artwork. Both of these feature in the attached digital booklet.

The opening track, Morning Portal, first appeared on the compilation One More Tune, and is dedicated to the memory of Keith McIvor.

Jarl – Nerve Cell Threads Electronics (Zoharum)

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We are glad to present the new album of Jarl titled „Nerve Cell Threads Electronics”. The Swedish musician refers to the themes that accompanied the creation of the trilogy on the brain and the nervous system, making the new publication an informal, fourth part of the series in which he touched on the topics of neurotransmitters, receptors and synapses. The album contains four tracks called „Electrical Impulse 1 – 4”, filling nearly 60 minutes. This time the tracks has a little darker tone/sound, but still psychedelic, melodic, restrained and sometimes intense with percussive layers and sequencer based with thick analogue sounds that slowly changes into other sounds.
The album is available on CD in a six-panel digipack, on cassette and in digital format.
 

Composed, recorded and mixed by Erik Jarl.
Cover artwork & design by Karolina Urbaniak.
Mastered by Peter Andersson

Ed Herbers – Season Cycle: Winter (Passed Recordings)

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It is remarkable how a small shift in the sun’s position has such a dynamic effect on the weather. The seasons are experienced differently around the world, and I am fortunate to have lived my entire life in a place that has four distinct seasons: winter, spring, summer, and autumn.

I find the seasons to be a great source of inspiration, and I set out to create a suitable soundtrack for each one. Beginning on Winter Solstice (Dec 21, 2025) and on each subsequent equinox/solstice through 2026, I will be releasing an EP of songs inspired by the corresponding season that “begins” on that date. Season Cycle: Winter is the first EP in the series.

I have mixed feelings about winter. I usually find the long, dark nights and freezing temperatures a little depressing, but I also enjoy the contrast of a warm fire and twinkling holiday lights. We tend to have at least one good snowfall each year, an element of winter that adds a little magic to the cold–there’s something difficult to explain about the way it soundlessly covers the earth, creating temporary, unfamiliar landscapes. I tried to channel the season through somber ambient drones and frozen soundscapes (while also trying to capture some of that winter magic).

I acknowledge that these songs are not representative of how everyone experiences the seasons (my Northern Hemisphere/American Midwest bias is a big factor here). Even if you live in a part of the world where your experience of the seasons is not like my own, I hope that, even if just for a moment, these songs immerse you into the cold of winter, the blooms of spring, the humidity of summer, and the blazing colors of autumn. 


All songs written, mixed, and performed by Ed Herbers. All songs produced in Renoise 3.3.2
Album art & digital booklet photos by Ed Herbers.

Mastered by Exit Chamber (exitchamber.bandcamp.com)

Full Moon’s Light on Fallen Snow first appeared on Passed Winter, from Passed Recordings (passedrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/passed-winter)

Contagious Orgasm – behind closed doors (Ant-Zen)

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CONTAGIOUS ORGASM, the brainchild of hiroshi hashimoto from nagoya, japan, stands as a bold exploration of experimental sound and ambient noise. his compositions are a captivating blend of swirling psychedelia, crude samples, abandoned rhythms, and post-industrial noise, all woven into a seamless tapestry of ambient and concrete elements. this is music that demands active engagement, rewarding the listener with a hypnotic, immersive experience that is both inviting and disconcerting.

each composition is a rich vignette, balancing noise-soaked textures with exotic percussion, and gradually winding down into dreamlike interludes. CONTAGIOUS ORGASM’s work draws listeners into its nebulous darkness, offering a space for introspection, tension, and revelation. turn off the lights and let yourself be carried by this multifaceted, elegant journey through intimacy, alienation, and the blurred boundaries of perception and reality.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS, time softened and blurred. each room held a fragment of feeling – a flicker of mood, a whisper asking thirsty?, and somewhere, a reflection of longing beneath the moon under water. shadows stretched gently, revealing a soft sensitivity in everything touched, a quiet ache threading through silence. reality wavered in the glass of an inverted mirror, showing not what was, but what might have been. then came the return – subtle, weightless, yet undeniable. beneath a suspended ceiling, where thoughts drifted like dust in filtered light, he understood: some truths only reveal themselves in silence, and only BEHIND CLOSED DOORS.

composed and performed by h h. and fts. recorded and mixed at cool anatomy and yard cemetery, 2023-2024

artwork by stefan alt

this is ant-zen act475 & raubbau raub-107

The Black Dog – Loud Ambient (Dust Science Recordings)

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Making this album was an absolute joy. We used Rothko’s artwork as a major influence. His use of colour fields, blending, mood and scale really helped us build an album of tracks that could stand on their own and also work together as a coherent whole across all the tones we had been working with. It was also a chance to fall back in love with our 909, 808 and 707.

While working on music for several other projects, the “Rothko” project got renamed Loud Ambient because it did not really sit right with the My Brutal Life series. We often talked about what people make of The Black Dog and whether they think we only make ambient music. We do not. Over the last year or so, one of us would be working on something and someone else would say, “That is a Loud Ambient track.” The name stuck. We liked the funny side of it.

With Loud Ambient, everything just fell into place creatively. Surprisingly for us, the tracklisting never changed, just small tweaks here and there. That rarely happens. It marks a first for us as a band. All the stars aligned and the confidence in this album is the strongest we have ever had.

Loud Ambient was made to dance to, something we have not done in a while. We welcome the return to the dance floor with both hands. Will you join us?

snwv – music at a distance 280 (Self-Released)

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One element of creativity that’s undervalued, I think, is whim. We can make plans and restrict ourselves to certain forms, but newness and variety can enter by following a thought in the moment. Right before this performance, I thought of using some clipped string ends and the violin bow as ways of exciting the strings, and adding unintentional sounds. As a result, some of these pieces have sonic profiles that are unusual for this series.

The resulting timbres have the quality of small, distant bells, or sounds from an indeterminate instrument. The conventionally played notes often resemble low brass or wind instruments. These pieces are in line with the meditative quality of the series, though the timbral variety suggests new areas to explore.

The titles of these pieces are references to the visual and performance art of Hamish Fulton. Thank you for listening!


Maurice Rickard: Guitar, programming

Signal chain: Univox Coily in Bb F Bb F Bb C tuning > Reuss Effects Understate, Reuss Effects Repeater Fuzz, Balls Effects KWB > Vox Wah > Dunlop Stereo Uni-Vibe, Hungry Robot Wardenclyffe Deluxe > Moyo Volume > Max/MSP eight-delay patch with FFT pitch shift, tremolo, convolution reverb, AudioThing Reels. Guitar played with fingers, eBow, string ends, violin bow.

Impulses: Inchindown Oil Tanks (Matt Gray mattg.co.uk ), silent5 Biamp MR/140 (Tilt Up 2), St. Paul’s Huddersfield (near), Fort Worden Cistern

Zane Trow – Ibis (Room40)

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A note from Zane

the moon, wisdom, knowledge, writing, hieroglyphs, science, magic, art and

… judgment, so they say

i have got to know a stand of sixteen Ibis quite well over the last few years, never any trouble

we live in times of rising fascism once more, though of course, it has never been far away. the endless war stretches on. the whole system – the onslaught of inhumane competition, the normalisation of cruelty, racism, genocide …

“ni dios, ni estado, ni patrón” …

from the stand there is one Ibis, once or twice every day, to oversee an avocado tree and keep a keen eye, just in case some avos might fall … the tree is forty years old … the bill well skilled.
 
most of the field recordings here are from the same stretch of wetlands and riverside. many birds live there, and they try their best not to offend anyone, but their habitat will soon be scraped out and covered in crude development. there are three recordings of the same lagune at different times of day, one is treated and overlayed on another … and one is annotated with a distant creek at nightfall, in the mountains after a cyclone. there is also a bell, treated, from the ice cream truck that, for the last twenty years or so, has passed up my street every month …
in the evolving electronics, feedback styling and synthesis improvisation there is an abiding interest in the raveling and unraveling of sonic textures .. exploring unresolved tensions between ideas of time and space, the recorded and the live, the analogue and the digital, the real and the unreal …
……………..
analogue, digital and virtual synthesizers, found sounds, sonic devices, analogue echo & digital delay units, percussives.

created, recorded, audiomulched and mixed at Studio Vector in Slacks Creek, January thru June 2025.

I would like to show my respect and acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of Country and to all Elders past, present and emerging, the Traditional Owners of the lands, winds and waters.
Many thanks to Lawrence English for mastering and support.