Tag Archives: downtempo

Beyond Sensory Experience – In This Our Life (Cyclic Law)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description:

Beyond Sensory Experience announce “In This Our Life”, a new album that extends and deepens the austere, melancholic sound they have refined since their formation in 2001. The duo continue to balance sparse, cinematic atmospheres with richly layered textures and haunting melodic motifs.

“In This Our Life” follows a sequence of records that critics have described as immersive, melancholic and beautifully unsettling, works which place the duo among the most discreetly consistent voices in contemporary dark ambient. Previous releases were praised for their ability to create vast emotional registers from minimal material, a characteristic the new album amplifies while exploring more expansive song-forms and dynamic contrasts.

Stylistically, the album keeps the trademark BSE touch: low-frequency washes, distant vocal fragments, analogue warmth and crystalline, slowly unfolding harmonies. Where earlier records often emphasized brooding stasis, “In This Our Life” moves the project into more narrative territory, allowing passages of melancholic catharsis to emerge from dense, claustrophobic beds of sound. Reviewers of earlier records noted the group’s talent for making the sparse feel monumental, a sensibility that informs this new collection.

The production embraces both analogue textures and carefully balanced percussive elements. Tracks shift between shadowed ambience and melodic refrains that linger, and the sequencing creates a discreet arc, from intimate, near-silent openings to more emphatic, emotionally charged culminations. Fans of the project’s prior work will recognize the continuity, while new listeners will find entry points in the album’s stronger melodic hooks and cinematic pacing.

CD Edition of 300 copies in 6 panel Digipak. 11 Tracks. Running Time 48:16

Of One – Textures (Cruel Nature Recordings)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description:

OF ONE is the latest vehicle for Dublin’s Alan O’Boyle, who has been prominent in electronic music since the ’90s with Decal, Decoy, Legion of Two (with David Lacey) and Legion Of One. His work in various guises has appeared on labels such as Planet Mu, Rotters Golf Club, D1 Recordings, Satamile, Leaf, Law & Auder and Sabrettes.

“Textures” is the fourth OF ONE album and the first for Cruel Nature Records.

Start with a static texture – a drone, some feedback, a noise loop – and then build. Sometimes the texture that seeded the composition survives the process intact and part of a bigger picture (“Please Answer. Please.”), sometimes it appears briefly as a reminder of the beginnings (“To Exceed On A Full Moon”) and sometimes it becomes the entire composition (“Into The Process”).

Written, recorded, compiled and edited by Alan O’Boyle from a week of experiments in July 2025.
Photos of Cruagh Woods, Dublin (2024) by Alan O’Boyle
Artwork by Barry Murphy.

Scanner – Forces, Reactions, Deflections (quiet details)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description:

Music by Robin Rimbaud
Mastered by Alex at quiet details studios
Artwork by quiet details in collaboration with Robin Rimbaud
Design by quiet details
© quiet details 2025 all rights reserved

Elated to welcome one of the most enduringly creative and boundary-pushing artists of the last few decades to quiet details, Robin Rimbaud, otherwise known as Scanner.

A towering figure in the worlds of music, sonic and visual art, dance, installation and a myriad of other disciplines – Robin has covered a huge amount of artistic ground since his earliest forays into our consciousness in 1991.

From countless albums and projects as a solo artist and in many collaborations, including the likes of Brian Ferry, Michale Nyman, Steve McQueen, Stella McCartney, Laurie Anderson and Hussein Chalayan, and Pauline Oliveros; to the first Sound Art commission at the Tate Modern London; scoring a dance piece for the UK Olympics; the list of his critically-acclaimed achievements goes on and on.

At the core of his work is always a deep curiosity, the ability to make cognitive leaps into the creative unknown and fashion something beautiful – it’s with this sense of wonder he’s made something truly incredible for quiet details.

The album is a stunning sonic exploration of the world around him, another fundamental element running through his work – realising the majesty contained within structures that has always been there, now brought to life.

As Robin says:

This album is forged entirely from the resonant clangs, echoes, and whispers of a stainless steel staircase at home, transforming everyday architecture into an unexpected orchestra.

By coaxing rhythm, tone, and atmosphere from the metallic body of a staircase, the work reimagines movement between floors as a passage through sound.

No synthesisers were used in the creation, only the natural sound of the staircase using a geophone seismic microphone and the gentle assistance of the occasional resonant filter and sample software.

This has led to an album of enveloping beauty – highly textured drones meet distant pulses; metallic fragments merge with hauntingly evocative melody. Physical architecture translated to harmonic structures in the most breathtaking way imaginable.

There’s so much to admire here – from the beauty of the original recordings to the highest level of craft to turn them into something so musically engaging – a true masterpiece from one of our finest artistic minds.

Huge thanks to Robin for being part of the series.

The artwork was made as always influenced by the music and idea behind the album – originating from a photo from Robin which was then captured with analogue photography and processed here at quiet details studios.

As usual, the album is presented on the physical edition, a custom six-panel digipack with a separate fine art print too.

The CD also has a special long-form continuous mix of the album, created by the artist and representing the music in its purest form.

scanner.bandcamp.com

Golden Brown – Whisker Fatigue (Eiderdown Records)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description: Under the Golden Brown moniker, Stefan Beck has carved out a comfortable niche for himself over the past several years. The Colorado-based guitarist’s discography is packed with expert acoustic fingerpicking, warm melodies, gentle lap steel reveries and twinkling electronics. It’s music that provides the listener with a welcome escape, a dreamy sonic landscape to wander amidst. And if Beck stayed planted in this particular landscape, blowing smoke rings in the Shire on a sunny afternoon, that’d be just fine.

But Whisker Fatigue suggests that there are further corners of the Golden Brown-iverse left to explore — much darker corners. From the very first moments of “Beelzebufo,” it’s clear that Beck is guiding us through swampier territory, something akin to the slo-mo elegy of Miles Davis’ “He Loved Him Madly” or the low-sun western hauntology of Earth’s The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull.

Stretching out to almost 15 minutes, “Beezelbufo” (named for a fearsome, thankfully extinct amphibian from the late Cretaceous also known as “the devil frog,”) oozes with a strange, primordial dread. A busted thrift store organ and spectral percussion all contribute to an ever-deepening chthonic wooziness, with the silvery strands of Beck’s electric guitar serving as the only lifelines to keep us from disappearing completely into the mire.

The album’s other epic, “Boom Boom Pachyderm” feels similarly heavy, ghostly harmonics and funereal keyboard accents from Prairiewolf’s Jeremy Erwin floating over restless seas, uneasy rhythms. This is music that feels closely in tune with the modern malaise, when the way forward is unclear, when storm clouds seem to be constantly gathering on the horizon.

Fear not, Whisker Fatigue isn’t fully doom-stricken. Throughout there are glimmers of light — like the playful dubby textures of the title track, or the steady momentum of “Cross Pollination,” or the mystical guitar work that drives “Ancestral Slime.” Beck doesn’t want to abandon us to a desolate fate in the Swamps of Sadness; this is just one more beautiful chapter in the Golden Brown saga. Go ahead and sink into it