ambient
Mark Kidel
There is a great deal of sense in transposing electronic music to a symphony orchestra. However beautifully crafted, imaginatively constructed, and creatively programmed, the sounds that come out of synthesisers and other digital tools lack the knife-edge fallibility of music that is produced with the hand or the human breath. Brian Eno’s concert with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic provides compelling evidence that his compositions reveal more of their essence when taken on a trip into the world of strings, brass and other wind instruments, and the chance-prone reality of human moods and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Had Devendra Banhart been born between 1940 and 1950, he’d likely be a household name. His output – very loosely – sits between Cat Stevens, Syd Barrett and Richie Havens, studded with a greatness not widely acknowledged. He had a spell around 15-20 years ago when he seemed about to commercially explode. That didn't happen but he’s settled to a solid career and done much gorgeous work since.2013’s Mala album, a career highlight, was followed by two that appeared to dip into the alternative possibilities of 1960s Latin American songwriting (do check the luscious Helado Negro remix of "Love Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHRahill Flowers at Your Feet (Big Dada)Rahill Jamalifard’s debut solo album somehow transmutes autobiography into gorgeous slow-pop. Of Iranian-American origin and best-known as singer of the band Habibi, she and FKA Twigs producer Alex Epton use home recordings and pensive, sometimes nostalgic lyrics to create something unique, lolling and amiable. Beck appears on one song, “Fables”, and the magpie spirit of his best work is a good reference point. It’s a lovely album that seems at once familiar, yet strange and new, a collation that includes elements of jazz, trip hop, hip Read more ...
Joe Muggs
One of the greatest things a musical artist can achieve is world building. That is, creating a distinctive type of environment, language and coordinates for everything they do such that the listener is forced to come into the musical world, and to engage with it on its own terms rather than by comparison. It’s something that musicians as diverse as Prince, Kate Bush and Wu-Tang Clan achieve have achieved, likewise plenty of more underground creators too.Belgian polymath Marc Hollander has achieved this in particularly special way. Over more than 45 years, he’s built his sonic world not only Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Ambient is everywhere now. After a quiet (lol) 2000s, when it rather disappeared into the cracks, perhaps tarred with the sense that the more cosmic sides of the Nineties rave experience were passé, beatless music steadily rose in profile through the 2010s – aided by the rise of “post-classical”, increased accustomisation to home cinema and immersive gaming soundtracks, the wellness movement. Finally came lockdown isolation and a slew of former dance artists finding they’d always had an ambient side, and we reach the point where you can’t move for pulses, throbs and audio floatation.Formerly Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It’s always hard to choose one album to spotlight come the annual Best Ofs, and 2022 has given us an extraordinary embarrassment of riches to choose from – the bountiful bastard…January brought with it a small but perfectly formed under-the-radar gem in Bed Wetter’s A Life in the Day. A deeply personal piece, it saw producer Geoff Kirkwood removing his Man Power mask and letting us in to his world of gorgeous, atmospheric sound sculptures.Andy Bell’s Flicker followed. A double album of wide-eyed eclecticism, Bell’s second solo outing felt simultaneously new and nostalgic. It was, without Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Want an antidote so forced seasonal cheer and the catchiness of Christmas pop? How about some almost entirely atonal drone, clatter and throb with titles like “Fish Death”, “Tales for Violent Days” and “Dissonance Émancipee”?Music presented as a “lucid nightmare” fuelled by “toxic relationships; job insecurity and exploitation; immateriality of the future, translated into frustration, exhaustion/desperation, claustrophobia and a desire to escape; anguish, panic and a sense of powerlessness towards nature and disease”?Well here’s the funny thing: this album by a Rome-based audiovisual artist Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Even those with the most tangential connection to pop music will be aware that K-Pop is all conquering, and the likes of BTS and BlackPink are on some metrics the most successful of recent acts anywhere. But at the same time, there is also a growing awareness that there is a burgeoning Korean indie and art music scene, the flames of which have been fanned by what has become one of London’s most interesting and enterprising annual festivals, K-Music.This year's K-Music had another bumper crop of talent, the most intriguing being Park Jiha, a Korean multi-instrumentalist who creates immensely Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s been a quiet storm of critical approval building around Weyes Blood. American singer Natalie Mering has been releasing music for over a decade but, during the last two or three years a tailwind of positive verbiage has blown her faster forward. Her last album, Titanic Rising, the first of a loose trilogy, of which this is the second part, made low level inroads to commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, a fine balance of delicate singer-songwriter fare and something more baroque, has the potential to go further.Imagine the strident, indie- Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There is now a kind of “leftfield mainstream” in electronic music. It’s populated by people a decade or more younger than the original acid house generation, but who take their core inspiration from post-rave experimentation of the early-mid Nineties. Dusky, Bicep and to an extent people like DJ Seinfeld, Four Tet and Jon Hopkins all channel the rich melodies and textures of Future Sound of London, Orbital, early Aphex Twin, Underworld and co to arena-filling effect. And Daniel Avery has been chief among these. Running through his work from the beginning have been tones and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Ten minutes before The Orb got on stage at the Hare & Hounds, Alex Paterson was standing in the building’s courtyard with a big old spliff in his hand “clearing his head” and getting ready for action. So, it was good to know that some things don’t change.The audience of this sold-out 30th anniversary celebration of the ambient house trailblazers’ second album, UF Orb, similarly largely looked like they could quite easily have been there the first time round too. A room full of mainly 40- and 50-something blokes, with a surprisingly small smattering of female counterparts, were packed in, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
“Our only hope of saving our planet is if we begin to have different feelings about it,” Brian Eno writes in introduction to his new album in five years, Foreverandevernomore (the first featuring his own vocals since 2005’s Another Day on Earth). “Perhaps if we became re-enchanted by the amazing improbability of life; perhaps if we suffered regret and even shame at what we’ve already lost; perhaps if we felt exhilarated by the challenges we face and what might yet become possible.”Not, he adds, that this is a preachy album of propaganda songs. And it isn’t. Its mood music. It intimates, not Read more ...