2, courtesy of Feminist Press and Justseeds Artists' Cooperative. An instrumental outfit like Tycho now has Grammy nominations and sells out mid-sized venues easily. Here between the world of life and death you are but a tiny spec of dust on the shoulder of giants, a world built by the dreamers that came before you. How can you enjoy a pop song when you can't even hear yourself think? Though Robert Rich's association with new age limits his appeal among higher-minded consumers of ambient, his music is anything but centering. There are so many.
Ballard and Cormac McCarthy. Huge release from the Spanish ambient hero.
The great allure of
This collab is just one of the six full-length records uploaded to the Japanese artist Chihei Hatakeyama's Bandcamp so far in 2019. Aymara composer Elysia Crampton's first acoustic album pairs the Andean rhythms she's long worked into her sci-fi electronica with the stripped-down spirit of post-minimalist music. The man behind the Dream Syndicate and Miracle 3 reflects on his wild solo career with a definitive box set. The streets lie silent as you watch from above the high rise. We take a look at the trends emerging from the fringes and why they're meaningful.
It's not just gun-toting crooks who abuse refugees, we learn from memoir I Just Wanted to Save My Family, it's also politicians and legal officers filling their personal and national coffers with fines and extortion who profit from criminal human trafficking. As Saíz has been making music for close to 50 years, it's thrilling to hear an artist of his stature attack new music with a young man's enthusiasm, now filled with more passion than ever before. But not even that can match the stories Steve Wynn has to tell.
But turning up the volume allows all the myriad pieces to become visible – guitars, organs, pianos, synthesizers, a small army of processing, sampling, and sound treatments – and renders this seemingly vaporous ascendance in staggering tactility.”, “I want to revive the soul of Japan that still sleeps in the darkness” – Meitei / 冥丁, “Haunting and delicate, distant and timeless, Komachi is awash with white noise, complex field recordings and the hypnotic sounds of flowing water.
But first, a word from someone whose work appears on this list. His radiant drones are a nest of hidden feelings; they glisten with complex emotions and textures, teasing out moods of vulnerability and hope. Crafted as a tribute to the lonely landscapes and "non-place[s]" described in the writings of Endo, Ballard, and McCarthy, this record is a sparse one. Fragments from a land that is a largely silent place. I’m a bit behind with all the new releases, lately, so these lists, on the blog here, are greatly appreciated. Watching the way Jamison Isaak's Teen Daze project has transformed over the past several years has been nothing short of thrilling. It needs to be heard to be believed. The pieces, of course, are still just as beautiful.
From the Dntel-indebted mid-tempo workout that is "Endless Light" to the 1990s new age pastiche "Hidden Worlds" to the deliberate nod at Bibio's folktronica sound on "Spring", Isaak takes a break from the bleakness of his past few albums to stretch out and have fun. Free Radicals is Noisey's column dedicated to experimental music. The album suggests that even when performing for sleeping audiences.
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Fans of futurist epics like "New jazz" drummer Dan Weiss has composed varied landscapes for a band that use doom metal textures and delve into electronica, but just as often use acoustic piano and organic drumming to make complexity sound luscious.
So here's a hefty list of the year's best ambient music. The D.C.-based sound artist's sole release on Bandcamp is sharp, prickly, and gleams with a surprising beauty. That's been the thread holding his dozens of albums together this whole time.
HF. The results are, predictably, spectacular, twitchy, and digitalist at some moments and warm and inviting at others. Grass & Trees, the second Kranky release from Jacob Long's Earthen Sea project, is like the genre's negative.
Lot of stuff on here I need to check out. This makes Newman the ideal songwriter to dismantle what would come to be called toxic masculinity. So here we are.
- Daniel Bromfield.