Back catalogue: Ambient/Drone

Review: On her sixth full-length album, Tokyo's Satomimagae continues to refine her idiosyncratic fusion of folk, ambient and sound collage into something singular and quietly expansive. Hailing from Japan's acid-folk scene, Satomi's music often blurs the edges between the intimate and the cosmic, the rooted and the abstract. Taba floats beautifully in that liminal space. Rather than traditional song structures, she presents Taba as a series of open-ended vignettes, each radiating with a soft-focus clarity. The arrangements are centered around fingerpicked guitar, hushed vocals and ambient textures that are deceptively gentle. Closer listening reveals a rich interplay of glitchy electronics, subtle field recordings and haunted atmospheres. Tracks like 'Many' drift on echoing voices and vaporous folk melodies, while 'Tonbo' finds a summery sweetness in its fusion of pop and pastoral folk, complete with the sound of nature rustling at its back. 'Omajinai', perhaps the emotional core of the album, embraces traditional pop structure only to dissolve it into a haze of nostalgia and spectral warmth. Taba is not background music, it asks for deep listening, but rewards you with quiet truths and melancholic beauty.

Review: Florian TM Zeisig's latest project has been created with perfumer Angel Paradise so blends scent and sound into a multi-sensory experience rooted in the Bavarian Alps. While living in the rural village of Hinang, Paradise studied alpine plants to craft natural perfumes while Zeisig composed Spool, a reflective suite inspired by nostalgia, landscape and the duo's impending departure. Combining field recordings, ambient loops and blurred instrumental vignettes, the music has a wonderfully dreamlike, pastoral atmosphere that has your head lost somewhere beautiful. Paired with the fragrance that comes with it and captures the oily, floral essence of their environment, this is a poignant meditation on memory, nature and the fleeting beauty of physical presence that is unlike anything else you will experience this year.

Review: For their new album Lust 1, Voice Actor's Noa Kurzweil joins Welsh producer Squu for a woozy, intimate exploration of ambient sensuality. Following the sprawling Sent From My Telephone, this 45-minute work feels more focused but just as dreamlike with Kurzweil's hushed, often unintelligible vocals hovering over Squu's glowing pads and dubby pulses. With additional glitchy textures, soft hits and melancholic drones, the work forms a world that teeters between erotic hypnosis and emotional exhaustion. Highlights like 'You' and 'Nekk' blend vague ambience with jolting detail while pushing the sung-spoke-whispered words to the brink of abstraction. This is an album rich in fleeting emotions, tactile textures and forgotten memories.