Ambient / Drone Recommendations June 2016

Review: Blackest Ever Black come up trumps once more with this delicious reissue of Caroline K's Now Wait For Last Year. For the uninitiated, Caroline K Walters' contributions to the minimal synth canon date back to the late '70s, forming the cult act Nocturnal Emissions with Nigel Ayers and founding Sterile Records. Along with the bounty of Nocturnal Emissions material this label issued, Sterile also dabbled in the dark arts of Lustmord, a noted influence on Kiran Sande's BEB no less! Now Wait For Last Year was originally released in 1985 and ranks as her only solo album - Walters would later pass away from leukaemia. Taking its title from a Phillip K Dick novel about time-travel enabling hallucinogenics, this reissue from BEB has been a long time coming and will positively delight anyone with an interest in the fringe electronics of the early '80s. The 21 minute A-side track, "The Happening World," sets the tone delving deep into foggy, spectral ambience with the four subsequent tracks retaining a similarly immersive mood.

Review: Joey Anderson, Madteo, Nuel, Innerspace Halflife and Even Tuell; all names to have graced Latency. The Mura Oka project from Latency co-founder Sidney Gerard and Louis Vial (Ezzaid) stood tall alongside those names, so do you expect any less from Australian producer Kane Ikin? No! Having just graced Type - John Twells & Stefan Lewandowski taste-making label - Ikin is a producer making music worth talking about, let's just call in undefinable. This Basalt Crush EP sways between the forlorn ambient and tribal haunt of Blackest Ever Black ("Echoic" and "Autophasic") to the scatter beats of Samurai Horo character Ena ("Grid"). With some heavy, slowed down and instrumental post-punk on "Gestalt" and to the luminous glow of "Street Flare", this record is another pearl from Latency.

Review: Having introduced Gigi Masin to a wider audience via the brilliant Talk To The Sea compilation back in 2014, Music From Memory is now attempting to do the same with Suso Saiz. Like Masin, Saiz was a new age/ambient pioneer in his country (in this case, Spain), releasing a smattering of obscure solo albums between 1984 and the present day. The material on Odisea - dreamy, stripped-back, evocative, occasionally breezy and largely built around vintage synthesizers and his own, Steve Hillage-like guitar work - is taken from those albums, as well as an obscure cassette-only release. As usual, the Amsterdam diggers have also included a number of previously unreleased tracks, drawn from the musician's extensive archives. It all ads up to another must have compilation from Europe's premier Balearic archivists.

Review: Long players from L'estasi Dell'oro, D.A.R.F.D.H.S and Kartei signalled a move into artist albums from Dutch label Field that felt wholly right, and they've scored a real treat again in securing this Cold Radiance LP from Japanese artist IORI. Known for a potent brand of deep techno that has seen releases on Semantica, Prologue and DJ Nobu's Bitta label, Iori Asano is offered the chance to explore something different on this, his second album. Encourage to dabble in more explicitly ambient and experimental composition, Asano positively revels in this creative freedom for an eight-track album he himself likens to an "aerial sci-fi movie soundtrack." The gravelly sonic tones of opener "Transmission" sets the scene for what turns out to be one of the most enjoyable ambient techno albums of 2016 so far.

Review:  Klara Lewis made her debut with an LP for Editions Mego back in 2014, and she's been relatively quiet on the Western front since then. She's returned to the label with a new album, however, the unambiguously named Too. Much like her previous work, this is an album of pure experimentation and subtlety, bound together by Lewis' refreshing take on drone and ambient. Although the sounds themselves aren't revolutionary, it's Lewis' arrangements and production that render these hollow segments into living, breathing animals. Another fine instalment of the mighty Editions Mego.

Review: Vienna artists Bernhard Hammer and Jakob Schneidewind step away from their Elektroguzzi project for some calming, electro-acoustic experiments as Monochord for the ever-adventurous Meakusma. Spatial Stereo is an intriguing affair, with opener "Floating Tank" offering an attractive fusion of glitch production, deep techno textures, and undulating, ambient electronics. "Baklava" moves further towards classic ambient territory via picked acoustic guitar strings and drowsy pads, while "Helix" joins the dots between experimental electronica, spaced out jazz, and Chris Watson style field recordings. Finally, he summons the spirits of Pete Namlook and Susuma Yokota on closer "Patina", by far and away the EP's most sublime moment.

Review:  Andreas Gerth and Florian Zimmer return under their Driftmachine moniker with a new album for Umor Rex, the under-rated Mexico City imprint that likes to travel every corner of the globe in search of new and interesting electronic talent. More specifically, the majority of their artists, including Driftmachine, have a penchant for the genreless, and this is heard loudly on Colliding Contours. Tagging this album as drone would be doing it no justice, the sonic patterns within tunes like "Sans Soleil", or "Gaukelwerk" are too rich in texture and motion, with the latter being particularly dubby. Others like "Observant Sirens" stray even further away form any notion of ambient, and deliver a hot and murky pool of analogue percussion backed by a spectral collection of sounds and noise. TIP!