Juno Recommends Ambient / Drone May 2018

Review: Icelandic neo-classical producer Johan Johansson could not be considered anything less than a pioneer and a driving force behind the contemporary ambient movement. Although his music is grounded in non-electronic instrumentation, he has allowed the analogue and digital world to gel more freely, giving inspiration to other like-mined artists. Thanks to releases for powerhouses such as Touch or 4AD, he has constantly grown and evolved, but it's this call-up to Germany's enedlessly respected Deutsche Grammophon which truly instils the sense that he is a master of his own art. Englaborn & Variations is a long and meaningful story, constructed with precision and vision, with the sounds of classical strings taking it from bleepy drone to an orchestral symphony of tonalities. An important record.

Review: Premature Recordings looks like it will be a magnificent label going forwards, if the EPs keep on coming in like this. For their second outing, the imprint have grouped up New York's Terre Thaemlitz aka DJ Sprinkles with the UK's Robin Rimbaud, best known as Scanner. "Terre Loves Robin" is an oddball track, a glitch, molecular experiment sitting somewhere between ambient, noise and post-classical, while newcomer Ben Galyas' "Cloud Version" unleashes a much vaster, freer stratosphere of sounds that recall the best material on mythical drone and ambient labels like London's Touch. This is a special ordeal.

Review: Sometime Klaus Schulze collaborator Andreas Grosser spent much of the late '70s and early '80s making experimental syntheszier music inspired by the (then) West German kosmiche scene, handing out cassettes of his recordings to anyone who was interested. The best of these unreleased works were first gathered together on 1981's Venite Vessum, a cassette-only release that now exchanges hands for large sums online. Happily, Running Back has decided to make it available on vinyl for the first time, stretching the spacey and otherworldly ambience of Grosser's deep space compositions - some of which bubble along gracefully for 15 minutes at a time - over two slabs of wax. Thrillingly, this edition also includes a previously unheard track, the Philip Glass style synthesizer cycles and sun-bright positivity of "The Quantum Jump".

Review: Brussels-based Echo Collective is an extended crew of classically trained musicians helmed by Neil Leiter and Margaret Hermant. While they've been active for some time and worked on countless projects, Plays Amnesiac - a re-imagining of Radiohead's 2001 album of the same name - marks their full-length debut. It's an undeniably impressive collection, with Thom Yorke and company's glitchy, heavily electronic original songs re-cast as neo-classical pieces rich in arresting clarinet and oboe lines, jazzy live drums, cut-glass violins and gentle orchestration. Occasionally projects like this can feel a bit gimmicky, but Plays Amnesiac simply oozes class from start to finish. There are no cheesy gimmicks here, just sublime, classical-jazz fusion cuts that dance from the speakers like the soundtrack of a film we've yet to see.