Juno Recommends Ambient / Drone May 2020

Review: Islands, volcanoes and instrumental exile stories...
From Overseas is the experimental ambient project by Kevin Sery.

Originally from the tiny French overseas department and region, Reunion Island, he routinely bounces between his home island, a small port town on the east coast of the US and continental Europe picking up fresh ideas and inspiration along the way.

With a beautiful master by Stephan Mathieu (12k, Shelter Press, ...), From Overseas releases his first full length album "Home" on PITP. "Home" is a journey through beautiful soundscapes where dark and light intertwine, where ambient tones give way to post-rock guitar craft, then segway to melodic drone, noise and back again. These soothingly powerful songs evoke emotions on a full spectrum, dreamy unplanned travels and inspire us to question the nature of the place that each of us calls home. The fourth track, Maloya Tales, is a personal tribute to Sery's homeland 'Reunion Island' and gives the listener a glimpse of the mystical rhythms of traditional Reunionese Maloya music.

Review: Imaginary Softwoods has the kind of overwhelmingly beautiful take on ambient music that finds his early cassette-only releases being picked up and reissued on vinyl by a range of labels from Digitalis to Archives Interieures. This time around 2016 Mineral Disk release "Annual Flowers In Color" has been picked up by Amethyst Sunset, giving a fresh airing to a stunning album. The highlights are primarily the longest tracks - "Aura Show" is a stunning, glacial drone piece at heart although it goes on a sizable journey over 10 minutes. The shorter vignettes are just as delightful though - the winsome reverie of "The Geranium Room" will have you lamenting its brevity when it finishes after 65 seconds.

Review: Three years ago, Giuseppe Tillieci and Filippo Scorcucchi joined forces as LF58 for a debut EP of blissful ambient epics on Auxiliary that arguably didn't get the coverage its quality deserved. We have a sneaking feeling that the pair's debut album, which lands on the fantastic Astral Industries imprint, won't go unnoticed. For starters, it's brilliant, with the four lengthy tracks seeing them drift between Global Communication/Irresistible Force style melodic positivity (the hazy effects, huggable pads and echoing melodies of "Iniziazione"), ultra-deep, psychedelic dub techno ("Rituale", where simple melodic refrains wind in and out of sparse but hypnotic beats), swelling tropical ambient warmth with added deep space effects ("Metamorfosi") and the kind of languid, slow-motion fare that sits somewhere between Pete Namlook and Spacetime Continuum (side D suite "Evocazione/Contatto/Risveglio").

Review: Astonishing, 22 years have passed since the release of Stefan Betke's debut album as Pole. Along with the "2" and "3" albums that followed in 1999 and 2000 respectively, it helped establish him as a producer with a defiantly distinctive, dub-fired sound: a brand of electronic minimalism that drew just as much on ambient and micro-house as it did techno and of course reggae soundsystem culture. Crackly, spaced-out, hypnotic and mind-soothing, all three albums sound as fresh now as they did when they were first released. Helpfully, Mute has decided to reissue all three at once via this box set. There are no bells and whistles, just three essential albums in a plain black box. If you don't own them already, you know what to do.

Review: Like many of his contemporaries, US producer Huerco S usually deals in wavy, trembling house amalgams, but also often deals in all things ambient and beatless. This new LP on Anthony Naples' Proibito, however, is a marked step in a different direction from the artist, and it shows us that he's more talented at the genre than merely a B2 stuck on at the end of a techno deviation. For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) is a stunning ambient album; each track across its duration is filled with life and purpose, a clear musical and expressive direction that many so-called ambient artists lack. It's likely to be remembered for a long time, and allow this artist to be seen as having a truly experimental mindset.

Review: The astounding discography of O Yuki Conjugate continues to be re-examined through some choice reissues, following on from the LPs on Emotional Rescue with this incredible 1991 album brought back to life by B.F.E. Records. Peyote finds Roger Horberry and Andrew Hulme taking their Fourth World interests further afield on the likes of "A Darker Belief", while sinking into a more ominous kind of ambient quicksand on "Earth Loop Fragment" amongst others. It's evocative, proudly gloomy music, but electrifying in its depth and detail too. The sound worlds O Yuki Conjugate build are quite simply astounding, and if you loved your journey into their other recent reissues, you certainly won't want to pass this one up either.

Review: When he originally released "The North Bend" in 2010, Rafael Anton Irisarri was not the celebrated ambient artist, sound designer and mastering engineer he is today. In hindsight, it was probably his breakthrough album: a release that rightly received rave reviews and introduced him to a wider audience. Listening to this anniversary reissue, which reprises the original track list, it's easy to see why it landed so well. Musically, it blends melancholic and poignant, neo-classical style musical movements with dense layers of white noise and drone style sound design, resulting in a sequence of slowly unfurling tracks that sound brilliant first time around, but also reveal more intricate details once you've listened a few times.

Review: Elina Shorokhova AKA Soela has shown much promise over the last few years, with her releases on Lost Palms, E-Beamz and Detroit Underground all attracting plenty of plaudits. She's now been added to the Dial Records roster and here offers up a hotly anticipated debut album that prioritises mood, melody and glassy-eyed aural textures over any specific desire to make dancefloors move. That's not to say that you couldn't play much of the music in a club setting, it's just that the brand of house explored throughout is dreamy, tuneful, ultra-deep and pleasingly hypnotic. There are nods to ambient, IDM, dub techno and minimal, too, making it the kind of set to immerse yourself in on headphones while enjoying a little spring sunshine.

Review: Those with a passion for early new age music should know all about Iasos, a California-based musician who has been serving up deliciously meditative ambient and new age albums since 1975. Here he offers up a new edition of his sought-after 1978 set "Angelic Music", a warm, dreamy and luscious blend of slowly shifting chords, sustained notes and slow-burn melodies that increase in prominence as each of the two 30-minute tracks progress. Interestingly the versions showcased here are longer than the edited versions initially released, with the flipside - where recordings of crickets rise and fall around swelling synthesizer chords - being our pick of a very strong pair.

Review: Way back in 1975, two albums slipped out that would effectively establish the synthesizer-fired "new age" sound. Arguably the more important - and better quality - of the two was "Inter-dimensional Music", the debut LP from California-based musician Iasos. Here reissued on vinyl for the first time in a decade, the superb set combines drowsy ambient chords, gentle organ melodies and other subtle instrumental flourishes (bass guitar, pedal steel, lazy electric guitar solos) with field recordings of lapping waves, babbling brooks and so on. While new age would become a bit of a cheesy cliche in later years, "Inter-Dimensional Music" is a superb collection of drifting, meditative tracks that soothe and seduce the senses.

Review: Husband-and-wife team Carl Hultgren and Windy Weber have been successfully fusing elements of ambient, dream pop and shoe gaze since the early 1990s, keeping up a steady release schedule that has so far resulted in no less than 11 studio albums and a string of inspired collaborative sets. Their latest album, "Allegiance & Conviction", is their first for three years and sees them drowsily drift through a selection of opaque, otherworldly tunes rich in densely layered guitars, hazy aural textures, barely audible vocals and dreamy, delay-laden sounds. It's a hugely enticing set all told, with our favourites including the glistening head trip of "Moth To The Flame", the Labradford style post-rock drones of "Alone" and the slow-burn bliss of "Crossing Over".

Review: Green-House is the handiwork of Olive Ardizoni, who finds a sympathetic ear in Leaving Records for her delicate, pastoral strains of ambient reflection. Rather than being static, these are charmingly alive pieces that quiver with sensitivity and plaintive melodies that suggest some inspiration from the iconic Mort Garson record composed for houseplants. If you enjoyed that wobbly ride through sweet-natured synth refrains, you'll love this album too as it interweaves warm tones around bucolic field recordings. This comes highly recommended - a record that leaves you feeling nourished after listening.

Review: Those with a passion for early new age music should know all about Iasos, a California-based musician who has been serving up deliciously meditative ambient and new age albums since 1975. Here he offers up a new edition of his sought-after 1978 set "Angelic Music", a warm, dreamy and luscious blend of slowly shifting chords, sustained notes and slow-burn melodies that increase in prominence as each of the two 30-minute tracks progress. Interestingly the versions showcased here are longer than the edited versions initially released, with the flipside - where recordings of crickets rise and fall around swelling synthesizer chords - being our pick of a very strong pair.

Review: Way back in 1975, two albums slipped out that would effectively establish the synthesizer-fired "new age" sound. Arguably the more important - and better quality - of the two was "Inter-dimensional Music", the debut LP from California-based musician Iasos. Here reissued on vinyl for the first time in a decade, the superb set combines drowsy ambient chords, gentle organ melodies and other subtle instrumental flourishes (bass guitar, pedal steel, lazy electric guitar solos) with field recordings of lapping waves, babbling brooks and so on. While new age would become a bit of a cheesy cliche in later years, "Inter-Dimensional Music" is a superb collection of drifting, meditative tracks that soothe and seduce the senses.

Review: Each successive EP on Nikki Pryke AKA Lioness' Envelope Audio imprint has been a multi-artist affair, offering tracks that explore the margins of techno, electro and ambient. The label's latest EP follows this template, with Pryke playing a central role on a selection of tracks that veer towards the more slowly shifting and spacey end of the ambient spectrum. Pryke first joins forces with Johanna Knutsson on the languid, synthesizer-heavy bliss of "Oramics", before collaborating with Tora Vinter on "Delian Archives", a fine tribute to Radiophonic Workshop pioneer Delia Derbyshire rich in icy motifs and modular bleeps and glitches. Arguably best of all though is B-side "There, There, Theremin", a celestial ambient excursion crafted by Pryke and Fjader that wraps deconstructed Theremin sounds and ghostly chords around tactile, easy-going electronics.

Review: Here's something of a rarity in the 21st century: a CD single. It comes courtesy of Osaka-based ambient/dub/digital reggae fusionist (and sometime Tapes collaborator) 7FO and guest vocalist NTsKi. In its original form "D'Ya Hear Me!" is opaque, loved-up and saucer-eyed, with NTsKi adding dewy-eyed vocals to a 7FO riddim that cannily joins the dots between dreamy ambient pop, lo-fi digital reggae and cheery electronica. 7FO's inventive, colourful and gleefully innocent-sounding backing track can be heard in full on the instrumental "Karaoke Version". Heavier digi-dub flavours are provided on the superbly out there and spacey Bim One Production remix, while the CVN rework re-imagines the track as an off-kilter chunk of cheery experimental pop.

Review: Despite having a name that sounds like a Scandinavian conductor, Petr Aleksander is actually the combined efforts of Eliot James and Tom Hobden, two musicians who met while working on Noah and the Whale's debut album, and combine for this project that comes with very strict rules - create more considered, precise music by limiting instruments to piano and strings, but refuse to sacrifice raw emotion. This record sees that philosophy applied to 'This Is Not A Safe Place', the beloved sixth album from Ride, an outfit that have penned some of the most important shoegaze tracks of all time. Accomplished ingredients, the result of this cross-pollination is a stunning and subtle slice of intelligent pop music, rooted in modern classical, complete with ambient touches, but strikingly playful and easily saleable. A unique and highly polished addition to the list.