Juno Recommends Ambient / Drone: July 2022

Review: Jacob Long's third full length LP under Earthen Sea sees the New Yorker weave together a slew of downtempo tracks, pulling from dub-techno and chillhop sensibilities, in a tracklist that feels like you are in the center of a steel sphere, as tracks like the Lo-Fi 'Stolen Time' and 'Rough Air' reverberate around you. Ochre Sky is a real highlight off the records back half, the mellow timbre and interspersed organic percussion (including a sample of a sink splashing) evokes a slow paced walk through a luscious garden. The material quality of Ghost Poems is what makes it so special, with each of the 10 tracks constituting a different biome to an expansive diorama. From the warm sunbeams of 'Fossil Painting', to the underground lakes of 'Felt Absence' each track has something refreshing to offer.

Review: Following the wonderful sound path they established with the Luke Sanger and Hoavi LPs, Balmat continue apace with this stunning ambient excursion from Patricia Wolf. Previously spotted in Portland, Oregon outfit Soft Metals, Wolf strikes out this year as a solo artist with this and an adjacent album on Past Inside The Present. Her approach is slow and refined, capturing a certain organic mystery in her simple, patient arrangements. The palette is clear and open, but it's the arrangement rather than the sound design which truly captivates on this flawless ambient album.

Review: There's a healthy stream of Nurse With Wound reissues occurring at the moment - check the stunning Salt Marie Celeste double CD drop on Dirter. But now here comes something contemporary from the minds of Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter, fittingly maintaining the nautical theme. Shipwreck n' Roll did sneak out in 2021 as a limited art edition but now it gets a wider release, reportedly assembled from "flotsam, jetsam and driftwood gathered in the Lofoten Islands in 2004, reassembled at IC Studio, London 2021." It's a Nurse With Wound release through and through - an arcane 7" of strange, artfully assembled sounds with a challenging but curiously compelling quality.

Review: 'An Orchestral Suite For Tape' is a compilation specifically curated for playback on the noble cassette tape format, featuring orchestral arrangements by Texas-Indiana duo zake & City of Dawn. Including songs from four albums and one compilation, the first time these tracks have been available on tape, the mood is deep and meditative, the billowing clouds of synthesisers providing ample space for thought and relaxation alike.

Review: Hydeout Productions have been carrying Haruka Nakamura's work since 2013's Melodica, and now they're back in partnership for the gorgeous contemporary classical lilt of Nujabes Pray Reflection. The album is a tribute to the late Japanese beat producer Nujabes, considered a godfather of hip-hop in the vein of J Dilla until his untimely passing. Nakamura's work centres around classically-trained piano composition reinterpreting some of Nujabes' beats, but it happily takes in a broad tapestry of instrumentation to create vivid, expansive pieces rich with sentimentality. The entire 12-track run is beautiful and elegant without fail, shining some of these treasured beats in a whole new, previously unimaginable light.

Review: American musician, photographer, graphic designer and 12k record label founder Taylor Deupree has certainly created quite the mythology, and garnered a stellar reputation for himself. Having worked with some of the most forward thinking names in synthdom - Ryuichi Sakamoto, Marcus Fischer - and laying claim to the title of President d'Honneur of the fifth Qwartz Electronic Music Awards in Paris, to some extent you should know what to expect here. Sophisticated and classy stuff with a conceptual grounding. Built on the idea of marrying technological sheen with the imperfections of nature, combining the raw and the processed, perfect and beautiful, in many ways Deupree's work, which here sits in a gorgeous ambient sonic plateau, hits the nail on the head when it comes to this century's opening decades. A time when ideas around what could be achieved and what's happening, where we're going and where we want to be, and - crucially - our difficulties figuring out where we fit in, are omnipresent.

Review: 'Infinite Branches' explores multi-textural sound illustrations that encompass an array of calm tones and gentle movements. The ep features four beautiful arrangements by the artist with eight reworked vignettes- where two branches of the theme share a certain commonality, but never intersect. Infinite Branches is a compelling and inspirational paean to various forms and patterns of the ambient genre which include reworks by: 36, zake, Pausal, City of Dawn, Ai Yamamoto, awakened souls, Patricia Wolf, and Christina Giannone.

Review: Building a refuge for exiled planets.
Conscious absorption of rare elements.
Cloudlike observations of evaporated landmasses.
A wistful emulation of escape.
Preparing food for the moon.
Strange situation test for non-terrestrial officers.
Counterfeiting consumer electronics.
Retuning GABAergic interneurons.
Accompaniment for affective picture systems.
Rituals of self-decompression.
Inquiries into trace minerals.

Review: Electronic Sound magazine once described Lancastrian and Lancaster-based synth wizard Field Lines Cartographer as a producer who makes "the sound of big, strange worlds". Whether this is your first dive into those domains or your 1000th, it's hard to deny the article hit the nail on the head. With records sporting titles like The Ferric Landscape, The Glimmering Plane, and WF 14 - Formic Kingdom, clearly the artist is encouraging us to imagine other places and realms beyond. Musically, Dreamtides doesn't break from that stylistic zone, but it is notably lighter and more inviting than some of FLC's other work, which doesn't exactly shy from roaming into darker places than those presented in this particular sonic vision. Here, then, it feels like we're floating in space and time itself, surrounded by warmth, welcomed by every element, having moved passed fears and worries. Here's hoping death is similar.

Review: 
For the first time ever since the mid-80s, Robert Fripp's God Save The Queen is now avaialble on fresh vinyl once more. It was the second solo album from Fripp and is made up almost entirely of so-called 'Frippertronics,' which means much of the record was performed by improvisation. Under each track are solid drums and bass to get the grooves going and guitar loops for the five tracks were recorded live in concert during 1979. It's a real left turn of an album and one that can be as mesmerising as it can wild.

Review: Siamese Twins Records was founded in Bangkok in 2020 as a label celebrating authentically rooted sounds from Asian artists and kindred spirits in other parts of the world, championing dialogue and collaboration. Son FM first appeared on a compilation on the label in 2020 as a partnership between Nic Ford and Attiss Ngo, and now they follow up with a fully-fledged album of ambient work. The sound on Points Of Light speaks to a solemn dedication, ensuring every tone is shaped, textured and rendered with care. At times it can be murky and mysterious, taking in threads of looped percussion and disorienting found sounds, but for the most part it's an immersive, meditative trip that exists outside of time and space, like all good ambient should.

Review: Robert Fripp's pioneering work in electronic music reached its influential peak with the so-called Frippertronics tour of 1979. Creating compelling soundscapes out of tape loops might not seem revolutionary now, but it certainly was at the time, and out of the tour came this limited and highly prized album, perhaps the most sincere recorded document of Fripp's creative breakthrough. Now Let The Power Fall is being pressed on vinyl for the first time since its initial release on Editions EG in the 80s, and it comes with additional versions of '1984' never heard before.