Juno Recommends Ambient / Drone: March 2023

Review: Lawrence English's album Colours of Air on Kranky finds him hooking up with fellow composer loscil aka Scott Morgan. The pair find a perfect sweet spot between their respective backgrounds as they work up absorbing ambient sounds from a collection of recordings of a century-old pipe organ that lives in the Old Museum in Brisbane, Australia. The source recordings were then processed, transformed, and elevated into these absorbing soundscapes where timbre, spatial fluctuation and swelling drones all sweep you off your feet. It is a truly original and captivating piece of work.

Review: Sure to be one of the best aids for astral projection you'll be able to find this year, Polypores' 'Praedormitium' is a long ambient dream of the new age diaspora. Continuing its mastermind Stephen Buckley's mission to convey the feeling of hypnagogic calm before sleep (a state often accompanied by auditory hallucinations), this is by definition a liminal album. Packed with seemingly incongruous ambient sounds that work together in harmony (many a string-tremble, spaceship bloop and vibraphonic flourish crop up), this is a deeply textural album, likelier than not to lull all you insomniacs out there into better nighttime hygiene.

Review: Even a decade on, the prospect of Donato Dozzy reworking Bee Mask for the Spectrum Spool label is a mouth-watering one. Now the timeless album gets a special reissue to mark the 10th anniversary on double LP collection. Originally commissioned to turn in a remix of Bee Mask's 'Vaporware' track from last year's LP for Room 40, Dozzy apparently felt the track's inherent beauty merited more than just the one and sent over seven! This decision has resulted in a superb collection of reimaginations from the Voices Of The Lake producer, ranging from calming moments of serenity to bleepish, deep techno explorations.

Review: Canada may not shout as loud as the US, UK or Germany when it comes to electronic music, with the exception of Richie Hawtin perhaps, albeit frequently assumed he's American, and is actually part-British. Nevertheless, the larger North American state has a truly remarkable legacy in house, techno, ambient, and synth-y odds and sods.

It's proof the apple never falls far from the tree, given proximity to some of the bonafide birthplaces of those sounds - Chicago and Detroit. Edmonton's Khotin is indicative of the difficult to define tones that emanate from the Maple Leaf and its people. So much texture, pouring with emotion, and fundamentally born of new ideas, or at least different ways of thinking. Release Spirit, his third album on Michigan's Ghostly International, is thoughtful, intelligent, downtempo electronic stuff, crafted with love and attention to detail.

Review: Where do you even start with a title like this? To say Hollie Kenniff has set out to try and tear through your emotional brick wall in the sweetest and most gentile way possible is full understatement of the century territory. Following up on her spellbinding 2021 ambient masterpiece, The Quiet Drift, her latest offering to the world almost sounds like a memory even before you know what it's called.

From the outset, these are lush soundscapes that ebb and flow behind and in front of piano keys, suggestions of notes that almost aren't there, with the consistent totem this overwhelmingly rich timbre. The arrangements, often deceptively loose, reflect the work of mind's eye, its ability to recollect but not necessary in 360-degrees, colour, or linear timelines. Tracks such as the aptly titled 'Momentary' introduce refreshingly clear structures of melody, before again vanishing into beautiful walls of brilliant sound.

Review: Many of ASC's albums never made it to wax first time round, something he's now addressing via a swathe of vinyl additions of classic back catalogue releases. The latest to get this treatment is 2014's 'Truth Be Told', a set that's amongst the San Diego-based producer's most inspired ambient works (and there have been many over the years, as well as plenty of killer experimental d&b and spaced-out techno). While it naturally makes use of processed field recordings and cutting-edge sound design techniques, 'Truth Be Told' is a very nostalgic ambient album. Those with a deep knowledge of the 1990s works of Pete Namlook will feel right at home, while the slowly pulsing chords, immersive pads and gently unfurling lead lines reminded us of Sun Electric's often overlooked classic '30.7.94 Live'.

Review: Jo Johnson is a rising name in the realm of modular ambience; here she presents her latest four track mini-album for Mysteries Of The Deep. 'The Wave Ahead' is an implicit homage to the likeness of sound waves and the moon-guided waves of the Earth's oceans, producing a nighttime calmdown for polyphonic synth in five tracks. For Johnson, both kinds of wave are nearly one and the same - 'diaphonous' - and the realisation is made manifest here in a stellarly arpeggio-heavy, sinewave-surfing LP, which recalls the work of Steve Hauschildt or Hannah Peel.

Review: Another gem of lowercase ambient music from Ohio, 'The Notional Pastures Of Imaginary Softwoods' is the latest statement by Imaginary Softwoods (John Elliott), who has worked in his own special brand of musico-horticulturalism since the early noughties. The longstanding project Emeralds makes up another flower to his daisy chain. With many of these pieces composed through elaborate rituals that often span many years, this is a hauntingly beautiful album into which reams of time and effort has been poured.

Review: The Zenker Brothers's Munich-based Illian Tape label is one of the architects of the contemporary underground. After making breakbeats cool again, the label continues to branch out in various directions. This time out it is MPU101 who links up his machines, turns them on and lets them cook up a series of grainy, lo-fi and downbeat soundscapes. Some have gently suggestive rhythms, others float through space and all of them come laden with a certain sense of melancholy. Importantly, though, there is often beauty in the shadowy moods cooked up.

Review: The Jon Hassell retrospective series from Ndeya Records continues with 'Further Fictions', one of the recent three to explore the visionary composer and performer's ideas centring around the idea of the Fourth World. Further Fictions is a double CD anthology of the music on the vinyl editions, with a disc devoted to each album in hardbound book style packaging and an extensive booklet containing sleevenotes and archival images.

Review: The second album from Carla Oliver's solo ambient project, Badskin, the Aussie underground rock alumni ventures once more into the meditative plains of ambient, creating what can only be described as an album that is truly alive. The air rattling through pipes, the howling wind of the droning synth and the delicate percussion conjure a lone tree creaking back and forth in the night. 'Jourama' and 'Swimmer's Body' have a C418 quality to their evolving forms, though tracks like 'Blackwater' take a dark turn, and 'Critical Path' has a Kabuki theatre element to its screeching woodwind sections. The tone is otherworldly, flipping from comfort to unease at the flip of a switch. Oliver is a master at work.

Review: William Basinski and Janek Schaefer make for a long distance collaboration on this much anticipated new album. It has taken the past eight years from conception to final execution but that more than proves worth the wait. Time and duration are recurring themes in their work and during the pandemic yeas in particular those were very much skewed and warped for us all. ". . . on reflection" casts itself free from temporal restraints with delicate piano passages, flickering melodies and drawn out drones that really sink you in deep.

Review: Aguieere's next album is a fine coming together of Antwerp synthesist David Edren and Tokyo minimalist Hiroki Takahashi. They make a nice and natural connection it seems as they explore a wide range of subtle electronics, and contemplative synth-scapes and explore the potency of restraint, open space and sonic patience. This is artful ambient throughout with the likes of the first tune 'Dusk Decorum' setting the tone with wide open vistas and twinkling, starry horizons. There is plenty of great synth colorisation in these tunes as they ebb and flow throughout the orchestral lullaby of 'Stalactime', which is a real highlight.