Juno Recommends Ambient / Drone: July 2023

Review: Ryuichi Sakamoto is making a very welcome return here with his first solo album since 2017's async. Milan Records are releasing 12 in January to coincide with the venerated Japanese composer's 71st birthday, and the timing is poignant given the album draws from musical sketches created while Sakamoto battled for two and a half years with cancer. Sakamoto himself describes reaching for his synths as a kind of therapeutic response to a big operation, and so the music carries an added depth of personal experience from one of the most profound ordeals a person can go through.

Review: A collaborative new single by sampletronic master Kieran Hebden (aka. Four Tet) and guitarist and composer William Tyler, two acclaimed musicians and both longstanding friends. Part of a recent spewing-forth of Hebden-adjacent material to hit the shelves after the artist's oft-reported-upon "agent of chaos" phase, these two tracks, pressed to a furtive 12", provide a neat counterpoint to that assessment. Rather than a pair of riddim bangers, the record flaunts Hebden's signature electronic textures and Tyler's guitar into a hypnotic, nominally dark soundwhirl, reminiscent of the earliest days of Text, but with a unique edge - a sonic corner never quite scoured before by either artist.

Review: A fantastic introduction to a Japanese electronic artist who has simultaneously influenced many while flying well under the radar, Gaia: Selected Ambient & Downtempo Works presents a deep dive into the world of Dream Dolphin, a producer who began releasing music under this moniker at the age of 16 and was brought up on classic Italian songs before discovering the likes of PIL, Yellow Magic Orchestra and The KLF. Amazingly, even thought there's a good chance you'd never heard of her before now, Dream Dolphin, also known as Noriko, released a staggering 20 albums in just eight years, and 18 of the tracks from that catalogue are here now. The vast majority never available on vinyl before, they span IDM, ambient, downbeat, trance, organic experimental and more, making this a real trove.

Review: Past Inside The Present has really gone to town with the re-release of this 36 album The Lower Lights: it comes in several different formats and vinyl versions with this one being a limited, numbered and opaque red vinyl including a download code. Musically it is just as essential as a collection of tracks from a year-long 'Audio Diary' project undertaken by 36 between April 2018 and April 2019. It first came back in May 2019 and soon sold out, such is the quality of the vibrant and eclectic ambient sounds within. This is not sleep-inducing background material, but rather emotionally charged soundscaping with a mix of dark, futuristic and urgent pieces all making the cut.

Review: Icelandic musician Gunnar Jonsson Collider debuts on A Strangely Isolated Place with an expansive trip through six fictional environments, brought further to life through an accompanying video by artist Arna Beth. S.W.I.M. is an equal parts trip through space ambient and hauntology; 36 meets Pye Corner Audio if you will. Intense, low-centric 'Environments', 1-6, inspire hazily glimpsed vistas in the mode of ambient warmth. As if accidentally finding oneself witnessing celestial phenomena one isn't meant to witness - the space-trip from 2001: A Space Odyssey springs to mind - each of these tracks are almost like time-locked landscapes, slowed down by their lo-fi temperaments and subby pulses of feeling.

Review: Another week, another new release from the unstoppable ambient powerhouse that is zake. His latest full-length LL has two new cuts by the American maestro with remixes from a hefty selection of equally prolific producers all served up on his home label Past Inside the Present and no fewer than six sides of vinyl. Across this immersive two hours of music, there is a mix of ambient, drone, drum & bass, electronica, and deep techno from Warmth, Aural Imbalance, ASC and Bvdub. It is yet another essential release from zake and co.

Review: Noted as a "beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue" (we're looking at you, Spotify) Tim Hecker's No Highs is a righteous paean for what ambient music should be. And that certainly isn't mindful background music for turning you, the listener, into the best and most productive capitalist you can possibly be. Instead, Hecker's latest invites considered and focused listening; an alternative to the mediated, telescreeny musical SSRIs that impose on us today. A world turned upside down, the album presents highlights such as 'Lotus Light', 'Pulse Depression' ad 'Winter Cop', which suggest anarchic themes, while also fastening a sense of jaggedness and tumult, in a style of music that is so incorrectly expected to be neither of those things.

Review: Past Inside the Present label regulars zake and Tyresta at long last come together for a well-overdue collaboration. This collection of sounds is called Drift and is all about reflective mood music that will send you deep inside yourself. It's a typically immersive listen from two of ambient's finest practitioners with lots of wide open spaces for you to sink into, slowly shifting timbers to gaze at and poignant atmospheres that cannot fail to leave an indelible impression. As usual, the sound design is top-notch here and the attention to detail second to none. It was well worth the wait, then.

Review: Thanks to this lovingly presented reissue from Past Inside The Present, you can own The Lower Lights by 36 in just about whatever coloured vinyl you wish: This is the Past Inside The Present translucent red version with others also available on Juno. It's an album first put together by the label back in 2019 shortly after 36 had finished a year-long 'Audio Diary' project. Not all of the tracks they wrote in that time make the cut, but the best 10 do. They are direct, absorbing and energetic ambient soundscapes that are emotionally charged and demanding of your attention.

Review: Ayami Suzuki is a Japanese singer and sound artist who uses her voice and field recordings to create ambient experimental mindmelts. Her new LP, Umbilical, hears the virtuoso team up with Brazilian musician Carlos Ferreira, who normally stays rooted in meditative styles from drone to post-rock. The pair take up equal weight space on this calming, umbral new cassette album, which was made remotely between Japan and Brazil. Few know how these two masterminds met, but what we do know is that the LP evokes a usually very difficult-to-pin mood - its course makes us imagine the feeling of encountering some otherworldly nymph, or half-divine fairy, in a baroque outdoor bathhouse on one sunny May morning. Aiming to reflect Suzuki and Ferreira's intimate and close connection across the distance that separated them, it is (not by coincidence) certainly a gap-bridging album, spanning everything ethereal, REM-sleepy, and stretched-out.

Review: It has been some five years since US ambient maestro zake dropped the first volume of his Orchestral Tape Studies. We're glad to finally have the second instalment in the series available because there has rarely been music as cathartic and soothing as this on our shelves. It's made from drones, field recordings and richly layered movements of fragmented orchestral loops. It is heavily inspired by the sound of the greatest minimalist symphonic composers and orchestras of the last 100 years and comes in several different colours. This version is a transparent rose vinyl LP and download code.

Review: The mighty Hospital Records is reissuing Green Graves, a classic album from Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement from back in 2016. It's an album that, as the title suggests, soundtracks a trip through the jungle with steamy pads and humid atmospheres, distant animal sounds and deep tribal rhythms. It's full of ambient and experimental mystery and intrigue, with suspenseful pads over barely-there skeletal drums that snake through the undergrowth on cuts like 'Red Protection Against Black Magic'. 'Nocturnal Anatomy' is darker and more dubby, hitting at the arrival of humans and their machines who come to destroy the forest.

Review: We're starved for two-sided 12"s in the world of ambient music, but Chris Madak aka. Bee Mask has refreshingly graced us with one this week. It should be said that there's Skee Mask and then there's Bee Mask; the latter is far more unsung, undeservingly so. Madak's music is abstract and cerebral enough to have lent him credo enough to have released on the likes of Weird Forest, Spectrum Spools and Room40. But this latest reissue, 'Versailles Is Not Too Large Or Infinity Too Long', hears him plunge the ethereal heights for the US label Unifactor. Originally released on cassette on Chondritic Sound in 2008, these pieces deserve the renewed attention and the fresh laying to wax, since they're not 'regular ole' ambient cuts in the slightest. Unafraid of indulging the high end freqs, Bee Mask fleshes out a mood of uncertain, urgent bliss - sizzling, crunching and soaring the drone, as if its maker were a modern Icarus flying too close to the sun.

Review: This is a reissue of the 1996 album by the British Asian singer Sheila Chandra, who commands wide renown among diggers for her fusion of Indian classical, folk and pop music. Abonecronedrone is a minimalist exploration of the drone, the continuous sound that underlies Indian music. Six tracks, each named after the drone sound they feature, 'Abonecronedrone 1' to 'Abonecronedrone 6', resound across its resonant body, recalling the almost mathematic way Indian ragas have historically tended to be categorised. Chandra's layered vocals glide across the top, drawing particular attention to some rather prominent harmonics, overtones and textures.

Review: As with the first volume of his Orchestral Tape Studies series back in 2019, zake places a real focus on tone and recurrent murmurs in these magnificent arrangements. They are a mix of delicate repetition, sound treatments and subtle manipulations that pay homage to minimalist symphonic composers and orchestras in his own unique way. It is another adventurous and immersive listen from zake and one that comes in many different coloured vinyl versions. This one is a coloured version, but what colour you will not know until you open it up.

Review: Lewis and Void take themselves out of their own stylistic realms on this Full-On album in order to explore new and unique collaborative worlds. They are both known for their work on Editions Mego and for pushing noise, abstract and ambient boundaries, seeking out their own voices in the extreme ends of the spectrum. They fire ideas back and forth at one another here in order to find a dialogue with their tools - guitars, synths, euro rack modular systems, voices, samples and outboard processing. It is brutal and playful in equal measure with wild new shapes, sounds and textures coming at you thick and fast.

Review: Copenhagen label FELT welcomes back Civilistjavel for a fresh four tracker that builds on the success of the Jarnnatter album in 2022. It is another collection of fine electro-acoustic drones in the fashion of greats like Biosphere and has a trip-hop sojourn with Cucina Povera that is particularly interesting. Though leaning on dub techno in the past for inspiration, there is a less rigid take on genre in these tracks as various locations "in the Nordingra area of the Swedish high coast are exorcised and channelled through sound."

Review: Civilistjavel's most recent album, 2022's Janmatter, was a predictably atmospheric and out-there affair that blended suspenseful ambient moods and melodies with occasional IDM rhythms and plenty of experimental chops. Here two giants of leftfield electronic music and experimental techno give their interpretations of the album, crafting 'remixes' based on stems from a variety of different album tracks. Dave Huismans dons his familiar A MAde Up Sound alias on side A, re-imagining Civilistjavel's work as a hybrid deep techno/dub techno/ambient techno epic - all densely layered ambient textures, deep and distant beats, and waves of effects-laden synth sounds. Ossia takes a different approach on his 'Disconnected Dub', delivering an immersive sound design experience built around creepy, effects-laden ambient chords, unsettling rumbles and echoing bleeps.

Review: Optimo Music continue to dazzle with their increasing experimentation, this time welcoming Finnish producer and K-X-P frontman Kaukolampi to the fore. Exploring the concept of sound as a physical and spatial phenomenon, the LP explores Kaukolampi's idea of "the sphere": his metaphysical and/or musical analogy for being subject to an undetectable outside force, as if being manipulated by an unseen cult. Hypnotic, eerie grooves play out in a muted, time-crystalline fashion, all tracks evoking the feeling of being locked in spherical amber, unwitting.

Review: Sheila Chandra's Zen Kiss, first released in 1994, was among the best examples of the British singer's many forays into contemporary international music. The twist is that most of the album is a simple yet striking a cappella, which plays out from start to finish, and is rarely accompanied by anything so much as a faint yet enchanting drone. With Chandra's interpreting songs from various cultures and traditions - including those of Indian, Spanish, Celtic, and medieval origin - she displays a remarkable vocal range in both pitch and stylistic breadth, ranging from the rhythmic to the ethereal and improvised.