Juno Recommends Ambient / Drone: November 2023

Review: Carsten Nicolai's distinctive approach to reduced, crystalline electronics continues to bear fruit with the second part in the Hybrid:ID series, which commenced in 2021. As with the prior volume, the music contained within is drawn from a commissioned score to a dance piece by Richard Siegal. As his own Noton label outlines, these ten pieces 'delve into infinity, drawing inspiration from resonance and elasticity.' Needlepoint pulses, electrostatic flickering and elegant dub techno forms abound, each sound given appropriate space in the unmistakable style Nicolai has made his own over a celebrated career on the fringes of contemporary electronic music.

Review: The ambient husband-and-wife duo is an effective formula, one which here reawakens in the form of Awakened Souls. James Bernard and Cynthia Hall Bernard join forces for the making of Unlikely Places, a mini-album of Californian swells, field-recorded wonderments and guitar-drenched accompaniments - ultimately a washed-out ode to the creative possibility in all things. Centring on the idea that inspiration can be found anywhere, this is an album of relentless, gazy, waterfally gushings, from the hopeful 'It Could Be Wings' to the moodier 'Moonbeams'.

Review: Mary Lattimore is one of the foremost harpists of her generation, a status duly restored with the release of her latest LP, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada. Named after a hotel in Croatia about which Lattimore recalls many blissful holiday memories, the LP laments the oncoming threat of loss, as Arkada now faces plans to be renovated. Through this immediate story, a wider picture of collective mourning is painted - the album is a collaborative affair, enlisting the many famous faces of shoegaze, folk and goth stardom, namely the likes of The Cure's Lol Tolhurst, Rachel Goswell and Meg Baird - producing a sound that is as eerie as it is serene.

Review: Tyresta's Small Hours album (a direct follow-up to 2020's All We Have) comes on beautiful 180-gram splatter green vinyl via Past Inside The Present and is another majestically subtle and intimate ambient work that explores "impermanence, grief, loss, healing, and growth". It's an album that reveals more with each listen as the carefully layered-up synths and melodies intertwine harmoniously to make for a perfect late-night soundtrack. There's plenty of soul searching to be done while lost in the midst of this album, but it will be a rewarding task as you cannot fail to find "solace, rejuvenation, and a rekindling of the unfettered spirit," as the label puts it.

Review: Natalia Baylis based her first album for Touch Sensitive around the fortuitous discovery of an Italian-made CRB Elettronica Ancona Diamond 708 E organ at the recycling centre, in what now seems like a fated outcome for the Irish ambient artist. Feeding the wonky sound of the instrument into swirling pools of processing, she used one of her father's old photos of three ladies bathing in the sea to set her angle of approach - and so Mermaids came to be. Enchanting, mysterious and flowing like the ocean, we couldn't think of a more fitting title for this mesmerising album.

Review: Swedish singer and composer Elin Piel returns to Mystery Circles after making a debut appearance on the Las Vegas-based ambient label back in 2020. Piel's sound deals in microscopic layers of textural detail slowly shifting around delicately embellished melodies - 'Tunnlar' is a perfect opening statement in this sense as glassy synth phrases pass through prismatic DSP and faint flickering interference skips around in the background. If you enjoy the work of artists like Emily A. Sprague and The Humble Bee you'll certainly find much to savour on this beautifully rendered album.

Review: Pretty Sneaky is an anonymous project about which nobody knows much of anything at all, though it has become synonymous with an image of a banana peel logo and self-released white label 12" EPs. We get more here, this time on Marionette. Marseille's Norman Levy aka Koldd has been enlisted as a collaborator on this one (the third time this has happened following his work on a couple of previous tunes) and it is a seductive mix of soothing sounds, laid-back atmospherics and gentle bird calls. This is slow-motion music for meditative periods of reflection and we love it.

Review: Scott Monteith is the Berlin-based but Canadian-born artist best known as Deadbeat, stepping out with new alias Ark Welders Guild. It is an audio-visual performance and recording project with Italian singer and curator Letizia Trussi, whom he met in winter 2021 and has since formed a strong creative bond. They work in Trussi's Rooms of Kairos studio and have already cooked up two album length pieces that come on Monteith's BLKRTZ imprint. Mons Clepsydra is the first and is an epic drone in four parts with string recordings permeating the moody, grainy, heavy atmospheres.

Review: According to the maestro himself, Roger Eno, The Skies They Shift Like Chords is a record about transience, subtle and pronounced changes, and, in many ways, the march of evolution in music and life itself. The celebrated piano and string-focused artist laid some serious groundwork for high expectations on his debut LP, and now elevates that blueprint towards the heavens with this stunning album.

Utilising an array of instruments - electric guitars, flute organs, bass clarinet - remarkably most of the pieces here are based on improvisations which then developed into full blown tracks, a process Eno describes as capturing "snapshots" we would otherwise risk losing in the ether. Contemporary classical at its most captivatingly beautiful, this is the very definition of timelessness, drawing on modern and age-old techniques to forge something anew.

Review: The White Arcades ranks amongst one of Harold Budd's best loved solo works. The ambient pioneer and celebrated pianist is of course well known for his work with the likes of Brian Eno, but this 1988 album demonstrates how clear-sighted his approach became when he was recording on his own. There's a pristine quality to this kind of ambience which allows it to sink into any number of settings, but it's far from banal. The subtlety of Budd's composition and performance as the piano and synth lines enmesh is a marvel to behold, suggesting half-hidden mysteries waiting to be solved, but only when the time is right. If there was ever music to soothe a troubled mind, this would be it.

Review: Mary Lattimore's standing as one of the foremost harpists in active service is without doubt at this stage, but even by her considerable reputation this record is a standout moment in a glittering career. Over the course of two years, the dedicated improviser committed herself to focused sessions and collaborated with an impressive cast of characters from The Cure's Lol Tolhurst to Slowdive's Rachel Goswell. The over-arching theme is one of the inescapable nature of change, as crystallised in the crumbling Croatian hotel Lattimore references in the album title. It goes without saying the musical results are achingly beautiful, nuanced and fathoms deep.

Review: Minneapolis' Chris Bartels aka Blurstem, and Philadelphia's Andrew Tasselmyer of the likes of Hotel Neon and Gray Acres have hooked up once more for a second collaborative album Midnight Letters. This album's starting point was original concepts played out on guitar which were then processed and experimented with through an ages-old analog tape machine. Add in an array of iPad audio processing apps, samplers, and Ableton software and you have a perfect mix of tools to serve up a sonic journey that perfectly merges the old with the new. The resulting ambient soundscapes are immersive and sparse but packed with subtle details that convey all manner of emotions.