New releases last two weeks: Post Rock/Experimental

Review: This new collaboration between Swedish producer Civilistjavel! and Lebanese artist Mayssa Jallad is both a conceptual inversion and a sonic ghost of Jallad's original record. Refracting material from her Beirut-focused album through sparse dub techno, Civilistjavel! transforms narrative-rich compositions into abstract, often beatless forms where Mayssa's voice floats disembodied in a fog of delay and reverb. Tracks like 'Baynana (Version)' and 'Holiday Inn (March 21 to 29) (Version)' feel haunted by memory, with structure hinted at but rarely resolved. It's a remarkable shift in context, but one that remains emotionally aligned. Civilistjavel!'s production avoids spectacle in favour of slow erosionivocal fragments hover, dissolve, re-emerge. Even more rhythmic moments like 'Kharita (Dub)' maintain an eerie restraint, built on slippery grooves and shimmering decay. Both artists are working far from their geographic homesiMayssa in Boston, Tomas in Uppsalaibut the result sounds uncannily unified. It's a record that holds grief and beauty in the same hand, illuminating the quiet force of Mayssa's voice and Civilistjavel!'s deft minimalism. Not so much a remix album as a parallel reality: austere, spectral, and deeply moving.

Review: Brian Eno, a towering figure in ambient music and a master of sonic landscapes, has shaped the contours of modern music through his production collaborations with iconic artists like David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2. His latest work with Beatie Wolfe, a conceptual artist from Los Angeles, encapsulates a career of endless reinvention. Recorded in London, the collaboration weaves together the worlds of alternative vocals and ambient soundscapes. 'Big Empty Country' serves as a vivid contrast between light and darkiits day and night versions embodying the very essence of Eno's immersive, evolving sound. Much like his work as part of Roxy Music and beyond, this release is both forward-thinking and introspective, grounded in a shared commitment to environmentalism and artistic exploration. It's a meditation on space, sound and feelingian unbroken thread in Eno's enduring legacy of artistic expression.

Review: Brian Eno, legendary master of ambient music and Beatie Wolfe, the LA-based conceptual artist known for her innovative blend of the physical and digital, unite for a collaborative sonic exploration. Throughout 2024, the two artists recorded material that bridges the boundary between deeply personal emotions and universal experiences, creating an evocative soundscape. The work pulses with the distinctive energy of Eno's ambient prowess, while Wolfe's haunting vocals add a layer of intimacy. On tracks like 'Milky Sleep' and 'Hopelessly At Ease', the listener is swept into a dreamlike state where time feels suspended. These moments of calm are balanced by the more urgent, yet still deeply meditative, 'Suddenly', which sways between serenity and tension. The delicate interplay between light and shadow becomes even more palpable on 'A Ceiling and Lifeboat', where the quiet sense of stillness gives way to a profound sense of rebirth. There's a sense of movement throughout the releaseiparticularly on 'Breath March', where rhythm and texture converge with palpable energy. Eno's atmospheric layers create space for Wolfe's voice to become a thread, guiding the listener through these reflective, almost sacred-feeling sonic spaces, where every note invites introspection and feeling.

Review: Japan's Envy created one of the most respected post-rock screamo albums of all time with this third album of theirs. Originally released in 2001 on Japense punk label H.G. Fact and again as a limited released in 2003 on Dim Mak Records in the U.S., with not many physical copies printed they've been scarcely available. Thankfully, that's all about to change now that this enduring masterpiece of foreboding post rock and blisteringly powerful screams is getting repressed. Envy's strength lies in their ability to flip flop between introspective atmospheric passages and intense guttural aggression within a track and for it to be cohesive. That said, where they don't relent, like on 'Invisible Thread', the adrenaline really kicks in and it's a palpable reenactment of the atmosphere at their live shows.

Review: We find ourselves lost in kosmische textures, dark jazz motifs and brushup drums, as Ivan The Tolerable (Oli Heffernan) edges us ever deeper into his singular sonic world with An Orphan Form, where wide scapes and underbrushed moodiness leaves us in an identifiable yet not entirely placeable place. There's a sense of constant movementicircular rather than linearias the music unfurls like a dream slipping just out of reach. Synth lines wobble and stretch, field recordings emerge from the mist, and the sounds of nature act as subtle anchors amid the abstraction. It's a spiritual detour after the cheekier tonalities of his various earlier cassette albums for the likes of Cruel Nature and Ack! Ack! Ack!.

Review: Bill Orcutt's approach to the guitar feels less like playing and more like detonating: a flurry of stabbing phrases, mangled blues motifs and broken time signatures that teeter constantly on the edge of collapse. It's a sound he's refined over decades, from his early days in Miami's punk and noise scenes to his present-day experiments in live-coded digital abstraction. This new album, which features two versions of 'Anxiety of Symmetry', finds him at his most feral and funny in years i a twisted tribute to the clunky MIDI guitar presets of the 90s, rendered via his cracked-software experiments with two fifteen-minute compositions built from a single concept: six sung numbers, each mapped precisely to pitches in a major scale. These micro-phrases ('1-2', '1-2-3', and so on) repeat and multiply, creating swirling polymetric harmonies that flicker between gentle hypnosis and algorithmic overload. Female voices loop in cycles of uneven length, forming structures reminiscent of Glass's Einstein on the Beach, but without its theatricalityithis is music of obsession, not spectacle. The emotional register is unusually soft for Orcutt, but behind the surface calm lies a meticulous compulsion. In an essay of the same name, he aligns this method with "Just Right" OCD, proposing a feedback loop between mental fixation and machine logic. What emerges isn't ambient in any passive sense, but a kind of orderly unravelingicomposition as therapeutic ritual, echoing the recursive spirals of Hanne Darboven or the trance-state potential of counting itself.

Review: Hayden Pedigo has always defied expectations and conventions. In a world of instant gratification, his music is both immediately enthralling but only truly rewarding for the more patient and deep listener. He's fused to the very core of the instrumental acoustic guitar canon, and yet seems hellbent on putting out record after record of, frankly, incomparable music. In his own words, I'll Be Waving As You Walk Away is "a micro-dose psychedelic album. I wanted it to be this tangible feeling, as if somebody had cut up a tab of LSD and put on a Fahey record." The trip itself is largely thanks to the technical genius at work here, with six strings manipulated in such ways as you often feel entire chasms of melody are opening up for you to fall into, Alice style.

Review: We've all been party to solo material by seminal UK shoegaze sorts Ride's guitarist Andy Bell, but what about their bassist? Not so much. Well, that's about to change. Enter the brooding debut solo album from Ride's low-end maestro Steve Queralt. A largely instrumental affair, there's elements of shoegaze and darkly textured soundscapes. Plus there's guest appearances from more 90s legends: Emma Anderson (formerly of Lush and Sing-Sing) and Verity Susman (Electrlane, MEMORIALS) grace the album. Anderson sings on the pummeling lead single 'Lonely Town', which was launched with an aptly monochrome meditative montage of a music video. Given the power of this debut, we suspect this nine-song collection is the first of many solo albums to come, from a musician who has nothing to prove, but plenty to express.

Review: Stephen Vitiello, Brendan Canty and Hahn Rowe pull strings in strange and rewarding directions on Second, the chameleonic follow-up to their 2023 debut piece First. Vitiello, having left behind a vista's trail of ambient, lowercase and electroacoustic work with the likes of Taylor Deupree and Pauline Oliveros, now sketches raw forms with Rhodes, guitar and modular gear before looping in Canty and Rowe. The former adds drums, bass and piano with typical restlessness; the latter, once of Hugo Largo, folds in bowed guitar, viola and 12-string textures. There's a thread of freeform drift here, but it's sotted in dub weight, Krautrock pulse and post-punk lean. "We're coming from three different schools," Vitiello notes. Throw in a guest spot from Animal Collective's Geologist on hurdy gurdy, and it's a strange little world built on sideways logic.