Tags: Experimental Ambient

Review: Mood Hut's semi-regular forays into ambient-adjacent territory are always worth checking, largely for their preference for hallucinatory sounds, new age melodies and loved-up textures over academic concepts and po-faced experimentalism. Their latest chill-out room friendly missive, which comes courtesy of Chinese producer Knopha, embraces this approach while also offering nods to his own off-kilter dancefloor productions. So, opener 'Fizz', a languid, post-club shuffler, is followed by the jazz-flecked, opiate ambient soul of 'The Light', and the sun-bright joy of 'Mizu Le Gout', where loose-limbed breakbeats, star-burst melodies and cut-up vocal snippets catch the ear. Arguably best of all, though, is the EP-closing 'Corundrum', where Mediterranean guitar sounds and echoing electronic motifs cluster around a UK garage-influenced ambient house groove.

Review: Albertan experimenter Dylan Khotin follows up last year's full-length with an equally impressionistic two-tracker and logical successor, 'Alterac Acid/Mornings II'. Both tracks here are curious digi-Balearic offerings, with spacious episcopies of sound cast across meandering landscapes once seemingly trawled by space invaders and/or deep-cosmos probes. A nearly aimless acid line unfurls across the A-side, locking things into a nice stasis, before a more subdued, dare say clipped stab-womp drives the action of the B-track, which hardly so much as teases its drum line, nor avails itself of a need to even use drums at all (at points) to compel the listener into a driven, awestruck state of bliss.