Elsewhereness revisited is an occasional feature documenting the drift at the margins: ambient gasbagging, ’tube-d, ’cloud-ed, and ’camp-ed up, complete with companion mix, Elsewhereness revisited #9.
Proof good things come to those who wait in word of a second album from Forest Management ‘after almost four years, a deleted album, and a fair amount of life change.’ While release of the ‘new age odyssey-like’ (says IA) 21st Century Man awaits the pleasure of Terrible Cloud Records, in the meantime a pair of previews have ears piqued to the peak with promise of FM‘s deepest diving yet. The semiotic sweep of John Daniel’s audio palette strikes in a soothing-harrowing shift from the subtle sublimation of “Flying Through the Night” to the swells and billows of “Mother”—fit to melt the most solid of flesh with the impressive heft of its ambiguous emotion charge. Fancy oneiromancy.
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Pausal‘s course, charted across Barge, Students of Decay, Own, Infraction, and Dronarivm, takes them to Yorkshire’s finest, Hibernate, with their Volume Flow. After the more experimental Avifaunal (see Best of 2017), Alex Smalley and Simon Bainton decided to go back to ambient roots, with several lengthy improvised pieces, later post-produced and edited down to form these tracks; they set out to articulate appreciation for all biological forms of nature—the eponymous ‘Volume’ referring as much to liquid state as it does to audio levels. Alex also has his own Curves, er… an album, that is, in his Olan Mill guise via ER fave, Shimmering Moods (see below). Apparently completed either side of a trip to Myanmar, capturing a time of total change as he prepared to become a father and relocate to Germany. Through field recordings from his home and work environments he found himself reflecting on places where he’d spent his life living, working and growing, with layers of processed guitar, synth and voice added to create a time-capsule of locations and experiences.
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Back to Shimmering Moods, whose sheer prolificity of goodies compels bite-size over fuller chews: Convenience from V I C I M, aka Linus Schrab, half of Thet Liturgiske Owäsendet (previously on Lobster Sleep Sequence, Low Point, Funeral Fog and for/wind), follows up the ACR split with Forest Management, arid / Fragments, last year—reflections of days away from family, friends and everyday life; a product of ‘investigating the hidden nature and possibilities of self-recorded synth loops,’ stretching, bending and arranging parts-to-whole. On Lost at Sea Puppy Seeds ‘paints vast dreamy landscapes, made of remote lands of wilderness;’ redolent of lost and lonely unmoored travelling without moving in search of peace and stability to lull and comfort. Boban Ristevski’s The turn of the screw not only references Henry James, but also Fowles (The Magus) in “Conchis,” though opener “Practical Magical Evocation” sets the tone for the album as more magic realist than postmodernist.
‘I Like The Music That makes me Contemplate,’ says Shaahin Saba Dipole, once of Flaming Pines and Hermes. His Reverence comes with profuse thanks to Siavash Amini, cluing us in to where he’s coming from. Luca Sigurtà‘s West of Eden peddles ‘emotional electronic noise’ with slow-paced rhythms and delicate analog synth flows; a sort of ‘very original trip‐noise‐hop’—mixing digital and analog, melodies with a sui generis melancholic feel. Banished Pills‘ Failure quotes Sartre’s Nausea, no less (‘I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire’), Edoardo Cammisa authoring via ‘field recs. [2015-2016] – sound assembly [2017] – analog electronics – tapes – bass drones – mics. & contact mics. – treatment, mixing and mastering [April 2018].’ Last, Minsk’s Kirill Mazhai‘s You Don’t Belong, product of ‘a transition period […] Some life stages ended, some relationships failed, some changes happened;’ tracks dedicated to quondam places that still resonate—lakeside house, 1st floor apartment, or city-centre park, it’s both tribute and a kind of closure, bespeaking a will, if not to detach, then to reconfigure attachment—a message to self and others eponymously signalled.
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Dallas sonician Tapes and Topographies applies an anaesthetic aesthetic to his take on Zeitgeist-y sedative, Opiates. Organic instrumentation creeps beneath a haze, spectral auto-Simulacra seeping through. The sonic contours of sources lightly graze the inner ear, as if Todd Gautreau were working with heavy-duty gauzed mics. A narcotized wooze runs through it, though what we have here is no zone-out, more an engrossing set of audio short fiction projected into the mind’s ear. Abstract, but also somehow concrete, each piece takes on a soundtrack-y aspect, sounds molded to suggest emergent narratives.
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CA-based Mirae Arts, a new label ‘focused on DIY culture and natural production styles,’ debuts with two releases that join the binary dots on an ambient-techno cline. There’s Brilliant Days from Michiru Aoyama, ex-Organic Industries, taâlem and Somehow, brings two serene ‘scapes crafted from guitar harmonics treated serenely with electronics for a glitchy underlay, affording space for your own nostalgic narratives. At the other end, Seraphim Rytm, Good Twin of dark techno type, Damaskin, of Unknown Precept and Noiztank fame, offers Prayers By The Lake, three tracts of shrouded Nu Italo-techno with an ambient coda: all ceremonial-like, misty mountain lakes, attended by mystic Nature invocations, evolve into a call to collective consciousness to reconnect with the environment and others around us. If you will.
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Poland’s How To Disappear Completely return with more ‘Music For Insomniacs,’ their experimental sleep music project issuing a further prescription drawn from their sea of dreams: Mer de Revs III is ‘a study in deliberately soothing textures designed to give the listener space to find stillness and collapse into rest – late night lullabies,’ clocking up nigh on 80 mins of new music. Assembled over a 12-month period with the same compositional ethos as the last two vols—simple as possible, most minimal gear, it represents ‘a culmination point of the trilogy and a summary of the first two installments.’ The flow from one sonic motif to another is taken slow, inducing slowdown and unplug. Any narrative is oblique, as it were a serving suggestion articulated via artwork, titular and surrounding discourse. Keeping it (Ether)Real.
Sitting well with the end of a long hot Summer, now cooling, the ‘laconic haze, ethereal curiosities, nostalgic glimpses and fictional illusions’ of For The Summer, Or Forever from Halftribe. He eschews rhythm for sound towards twilight twinkling, sidling up on you with sneaky moves—a simple motif lightly lifted with a timbral tweak or two. Gathering a welter of weathered tones and instrumentation, foregrounding soft drones and keys against a flutter of field sounds. Transcendent interactions between musical and textural sounds (“Swimming Off That Sombre Shore”), loosely rhythmic elements from non-musical sources, creaking woods, soft wind and natural movement brush against synth slivers (“The Simple Things”); soft piano submersions, rising choral pads, and periodic synth stabs ride tandem with the random, while maintaining focus (“Imaginary Lines”). Dronarivm casts Ryan Bissett as Producer of ‘deep ambient and downtempo styled music’ (yawn). We prefer Tone Whisperer.
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New maps, old territory: the past decade’s recrescence of underground tape and analog media nostalgia has afforded space for oddities whose outsider aspect prefers retreat to rebellion, quiet to querulous. One such is Lyon-based Charles Belpois, aka Magnétophonique, kindred spirit of future-basing tone-adventurer, X.Y.R. (see here), or the shipwrecked remotion of Wave Temples (see Isle Enchanted). Une Cartographie Idéale harvests 12 tracks from a back catalog of ltd. ed. tapes on now-defunct Carpi Records (co-curated with ex-roommate Baptiste Martin, aka Les Halles) and Mexico’s now-defunct Dept Tapes. Queerly compelling lo-fi Nu Age post-/proto-/retro-ambient, a bricolage of tape-hiss and loop-station offcuts; random keys corralled into smeared cameos ‘wavering between bliss and abandonment, paradise and prison,’ isolation and island fantasy mingled, tropicalia piped through a heat-haze of refracted melodies into lost horizons. 4th-world chillout for the washed-out generation, fragile synth doodle, swirls of pacific tropical nostalgia sounds drawn from an atavistic dreamworld. A desert island dusk OST for queasy late-summer post-heatwave days, laden with memories of sticky afternoons melting into balmy evenings. LA Exotic Moods swingers, Not Not Fun, host.
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First documented sighting of Pascal Savy was here a decade ago, but there seems to have been a late period hiatus, or hiccup. Back in May came Dislocations, though—a first full release since Adrift (Eilean Rec., 2014); superficially similar, but deeper listening suggests a fertile [de/a]scent in between. While Experimedia‘s previous, Matthias Urban’s Passagen, focused on the expressive potentialities afforded by rigor and process, Savy charts a more direct emotional landscape, drawing on the ideational legacy of Mark Fisher (cf. Ghosts of My Life ) and the notion of ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ (youtube) in what began as a pessimistic reflection on the subtle violence and disembodied forces of ‘capitalist realism’ (Zero Books). The project would evolve into something more intimate—an affordance structure via which to deconstruct and integrate feelings of personal dislocation; to ‘find himself reconnecting with his art, his community, and sense of hope for the future’ through this quietly roiling low-end mass a-fizz with occluded melody. Savy’s savvy is interstitial—between ambient drone, microsound and soft noise—in what could be an archive of lost transmissions from the frontline of late-period capitalism’s collapse. Mastered by Mathieu (Stephan), to boot.
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Ant’lrd and Benoît Pioulard‘s Deck Amber (Sounds et al.) is a double cassette with a lineage to earlier tape outings on such as Stunned, Digitalis, and Tranquility Tapes. On the first the pair pool resources, their love for texture synched into a fathoms deep composition, the second a side each split between them,. Hard to discern the provenance of these aural creations, individual inputs blurring into one as they sound the depths with a droning wave, cresting towards the beyond, only to be drenched by overspill of sounds. On BP’s “Solivagance” tones divide, one side pulling higher, the other staying lower. Ant’lrd’s “Slow Dream” is grounded in ritual patterns, channeling primal sounds from the ancients, now and then taking on a neo-futurist aspect, as if the cycles of civilizations were moving simultaneously between past-future poles.
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Jake Muir eschews previous leanings to synthesis—on Dragon’s Eye, Touch and Further (as Monadh)—for sample manipulation on his latest, Lady’s Mantle. The California dreamer pipes classic ’60s surf-rock source material into ambient wooze redolent of Andrew Pekler’s sensori-‘scapes and the gaseous hyper-timbrality of Richard Chartier‘s Pinkcourtesyphone. The label behind Space Afrika’s Somewhere Decent To Live and Echium‘s Synthetic Space earlier this year, sferic, cultivates similar immersive ambient-architextural themes, with Muir crafting poignant sound-vision fusions from samples smudged with field recordings from Iceland to California. Weird scenes and prefab dreams from these surf-snatches are collaged into a teeming sound stage; their harmonic auras, etiolated yet glinting, resound abstract-impressionistically through a transitional-liminal space somewhere between urban squall and oceanic sprawl. Untied States.
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Found Remains, ‘a NYC electronic label adhering to the shadows of thought and sound,’ offers Cody Lobbestael a platform to drift followers along a path of sweet’n’sour synth-ambience, with Particle Dissolution ‘travel[ling] through several layers of atmospheric synth work, transcending time, space, and hues of light, all while remaining based around a recurring theme that guides the journey.’ This Detroit spinner has previous form on sulky lo-fi DIY Belgian arthouse imprints like Archive, cf. Bleed‘s ‘smooth, laid Down and affecting ambient. From refined chords to altered feelings, descending into a dream-like world.’ Dominic Coppola (of whom more anon) masters.
Looking for ‘an Arcane Environment of Pure Emotion’? Sangam’s your man. ER-buffs will know the Mancy mood-swinger ‘creates ambient portraits of social dysfunction, depression and heartbreak’ (The Wire) with a nifty ambient-synth-vaporwave variant. His latest Departure mixes Heaven and Miserable (Manc-stylee) to good [a/e]ffect on US DIY art & music collective, Æescape Sounds. ‘You feel that? A cascade of emotions. The lights of the city linger in your thoughts. A flicker of clairvoyance, and it’s gone. Not so easy to speak your mind now is it?’—a more oblique blurb for Escapism Path via Canada’s New Motion, tagged ‘electronic experimental ambient atmospheric cyberpunk dark ambient dreampunk drone internet,’ so you know the score. And a good score it would make for what’s playing in your personal head cinema. Not only prolific on his own account but others’ too, as seen on “Judge Penitent (Sangam ‘Blink’ Remix),” a retool of a track from S/T album on Blank Editions from Inchindown, Tim Garratt (aka Moon Zero) and Matthew Heywood’s (aka Bruised Skies), unsung back in March.
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Constellation Tatsu’s Spring Batch landed while we were otherwise engaged, and barely time to take it in, but with the summer batch upon us, here’s a slalomette through it. First up, Alex Crispin—name may be new, but no newbie he, with previous on Sounds of the Dawn and a portfolio incl. the BBC and Royal Academy; his Open Submission evidences compositional prowess at work, as it ‘submerses you in its washed out, melancholy atmosphere. […] through giant halls full of light and colorful glares, through crepuscular caves and wide open shoreline landscapes.’ On to Chihei Hatakeyama, who never sleeps despite the cosy-seeming comfort blankets he creates. Scene is superficially as blithe as ambient drone can get, yet ambiguous enough to tempt deeper, as in “Blue Reminder,” a sonic expanse that opens up new semantic vistas to ‘music to get lost in.’
Established Sounds of the Dawn artist and Microphones in the Trees blog contrib, Daniel Guillén, deals in wide-open ambient scapes and healing drones with nature sounds and choral spheres as Lunaria. Ascension Now is attended by some stellar sky-bound spiraling with satisfyingly psycho-active harmonic saturation—and more than a tidbit of Grassowian drone food about it to remove hunger for routine small thoughts. ‘Music to heal imaginary persons’ is the byline for Shade Terrarium from Japan-based Joshua Stefane aka Endurance, and with its narcotic late night vibe, the likes of “Sonata Primar” might be pegged (reductively) as ‘background music,’ but its soft keys and shade, replete with environmentalia, pleasingly reflect the world while creating another. Finally, preview of an ER fave with a goodie in CT’s summer batch. Since modest beginnings making music for fun to supplement hubby’s Ambient Sleeping Pill radio station, Angela Klimek hasn’t slept for making poemme sleep tracks! Moments in Golden Light is a small imperfectly re-formed set of drone poems evoking forest scenes in ‘the magical hour after sunrise in which the earth is bathed in gold.’
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ACR hosts Anthéne for All Things Pass, on which Polar Seas captain Brad Deschamps’ quitar and synth take on various shapes, from what seems like celestial choirs, elsewhere shifting to texture tools—soft drones and tape-y timbres. A reminder of After the Angels (seen in ER#8), Rui P. Andrade and Farwarmth’s HRNS debut, fusing the subtlety of Andrade’s All Lovers Go To Heaven and the heft of Farwarmth’s Immeasurable Heaven to good effect. With its harp arpeggios, haunting loop phasing and endless spectral drones, it ‘feels like it unfolds in an urban metropolis in a parallel universe. expensive, dark, tall and out-of-reach depressing, […] with its eerie alleyways, misty streets, dim lights and unapproachable silhouettes. but when you look closer, you’ll discover a distinct sacredness, an unmistakable purity.’ All 3 tracks retooled by kindred, ot to, not to, Adam Badí Donoval and Wim Dehaen.
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Whitelabrecs commemorate 20 more releases since their last box set (containing 1-20) with Whitelabrecs Box Set Volume 2, bundling all catalog nos up to WLR040, Daliah’s Holy Mountain, as well as some OOP items from the likes of Sven Laux, Steve Pacheco, and The Prairie Lines (see below). Latest rec from the lab is from Milan-based KrysaliSound curator, Francis M. Gri,, who has previous on his own label and Final Muzik. Apart was produced using reworked material from unpublished works under this name assembled from a hard-drive backup created 2003-2005; the previously completed tracks wouldn’t load due to a technical glitch, but fortunately he’d saved the individual components so he variously stretched, detuned, reversed and effected the sounds to arrive at a set of two mid-length pieces. Around the time of working on these, a new piece, “Last,” originally shared as a free d/l, was created. Each piece is immersive, with guitar and synth drones joined by loops, reversing textures and light shards of noise/static, shimmering drones, synth and guitar lines collide.
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The past two decades has een Casino Versus Japan explore variously interwoven realms of ambient sound from hazy IDM through gaze-y ambient drift. Back in 1998 the s-t debut‘s fuzzy blend of IDM tropes and post-Cocteaus dream-pop inflections made Erik Kowalski’s project the stuff of ambient electronica legend; and follow-up, Go Hawaii (Wobblyhead, 2000), proved a low-light classic, if not musical millennial Zeitgeist-marker. A hiatus or two—till the end of a decade starting with Whole Numbers Play The Basics (Carpark, 2002) and ending with Night On Tape (Attacknine, 2010), then half the next decade till a sprawling return in the 80-track Frozen Geometry (2016)—has served to keep things fresh. Now Suicide By Sun, marking CvsJ’s 20th anniversary, puts out flags of various colors, twenty two new hues accrued over a slew of studio sessions sequenced into 4 sides of ‘narcotic reverberation, reflective loops, and dream-soaked delay… guitar gestures refract into twilit horizons; hymnal drones swell and shimmer; smeared notes sway like lullabies of quiet communion.’ Diving deeper into soft focus abstraction, altered state guitar loops in billowing oneirism. Whether allusion to climate change, vampiric dark romanticism (TV Tropes), or popular science findings (Newsweek)—even if empty signifier, Suicide by Sun assures ‘pensive, patient, personal music, mapped with feeling and finesse by storied hands.’
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Compilation Corner: three are on the radar, occupying overlapping sonic territory. First, Faint’s Peaks serves as an introduction to the variety of artists on its roster. While a sense of peaceful drift is established, there’s a subtle paradigm shift early on with José Soberanes’ “Sobre Tus Aguas” (‘Mind the waters’?), whose tonal tenor starts shading an otherwise tranquil track towards a more tenebrous ambience, after which the lapping waters take on an unheimlich aspect. On Mykja’s “Nericoolpeel” sublimated dub beats surface, gradually breaking through, and taking control as the set ventures further onwards and upwards. Stand-outs: SVLBRD’s blissed white-out, “Isfjord,” Mind Over MIDI’s “White Mountain,” echoing the eponymous theme, and the neo-industrial inflections of Spain’s Discknocked’s “Annutbiv,” cf. his Pandemonium [LP] for Outer Limits techno purveyors, Circular Ltd.
Archives presents Solstice, whose soft rejuvenating tenor is put to good effect on Hirotaka Shirotsubaki’s “Summer Forest,” an invitation to forest bathing at once the twin and the opposite of ocean bathing. Deliberate pacing affords space for reflection and opportunity to note the subtle variativity of programme. Shirotsubaki is among several here with a recent Archives album, incl. Warmth, Robert Farrugia and Hotel Neon; the last mentioned contributes a fine “Gossamer,” which delivers the keynote address while reflecting its significative ambit with droning undulations. Like most here, it skirts the borders between ambient and drone, while the boundaries negotiated by Farrugia’s “Transition” are suffused with a vernal-aestival air; honorable outlier is Mikael Lind, whose “Havsbris” (“Sea Breeze”) is all poignant pianism with a string-surge mid-way; best in show, though, is Steve Pacheco with the spectral glimmering “Emanate.” No filler here.
Polar Seas compiles 22, mostly exclusive, tracks for A Light, A Glimmer. Largely homogeneous, but a few distinguish themselves, like James A McDermid’s deeply textured “Sere.” Includes a cast of ER types like Benoît Pioulard, Celer, Endurance, Hotel Neon, and Forest Management. A fundraiser for farm-based Wishing Well Sanctuary animal care facility near Toronto, on whose peace pole is writ ‘May Peace Prevail On Earth,’ to which the music is attuned in spirit (see more extensive igloo ‘view from Philippe Blache). Still on Polar Seas, Andrew Tasselmyer—who gave us Resonant Moments and Vantage Points (Shimmering Moods) and the Gray Acres project (see ER#8)—is now on to Places Real and Imagined; meanwhile back on Archives his Hotel Neon has Means of Knowing, referent for which is to be found in accompanying text: ‘Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world…walking is not the action by which one arrives at knowledge; it is itself the means of knowing.’ The mission: ‘to know ourselves more deeply,’ evoking the depth of experience available daily via ever-evolving interplay between tactile physical sounds and textured synthesis.
BLNDR’s debut album, l’Observatoire is a nostalgic overview of his past few years that purportedly seeks to capture resonant memories from his travels around the world, tracks referring to specific places, moments, and memories he wanted to commemorate. There’s a marked touch of melancholia laced through most of the tracks in what is an unusually sublimated ambient-electronica affair for the producer’s patrons, Hypnus. It is, though, in the zone in being avowedly redolent of ‘Sweden and musicians like Isorinne or Acronym […],’ though nods to seminal electronicians such as BoC, AFX, AE, and late-period types like OPN and Actress, are perhaps more notable.
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Two artists with a similar aesthetic of loop-finding collage and a label in common: South London’s Bill Bawden, purveyor of artisan ambience since 2005 on Serein, 12Rec, Resting Bell, Audio Gourmet and Rural Colours as Herzog, recently reborn as The Prairie Lines (see whitelabrecs above), has Today Leap and Stop Time out on eilean rec.: loops a daisy! Previously on eilean, now on Fluid Radio, Moss Covered Technology‘s And His Many Seas—something of a personal voyage for Greig Baird (Dad suffering from cancer)—sets out, dedicated to Baird Snr’s love of traveling, to navigate unknown emotional waters: conceptually and sonically exploratory.
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Random round-up: Dominic Coppola adds to his run of drone-ambient-shoegaze guitar meditations with the gorgeous Eros at Temple Stream (Alien Passengers) and ‘four new pieces that float, drift and slowly wrap around you in timeless mood-altering fashion,’ aptly titled Serenity Channel (Strange Rules). Meanwhile queasy drones creep to the gravitational pull of aquatic life, cresting with sonic spume, a touch of Tim (Hecker) and a Caretaker-ly caress: yes, it’s ‘disintegration fruitloops’ man, Leaaves, with Old Coast (Little L). And Berlin’s exael has some sweet things out on bc, tastiest of which are tunic trax vol. 2 and edits.
