For The Ambient Lovers...review and mixtape archive 001

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I know the new Roger Eno - "This Floating World" record has finally come out, and that's grand and everything, but I'm equally as grateful for this wonderful gift from Norman Records

https://soundcloud.com/normanrecords/nor...de-of-time

If you want to check out Eno's piano recitals on the "Recital" label ran by Sean McCann, then go here: https://soundcloud.com/recitalprogram
FR 206 - Hellenica - Land Of No Return

There are some lands you don't want to return to. Other lands you relish like a cool spring. "Land Of No Return" by Hellenica is very firmly in the latter camp, since it's full of vim, zest and a quiet opulence that is brought to life with the
use of electronics and recording every sound to a 1970s Denon reel-to-reel antique shop tape machine. Jim Demos gives archaic and expected info of the processes involved, which account for synthesis being treated with analogue warmth and stretched algorithms. This gives the land of no return a fitting alibi to become some life-changing power instead of out-of-date sour.

Indeed the lip-licking tastiness of the synthetic equations on offer amounts to delightfully peculiar and somewhat "quite"
music. Particular and artsy, arresting and dancefloor...a neat combination is reached. Yet it's very ambient. Comparisons that suit could be to Orbital's "In-Sides" album, and drones-wise, Aquarelle on the Low Point label. Jim Demos has produced very cleverly stitched together sounds that do not rely on fixation, instead need to be treated as a whole. They are rhythmically very odd - it always sounds like everything is "slightly" behind the beat, giving the record a feeling of instability. Yet the strength lies in well-put-together soundscapes, waveforms and transductions. It really is something of paradoxical oddity, like the occasional soaring electric guitars that almost create full-on power chord choruses out of the material.

There are also nods to The Caretaker/Leyland Kirby stylistically throughout, a general maudlin (not mawkish) fascination with the depressive states of antimatter and decompression from dementia. Another compliment related is that the music is very focused. Nothing outstays its welcome, there is a firm grasp of texture, modality experience, the reigning in of the by-standing public. That's also been something that's fascinated me about ambient listener-ships. There really isn't anything of a "following" except for touring artists, and producers like Hellenica often become forgotten in the detritus of "heard it once / no return". I am piqued to comment on this because of the title of the album, "Land Of No Return". If you think of the "land" as something of matter, like a fish, for example, then are we to simply take the nourishment or let it go? Are we as humans purely built for disposing of music so frivolously that we might as well catch pathogens through disease and decay? I think not. But it is a point I question only because of this new release.

And isn't that the point? Music is meant to make us feel good, and so is criticism, or social commentary, documenting, whatever you want to call it. With this collection of seventies-and-eighties-soundtrack pieces I found serenity in the solace of time. A strongly stirring record, I've not heard anything quite like the sounds of Hellenica here. Get the release before it too, may vanish into the land of no return.
Mario Diaz De Leon feat. Tak Ensemble - Sanctuary LP.
On Spotify.
by the way people, I've left my soundcloud collection online indefinitely for stream, but cancelled my £10 subscription that included sc go (7.99/1.99), since 3 months ago. it was too expensive for someone who gets given less than minimum wage and needs savings every day. sc is full of beautiful music by other producers that I produce for them with my ears and electronic neurotransmissions, everything always falls into place once the soundset has been immediately auditioned in 4 bars minimum.
Acronym - Malm (Field Records)

https://acronym-field.bandcamp.com/
Ta.
Im enjoying the Space Ambient playlist if you search "drone music" on Spotify to find it.
302 hours of neutrality drone if you put it on shuffle. Great for overnight sleepovers with the lover.
Scanner - Fibolae

The well-beloved to some but underappreciated to most artist Scanner makes a return to form on his new album, "Fibolae". Starting off as a progressive stretch around the coastline environmental tuning of artists such as Christian Fennesz and Timothy Hecker's champion style, the music soon discombobulates into a sultry and jazz inspired super cluster that is somniferous and soporific. Much of the tuning of the record intrinsically maps itself well to the pentatonic and chromatic scale. Pentones are used throughout to purify the illustrious webbing these feats of musicianship tread. In the same ordinance the listener finds an exotic late night club rhythm that I would not mind seeing recreated live.

Mrb
“A pleasant diversion from the dead-ended fantasia of pseudo-escapism” ~ SubVersion
 
Hanetration - Ancients EP

www.hanetration.bandcamp.com
I will do an audience friendly Xmas ambient mix for this thread called "Handling Normality"; a link on from Handling Grief and Handling Happiness mixes for the Subvert Central exclusive For The Ambient Lovers Mix Series. 

It will not be a yearly round-up, because now my archiving style is fluidly long haul, so I don't lose loads of data. I can no longer afford to archive to order because my brainbox is constantly redeveloping.
https://boomkat.com/products?q[keywords]...0caretaker
Fairy
Environmentally and in the context of 745am on New Year's Day, I'm solvent and under the influence of the music I last took the ferry to Westerpark, Amsterdam with eight years ago..."No Two Things", a deep house exponent I clubbed to in Maidstone Great Britain River Bar with Aya, by Blue Six. This tune is so dreamy, it's one of my favourite records this lifetime.

It's on eMusic.
Robert Scott Thompson's new stuff is very pleasant. If you have heard "Telemetry" from SubVersion's "SlipStreamDreams" compilation on www.focisleft.bandcamp.com, why not check out "Alphabet Of The Trees" in the lineage of The Silent Shore?

https://robert-scott-thompson.bandcamp.com/
Great debut album of Max Wuerden & Thore Pfeiffer (of Pop Ambient fame):
https://wuerden.bandcamp.com/album/feinherb
Carbon based lifeforms- derelicts 

Amazing set of files submitted to bandcamp.
Check it out if you can.
Sruti - Heard, Unspoken (Eilean Rec., 02 February 2018 release).

Pretty damn heavy duty bizzo from Sruti here, coming somewhere between the tramlines of Ben Frost and the ambient efforts of Milieu and Quosp on the Metanoia netlabel (RIP), specifically Milieu's "Brother" LP. "Unspoken, Part One" is the best track here, a quivering mass of exorcised vocal demons floating around the aural hemispheres like coffee clouds chugging to the surface. Although the record as a whole outlines itself in sadness and melancholy, the trite "glimmer of hope" synaptic oddity is rendered beautifully once again in the narrative, closing us out with an Alva Noto "Xerrox Vol.2" fairytale-ish asymmetric.
The main thing with JL's Gary Numan comparison is that I am similar in this way:
I regularly forget. This causes I to see the world as an alien odyssey and oddity.
Humans I talk to, I struggle with. Everyone just seems closer these days.
And I find that strange, because I am used to being “a little on the outside”.

Aloofness.
Gabriel Saloman - Movement Buildings Vol.III

All music by GMS (Guitar, Piano, Percussion, Voice, Field Recordings) MBvIII originally composed for «What Belongs To You», a dance created by Vanessa Goodman
Recorded and produced at the STAG in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories 2014-2015
Design by Bartolomé Sanson
Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler at Dubplates & Mastering

Shelter Press has made good on its promise to deliver the third and final volume of its series featuring Gabriel Saloman, released both on beautiful vinyl and collected with Movement Building Vol. I (2014) and Vol. II (2015) as a double CD. For fans of Saloman’s post-Yellow Swans work - an already dense catalog of darkly cinematic compositions mostly conceived as accompaniment to some of Vancouver’s edgier contemporary dance companies, Movement Building Vol. III is not only a much anticipated conclusion to this trilogy, it is the most fully realized album in years. Where as Movement Building Vol. I & II acted primarily as documentation of time-based artworks, Movement Building Vol. III offers a more coherent and narratively rich album that will appeal to admirers of Soldier’s Requiem (Miasmah, 2013).

Movement Building Vol. III's themes are taken from the dance it was composed for, 2015’s What Belongs To You, created by longtime collaborator Vanessa Goodman (Adhere, Soldier’s Requiem). That work sent its dancers through a physical journey exploring the needs of the body, for shelter, for love and for self-actualization, roughly aligned to Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”. The resulting album seems to achingly soundtrack the struggle for survival, not simply for bare life but for something greater and more transcendent that would make survival have meaning. It holds dread and hope in equal parts, never quite giving away the end of the story. Though this record was recorded two years ago Movement Building Vol. III could be the perfect album for our current era of civilizational near-collapse, whether at the hands of maniacal politicians, the slow burn of the Anthropocene or the constant enclosure of the corporate driven, social media enabled surveillance state.[/white]
That text is about Gabriel Saloman - Movement Buildings 3 Volumes press release, copy and pasted from one of my emails. No worries on whiting it out Statts, just as long as I have record of it and it's harmless.
(12th February 2018, 15:49)Muttley Wrote: No worries on whiting it out Statts

I've done it anyway Smile


Fairy
Hugs

I've just been revisiting some sounds and sites on my lounge Asus. Lil Wayne is not so nice aggro-ambient in the vein of "Dior Paint" Lil B, while Sound Meccano - Salty Wind And Inner Fire has aged well ('2015). Quite Aphexian, I wrote a capsule Eilean Rec. Article for Fluid Radio not too long ago on it. Works well on a system at low volumes.
https://theambientvisitor.bandcamp.com/a...he-spirits

Newest album from The Ambient Visitor, the Bing Satellites side project, as trancey as I like. Just downloaded it for free, 50p nets you unlimited access. And don't forget Bing has a 108 catalogue releases for £50 offer on his Bing Satellites material...crazygood value. "Meeting of the spirits" is a soporific gem of a record, which gently bubbles away until reaching a kind of symbiotic retrograde. There is a limitless chill in the production, and comparisons to Marsen Jules and Ashra wouldn't go unnoticed. Although a gentle comatose soak, full of wistful warmth and half-remembered sweet nothings, the album is pure drone. Anyne who follows Roach on eMusic will know this sort of vibe; slick, unmechanised and considered. The enchanted forest kind of symbiosis is a ledger entry of luscious; the cumulative anti-intensity a retrograde example of static links. It's a fine tone tapestry. Smile

www.bingsatellites.bandcamp.com
FTAL MIX 008 - Handling Static

https://focisleft.bandcamp.com/album/dj-...-26th-2018

A single from the currently in-the-works "Drone Works Vol.II" by my longform alias, Longformacus. A multi-tracked sample spree of stretched and elongated tones; rhythmic orienteering over a faint ide, a generalised root of contentment in the mastering, and an edited down approach influenced by the preceding catalog edition "Ultrawerld". 

Static is the premise that has been killing this man for centuries over. Inner electricity; the shivers down the spine. In simple terms, the moments where the ultramundane isn't it, isn't the gap between time + space. This is the fourth dimension, some say, stasis, volume, static.

credits
released February 26, 2018

[img][Image: a2258416061_16.jpg][/img][img][/img][img][/img]
and Handling Static has an ID Tag!
Tarab & Artifical Memory Trace - Obex

As this album of primarily field recordings – not the first for Tarab, at least – unfolds, “Obex” takes on a heavy serrating and almost surgical quality to the art of the re-arrangement. Fragments of sound pile up like a destruction derby composed of ant larvae. The sounds are hugely discrete music: birdsong, creaks, scrapes and crackles, the wind (as treated first on fellow field album “Wind Keeps Dust Away”). In the main of the meander there’s an eerie arcane edge, an exactness as well. Points of reference are hard to come by here; the music is wholly alien and nonconformist. An oddity of musique concrete influence, Radiophonic Workshop and John Cage all included, “Obex” showed me how pointillist sound environments really can be without, to the misnomer, becoming “point less”. A stirring diversion.

Wave
.

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