When last we heard from Mingo, he had crossed over the musical river, away from his dark-edged, often tribally toned electronic musings to dabble–quite well, it must be said–in the shinier realms of New Age. With The Blue Star he returns to refine the sound that resonated with me on albums such as The Once and Future World  and The Light That Bends. And while I have enjoyed everything I’ve heard from Mingo over the years, I do have to say that I prefer him on this side of the river. The Blue Star deals in curtains of light-grey shadow, the pulse of percussion mixed with suggestions of EDM, and wafts of slow pads both comforting and ominous. After the opening track speaks its relatively quiet peace with long bass chords and a pleasant-if-mildly-haunted piano, Mingo nudges us toward the darker side of things. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of twilight to see by, and the murky stuff is well in the distance. “Narvi” uses percussion to give us our first hint of a primitive influence—less tribal than just organically simple and marking a nascent rhythm while long pads drone beneath it. A tone like bass flute comes in to underscore it before Mingo pulls a smooth shift and goes toward more of a spacemusic motif courtesy of big, shining pads. Two tracks in the  middle of the release are where we pick up some vibrancy and that nod to EDM. On “Amida” Mingo folds percussion in over windy drones and keeps easing the intensity upward. Soon enough it’s chugging and churning like an industrial thing, its rhythm made entirely of pulses. It will catch hold of you and pull you along for a few minutes. Then comes this album’s money shot: “Omega Point.” I cannot stop listening to this. It’s got some Berlin pedigree, it’s got an amped-up electro-pop attitude, it drones, it hums, it moves from potential to kinetic and you barely feel the acceleration. What you do feel is the joy of the thing. It’s reveling in its old-school garb and it’s doing it without a lot of effort. At its high point, what you’re listening to are two notes, maybe three, just repeating their phrase as the drone forms beneath it very slightly change key. I hear so many 80s echoes in this piece. Probably why I adore it so. And it’s worth repeating that it does it in a fantastically minimal style. That’s what strikes me about The Blue Star—how much Mingo is able to convey using what amounts to very little movement. There’s a deceptive simplicity at work; the elements alone don’t do much, if you listen closely. They stretch. They repeat themselves. They hold a note. And yet, when they’re layered, out comes this fantastic dynamic even though you know it’s still not doing much. “A Glimpse of Dawn” is a perfect example. It pulses and throbs, it sends spirals of electro-squibble off into the air now and then like it’s testing something, it sings softly to itself. It’s also got texture, an odd energy, and a weirdly compelling tone. The title track grows patiently as you listen, with fresh layers of sound cleaving off and rising without your really noticing. Each new bit feels like it’s been waiting all along.

Repeat listens are a given with The Blue Star. It dovetails nicely into itself and each new listen seems to uncover one more secret. Its mix of space and primitive, dark and less dark, and its commitment to effective minimal structure has made it a personal favorite. Dive into this one immediately. Mingo is always worth listening to, and The Blue Star is him at his best.

Available from Mingosphere.

As I was listening to WAsteland ElectronicAH Vol. Too ~ Ambient​(​esque) Musics for Your Lucid Coma, I found myself constantly wondering if the tinny and slightly clumsy construction of some of the pieces were on purpose or the sign of someone perhaps less adept at the craft than a listener might hope. So I headed over to Micah Cone’s Bandcamp page where I read that these songs were “Created on a 2009 MacBook Pro utilizing Garageband and its Musical Typing feature.” Mystery solved, and now I better understand why I’m not overly interested. There’s nothing all that objectionable here, but I find that the pieces hold my attention for a couple minutes at most before I want to move on. There are very listenable moments—Cone hits it squarely on “A.% (Gravitational Intolerance)” with a blend of wobbly, lonely bass notes and a quietly singing synth line placed over the sound of a Rhodes electric piano. I like the way he metes it out slowly, with the synth taking a more vibrant line. He sends the Rhodes bouncing between left and right in a way that’s mildly dizzying but acceptably so. “A.# (150,000-Light-Year-Long-Lightning-Bolt)” grabs my attention at first. It’s very subtle, with a catchy melody over humming electronics. It loses me a bit when the tone switches up and Cone brings a sort of silly-sounding synth to chirp out a passage. “A.^ (The Low-Hanging Fruit of Knowledge)” is addictively fun—again, at first—but unless you’re a huge fan of chipset and video game theme songs from the 80s, the fascination will probably wear off well before it runs its almost-10-minute course. For those first few minutes, though, its jaunty tone and meaty bits of bass are engaging.

I understand that the whole old computer and musical typing thing is meant to be the hip draw here, but irony only goes so far. If the music doesn’t hold my attention once we’re past the curiosity stage, what’s left? I hear a lot of elements I like on this release, but the approach and Cone’s tendency to spend more time on a piece than it needs just makes me shrug. Give it a listen for yourself.

Available at Bandcamp.

I admire artists who choose to challenge themselves, who don’t allow themselves to sit in the same spot doing the same thing. It can be a risk, but there’s also a strong chance of a fresh new reward—for the listener as well as the artist. Phillip Wilkerson’s Swiftly the Sun represents an artist taking that kind of chance. Looking to explore new modes of electronic expression, he says, “I simply cast my creative True Self adrift to produce whatever came of its own making.” We, along with Wilkerson, now get to enjoy the rewards of his risk. Swiftly the Sun doesn’t seem to go too far afield of the artist’s general motif. He has always been one for soft pads and slow melodies packed with emotion, and that plays out here. But there are moments of experimentation, some subtle and some not, that will take long-time Wilkerson fans (such as myself) into interesting new concepts. Jumping straight to the front of that line is the standout track “Calm.” The title is a lie, by the way—this song has kinetic energy to spare, doled out in chunky doses of spiraling, dervish-like synth lines. Whether this is Wilkerson playing his trills straight and then manipulating them or it is him fiddling with the knobs to spin and twist these lines, it’s absolutely captivating. It works its way up into a feel almost like a jazz combo where the rhythm section lays down a steady, unchanging melodic base while the synth lead just goes gorgeously off into an inspired jam. I could plug this one into my head all day and be happy. It hits me spot-freaking-on. Maybe it’s because I love an old-school sound, but it’s also probably because it just works. “Vanishing” plays with chime tones that ring out over a quiet base. It’s a familiar juxtaposition, and here, between the lush drones and the repetitive nature of the chimes, it has a light hypnotic effect. There are plenty of quiet spots here as well, and Wilkerson nails them, as usual. The opener, “And Lilacs Too,” offers a piano melody that walks past misty pads. It is patient and emotionally descriptive. “Ways of Forgetting” is 25 minutes of pure ambient immersion. Long pads mingle like clouds and nothing is raised much above a confident whisper. Like meditating? Here’s your soundtrack. It’s full-on calming, slows the breath, and sets time aside. It’s not one of the out-of-character track here, but it’s a track that reinforces why I enjoy this guy’s music so much. The release closes with “Beyond the Farthest Horizon,” another slow-motion drift with a faint touch of melancholy. It has a certain spacemusic mentality to it, but feels more grounded, more like a captured quiet moment stretched out for us to examine in our good time.

Swiftly the Sun may seem more like a set of experiments to Wilkerson than it does to me. From this listener’s perspective, it’s yet another collection of music to listen to over and over. It has all the heart I expect from him, and adds in some fun and slightly unexpected shots of energy and vigor. An excellent addition to an already impressive catalog.

Available from Bandcamp.

What if I told you that there was a dark, industrial-edged album that actually manages to be sort of…soothing? You could take my word for it, or you could just delve into Between the Horizon and the Abyss, the long-awaited new release from Yen Pox. There you’d find an hour’s worth of big, dense masses of sound and sensation that, okay, might not soothe so much as hypnotize, but at the same time, they’re not out to crush and depress you. Michael JV Hensley and Steven Hall craft an accessibly grim, decimated world to take us through, a place that is at once desolate yet populated with ghosts and decaying machinery. Sandstorms of sound rise up and rush in to create the album’s harshest moments. “Grief Ritual” is one such spot, perhaps more effective for the way it comes out of the almost brighter, more ambient tones of “In Silent Fields.” Rolling in on growling bass pads and an effective pairing of industrial chugging and the squeal of tortured metal, “Grief Ritual” hits a point just to the able-to-breathe aside of isolationist ambient. We hear lost voices calling at us from the distance. And when it relinquishes its hold, you feel it. However, where it deposits you is in “Ashen Shroud,” which features vocals from Dark Muse that ring of singing a best-forgotten ritual. There’s excellent texture work here, and echoes that give the feeling of being in some underground place, a place we shouldn’t necessarily be but we can’t help looking around. I close my eyes during this track, and just let the sound do the painting for me. That’s perhaps the best description I can give of what happens when listening to this album: you reach a point of surrender and, dark ambient or not, you just let it finish showing you around. There are elements of grace and beauty lurking here, patiently awaiting your acceptance. They know you’ll get around to it. There’s a lot of tasty stuff happening here. “White of the Eye” opens with a rip of viciously distorted guitar and sounds like it’s about to break into an industrial rock melody before it just scatters itself across the wind. “The Procession” screeches at you and there’s another of those voices always just out of reach behind the caustic rasp of sound—what if it’s telling you how to get back? What if it’s lying to you? Yen Pox crank the density on this track, surround you in the sound and obscure your connection to the world. When they ease the pressure, you’re left with bass pulses puddling around you and everything is fading…for good.

Waxing a bit rhapsodic about dark ambient might seem odd, but it’s to Hensley and Hall’s credit that their work implants these kinds of visions, these feelings and stories, straight into the listener’s head. It’s easy for dark ambient to straight-arm a listener or to have to goad and dare them into listening. But really good dark ambient entices you to listen by appealing to some questionable urge hiding in your soul, then holds you there with a combination of hypnotic influence and well-crafted sonic narrative. The Yen Pox Bandcamp page says it’s been 15 years since the duo’s last full-length release. While it was clearly tell well-spent as far as crafting an excellent album goes, I would like it to not be another decade and a half before they get around to having their way with my mind again. Dark ambient fans will devour this; even casual listeners looking for an intriguing change of sound should strap themselves in and take this ride.

Available from Bandcamp.

One of my review listens for Roy Mattson’s Mesmer happened as I was driving along wood-shrouded, unlighted and twisting New England backroads on a dark autumn evening. There came a point where I reached a recognizable confluence of action and atmosphere, where the music was exactly suited to the moment. Now I find that I want to listen to Mesmer only as night comes on, when my mind goes comparatively quiet and I can just let the spaces Mattson creates unfold all around me. On his page the artist notes that he intended the album “to be listened to at night around a campfire or stargazing…” and it’s safe to say he’s squarely nailed the theme. Of course, it helps to layer in field recordings of night sounds; the crickets, the owls, all that, set over quiet pads. Lace it with the active pulse of smooth sequencer lines for a bit of vibrancy. And a touch of tribal percussion in just the right spots always offers up that after-dark feel. The mix of styles blends well one track to the next, and the overall feel is laid-back and pensive. The opener, “Mesmerized,” has a little of everything; owl hoots welcome us, pads lay the groundwork, and the sequencer lines gets us moving a bit. Mattson sets the sequencer aside for several more tracks, then brings it back as a gentle wake-up call on “Invitations and Consolations.” In headphones, the sequencers play out very nicely, spatially. I find the percussion elements here just a little distracting. It sounds like Mattson is leaning toward some kind of syncopation, but it’s hitting a bit randomly. “Feathered Night” leads us into tribal territory by adding a familiar-sounding percussion line in the midst of a breeze-soft flow. It carries into “Quietude” where we are also serenaded by crickets. Flutes slip in as accents, their breathiness upping the organic ante.This time-stretcher of a track takes me out of myself and out under the stars. During one listen, I checked the track length and was surprised it was just eight and a half minutes. Flute plays a major role on “Tending the Embers.” Coasting over pads, it’s meditative and prayer-like. I have always felt that flute music in an intensely personal, intimate thing, and that feel is conveyed well here. And as someone who has say watching the glowing coals of a fading fire well into the night, I connect with this track.

At 81 reasonably quiet minutes, Mesmer has the ability to take its listener quite deep. It’s a looping listen, for sure. That being said, as I tend to prefer a bit more subtlety in the use of field recordings, there are spots where—for me—they might be a trifle overdone. From a thematic point of view, they’re spot on; from a me-as-listener perspective, less so. (For example, the first few minutes of “Invitations and Consolations.”) Also, as much as I enjoy the tribal tones that Mattson brings in, I feel like it might sometimes wander a bit far into Steve Roach’s yard. On the other hand, I’ve been down Mesmer’s starry-night path many times and have fully enjoyed it. Mattson’s output it starting to ramp up; he’s got a lot to say, musically, and this is as good a place as any to start listening to him.

Available from Relaxed Machinery.

Two and a half hours of deep, flowing, textured classic ambient music from Altus? This is what is known as “a very good thing.” Having listened to The Time Collection several times over, I feel confident in saying that this release deserves a place alongside similar benchmark recordings such as Roach’s Quiet Music series. Musician Mike Carss has always exhibited a gentle hand on the ambient controls and a definite way with slowly coaxing emotional content out of long-drawn pads, but here I have to say he has exceeded himself. But this is not just a long set of pad-on-pad drifts. There is texture and shadow, light and dynamics. Things are a bit ominous at the outset; “Illusionary Progression” begins with rattling sounds and a looming, rising bass pad. The tone is a little gritty, very much in a spacemusic vein, complete with the sound swooping around your head. The up-front drama here belies the quieter thoughts ahead, but it definitely grabs your attention. Carss settles into a classic feel, layering his way quickly into a rich, fully dimensional zone. At its midpoint, it spins toward the light in a change of approach that borders on breathtaking. Those crunchy bass sounds slip into a supporting role, rising up beautifully in places, and the voyage is well underway. Carss gives his tracks plenty of room to patiently stretch out–the shortest is 11 minutes. He’ll draw a melody out to a splendid slowness, as on “Absolve the Past,” filling it with an elegiac feel, a hesitant beauty that slips quietly into your soul. It’s heard again and happens again on “What You Leave Behind.” Echoing notes brightly pick out the extended melody over cloudy pads. To me, Carss nails the sense of hesitant but hopeful departure. From the first time I heard it, this track had something to say to me. In the middle of “Memory Thief,” he calls in a vocal sample pad, adding an unexpected element that simply folds itself into the existing calm flow. It’s to Carss’ credit that you barely notice its arrival but you feel its effect. This long journey concludes with the 30-minute arc of “Walk With Oblivion.” Here we turn back toward a darker sense at first, then again rise slowly upward in tone. This is a big track, with plenty of dramatic rises and falls, yet still manages to remain calm. It is spiritual and meaningful.

I would consider The Time Collection to be living atmosphere ambient. That is, it’s the release I want to put on loop and just let it run, filling the space at low volume, more or less living up to Eno’s definition of ambient as being “as ignorable as it is interesting”—although here I would strongly argue the “ignorable” part. But as music that is simply there, existing alongside me, yes, absolutely. Carss’ output was already quite impressive; I consider him one of the best names in ambient (and I know I’m not alone in that). The Time Collection sets a fantastic high mark, showcasing an artist absolutely in command of his element. However you choose to experience it, whether in an Eno-esque fashion or up close and meditative, it will captivate, calm, and move you. This is a truly amazing piece of ambient music, and a must-own. Far and away one of the best things I’ve enjoyed this year.

Available from Altus’ web site.

Straight out of the heart of Philadelphia’s Berlin School-loving electronic music scene, here come Ombient (aka Mike Hunter) and Chuck van Zyl, with three long, majestic-in-their-analog-glory pieces on Space Patrol. For me as a listener, this doesn’t have to be anything other than what it is: a classically cool hour of bouncing, intersecting sequencer lines, spring-loaded bass tones, and all manner of nostalgic knob-invoked electrosound. Hunter and van Zyl land squarely in my old-school wheelhouse, and I am oh so very content to coast through the cosmos with them. “Space Cruiser” is exactly that, a 26-minute coast that opens with the high melodic tones of a Mellotron flute to establish the piece’s base before the sequencers kick in like the comfortable pulse of the star-drive. Familiarity takes over, and that pulse, those lines, these elements we’ve heard before and which are raised here in homage, act like gravity upon your body—you will move to it, however slight. van Zyl’s synth leads are fluid and calm, little zero-g drifts full of grace. As we enter into “The Zone” the duo take us into strange, uncharted regions filled with wayward sounds, dark drones, and scattered sonic detritus. Church bells (maybe repurposed from the Ministry of Inside Things track “Grateful”?), applause, clattering sounds, voices—all this spins past as we drift through a space that feels nicely improvised. (These tracks come from live performances.) It seems like Hunter and van Zyl knew they would spin us into this place, and then challenged each other to pull the strangest possible tones and thoughts from their gear. It’s pure atmosphere, of the Twilight Zone variety. There is a sense of passage to this track, with the end of it sliding us into the closing piece and a return to brighter analog thoughts. “Outland” has energy to spare, doled out in shiny lines and spirals of Jarre-esque twitter. And, of course, it closes ever-so-smoothly by bringing us back to the high tones that kicked off the ride, which means (again, of course!) that Space Patrol loops back on itself virtually unnoticed to keep the ride going as long as you like.

It’s no surprise that I enjoy Space Patrol a whole lot. I’m an old-school electronic fan, have enjoyed van Zyl’s work both solo and as part of Ministry of Inside Things, and became familiar with Hunter’s work when I saw him perform live at the electro-music.com gathering. This is the stuff I’ve loved for years, perfectly rebuilt into something that makes me need to turn up the volume when I listen. It’s solid Berlin and an excellent paean to the range of the analog synth. This will absolutely resonate with knob-heads like myself, and will please anyone who like good, straight-up electronic spacemusic. Buckle in, take off.

Available from the Ombient web site.

Truth in advertising. On Arryhtmia, Sote (aka Ata Sote Ebtekar) largely dispenses with paltry concerns like rhythm and standard percussion and lets some kind of algorithm-based compositional wizardry take the helm. While I can’t say I particularly care for the outcome, there are some interesting ideas at work, and now and then it catches my ear rather than shoving me away. Ebtekar maintains the traditional tunings of the music of his native Iran, but rams it through his electronics to create forceful things that fly toward your head at high velocity. The overarching idea seems to be to begin with a batch of noises tangling with one another, squibs and squawks of electro-sound, then push them together into a more cohesive pattern. The pieces each eventually take on their own thumping character, and all are fairly aggressive. The wobbly junkyard clatter of “Pep” gets more in your face as it goes along, its core sounds almost comical in they way they squish and bounce. The effect is heightened by runs like a muted xylophone mated with chipset. “Lacuna” stacks harsh metallic banging on deep bass riffs, and everything works into one of the more outrightly rhythmic pieces on the release. Other tracks more or less follow suit, looking to find that place where aggression meets beat or lack thereof.

Arrythmia is not an easy listen, and not something I’d hurry back to, but at the same time the more I listened to it—and that was very mood-dependent—I began to hear what Ebtekar is doing. It doesn’t mean I like it, but it means there’s a point of entry for the open-minded listener. Those who appreciate noise and the experimental approach will uncover more meaning here.

Available at Record Label Records.

Any time I feel myself connecting with a dark ambient album, I begin to wonder if it’s time for therapy. What is it about some of this stuff that manages to hook into that grim and hidden corner of Who I Am and makes me feel like I’m welcome here? And why? Filth Haven from Kristoffer Oustad is one of those albums. It may be because this is not a crushingly heavy, drone-based bit of darkness that I find an easier entry point into it, but there’s no doubting that the overall tone is weighty and absolutely coated in shadow—and I am oddly at ease here. Okay, not at ease per se, but from the first booming chords of “Elberton 1979,” that resonant force locks in and surrounds me and I’m in a place I don’t think I’ll mind. Oustad takes an odd monument called the Georiga Guidestones as his source of inspiration, and when your inspiration is an “American Stonehenge” that’s over 237,000 pounds of granite in total, your sound is understandably dense and loaded with mystery. Oustad, however, doesn’t just pile on the potency and call it a day. “Anti-Clockwise Rotation” lightens the load somewhat, and takes some energy from a kinetic sequencer line tapping out some Morse Code urgency over vocal pads. “Row Me Over” is grim, but even as we’re presented with the uncomfortable creaking of a weakening boat, there’s a kind of edge-of-lightness tone to the flow. Darkness comes in tracks like “Traveller,” one of my preferred pieces here. Didgeridoo tones snake outward from the beginning. This sound always feels like a dark-spirit calling to me, and it grabs me straight away. Between its from-the-pit drone and high, falling notes, the track works its way into a smooth hypnotic lull with just enough shadow to keep you on edge. Oustad sets that course, then drops out the ridge and sets the listener drifting in a mistier, disconnected place. The switch is perfect. “Liquidator” is aggressive and pulsing, bring the big tones back in concussive waves. The sound gets nicely dense here, pushing right up to the border of truly dark ambient style. As the track progresses, the expectation of when the next pulse comes in actually becomes a bit suspenseful.

Filth Haven speeds by in under an hour, and it loops quite nicely. Trust me on this—I have taken this dark and lovely ride many times over. Oustad controls the emotional content with a sure hand, and never feels the need to bury the listener under a cairn of sound. The atmosphere, the mystery, the sense of unknowing, is what this album is all about. Lights out, headphones on. It’s time to get in touch with your own grim corners. An excellent dark release.

Available from Malignant Records.

I know I’m out of my musical league when the first sentence of an album’s description gets my head spinning. Composer Dave Seidel tells us that “Imaginary Harmony takes as its raw material a 25-note-per-octave ‘scale’ built by octave-reducing the set of harmonics used by La Monte Young in his 1990 sine wave installation ‘The Prime Time Twins in The Ranges 576 to 448; 288 to 224; 144 to 112; 72 to 56; 36 to 28; with The Range Limits 576, 448, 288, 224, 144, 56 and 28.'” It actually gets headier from there, and quite mathy. Seidel offers two tracks of identical length (9’22”) built as generative compositions in CSound, a computer music computational language. For me, unfortunately, it’s a bit like listening to a test pattern. I hear the very slight shifts of tone in these long drones, but to my ears they are glacial and I feel like I’m just listening to sets of one long tone at a time. Seidel further notes that because of the generative nature of the composition and the fact that the chords “generated are selected by a randomized process,” any real-time performance of this piece will differ. Having listened to these two tracks, I feel it would take a keener ear than mine, or perhaps just a more heavily experimental mindset, to appreciate what is at play here.

Available from Mystery Bear.