It is cold and dark, this place we’re being taken in Farthest North, the new collaboration from Parhelion and Zak Keiller. As the duo “[focus] on the stark, cold immensity and volatility of a place located at the ends of the world,” we are rimed with the standard memes of isolationist ambient. Cutting electronic winds, deep bass grumbles, and a well-crafted, adequately morose sense of being quite alone take the forefront. This is us dying a relatively slow but placid death in this wasted tundra, looking out over the coarsely angled, inescapable landscape around us while at the same time finding ourselves taken in by its stark and dangerous beauty. We ares guided through the threatening depths and ominous rumble of “Perfect Desolation,” which surprises us near its end with a sudden, if brief, brightening of tone before it fades into a hiss of wind. We are exposed to the alien sounds of “Smokey God,” where bass pads rise and fall like the sleeping breath of some forgotten entity and cavernous echoes surround us. It’s not all doom, gloom, and an icy fate. The brief “Abode of Light” comes in more like a standard ambient track, its tone brighter and softer. It flows into “Opal Sky,” giving us a glimmer of hope with glistening guitar lines, the light sparkle of sunlight on the snow. But listen to the way a bass drone insists itself upon the scene before the tone turns darker once again. The piece is a nice break in the flow, and effective both for its lightening aspect and its subsequent return to the shadows. The title track is the longest tour on the release at just over 10 minutes, and it passes slowly through both light and shadow, impending peril and now-you-can-exhale relief. Farthest North runs a scant 45 minutes, but its enveloping nature draws out that time. Beatless but loaded with imagery, it’s a release that’s easy to fall into. Fans of darker, borderline isolationist ambient will fare better with Farthest North, but it’s well worth listening to if you like your ambient with real visceral appeal.

Available from Cyclic Law.

It’s not unusual to pair music with spoken word performance, but in my experience it’s been fairly rare in the ambient music genre. Not being a huge fan of performance poetry, I headed into Tryptich, the release from the sound collaborative called WASH, with a bit of hesitation. Unwarranted. This isn’t bombastic, shout-at-the-mic poetry backed with music. Rather, these three tracks are long walks taken through evolving landscapes with a tour guide prone to flights of interesting language. While I won’t go so far as to critique the poetry itself, poet Scott Bywater’s voice packs a sort of bemused world-weariness as he looks around him, and the rhythm of his words plays nicely into the music around it. Each piece contains a number of short poems (included in a PDF booklet with your download). In places, Bywater repeats phrases over and over, self-looping to intensify a verbal moment. As a writer, I respect a lot of his wordplay. He knows his stuff. The music varies appropriately by piece. On “Phnom Penh/Earth,” there is a blend of field recordings, from nature sounds to the chatter of a living city, deep electronic textures and fittingly sluggish jazz guitar. Warren Daly, Alex Leonard, and Hal Fx craft the soundscape to nicely capture the feel of “the sublime heat of Cambodia’s capital city.” The dynamics shift and flow with the words, showing how the musicians and poet, as the press materials note, “[interact] piece by piece to weave ideas in and out and around, maintaining high degree of improvisation and flexibility within a disciplined structure…” As we shift to “The Art of Travel/Fire Through the Air,” the tone changes to an industrial chug and huff, mechanical and urgent but played against drifting washes as we “drift across Europe.” This piece gear-changes into a sequencer-driven pulse, adding a nice retro feel and keeping the rhythmic sense of perhaps seeing Europe by rail. A ways in, there’s a great passage built on ripping good guitar lines. It’s brief, but the energy of it does a great job of stirring the pot.”The Art of Living/Water” grabs a shimmering guitar line to establish its thematic face, rippling echoes like the flash of sunlight on a pond. Light percussion slides in to lend an understated post-rock feel. Each piece on Triptych is a long, immersive experience unto itself, clocking in at 26, 32, and 29 minutes respectively, and each is time well spent. The blend of music and words is seamless. Neither interrupts the other; the symbiosis shows perfect harmony.

Triptych took a small amount of getting used to, but only because it’s such a rare kind of thing to come across my threshold. (And no, I’m not looking to delve more deeply into spoken word, but thank you.) Having delved into it over and over, its beauty–both lyrical and musical–grew on me and the release revealed itself as a thor0ughly engaging, extremely intelligent suite of pieces that exude confidence and truly pull the listener in. You need to give this a try.

Available from Invisible Agent.

 

Using a nine-minute track from a 2011 release as a starting point, Steve Brand expands on the idea beautifully with the three long pieces that form Over-Soul. This is a very big bit of work, a broad and cosmically panoramic thing that also manages to be as personal and spiritual as an epiphany. As Brand gently layers long pads over, through, or alongside each other and kneads their surfaces with texture, the listener cannot help but ease into a very quiet space.  There’s a slight rite of passage to go through first, however, as the opening track, “The Wise Silence,” sets about balancing shadow and light over its 21-minute run. Brand brings us in with a dark, rising tone that turns to a growling breath rich in low-end tones. It’s reasonably ominous, which makes the shift toward lighter sounds that much more potent. The shift comes and goes as the piece goes on, pulling the listener deeper into the flow. It’s remarkable what Brand achieves with what feels like a fairly slight sound-set. The layers here are not overly deep, but they’re fully effective–you feel the weight of the shadows around you, and you feel the relief of shifting away from them. “The Collective Heart” moves into a realm that is equal parts spacemusic and pure ambient, where the windy hiss of washes and high pads arrive to regulate your breathing. Brand does an expert job of handling the transition between these tracks. The calm that “The Collective Heart” eventually gives us doesn’t come immediately; it unfolds slowly from out of the darker landscape of its predecessor. There’s a nice minimal feel at play here, a cool sparseness of movement that brings its own power. Brand plays a bit with dissonance here, but lightly so, underscoring stretches with what sounds like the modified sound of a temple bowl. The ringing sound draws the attention just slightly toward it as it comes and goes. With “Unity” we are moved into a meditative space, soft and largely free of shadow. The tone here is higher overall, and hopeful, bring the proceedings to a cleansing close.

Over-Soul truly is a release that you need to make time to simply dive into. It will pull you into itself, as I said, regardless of how much attention you think you’re giving it. But this music draws out something intensely personal. It touches the listener very deeply. It is quite stirring while managing to be deceptively simple in structure. Brand’s music always carries a very honest, human feel. It’s in tune with you just as much as you are with it. While it’s his music, in listening it becomes very much yours. Set aside the time and pay close attention to the lush emotional content of Over-Soul.

Available from Pioneer Light.

On their debut release, Being Is The Sum Of Appearing, Diamat work within the familiar framework of mixing melodic electronica and glitch. The trio of Attilio Bruzzone (Port-Royal), Andrea Zangrandi and Christos Garmpidakis (Dergar) turn out eight texture-rich tracks, expertly shifting tempos along the way and hitting the spot equally well whether fast or slow. While it’s not earth-shakingly new, it is solid, repeat-worthy listening. The quieter side of the equation runs heavy on emotion–melancholy, longing, and ache often peer out of the structures, and they’re quite beautiful. “Heliotrope,” which is one of the quieter pieces here, thrives on these kinds of sounds. After a two-minute vignette of light pads and a vocal sample immersed in a wash of white sound, the atmosphere shifts to let gentle pads and a softly bouncing sequencer line take the front. On a release that’s more about the higher BPMs, it’s a well-thought-out break in the flow. The glitch aspect is handled nicely, complex patterns underscored with the insistent dull thud of bass drum. If I had one off thing to say about this release, it’s that I felt like I could use quite a bit less of the thump. In places it works absolutely fine; but when I listen to “Zralocik,” for example, it feels obtrusive–I want to hear more of what’s going on beyond it. (My aged ears keep picking up a faint hint of New Order in the background.) For me, this album, which begins establishing its likability with the first few tracks, really hits its stride in the stretch beginning with the two parts of “Misunderstood,” “Shane Vendrell,” and “Painkillers.” The first slides in quietly, layering in elements, its base, repeating melody slowly rising up to take the lead. And then come the drums, big and potent and perfect, to take it in a fresh direction. Part Two slows the pace and settles into a lounge-like space…for a while. It’s a pleasure to listen to this gently ramp up–you can feel the switch coming on, and it’s a smooth transition. “Shane Vendrell” is where the straight-up club thump of the drum works for me. Here we’re getting a blend of textbook techno over ghostly vocals that chant like a mantra, all curling into a hypnotic swirl. “Painkillers” opens keeping a similar cadence, but slowly dissolves, letting its components fall away to reveal its underlying simple grace.

Being Is The Sum Of Appearing is a pleasantly groovy little ride. Its path may take it through quite-familiar territory, but the landscape of the thing is worth paying attention to. I really like having this in a shuffle, where the thuds and the glitch are spread out and come as a more welcome arrival rather than more of the same. Check this out for sure.

Available from n5md.

I have always appreciated artists who can take disparate elements, from noise to glitch beats to industrial clatter, and bring them together in a way that retains that cacophonous, chaotic sound and yet turn it into something rhythmically engaging. Such would be the case with The Looming Machine from Nuclear Whale. Musician Jonathan Ridley comes at his listeners with work that grinds, gnashes, hisses and thumps its way along. The beats are mechanical in their tone and cadence, but packed with clenched-fist aggression. Much of it is punctuated by a big, dense low end, a hammer of bass that punches you right in the aesthetic. “Flarepath” is the prime example here, drum-driven and backed with industrial churn. Ridley layers and weaves the sounds into a rich complexity, and that complexity becomes a very catchy groove. Ridley’s also effective when he strips his sounds down to an almost minimalist form. “The Ghost of a Flea” mostly keeps its voice down as it chugs ahead on a sort of mutated electropop beat, a small set of sounds running deep. “Ash in the Sky” floats appropriately along on windy pads, a quietly ticking beat and a sense of tenuous expectation. “Venal,” my favorite track here and the longest on the release, is intriguing for the way its holds its basic shape the whole time, yet is in a state of constant flux. A four-count beat tracks steadily along as Ridley essentially adds and removes sound components without interrupting the mesmerizing pulse. You know when new elements are added because there’s a sort of ripple in the flow  but you can’t quite figure what’s been taken away. In spots, the things that get added have just enough of a disruptive quality at first to make you pay attention. Then, in moments, they’re subsumed into the general flow like they’ve always been there and you just pulse onward. A great piece. Throughout The Looming Machine, Ridley’s theme of “a secular apocalypse, the feeling of being cheated of our futures by the wealthy, the search for deeper truths within, and the hope for a better world” is  supported with sound bites, interesting drop-ins that aren’t over-done. Enough tension exists within the music that he doesn’t need to beat us about the head with it.

The Looming Machine is one of those beat-based releases where, as I listen, my hand keeps drifting over to the volume knob to turn it up a little more. It’s aggressive but doesn’t just pummel; it’s catchy but it keeps a raw edge. It’s intelligent, has something to say, but also knows that it needs to hook you in. Definitely something to dig into in your somewhat darker moments. Have a listen.

Available from Sparkwood Records.

Through two previous collaborative efforts, David Helpling and Jon Jenkins have developed a distinct signature sound. Robust, romantic, and cinematic, it is almost instantly recognizable and utterly captivating. This third entry and the final chapter in this sonic trilogy, Found, carries all the hallmarks of the first two and brings the series to a superb close. Found courses forward on big, potent drumbeats, soaring guitar and lush piano, with everything supported from below by soft pads, long chords, and understated electronic textures. Pieces tend to begin quietly, build to a full-on orchestral climax with an emotionally powerful density of sound, then recede, fading, to let you catch your breath. This is music to listen to closely; Helpling and Jenkins have always brought a cinematic quality to their work, so it’s vital to dig into the sound to understand how it’s structured and how it’s affecting you so deeply. While you’re busy building panoramic tracking shots in your mind, your mental camera sweeping low across the plains or winging between rugged, snow-frosted mountains (trust me, you’ll go there even with my saying so), you’re also taking in the gorgeous harmony of elements, the interplay of rhythms and textures. This truly is contemporary instrumental music at its best. Expertly crafted, deeply moving, absolutely memorable. It’s almost sad to say that Found marks the (at the moment) end of the collaboration between these two marvelous artists, but at the very least it gives us a reason to go back to Treasure and The Crossing and start all over again. Found was recently named Zone Music Reporter’s Best Electronic Album of 2013, an honor that is well deserved. Take a listen, and from the very first moments you will understand why.

Available from Spotted Peccary.

First off, kudos to Busy Beds for having one of the most eye-catching titles in recent memory. In cramming 18 pieces into less than an hour on Seascape with Sharks and Dancer, Busy Beds offers up a swiftly changing palette of musical colors, all tied together by his use of minimalist loops. This collection could feel a little directionless if not for that unifying device. Tonally, the pieces zig-zag from lush guitar layers to sad piano ballads to raspy ambient swirls. Most run less than two minutes, with the longest topping out at just under six. Yet the switch up never feels forced or jarring, which is a pretty good trick. There’s a statement to be made, it gets made, we move on. Overall, the pieces here are wrapped in a consistent dreamy haze, which goes a long way to keeping the feel even. The more I’ve listened, the more I’ve come to enjoy the way Busy Beds moves through the variety. Sometimes I’m listening to folksy guitar, as on “Don’t Be So Nice” and “Sometimes.” The sound is charming, a bit rustic, and plays perfectly against ambient backdrops. Then there’s the melancholy-drenched piano of “Indian Ocean,” laced through with electronic warbles as counterpoint, putting me very much in mind of the work Tim Story and Roedelius–the gentle side rubbing against the slightly experimental side. Piano is also at the front of the very lovely “Truro,” where the minimalist touch is superb. Simple piano chords repeat a pattern against a swirl of pads. The way this piece cuts out mid-cadence is excellent. It leaves the listener with a slight sense of longing for completion. “Delivering” takes my mind to the middle of Oldfield’s Ommadawn and its chorus of guitars. This piece is like a warm cocoon of sound that just keeps spiraling upward, beautifully. On my initial listens, I sometimes felt that some pieces had an unfinished feel–that they were cutting out just as they were reaching a point of saying something interesting. On repeat listens, however, it bothered me less. For the most parts, these are vignettes or passing glances at a musical thought, and they are as long as they need to be. I’m very intrigued by Seascape with Sharks and Dancer, and look forward to more from Busy Beds.

Available at Bandcamp.

Epoch (K. Holewczynski) is a man with a manifesto and a mission. Musically charging into the fray to unveil “the obvious overreach of U.S. and its allies’ influence in world affairs under the guise of the protection of democracy and freedom,” on Sanctimonium Epoch comes armed with martial dark ambient and thumping EDM overtones. His sound, as always, is big and bold. There is a story to be told here, and it plays out in soundbites, the spoken-word dogma of the aggressor chopped, sliced and shuffled into an appropriately bombastic framework. Where this release excels is in how Holewczynski metes out the pace of the story. It would be easy to just go heavy on the dark pads, layer jt all up and overload the thing with howitzer barrages of percussion and let it go, but the artist takes the time to craft the thing with a cinematic mindset. There are quieter parts, and there is a rush of action–check out the crowd-chant frenzy in the middle of “Disciples of Mars” as Holewczynski fills the background with urgent strings. A great drop lands, and then the sonic shelling starts. I love the repetition of “A New World order is coming into being” here–this Truth is being drummed into your head. There’s dark wit here, as well–“All Heil the Chief” takes the known song, harshens up the edges, then fades it into a lock-step, gather-the-troops military tattoo complete with crowd calls and more political split-tongue speech work.

Sanctimonium, and Epoch’s work in general, isn’t for everyone. There is a disturbing aspect to it, a constant through-line of darkness and uncertainty as Holewczynski presents his version of tugging back the veil and showing you that everything you know might be wrong. The music is very intense, to say the least, and Epoch fully understands how things like anthems affect our psyche. Music has always been used as a way to stir souls to whatever end; here, it is used to make you sit up and listen to what’s being said. Listeners comfortable with dark(er) ambient will enjoy this more, but if you’re interested in being challenged, start here. Another strong bit of martial darkness from Epoch.

Available from Carbon 12 Records.

It took me a few listens to warm up to Banco de Gaia’s first full release in seven years, Apollo. I initially wasn’t crazy about Zhenia Mahdi-Nau’s call-to-prayer vocals on “Lamentations”–until I took a dose of it in the headphones and felt the effect rather than just hearing it. When I grasped it as the invitation into Toby Marks’ blend of world music–with an emphasis on Middle Eastern sounds–and dub influences, I found my way into it. Truth be told, they almost lost me again with the whirling dervish sax attack from Matthew Jenkins in the otherwise downright infectious “Wimble Toot,” but I came to embrace that as well with its rapid-fire serpentine runs and avant-jazz squeals. One last hurdle confronted me. “Eternal Sunshine” shows up next, wearing its openly nostalgic rave outfit and proceeds to quickly wear out its welcome with thudding minimalism and ceaseless repetition. From there, however, it’s easy to go all in with Marks. “For Such A Time” opens quietly, but blossoms into a piece rich with musical drama, a strong hook of a beat, and a great sense of atmosphere. Silky vocals stir the soul. “Apollon” brings pure bliss, thick with delicious bass, more soaring vocals, and a chugging world-beat rhythm. It’s a super-potent cocktail of joy and adrenaline, and it charges straight into the equally feverish “Hu!” for the best unbroken stretch of the disc. “All Sleeping” brings smooth guitar from Marks and flute from Tim Wheater as they lay out what is my favorite track. It sounds familiar and comforting, and the warmth it gives off is wonderful. (Though I could do without the howling and the overdone vocal drop at the start.) “Oreia” wakes you back up with hefty drumming and rich world vibes before “Acquiescence”  brings Madhi-Nau’s voice back in to close the circle.

Outside of the relative mis-step of “Eternal Sunshine,” which, it must be said, does have its own charm but feels weak compared to the rest of the release, Apollo is a beautifully produced, deep and catchy bit of work. The Middle Eastern tones bring a sensual touch and a little air of mysticism to the proceedings. Definitely one to play at volume. Dancing is encouraged, and probably unavoidable.

Available at Bandcamp.

 

Looking around the music community, I find that I may be of the minority opinion when it comes to Soundtrack to Life, the debut from duo Cosmo Frequency. Where others are hearing a diverse range of approaches, I am hearing someone with a checklist of standard New Age tropes, systematically checking them off as we go. Dramatic echoing voice reciting the start of our narrative? Check. Angel-choir pads? Check. Whooshing space wind sounds? Check. Romantically swelling piano over a steady Vangelis-style bass pulse? Check. Pan flute for world flavor? Check. Breathy Enya-esque vocals? Check. On and on. Throw in some thumping techno to represent the artists’ DJ’ing background, and there’s Soundtrack to Life. My problem with the album is that it comes off as hugely unoriginal, despite being well-played and well-produced. Paul Martinson and Brent Vincent are clearly talented musicians–multi-talented, in fact–but the music here is overburdened with the weight of all the artists they’re trying to emulate. Given how well this release has done on various charts (Echoes Top 25 in November 2013, nominated for Best New Artist by Zone Music Reporter, etc.), I suppose my opinion ought to be taken with a grain of salt. This just isn’t for me, but it’s clearly sitting nicely with others. Die-hard New Age fans probably want to check this out; just expect to hear all the things you’ve heard before, perhaps with a little extra pomp.

Available from the artists’ web site.