• Music

    Uzu Noir – Zo!

    Uzu Noir is the monicker used by Finnish audio engineer-mixer-producer (having worked with Richard Dawson & Circle, Brian Eno, The Tindersticks, These New Puritans, Ulver, Natacha Atlas, Pharaoh Overlord, The Utopia Strong, Cyclobe, Old Man Gloom, etc) Antti Uusimäki.  With such an incredible résumé, one would expect that his debut EP would cover interesting sonic terrain.  I’m happy to say that he does! Though he identifies the release as ‘ambient’, a buzzword I’m beginning to dislike only because of the lack of consistently about what ‘ambient’ actually is, I’d say that his ambient music is something along the lines of…

  • Music

    Liu Ying (刘英) – JUST (抓时)

    If you have come across the landslide of reissues of stunningly sublime Japanese new age music composed by the likes of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Haroumi “Harry” Hosono (of Yellow Magic Orchestra fame) or Midori Takada, I have a strong suspicion that JUST, just released today by Chinese composer and synthesizer/guitar player Liu Ying is going to appeal greatly to you.

  • Music

    Marcus Webb – sPaCeS pLaCeS

    Marcus Webb is a sound designer and composer based out of New Jersey in the United States who creates “foreboding soundscapes and craters of bass and noise serving as the constants within alternating conceptual constructs of city life and drones wrapping around cavernous spaces with clearly defined tones from his modular synths.”  Truth in advertising, as he makes great use of his studio to produce a sound that has the vibe of old ritualistic ambient cassettes of the early 1990s.

  • Music

    now|here – The Wayfarer

    This is one of those unsolicited posts that make blogging a pleasure.  now|here are a dark ambient/post-Industrial music project out of Italy whose work reminds me, in a very positive way, of acts which used to appear on Sweden’s Cold Meat Industry imprint.  The sounds here are cleaner, doomier, and loaded with a synthetic classical underpinning I like.  Perhaps I can say that this is a better-produced dungeon synth.  Enjoyable.

  • Music

    FRKTL – Prose Edda

    FRKTL is the nom de plume of British-Egyptian composer Sarah Badr, and her work straddles so many genres that it’s quite hard to describe accurately (a wonderful thing, as it means her work is incredibly fresh-sounding). There are, of course, long, drone-y elements to the music, but once you go into tracks 3 and 4 (Hverfa af himni heiðar stjörnur and Hart er með hölðum, respectively, you start hearing elements of techno (!), bleak synthetic choruses sounding like the angels reciting the liturgy over the bowels of Hades (or, in this case, Hel, in order to maintain a proper cosmology). …

  • Music

    Assembly Of Honey – Морозные Узоры (Frost Patterns)

    Assembly Of Honey are a magnificent Russian ambient drone project related to the magazine Meticulous Midgets, friends of our blog.  Their latest album has several tracks which would appeal to meditative musicians like Steve Roach, but also to New Age artists like Kitaro and even experimental bands like Britain’s O Yuki Conjugate.  There is a calming aspect to the music that, frankly, I needed to hear after a stressful Valentine’s Day.  Well done, as always.

  • Music

    Various Artists – Anthology Of Experimental Music From Japan

    One of the most remarkable things about the series of compilations released by our friends at Unexplained Sounds Group is the great number of new artists they come into contact with, and serve as a launching board for. Of all the artists on this compilation, only Ryo Murakami’s work rings a bell.  Masayuku Imanishi’s work sounds like a newsroom printing press staffed by Throbbing Gristle and Hélène Sage.  USG continue to release the finest in post-Industrial music.

  • Music

    Geneva Skeen – Double Bind

    Perhaps I’ll need to renew my subscription to The Wire or spend more time on other blogs, as I can’t believe I missed the work of Los Angelina Geneva Skeen.  My hometown is producing so many fine artists working within ambient and electroacoustic music that it has become (happily) difficult to keep up with this wellspring of talent. Double Bind defies proper categorization, sitting somewhere between academic musique-concrète, noise-style improvisation and a touch of mysticism in Skeen’s work.  Though bleak, there is a feeling of being inside of a warm, pulsating, silvery ocean in these compositions.  The one which won…

  • Music

    Various Artists – Zona Electronica

    Zoharum are one of Poland’s longest-lasting experimental, ambient, minimal and industrial/dub/illbient labels.  On January 30, they released a comp of musicians who are critical in Poland’s underground music scene.  Among familiar names, of course, are Jeff Gburek, Hubert Heathertoes and Mike Majkowski, but the new names I’m hearing on this release are equally as intriguing.  Zoharum have done sterling work documenting the current goings-on of their local scene.

  • Music

    Chris Conway – When Pianos Dream

    Though his bio on Bandcamp calls him a superlative jazz pianist, I would have to add that Chris Conway handles modern classical music with as much aplomb.  He has also worked with some stellar musicians, including Guy Barker, Andy Sheppard, Stan Sulzman, Martin Speake and the legendary Finnish sax player Sakari Kukko (leader of Piirpauke) amongst others. This album, released today, I believe, is a collection of improvisations and ambient electronic music he gathered while working with the United Isolation Ensemble, of which he is a member.  How ECM Records hasn’t signed such a prodigious talent is beyond me, but…