honest words on honest music
Sophie Hutchings
A visual piece on isolation…
Interview with Jason van Wyk
“… sound design played a big part, but I also revisited methods I used in producing club music […] it was more a process of looking back than forward…”
Interview with Alessandro Cortini
… on the musical ideas that fit like puzzle pieces, on partnership with Make Noise for a synthesizer module, and much more…
In the studio with Matt Robertson
“… I love the idea that your own projects and your own perception of your ideas, can evolve by themselves when you leave them alone…”
In the studio with Biosphere
“… I often start a composition by creating a theme with an acoustic-digital filtered sound. Over this, I often try to integrate pure synthetic sounds from a synthesizer…”
Interview with Max Richter
I finally catch up with one of my all-time favourite contemporary classical composers to talk about his latest record, VOICES and touch a little on SLEEP.
“… I’ve always been interested in what gives a piece of music emotional content, which for me derives from harmony as well as melody…”
James Murray
Careful Now
“… a radiant, soft-focused work of wide-eyed romanticism and childlike innocence…”
London-based composer’s first solo release since 2019, back on Ian Hawgood’s celebrated Home Normal label
Diana Yukawa
Returning
Diana Yukawa is an award-winning solo violinist who combines elements of electronica with modern and contemporary …
Gaspar Claus
Amour Constrictor
“… receding into a melancholic progression of exquisite harmonies…”
“… capturing the emotional experience of a childhood imagination…”
Viul & Benoît Pioulard
A Real Place
“… wide brush strokes in pastel colours, deep-textured warmth, and hazy memories…”
Focus on ASC
“… creation is a cathartic process for me, and I’m drawn to it like a moth to light…”
Vince Pope, Lambert
Concrete Clouds
“… divided by language, ideas, history, but united by the desire to create music…”
“… I’ve become immensely enthusiastic about emotional embodiment… I’d like to evoke specific feelings in the audience during the listening sessions…”
Jónsi, Sin Fang, Alex Somers, Kjartan Holm
Beitilyng
“… smoke in the air, tarred telephone poles, mowed grass, a beached whale and tobacco leaves…”
August 1st, 2022
Here’s a collection of amazing music that you may have missed in the last month, out …
“… an exercise in reflective restraint, dreamy atmospherics, ebbing dynamics, and divine textures…”
Focus on Głós
“… I don’t distinguish so much between Techno and Ambient. For me, it’s the same: a soundtrack to special moments…”
“… has God created us, or have we created God for ourselves?”
Siavash Amini & Eugene Thacker
A Quiet Glow (For Chūya Nakahara)
“… the idea of the fragility of the human being…”
Taylor Deupree
Small Winters
“… the sonic equivalent of dust motes floating in a sunbeam…”
“… there’s no point in wasting a lot of time on a track which obviously isn’t going to work, the listeners can hear it’s not been fun to work on…”
Luke Howard
All Of Us
“… while the music is a reflection of this artist’s personal journey through isolation, loss, and, ultimately, destiny, it is a work in which we glimpse a little of ourselves…”
Second studio album for Mercury KX by this post-classical Australian composer inspired by the predicament of humanity.
Mike Lazarev
When You Are
“… the possibilities of being outside being, and in the absence of elsewhere finding ourselves, whenever we are…”
Sophie Hutchings
In this episode, Matt Emery chats with the Australian talented composer and pianist, Sophie Hutchings
“… I do not have a concrete strategy. I would say it is more philosophy. I try to avoid too much knowledge; that way, I can keep up a playful approach…”
Rubin Henkel
The Postman
“… sometimes all these memories are captured with a photograph, and sometimes we can capture them with music…”
Jonathan Kawchuk
Everywwhen
“… unrelenting pulsing, jagged entries, in a particle cloud seeded with vocals… like boats thrashed in a storm…”
“… I really embrace the warbly unsteadiness of tapes, the intentional sound degradation, and focus on deeply textural stuff…”
Piotr Wiese
Coming Home
“… a poetic melody that comforts and quilts…
Collisions
Fourth Motion
“… generative shapes morph effortlessly into particle-based metaverse versions of the band members themselves…”
Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch
Ravage
“… how thoroughly unprepared we are for something almost all of us will experience…”
“I see Ravage as a mourning diary – it’s intimate, ritualistic in the sense that some of the methods used are sometimes more to do with their symbolic meaning than with the resulting sound.“
Frances Shelley
For Now We See Darkly (Drexler Rework)
“… textural ambience with a cinematic arc that guides a modern classical piece on an atmospheric journey…”
A Spatial label showcase of classic 90’s atmospheric drum & bass
Flore Laurentienne
Navigation IV
“… the passing of time and the elements changing in a cyclical and infinite way…”
Tegh & Adel Poursamadi
Ijād
“… what if one day in the distant future human beings encounter unknown types of feelings…”
“… we all could use the perfect English Holiday from time to time, for relaxation and recreation…”
PvC
For Ukraine Mix
A hand-curated sampler mix of pieces from both volumes of our benefit compilation by ambientblog
Orson Hentschel
Midnight Unrest
“… metallic, sometimes harsh and electrifying, surroundings of the urban life are landscaped into eclectic pulses…”
“… what I seek is to be like an empty vase that I fill by observing and exploring…”
Niels Orens
Implicit Void
“… melts into shapes, blends into surfaces, and dissolves into structures again…”
“… this is my own personal friendly reminder, to breathe in and breathe out…”
Pascal Schumacher
Luna
“… a quiet, dimmed-lights meditative journey with hints of nostalgia…”
Isambard Khroustaliov
Experts v. Shamans
“… proto-Autechre, post-Warp, and pre-AI hallucinogenic twists of psychedelic visuals and sounds…”
“… solo piano, innovative sound design, and an immersive aqueous sonic experience…”
Lawrence English
Outside The City Of God (Augustine wept)
“Music that lowers the heart and respiratory rates. Music that changes the state of mind. Music that leads to visions.”
Penguin Cafe
Harry Piers
“… this strong memory of seeing Arthur genuinely reach out to Simon through the piano…”
bvdub
Violet Opposition
… the emotional seepage of sound through the newly refreshed bandages of the recently healed wounds…
With Violet Opposition, Brock Van Wey floats the project into murkier waters by adding a layer of overdriven gilding to his trademark sound.
Matt Emery
Koi Swirls
“… elegant movement through the waters, with ebbs and flows culminating in the hypnotic swirls of the harp…”
Mathias Van Eecloo
eisOtones 14
50 tracks from 50 releases of 2021
“… about appreciating the medium from a musical connoisseur’s point of view…”