honest words on honest music
Best of 2022
Headphone Commute’s 15th edition is now live, revealing one list per day!
For Ukraine
All three volumes plus “… and darkness came” benefit compilation are now on sale for 30% off when you buy the entire HC discography. Folks, that’s 150+ tracks for only $30 (or more)!!! headphonecommute.bandcamp.com
How to fall in love with digital music…
All about appreciating the medium from a connoisseur’s point of view…
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 like to work quickly and destructively […] yielding beautiful and unexpected results with a focus on these happy accidents…”
Bruno Sanfilippo
Ver Sacrum
“… an emotional journey through the many notions of humanity…”
Don’t miss out on this magnum opus from this Barcelona-based Argentinian composer!
An interview with Alex (aka Fields We Found), the founder of this new label
Fields We Found
chroma
An introduction to a brand new label, quiet details, kicking off with the founder’s single piece
Christian Balvig
Where All Is
“… an ode to and from the night […] a rebellion against constant stimuli…”
“… I used to lust after the synthesisers and samplers I read about in magazines, but now everything that comes bundled with Logic seems to be more than enough…”
Henrik Lindstrand
Leva
“… between melancholy a joy… a totality of all past experiences and inspirations…”
Contemporary Noise Ensemble
Easy Time
“… a powerful shot in the arm of funky jazz through the fusion of instruments and genres…”
The Future Sound of London
A Space of Partial Illumination
“… luscious dreamscapes, delicately melodic compositions, highly programmed electronics sculptures…”
The second instalment in the 7th volume of the Environments series by FSOL
50 tracks from 50 releases of 2022
“… a good instrument gives you such deep inspiration and can make you tremble with just one note…”
SYML
In this episode, Matt Emery chats with Brian Fennel, also known as SYML
Ole-Bjørn Talstad
Utsikt
“… doses of nordic melancholy [with a] hopeful and optimistic outlook…”
“… when I start working on an album, I don’t stop until it is ready… it is the only thing I think about…”
ILUITEQ
It Happened In July
“… interrupting the ordinary movements of life in a new, unpredictable, and often dangerous way…”
A showcase of music that will appear on future PITP releases in 2023 curated by Zach Frizzell
Simeon Walker
Crave
“… forever retaining those short precious moments that seem to be held in the memories of our past…”
Eluvium
Phantasia Telephonics
“… a narrative of our dynamic invention; technological advancement; loneliness and isolationism…”
Loscil / Lawrence English
Colours of Air
“… sifting the swells and drones for every shade of radiance…”
The union of composers Lawrence English and Scott Morgan is seamless, sublime, and long overdue.
February 12th, 2023
I suppose it would be nearly impossible for me to stay quiet and not mention the …
Autechre, Atom™, and Constantine
To celebrate HC’s 15th birthday, I am highlighting albums I covered 15, 10, and 5 years ago!
“… an episodic journey that is a composite of what resonated with me on a personal level… “
Cedric Vermue
Aether
“… fragile, nostalgic, and serene […] and simply gorgeous music…”
Purple Decades
Journey Test
“… a wordless dialectic between contentment and nostalgia…”
William Ryan Fritch
Polarity
“… a dark, cataclysmic, and post-apocalyptic music, in all the right ways…”
The first in a three-album series reflecting on the many calamitous water crises affecting life on this planet.
“… sounds, images, and movements are all sources of inspiration […] I work like a sculptor, but with sounds, lights and objects…”
“Keep creating and make sure that the majority of your time spent making content is something you love doing.”
For Ukraine
150 tracks for $30
Forgive me for a quick reminder that the war in Ukraine is escalating as we speak. …
Daniele Bogon
Prima Luce
… sounds arise from nothing and return to nothing, but they persist in our memory, our flesh and our soul forever…
Pan Sonic, Brian Eno, and Otto A Totland
To celebrate HC’s 15th birthday, I am highlighting albums I covered 15, 10, and 5 years ago!
Mike Jedlicka returns for his annual vinyl-only mix of favourite records of 2022!
Heinali
Kyiv Eternal
“… a tribute to the city we love and which refuses to fall […] awaiting for this horrible war to finally end…”
Twin Color
Fight Part I
“… melodic lines eddy and whorl together while moon rays of Blade Runner synthesis shine brightly across the shadows…”
Haythem Mahbouli
The Great Flood
“… the future of a hostile Earth wherein humanity itself faces extinction…”
Tomáš Šenkyřík
Advent
“… subtle weaving together of acoustic elements, soft synthetic manoeuvres and evocative field recordings to spellbinding effect…”
“… picking up the sounds of the wind and the creaking building which is moving, together with music, in a slow, intimate, and wafty dance…”
Franck Vigroux
Paris NYC
“… a kind of melodic euphoria is paired with machine-funk elements to create a kaleidoscope of sounds from the future of the past…”
Snowdrops
Mémoires Élementaires
“… following an invisible force, a sort of tropism that sometimes unites us and sometimes distances us from each other…”
“… I really enjoy working with organic sources of audio, finding or recording sounds, which I then start heavily processing in unusual ways…”
Jameson Nathan Jones
Kept
“… a collection of sonic experiments created with no intended end-game or expectations…”
Dobrawa Czocher
Forgive
“… capturing the power of forgiveness in a moving and mesmerising meditation of cello conjured sound…”
Pêtr Aleksänder
Dawn Reverie
“… the melody shifts, giving the piece a gradual turning effect, hypnotic and soothing, emotionally charged…”
“Will we live on? Will the technology that we embed ourselves in outlive us?”
Jason van Wyk
Undoing
“… a tentative descent into introspection, tunnelling into a subterranean wilderness…”
Kasper Bjørke Quartet
Requiem
“Requiem represents an end but also a new beginning […] for mankind and for our planet…”
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
Simon Goff & Dobrawa Czocher
Appearing
“… what lies at the end of this journey, and what appears within…”
Jonas Colstrup
At The Crest
“… a sonic chrysalis of emotion, in which one wants to wait out all current angst…”
Yair Elazar Glotman
A Year
“… memories are elastic forms… [their] essence can shift when you look at it again…”
Halina Rice
Fracture
“… a fragmentation of reality through jittery and elastic elements, which seem to come in like waves, to unsettle and to heal…”
“… I’ve always been interested in what gives a piece of music emotional content, which for me derives from harmony as well as melody…”