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
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 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.
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, 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…”
“… my role as a performer fulfils me completely […] I don’t feel any frustration in playing other people’s music, I find it a total field of expression…”
Vanessa Wagner
Quiet Music [Nico Muhly]
“… sophisticated, elegant, exquisitely rewarding like softly whispered poetry…”
Jakob Lindhagen
They Were Never Really There
“… our memories play such a huge part of our identities, yet they are extremely unreliable…”
“… since I am dealing with prime numbers there are really no repeats [..] the music unfolds and shifts according to its own internal logic…”
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…”
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…”
“… about appreciating the medium from a musical connoisseur’s point of view…”