Info : DISCOGS
Jakob Olausson – Morning & Sunrise – (De Stijl, 2011)
Jakob Olausson’s 2007 debut album Moonlight Farm was a brilliant psych-folk gem, and its strange, secluded aura was reinforced by the fact that, at the time, Olausson was living as a beet farmer in rural Sweden. Since then, Olausson has maintained a marginally higher profile, touring extensively with the likes of Wooden Wand and Matt Valentine, and performing freer forms of jazz/improv in his duo Sus & Jakob. Despite all this activity, Moonlight Farm seemed such a distinctive, stand-alone piece of work that it never seemed necessary to expect or require a sequel. So the appearance of Morning & Sunrise comes as a very pleasant surprise, particularly in that it finds Olausson returning to the evocative terrain of Moonlight Farm without simply repeating himself.
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ghostrider – light pulse (digitalis, 2011)
mimaroglumusic / meditations / digitalis
everyone is going all berlin school these days, but ghostrider’s jens pauly just shrugs his shoulders wondering what all the fuss is about. he’s all ready to start his own fucken köln school, blasting seraphim blisscapes over the bridges attempting to drain the rhine. “light pulse” resonates with absolute clarity, rolling over the synthetic hills into a different shade of grass. as his compositions loop around and fold in on themselves, they disappear like vapor in the early morning and leave nothing behind but the haze. …
good weather for an airstrike – underneath the stars (hibernate, 2012)
gwfaa / soundcloud
Listen & Buy: bandcamp / stashed goods / hibernate
The Hibernate label starts the new year in good shape with Tom Honey’s latest cure for sleep deprivation and tinnitus in the form of his new album Underneath the Stars.
The ten tracks on this release continue Tom’s exploration of the gentler side of ambient soundscaping which started in 2009. Suffering with tinnitus himself he set out to write therapeutic pieces of music which subsume the din of our noisy world and the faint burblings of the troubled inner ear in a calm and blissful rapture. Amidst the reverbed, reversed and stretched guitar layers there are gentle electronic pulses, diffuse vocals, soft warbling strings and a host of cleverly muffled field recordings of kids playing, thunder, rain and other sounds that interject here and there, or form a burbling undertone giving some bottom end weight to these otherwise airy pieces. The second track Another Day Out really stood out for me with its opening gentle patter of rain and low thunder rumbles which slowly give way to gentle guitar phrasing and a wonderfully rich sounding piano and strings section joined by a choral overtone, playing out wistfully on distant kids voices.
Relaxed – check, soothed – check, drifting off to sleep with a smile on my face – oh yeah I’d say that was mission accomplished for me.
Do check out this album whether you have tinnitus or not – you owe it to your ears ! …
Tropics – Nautical Clamor (Bandcamp, 2012)
Info + Buy : BANDCAMP
Graham Lambkin – Amateur Doubles – (Kye, 2011)
myspace / label / discogs / Styles: the great american road trip
The thought of recording music in a car, especially while driving, has fascinated me over the last year. I even had grand plans of buying a handheld recorder, seeking to soundtrack my excursions throughout North Carolina, which are largely shaped around Top 40 hip-hop and R&B (Drake-lamenting and Rihanna-loving), questionable talksets on the local college station, and the audacity of fellow drivers to ignore a pedestrian’s right-of-way. I was particularly interested in how sound would leak out of my creaky 1998 Integra, whose speakers had long ago been partially blown out.
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Spiral Index – Gilded Dawn (Digitalis, 2011)
panabrite Buy: experimedia / aguirrecords / Digitalis
Norm Chambers has already brought us some of the year’s best music under the impenetrable Panabrite monicker and now he’s introducing us to his newest offshoot: the proggy world of Spiral Index. Gilded Dawn is a bright and dreamlike journey into synth-led pop expeditions, sounding like a futuristic hybrid of Chamber’s bouncy masterwork Infinite Pulsations and last year’s still-awesome Discoverer tape on Overland Shark (but with 100% more vocoder!!!). The path of Gilded Dawn, however, definitely takes its own unique course; these songs are cinematic, melodic, and just flat-out epic. My prediction is that, pretty soon, our entire solar system will be echoing with the cries for a vinyl release. …
mirror to mirror – here you leave today (cylindrical habitat modules , 2011)
Buy: experimedia / boomkat / cylindricalhabitatmodules
Alex Twomey has been running around making music as/with 1958-2009, Persimmons Pomegranate, Deep Jew, and Black Irish, and overseeing the Jugular Forest label, so, unsurprisingly, this is his first foray as Mirror To Mirror on the sweet vinyl. Here You Leave Today is full of charming synth sequences that fade in and out of static sky drone, pure & heavenly. It’s like a pastel oil slick, blue, pink, green, gold, all the parts identifiable but swirled together into homogenous ultra-harmonies. Ambient pop fit for a Renaissance Court, jesters juggling, candy eating, 100% playtime. Unwavering drones, settled in the front of your head, opening up new levels of consciousness, stunned sun hypnosis, in-fucking-credible. Seriously wonderful stuff on here. Can’t get enough. …
Perfume Genius – Put Your Back In 2 It – (Matador, 2012)
On February 21, Matador will release the next album from Seattle songwriter Mike Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius. It’s called Put Your Back N 2 It, and follows his excellent 2010 album Learning.
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Ryan Teague – Field Drawings – (Village Green, 2012)
website / myspace / buy / thanks to Azurehum & Dayne
Based in Bristol (UK), Ryan Teague is a composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist working in the field of electro-acoustic minimalism. His music combines contemporary arrangements and instrumentation with electronics and processing. He also produces music and sound design for film and TV.
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the nocturnes – Aokigahara (Errant Child Records, 2011)
The Road from The Nocturnes on Vimeo.
In Japan, Aokigahara is a forest at the base of Mount Fuji. Both a tourist destination of natural bounty and one of the top suicide sites in the world, it is simultaneously so lush it has been nicknamed Sea Of Trees and so mythologically curious that it has become associated with demonic presences. Exemplifying the region’s conflicting connotations is The Nocturne’s latest album. Aokigahara stirs up feelings from vague spaces — akin, perhaps, to what the morbidly curious feel when stumbling unexpectedly upon death. In circumstances when one can gain enough distance to view decay in its true artistic form, one can find in death the same sense of elation one finds in anything strange and novel.
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