The latest by Canadian composer Tim Hecker serves as a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue. Whether taken as warning or promise, No Highs delivers – this is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined.
Tim Hecker has released his tenth album Anoyo. Announced back in February, the release follows the producer’s recent LP Konoyo from last year, and marks the ambient instrumentalist’s second album with the Japanese musicians that make up his Konoyo Ensemble. Recorded during the same sessions as Konoyo, Anoyo continues the musician’s affinity for Japanese styles, incorporating the traditional Japanese instrument gagaku. The album serves as a companion to his 2018 Konoyo.
In the three years that have passed since the release of Ghostly's Idol Tryouts compilation, Ghostly and its brother label Spectral Sound have brached out beyond their roots in Ann Arbor under the guidance of Sam Valenti IV, who has built a shamelessly diverse roster of artists from around the globe. Idol Tryouts Two is an expansive document of this maturation, offering a plentitude of exclusive material separated into two discs distinguished as Avant-Pop and SMM.
Avant-Pop denotes a distinct brand of off-center pop treasures - it follows no formula, but you know it when you hear it. On this disc, exclusive tracks from Skeletons & The Girl-Faced Boys, Mobius Band, and the rest of the Ghostly roster document the crossroads where the avant-garde and the popular converge…
One of the most renowned and uncompromising entities working in 21st century avant-garde Arab-Levantine art and music, Jerusalem In My Heart presents a new album of vital and haunting electronics and electroacoustics, framed by founder and producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh’s spoken and sung Arabic, buzuk-playing and sound design. Qalaq is the most distilled, variegated and finely wrought Jerusalem In My Heart album to date – featuring a different guest/collaborator on every track, yet as cohesive, emotionally resonant, sonically adventurous and narratively powerful as any release in JIMH’s celebrated discography. Guests across the album's 13 tracks include Moor Mother, Tim Hecker, Lucrecia Dalt, Greg Fox, Beirut, Alanis Obomsawin, Rabih Beaini and many more.
After Jeff and Steven McDonald reconvened Redd Kross in 2006 (with the late-'80s line-up of guitarist Robert Hecker and drummer Roy McDonald), they seemed content to play the occasional festival show or short tour. For Redd Kross fans waiting for more music, it looked like 1997's Show World might be it as far as new albums went. The brothers had a trick up their sleeve, though, and in 2012 they released Researching the Blues, a self-produced album that not only continues their stellar recorded legacy but gives it an electric boost…
On 2016's Goodbye to Language, veteran producer Daniel Lanois and frequent collaborator Rocco DeLuca team up for an album of shifting experimental soundscapes created with lapsteel guitars. The album is far closer to Lanois' pioneering ambient works with Brian Eno, Harold Budd, and Michael Brook from the 1980s than his subsequent, more rootsy singer/songwriter albums. As the album's title suggests, there are no lyrics here, and the feelings evoked by this music can't accurately be expressed by words anyway. As simple as the idea of an ambient steel guitar album sounds, there's a lot going on here, and it never feels like mere background music.
Yes, it sounds crazy to make yet another recording of Schubert's Trout Quintet a "reference recording", particularly given the number of really good ones already in circulation. Never mind. There is no finer performance available, and certainly none better recorded: gorgeous, perfectly natural sound whether in regular stereo or SACD surround-sound. So what makes this performance so special? First, and speaking generally, this has got to be one of the most shapely, elegant, and effortlessly flowing versions ever committed to disc.
Songs about the river are a common trope in the history of music. Psalms of being cleansed, being baptized, being redeemed. There are ballads of murder, lost love, jealousy, and all sorts of rank human emotion reflected in the surface of the water. Respect, praise, and worship of the river are other themes often channeled through music as well. Even in the realm of ambient music, digital mimesis of the aquatic is commonplace. Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, in their ongoing archaeological approach to a post-industrial sound design, offers their own variant on this topic with considerable differences. It is not only the sediment, the debris, the waste, the scum, the mud, and the rot that are the source materials in Scaath Catfish, but also what is preserved in those elements and new forms of life fostered in this conceptual framework.