Ambient Music Blog
Connecting interested listeners worldwide to handcrafted & experimental ambient music.
To get you excited about the upcoming release of Slow Dancing Society's album Priest Lake Circa ’88, Hidden Shoal Recordings is offering a track from the album as a free download.
Download A Warm Glow (.zip)
The new Sigur Rós album með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust can be streamed in its entirety via last.fm.
I stumbled across Swedish band Tape, who play quiet, spooky instrumental stuff with a bit of found sound added in as texture. Luminarium is their latest release from Häpna Records. They've got another couple records, all worth your time, but I think this latest release is likely their best.
The Coachlight Woods is a new record from Portland's Glowworm. It's mostly stuff of the post-rock variety, but with some interesting instrumentation. It's a bit more quiet and introspective than your standard slow-build-into-kaboom post-rock. Been listening to it over the last few days quite a bit.
Related Official Glowworm Web site Glowworm MySpace Profile Glowworm on Virb.com
Christopher Bissonnette has a really nice new release available titled In Between Words. It's six tracks of stretched out, quiet drones and fuzz. Really delicate and well done. Highly recommended for those of you interested in the more subtle side of ambient music.
In Between Words is a collection of works, that continue Christopher Bissonnette’s explorations into orchestral and spatial acoustics. Cultivating an increasing interest in field recording and found sounds, Bissonnette has woven spatial ambience into these new compositions, while still concentrating on moments of near empty space between 'instruments'
Those of you who listen to actual music on actual physical media will be happy to know that Fennesz has released two tracks on 7" vinyl titled Transition.
For the rest of you, the good news is that there's a new full-length release scheduled for sometime this Spring.
From the fine folks in Australia at Hidden Shoal Recordings comes the latest release from Ambient Music Blog favorite Slow Dancing Society titled The Slow and Steady Winter.
It's quite nice stuff. Long, stretched out tracks with a lot of breathing room. Some towards the beginning of the record are rather dark, in a nice way. The tracks are generally atmospheric electric guitar ramblings with nice texture added throughout.
It's not a huge departure from 2006's The Sound of Lights When Dim, but if you liked that record, this one is definitely worth your time.
Room40 has recently released a 3" CD single from San Francisco based drone-ist Christopher Willits titled Plants and Hearts. It's a single track of 21 minutes and 30 seconds of droning guitars and etc. Really nice stuff and great value as an eMusic download, if you're the kind of person who uses eMusic.
From the Room40 site:
Incorporating 4hz isochronic pulses and panning at the same frequency, this work encourages the formation of 4hz brainwave patterns associated with states of meditation, deep relaxation, enhanced creativity, light sleep and lucid dreaming.
Science! I don't know about any of that, but I'm listening to it while writing this blog post and I feel pretty ok.
Hidden Shoal Recordings has announced that Drew Sullivan, better known as Slow Dancing Society, is set to release a new record November 6, 2007. The title is The Slow and Steady Winter and apparently it's the first half of a double album, the second half of which will arrive sometime in 2008.
There's a preview track available via the Slow Dancing Society MySpace profile, and you can learn a bit more about the new record via the announcement at Hidden Shoal Recordings.
Matthew Cooper, better known around here as Eluvium, has just released a set of tracks for free download. I don't know much about it other than what the site says, which is that they're "unedited improvised basement minidisc records." Sounds good to me! Go have a listen: www.concertsilence.net.
Irish artist Clare Langan has created a video for the song "í gær," which is to be included in the upcoming Sigur Ros record hvarf-heim.
Via the always lovely eighteen seconds before sunrise.
In the growing downloads section of their Web site, Danish band Efterklang has just released a free mp3 download of "Cutting Ice to Snow" (.mp3) from their upcoming album Parades, set for release this October 15th. Have a listen, everyone likes free!
Jason Szostek produces electronic music as bpmf. I recently got a copy of bpmf's Parousia Fallacy, and it's an interesting mix of synthy washes and spaced-out techno sounds. The best way I can describe it is it sounds like what a movie in say, 1984, would depict what a computer would sound like if it produced sound and you could hear it while it worked. And the the computer is maybe evil, or at least kind of weird and brooding. And also it speaks Russian.
Stop by bpmf.us, where you can preview tracks from the record.
Related bpmf MySpace Profile
Efterklang will release a new record, Parades, on October 15th, and you can listen to the last track "Cutting Ice to Snow" on their MySpace profile.
Related premiere! Cutting Ice To Snow - new song from new album!
On the recommendation of a reader, I recently picked up two new records by Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd, Before The Day Breaks and After The Night Falls. I'm familiar with Budd's work, specifically his collaboration with Brian Eno on Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror. I've also got Budd's The White Arcades. I like both of those records, and had heard good things about Budd's collaboration with Guthrie in the past, so I figured these would be right up my alley.
These two records have a similarity about them. And by that, I mean they sound like Harold Budd. Big, roomy, reverby sounding keys and guitar, but all muted and flattened a bit to sound like you're listening to something just off in the distance. Or, maybe, what it would be like to listen to another record under water.
The two records are apparently meant each meant to be a counterpoint to the other, and you can see this in the titles of the tracks, i.e. track 1 on Before The Day Breaks is "How Close Your Soul" while track 1 on After The Night Falls is "How Distant Your Heart." I created a playlist that positions the corresponding tracks from the two records together and you can hear the kind of call and response going on.
These are two very nice records, and if you have any interest in Budd's work, or if you like his previous work, which many consider to be prototypically "ambient," then you'd be wise to have a listen to these records.
I finally got my hands on the new Amiina record Kurr via eMusic, and I have to say I really like it. There are a few holdout tracks from previous EP's Seoul and AnimaminA, but on the whole the songs on this full-length record are more refined, a bit more pop-ish, some even with nice melodic hooks and bridges.
I hate to say it, but some of the tracks sound like they're destined for Volkswagen commercials. If you're into strange, but not to strange, Icelandic music like me, this is definitely a record to get. And if you're a bit put off by some of the weirdness of their previous work, this Amiina release is certainly more accessible.
Related Amiina MySpace Profile Official Amiina Site Amiina Wikipedia Entry
From Hidden Shoal Recordings, the label that brings you Ambient Music Blog favorites Wes Willenbring and Slow Dancing Society, comes a new record by Melbourne, Australia-based band Bury the Sound. Autmn Magnets is a 3 track EP of instrumental post-rock type stuff, and fairly intense at that. Nice tempo changes as well.
You can download the tracks from the Hidden Shoal Recordings online store (Hidden Shoal is all digital), or you can wait until July 3rd when it should be available widely in all the usual online places.
If you know Amiina, you probably know them as the quirky and whimsical Icelandic band that opened for Sigur Ros. The female quartet mixes bells, harps, even wine glasses and saws, together with electronic and more traditional instruments to create really just lovely sounding stuff.
I don't yet have their latest release, their official debut album Kurr, but I do have both of their previous EP's Seoul and AnimaminA, and I think they're definitely worth your time. It looks like a few of the tracks from the EP's made their way onto the new full length album. I grabbed AnimaminA from eMusic, but unfortunately I had to resort to iTunes and DRM to get my hands on Seoul.
Kurr is set for a June 19th US release, and I'm looking forward to hearing the full thing.
Their record label Ever Records has set up a charming little site to promote the record, where you can stream a few tracks and get a free download of the track Rugla if you provide them with an email address. There's an interesting video to watch as well. Sadly, they've trapped all this content in Flash, so I can't give you any direct links.
Related Amiina MySpace Profile Official Amiina Site Amiina Wikipedia Entry
Special Message: If you like Dustin O'Halloran's music, you'll probably enjoy our Ambient Music Blog Podcast, a continuous mix of context specific ambient music available for free.
After logging in to eMusic to grab some links to records for a couple posts, I noticed that there was a new Dustin O'Halloran piece available. It just so happens that I had exactly 2 downloads remaining for the month, so I snatched up the 2 track Prelude 2. The piece was used in a European Audi commercial. The first track is the full work and the second is the shorter edit used in the commercial. It's nice stuff, and definitely worth a listen.
I thought for sure I had posted previously about O'Halloran's Piano Solos, but I haven't. It's a great record of, obviously, piano music. I just realized that he's also released a Piano Solos Vol. 2. It's not currently available on eMusic, so I'm in the process of tracking down a non DRM'ed version.
Here's the Audi commercial [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqjpW-dar2w]
Grab 25 free downloads from eMusic if you don't already have an account!
Related Official Dustin O'Halloran Site Dustin O'Halloran MySpace Profile
I recently had the chance to have a listen to UK-based artist Nick Davis' Stone 3 project's upcoming EP Songs for the Seven-Eyed Goat. The record is quite a nice mix of ambient electronic sounds and meandering guitar melodies. Some of the rhythm tracks are Boards of Canada-esque, and there's just a little bit of a creepyness to the tracks that gives them a nice depth. And I think it's this depth that rewards deeper or repeated listening.
The EP will be released this June, so in the meantime head over to the Stone 3 site and listen to some streams of the tracks, or grab some mp3's of previous work at the Delta 9 Plastic label site.
Related myspace.com/stone3
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