Twin Color (vol. I)
Twin Color - Vol 1 marks the grand return of Murcof to producing a full-length album in all its glory and generosity, nearly two decades after the release of Cosmos in 2007. Celebrated for his classical, minimalist textures and unique soundscapes, Murcof has established himself as a master of modern ambient music alongside Tim Hecker, Alva Noto, and Johann Johannsson. With this new album, Murcof takes a bold step forward, embracing a distinctly cinematic and dystopian narrative influenced by the…
III-II
Through the course of time, DSR Lines (David Edren) never loses his intimate and profound connection to the universe of modular synths. These recordings made during 2014 in a residence at the Cem/Worm studio in Rotterdam, represent a further magical compendium of his Organic Electronic Music. In particular, here he draws from his expressive arsenal the cosmic and galactic potential of the Arp 2500, which happily floating throughout. A rigorous magician of vaporous, oscillating patterns, sidereal…
Binnenin
"... anatomical and cellular symphonies, catharsis of invisible biochemical processes, painting the micro-dimensional flows of the subtle body or imaginary geographies of hidden micro-bodies. Here, Edrens organic electronic music is enriched with new lymphs that also vaguely recall the influences of non-European music, especially Chinese and Japanese music (stick and chimes percussions) in an intimate and twilight dimension, poised between exotic ambient and cinematic suggestions. A miniaturisti…
Throb, shiver, arrow of time
Oliver Coates' Throb, shiver, arrow of time is a portal into somatic chiaroscuro, aglow with the embers of imperfect memories and smudged with the plumes of internal echoes, which augment in vast, mercurial dimensions. The ten compositions of Throb, shiver, arrow of time find weightless melodies soaring across after-image gradients, while Coates reaches further to collapse the digital into the analogue and vice versa, allowing serendipity to reorganize the material and push outwards, so the musi…
Oxide Manifesto
"Oxide Manifesto is intended as an audio sketchbook, which explores a particular method of creating music. It aims to link obsolete machines and experimental composition. In recording it, I embraced as many techniques of working with magnetic tape as possible. I gave myself the freedom to lean into the perceived flaws of tape as a recording format. Often we hear ‘it’s not about the equipment’. But on this album the equipment is in equal focus to the music. Wow, flutter, wonky pitch, abrupt edits…
Only Good Dreams For Me
On “Love2,” the second track on Zaumne’s 'Only Good Dreams For Me', Natalia Panzer’s voice emerges from a hazy smear of a pop-song chorus: “I am touching the cold window,” she intones. “I am touching the spinning walls. It’s a way to remember what’s mine is yours, and back again.” 'Only Good Dreams For Me', Zaumne’s first release with Warm Winters Ltd., embraces such direct contact as it cycles through states, from dread to hope. The heavy air that lingered on Zaumne’s previous releases, like hu…
The Magic Place
Julianna Barwick's The Magic Place, is a nine-piece full-length album of magic and solace, bursting joy and healing tones. Julianna's mostly-a-capella music is built from her voice multi-tracked through a loop station. There's more backing instrumentation on this one than on previous albums but it's the vocals—soaring high in reverb-drenched, wordless harmonies—that matter most here. It's the layered fragments and pieces that become an intricate pattern through technology; it's the sound of a ri…
Jade
zakè (aka Zach Frizzell) and Tyresta (aka Nick Turner) follow their recent ambient treasury, The Worlds We Leave Behind, with Jade, a surprise companion album that teases out several themes from previous works into three long-form sonic vessels, offering some of their most affecting work across nearly an hour of reflective bliss. In the process of allowing their individual instincts to further entwine, they have created a uniquely generative kind of collaboration, where every deep drone and deli…
Disconnect
Twin heavyweights Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug) and Joseph Kamaru (KMRU) unite for Disconnect, a powerful study of dread, hope, and profound sonics that marries depth-trawling dub with Kamaru’s voice, ambient sensibilities, and negative space. Kevin Martin first became aware of Kenyan ambient musician KMRU “watching the short 2020 documentary Under The Bridge,” he tells us. “Which, aside from immediately finding Joseph's approach to sound and music so instantly impressive, I also found his spok…
Harmony / Balance
Nigerian electronic musician and violist Ibukun Sunday debuts on Phantom Limb with Harmony / Balance, a brooding, introspective take on Afro-ambient music that follows two acclaimed digital-only albums for Phantom Limb imprint Spirituals. Based in Lagos, Ibukun Sunday has expertly positioned himself between the rarely-married cultures of ambient and West African musics. He entwines his compositions with field recordings from his native Nigeria and deeply considered philosophies of existence, hum…
Color of Time II
*200 copies limited edition* Past Inside the Present is proud to begin its summer slate with a new, full-length suite from Color of Time, the duo comprising label veterans Kévin Séry (aka From Overseas) and Nick Turner (aka Tyresta). Each artist is known for his own kind of spacious, heart-rending drone, and on II, they occupy a sonic universe in which melancholy themes linger over drifts of harmonic guitar and arrays of intricate detail. The delicacy of these environments results from a passion…
Mid Sky
*200 copies limited edition* Mid Sky, the first full-length collaboration between Past Inside the Present label head zakè (aka Zach Frizzell) and vocalist Angela Winter, is the result of a patient exchange of ideas and arrangements over the course of more than a year. True to its title, the album occupies a rarefied place between the terrestrial and the cosmic, as Frizzell’s organic drones and field recordings unfurl in tandem with the cascading harmonies of Winter’s otherworldly voice, which cr…
Kairos
*200 copies limited edition* Kairos is the sophomore album from Berlin trio Ausklang, following the monumental, critically-acclaimed Chronos (Past Inside the Present, 2020). Throughout its eight movements, Fabian Koppri, Benjamin Sohn, and Simon Ansing play with concepts of relative time and entropy through a masterful balance of melodic post-rock and layered ambient bliss, adorning an understated frame of guitar, bass, and drums with complex, ever-evolving arrangements, ranging from glitchy ele…
Agartha: Personal Meditation Music
Building on their long-standing efforts to illuminate the historical Ambient and New Age movement’s connections to minimalism and experimental electronic music, the venerable Important Records returns with the astoundingly ambitious “Agartha: Personal Meditation Music”, gathering an incredible body of music produced by Meredith L. Young-Sowers during the mid-1980s to aid meditation and spiritual healing. Resonating deeply with the work of Eliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Brian …
Issue 118: White Noise (Magazine + 7'', Red)
This month's Electronic Sound cover stars are the fabled White Noise – Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and David Vorhaus – and we're bundling the magazine with a fantastic seven-inch featuring previously unreleased Radiophonic Workshop remixes of two killer tracks by the pioneering electronic supergroup.
Radiophonic Workshop mainstays Derbyshire and Hodgson formed White Noise with offbeat American musician Vorhaus in 1968. We've interviewed the band's two surviving members for our cover feature…
Dead Eyes Opened
Severed Heads are one of the longest standing bands to have emerged from the Australian post-punk and experimental scene. They began in Sydney in 1979, and were an early outfit to incorporate elements of 'industrial' noise-generation, tape cutting & looping and electronic sound synthesis. As the project developed, song-structures and vocals were employed in a more-or-less recognizable mutant electro pop style. After many line-up changes featuring Gary Bradbury and psychedelic guitarist Simon Knu…
Space Museum
Tip! ** 2024 repress ** Dark Entries present the first ever official vinyl reissue of Space Museum by Solid Space. Solid Space was the British duo of Dan Goldstein (keyboards, vocals) and Matthew 'Maf' Vosburgh (guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals) formed in 1980. Dan and Matthew met at the age of 11 while attending school in north London. In late 1978 at at the age of 14, they formed Exhibit 'A' with Paul “Platypus” and Andrew “Lunchbox” Bynghall. They recorded two EPs in 1979 and 1980, self-releas…
Sumer Is Icumen In
Orchestrating vivid rites of polished futures.
eyetrees
*100 copies limited edition* boycalledcrow is the alias of Chester-based sound artist Carl M Knott (Wonderful Beasts, Spacelab). Knott, a former folk musician, uses his myriad acoustic influences to create unique, strange and beautiful compositions. We're excited to be able to bring you the latest wonderful album from Chester's boycalledcrow, after some superb releases for labels such as Mortality Tables, Waxing Crescent Records and Subexotic Records. Knott's music doesn't sit easily in any pre-…
Storia Notturna
*2024 stock. 300 copies limited edition* "Storia Notturna" is a collection of music written, produced and recorded mainly in September 2021, but its origins go back in time. As far back as my University studies in the early 90s. For one of the many extra-departmental courses that my study plan in Philosophy allowed, I chose Social History and found myself studying the seminal study by Carlo Ginzburg "I Benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento" (Einaudi, 1966). It was a r…