Umbilical
“Umbilical was made remotely between Japan and Brazil, which are on opposite sides of the Earth. Even though there is a very long distance, our collaboration became very intimate and close; we named the album “Umbilical” to reflect this connection. The album starts with Michi, which means path or road, embarking on a journey to another place before ending with Endless Urbia where we eventually come back to reality.” – Ayami Suzuki & Carlos Ferreira
Sound Space Variations
“Sound Space Variations" is a delicate and restrained sound bath. A mix of atmospheric, suspenseful drone sounds and meditative aspects. It is an album made for those moments when we just are. zakè has managed to capture the moments that lie between sounds. I am sure you know those unagitated murmurs and atmospheric hisses. The artist connects this in-between-world and our earthly one with calm and sonorous scores, making us think about everything and nothing. The six pieces on the record do not…
Module
"Esteemed ambient auteurs, zakè and ossa's collaborative output continues to soothe and delight in equal measure. After Syntheticopia in August 2022 and the dark long-player 'A Pale Shelter' in 2021 between zakè, ossa, and City of Dawn comes Module, a collaboration that includes seasoned electronic producer Ruben A. Tamayo, under the alias FAX. The power trio brings forth an eight-track excursion into heavy ambient atmospheres with moody soundscapes and a real weight of melancholy. As always, th…
Stay With Me
"Given the amount of collaborations he undertakes, Past Inside The Present boss Zakè is not so much musically sociable as utterly gregarious. He's also one to choose a good theme with which to imbue his musical productions with definable atmospherics. This collaborative effort with T.R. Jordan has water at its heart, with field recordings captured on the coast of Lake Erie - which straddles the US/Canadian border - fed into the mixes, giving them a distinctive psycho-geography. Spread over four …
Pyramiden
"zakè, James Bernard and Markus Guentner build a cascading and overwhelmingly beautiful record that combines the zen of the best ambient/new age music along with the “Big Sky” openness of post-rock bands like Explosions in The Sky and This Will Destroy You. You get songs with chilly names like “Polar Night”, “Seafrost”, and “Arctic Choir” – and there is a sort of vast arctic blue hue to these songs – but it lacks even a hint of desolation. I can imagine listening to something like “Assembly of L…
Nag-Hammadi
*200 copies limited edition* Deluxe vinyl edition of the 2022 album from German ritual ambient bands Nam-Khar (Winter-Light / Zazen Sounds) and Vortex (Cyclic Law / Tesco Organisation), joining forces to draw inspiration from the Nag Hammadi scriptures and their spiritual and cultural context. They fused their distinctive sounds to create a careful interpretation of the source texts from a pan-religious and spiritual perspective, resulting in hypnotic soundscapes and rhythmic patterns. The idea …
The Blue Beyond
The Blue Beyond is produced by Touch and Audemars Piguet following Audemars Piguet Contemporary's commission of two new compositions by Jana Winderen in 2019. The record offers edits of two sound compositions "Du Petit Risoud aux profondeurs du Lac de Joux" (2019) and "The Art of Listening: Under Water" (2019).
"Du Petit Risoud aux profondeurs du Lac de Joux" was first presented at Art Basel in Basel from 13 to 16 June 2019. A live performance of the piece was given at HEK (House of Electronic A…
S.W.I.M
*300 copies limited edition* Icelandic musician Gunnar Jónsson Collider debuts on A Strangely Isolated Place with an expansive trip through six fictional environments, brought further to life through an accompanying video by artist Arna Beth. Inviting escapism through detailed, glacial textures, S.W.I.M. elevates a traditional beatless spectrum into a first-person narrative, moving across burning wastelands, miles-high sundown, a dizzying night sky, subterranean exploration, and more beautiful, …
Materia
The second instalment in the Titrate series marks the debut of Pagan Red. This 180g vinyl album, housed in 350gsm reverse board print packaging, contains three experimental compositions featuring subtly enveloping drone, weightless percussion and immersive tonal resonance. Field recordings interweave with the synthetic, sparse rhythms emerge and dissolve, absorbing textures layer and evaporate. Exploring the symbiosis between the natural and the nonmaterial, Materia guides listeners on a journey…
Onda
*150 copies limited edition* With "Onda", Regensburg artist Markus Guentner releases his follow-up to Empire, which appeared on A Strangely Isolated Place in 2021. "Onda" captivates with its orchestral-like progressions, an endlessly interwoven carpet of sound that spreads out over six etudes. As if in slow motion, he scans through the individual sound particles, works out details, lets dust fall from the source material, cores, connects and in the end lets everything flow...
Golden Apples of the Sun
Obliques and Atmospheric are very happy to present their new album “Golden Apples of the Sun”. It is the result of close cooperation between Suzanne Ciani and Jonathan Fitoussi. The American electronic music pioneer has joined the French composer to sign a four-hand album around mythical synthesizers like Buchla, Moog and Ems… Mainly recorded in California, facing the Pacific Ocean, the white sound of synthesizers mixes constantly with the sound of the waves and wind. The music generated is dire…
Anchorage
Lithuania label Greyscale is up to a 29th full length here and once more it is a deeply moving journey. Phases of Gravity is behind it and serves up what amounts to an audio scrapbook that recounts a period in which the Hungarian artist conducted something of a rebirth. Anchorage then is a very personal work where the sounds are stripped back to their most distilled essence. It is always atmospheric in its fusion of ambient and dub with ocean explorations like the opener next to more weight and …
Orchestral Tape Studies II
Orchestral Tape Studies II is an enthralling amalgam of orchestral textures carefully crafted by zakè. It is a continuation of its predecessor, Orchestral Tape Studies which was released to high acclaim in 2019. Bringing forth pastoral meditations with becalmed, atmospheric intent, Orchestral Tape Studies II is a convincing display of beautiful scores primed for the self-reflective moments that are both contemplative and thought provoking. These delicate repetitions, reticent sound treatments, a…
Souvenir
*300 copies limited edition* Olof Dreijer and Mount. Sims present a collaborative release, entitled Souvenir, on Rabid Records. The five-track record centres around the rich harmonics of the steel drum.
The start of the Souvenir project dates back to when Dreijer (alongside his sister Karin as The Knife) and Sims were collaborating with Planningtorock on the Tomorrow, In A Year album. They were contacted by the organization SFOTE from Trinidad/New York, who asked them to work on a project using …
Out Of Standard!! Italia 11
Chapter 11 of this infamous compilation released in collaboration between italian labels ADN and Out of Standard!!
Descent
Descent is a selection of works spanning over 20 years. While it reflects Prior's background in the acousmatic tradition that emerged in the UK from musique concrète, Descent departs from several of the core Schaefferian precepts that underpinned the musique concrète to which it owes so much. The idea of sound as a quasi-sculptural material is a central tenet of musique concrete, with the goal of plasticity brought ever closer through generations of sound processing technologies. As with the chi…
Oceanheart
*2023 limited deluxe edition.* Oceanheart (ltd. deluxe edition) comes as a 2-LP/2-CD, limited to 500 copies each, with the first record being the original "Oceanheart" album from 1984. The second part "Oceanheart Revisited" is a remix album, created from Harald Grosskopf and Tobias Stock, an electronics engineer and owner of a top-class analogue studio where the new versions of the six "Oceanheart" tracks were created. Harald Grosskopf is best known as drummer in the band Ashra and for Klaus Sc…
"HEALING"
ugne&maria is the duo project of Ugnė Vyliaudaitė and Marija Rasa Kudabaitė, both based in Brussels. Their music is made from a mosaic of samples and carefully triggered field recordings, in dialogue with Vyliaudaitė’s violin. Intricate and calming but far from ambient, in that where ambient music recedes ugne&maria’s music sounds always close to the skin. The compositions are subtle and precise, setting up a logic and then gently manipulating it or letting it hover for several minutes. Elem…
ae³o & h³ae
* * Much-needed 2023 Reissue * * Drone: as with anything else that rarely changes, it's necessary to latch onto subtleties. What minimal suggestion put forth by a drone is so easily applied to pretty much any impression you might have that, predictably, describing one often leads to vague subjectivities bordering on bad poetry. And as much as I'd love to go around proclaiming my love for "deeply resonant, holy abysses" (not), I wish there were an easier way to communicate the real power of the t…
Pudel
Dadaglobal is one of the headstrong, camouflaged in elegance: one of the crazies. With him, we are being hoaxed. He is not to be pinned down to anything other than his artistic urge to move. «Pudel» is an intermediate stop. And the bohemian forest begins to speak. The subway. The soccer stadium. New York City, London Town, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Kyoto, Beijing, Hongkong, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Baden. A journey, ongoing. Dadaglobal takes a seat at the Clavinet, bells in orbit and gameboy on standby. …