Back catalogue: All genres

Review: Batu has proven himself hugely capable of making a wide range of music. He might be best known for his perfect techno designs but here delves further into the world of ambient. Across four tracks he explores a number of moods with painterly synth work that is detailed with gentle percussion, gorgeous keys, and in the case of 'Flown,' jazzy splashes of cymbal. 'Half Speed' is idk a slow awakening on a distant planet. 'The Fifth' brings more bright and energy synth motifs and 'Seams' is a soothing lullaby. A beautifully escapist listen.

Review: Royal Wavetable Mellodies & Old TDKs by Mexico baed artist Brainwaltzera is a perfect coming totters of the symphonic, the synthetic, the organic and the electronic. It's a record that could be a lost 70s classic as much as a new school homage to minimalism, experimental ambient and vintage synths. In fact, this is a selection of archive recordings in the artist's characteristically idiosyncratic style that we cannot get enough of. The collection of tracks are gorgeously native and innocent, with wispy melodies and retro keys all smeared and smudged into moving pieces of ambient that are beatless but dynamic.

Review: Italian composer and modular synth wizard Caterina Barbieri makes a debut on the Light-Years label here with a profound work of ambient beauty. Known for her musical vortexes, she warps space and time with her compositions and has done ever since breaking through with 2017's double-album Patterns Of Consciousness. Spirit Exit again finds her start up her modal rug and get to work in her home studio amidst Milan's two-month pandemic lockdown in 2020. It's a personal work that "takes inspiration from female philosophers, mystics and poets spread across time." The transportational sounds are as complex as they are emotive from front to back.

Review: Portland-based Kevin Palmer tucks himself away in a shed to make his music, so the myth goes. Wherever he makes it, he has always cooked up something special in the in-between electronic worlds. Now he lands on Blundar with a brand new album on numbered and heavyweight translucent green vinyl that offers up 12 tracks of ambient, dub and downtempo experiments which are at times intriguing and cosmic and others laid back and beautifully lazy. Each one is deftly detailed with myriad synth sounds, and atmospheric motifs and they all add up to a perfectly deep, dreamy and immersive listen.

Review: Any new release from reclusive Norwegian ambient colossus Geir Jennsen is cause for celebration. The Petrified Forest was inspired by a 1936 movie of the same name, the plot of which revolves around a world-weary British writer meeting a fellow idealist in an isolated diner in the middle of the Arizona desert. Jenssen's music has always been cinematic in tone - think widescreen visions with multiple related movements, sitting somewhere between icy loneliness and comforting homeliness - so it's little surprise to find that The Petrified Forest regularly hits the mark. Evocative, atmospheric and quietly melodiousness, it's a mini album chock full of brilliant downtempo electronica.

Review: Two years after Marc Richter released his most widely available album Back To Comm album, Alphabet 1968, on the ever amazing Tape imprint, he delivered another landmark with Earth. Originally, the music was conceived to accompany two screenings of the video Earth by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen. First commissioned for the Sydney Festival 2011, the visual work was scored by Melbourne's Oren Ambarchi for the grand unveiling, but then toured the planet, with different musicians invited to reimagine the soundtrack for different locations. Germany's Black To Comm was enlisted for Berlin and Krakow, and as the smart money was always on, he offered up a strange, beguiling, abstract but highly visceral score. Almost impossible to describe, at once witty but incredibly sad, troubling and intriguing, traumatised but honest, it might be the perfect accompaniment to a film in which several frames are dedicated to landscapes piled high with human corpses. Following the two live performances, the producer opted to make these 'tunes' his next record, which is now finally getting a reissue.

Review: When Black To Comm's staggeringly powerful Alphabet 1968 first landed, rather confusingly in 2010, it stood out on a burgeoning ambient and drone landscape for several reasons. Firstly, it was rather short. Certainly in comparison to similar sounding releases of the day - less than 45 minutes. Secondly, it managed to cram, or rather delicately introduce, myriad sub genres and styles within the relatively brief run time. Each track comes across as though it is autonomous, yet the collection really needs to be explored as a whole to get the full impact. So while 'Trapez' has this stunning, purposefully naive quality to it - like a music box fed through various levels of distortion, chimes straining through the muffled playback - preceding number 'Forst' is this grand, palatial overture of refrains and background marching drums, taking up a full quarter of the entire album on its own. Elsewhere, 'Traum Gmbh' brings fret and chaos to the equation, shrill notes invoking horror movie scenes, while 'Musik Fur Alle' invites us into an aural realm that owes much to candlelit folk tales.

Review: Brooklyn's Tyler Gilmore, aka BlankFor.ms, has released on Works for Tape and Piano, a full-length on Puremagnetik and has remixed The Cinematic Orchestra and Para One. Here he drops a new album on Mystery Circles that comes on hugely limited red vinyl. Once again it showcases his richly textured, emotive ambient music that is all made using his collection of analog synthesisers, an old spinet piano and degraded tapes. His experimental techniques result in some truly moving and impactful ambient that stays with you long after it has finished playing.

Review: Incredibly powerful stuff, Blazing Worlds - AKA Justin Wright & Grant Corum - recorded their self-titled latest album over a long summer in the US Midwest. Evidently inspired by what conditions were like, the official release information here opens with a reference to J.G. Ballard's landmark science fiction, The Drowned World, which, for all intents and purposes, could become a reality in the next few centuries. A planet so scorched lagoon waters that have flooded cities seem to burn by midday, there's a sense of rising temperatures about this truly hallucinatory album. Drone, ambient, use whatever label you prefer, this feels like you're either orbiting the sun itself, or looking out on lands that have long since succumbed to desertification, wondering when the scorching dunes might give way to some place more liveable. Atmospheric, futuristic, and deeply effective.

Review: Those of a certain vintage may remember Blue, an IDM and ambient techno duo who released a string of pleasingly otherworldly EPs and albums in the late '90s. The Path of Least Resistance Meets The Point of No Return marks the duo's return to action after 22 years, albeit via a set of tracks originally intended to be released as an ambient album back in 2001. These updated and reworked versions are apparently different to those in their archives, but that doesn't matter; what's on offer is becalmed, otherworldly, often unusual and uniformly emotive, with highlights including the squelchy bass and elongated organ chords of 'Spacepport', the Pete Namlook style ambience of 'Ava X', the deep space symphony that is 'She Found The Colours' and the becalmed brilliance of 'Crystalline Form'.

Review: The superb Greyscale project from the Lithuanian label continues with another gorgeous album, Strange Fog. It's a split release that finds Genning on the first six tunes and BOTN on the last five. These are evocative and picturesque ambient pieces that invite you deep into wide open spaces and have you gazing at the sonic scenery. Things start lo-fi and rather foggy but delicate melodies bright light and hope as the album plays out and you are cast ever more adrift from the real world and all the nagging anxieties that come with it.

Review: Chase Smith aka the W.T. Records and Apartment associate and documentary filmmaker Christa Majoras are back as brainwave research center with their second full length, Mosaic. Once again the sonically inquisitive pair mix up analogue synths with electro-acoustic experiments, epic and adventurous soundscapes and plenty of raw texture, hooky pop melodies and innocent rhythms. Along the way the duo take influence from their heroes including Ennio Morricone, John Carpenter and Kraftwerk on a record that was laid down in the back of Smith's synthesizer repair shop. It's an absorbing listen once more from this increasingly vital pair.

Review: The unstoppable dub techno and ambient label Greyscale seems to drop new music each week. This time it is BT Gate X-138's 'kV Pylon' that serves as the musical vehicle to take us on a trip through rich sonic landscapes and an array of emotions. Over seventy sublime and spacious minutes, this vital CD goes from grainy and lo-fi moodiness on the opener to explorations of the ocean floor on '330kV Test' via gloriously uplifting and optimistic pieces of melodic beauty such as '330kV Test'. It is another triumph from a label and artist that will find favour with all techno and ambient lovers.

Review: On his return to China in 2019 after a period away, Brock van Wey noticed a "strange, sound emitting item" on the table. It was a handmade 'steel tongue drum', a unique percussion instrument associated with spirituality and meditation in Asian culture. A few days later, van Wey recorded an extended jam of himself playing it, and later overdubbed electronic sounds, melodies, chords and textures. The result is The Depth of Rain, the long-serving ambient and drone artist's second Bvdub album of 2024. Where some of van Wey's ambient sets can tend towards the intense and claustrophobic, The Depth of Rain is a genuinely melodious, evocative and spring-like affair that ebbs and flows wonderfully throughout, providing entertainment and sonic bliss in equal measure.