Back catalogue: Ambient/Drone

Review: Yu Su's eclectic, organic sound is one that has been perfected over every consecutive release, and reaches its yetmost peak with 'I Want An Earth'. As if to make a defiant cry for a habitable planet, this one contains four tracks inspired by the artist's time spent in the deserts of Ojai, California, and the coastal areas of British Columbia, presenting a deeply pad-driven, warm and modular sound to match. A dazzling work of odd-timed cosmickery and varied sonics.

Review: German musician Mary Yalex makes her debuts on A Strangely Isolated Place with a new album that offers up her vision of the future via a suite of lush ambient tunes. Yalex draws upon her day-to-day surroundings for inspiration and pairs soft melodies with vivid instrumentation. As the record unfolds, things get ever more future facing with darker moods and haunting vibes that tend toward dystopia. Her pristine synth work shines throughout the album and it all adds up to a thought-provoking listen as well las a notable label debut for Yalex.

Review: Akira Yamaoka, Marcin Przybylowicz and PT Adamczyk's original soundtrack for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners hears original OST numbers written for the award-winning anime series set within the futuristic dystopian world of Cyberpunk 2077, which originally spawned as the offshoot of the video game of the same name. Fitting for the music's breathy progressive house and electro oeuvre, which is interspersed with more traditional expressionist orchestral climaxes and builds, the Edgerunners series centres on a crack team of cyberpunk renegades, as they traverse the beastly underbelly of Night City, located in a futuristic vision of LA, navigating a world replete with corruption, gang violence, and cybernetic addiction. A note for fans: this vinyl edition includes unused, never-before-heard tracks composed by Yamaoka for Edgerunners, but which does not appear in the series.

Review: In Li Yield's Chinese homeland, the title of this album translates back to English as 'childhood' or 'dishevelled hair'. Both are fitting. The London-based multi-instrumentalist and composer follows on from 2021's spellbinding OF with a second full-length record, and this time looks to try and immortalise the experience of growing up young, seeing the world through wide open eyes and learning by engaging with it. The technical back story is impressive - Nonage is packed with outtakes of old Chinese TV shows, mechanical toys and instruments that were made by the artist for this project. Yilei's own childhood piano jams, and half-memories, are also interspersed. In the end, it's a beguiling listen, intriguing and curious, and consistently hazy, just like those recollections from when you were only just able to reach the counter top.

Review: Amongst the many Hiroshi Yoshimura albums to enjoy a reissue in recent years, it's astonishing it's taken until now for someone to do right by Surround. Yoshimura's legacy (and second hand value) has shot up since the resurgent appreciation of ambient music from Japan and some his most treasured albums have ridden waves of online algorithms to become wildly popular and highly sought after. The prices on original copies of this 1986 album tell you all you need to know, but thankfully Temporal Drift are here to present a high-end reissue of this masterful piece of ambient escapism, crafted by a true master of the genre. This is the blue vinyl pressing, all the better to dive into head first.

Review: In the widespread revival of Japanese ambient music, Hiroshi Yoshimura's music has been cast as some of the most cherished and reissued. Albums such as Music For Nine Post Cards and Green have enjoyed high-end editions in recent times, and now comes the turn of 1986 masterpiece Surround. It's been fervently pined for by the new wave of Far East ambient aficionados, and for good reason. This is Yoshimura at his best, delicately placing elegant musical figures atop oceanic pools of synth and leaving ample room for the mind to cast adrift. That might sound like a very generic way of describing an ambient release, but Surround's qualities transcend the formulaic trappings of the genre to become something truly magical.

Review: Following the explosion of Japanese ambient reissues in the past five years or so, certain artists have become household names in a curious combination of favourable streaming conditions and a consistent need for people to slow their lives down via music. Alongside the likes of Midori Takada and Yasuaki Shimizu stands Hiroshi Yoshimura, oddly omnipresent on YouTube sidebars but more importantly universally appealing for his exquisite, wholly natural take on environmental music. 1986 album Surround has been crying out for a reissue for a long time and finally Temporal Drift have done the right thing and brought this stunning record back into reach. Faithfully remastered with the fervent audiophile audience in mind, this is a long overdue celebration of one of Yoshimura's finest releases.

Review: Club culture can be curiously misled at times. While the focus is so often on breakdowns, in reality it's the hypnosis of looped drums and hi hats that often captures our imagination. And while belters frequently steal the limelight, in doing so we're at risk of forgetting the unifying, open-armed foundations that are found in everything from techno to hardcore to jungle and beyond. Brutal Flowers certainly makes a strong case for rethinking priorities. "A no-airs and graces piece of cool future-proof ambience" the label puts it. We'd agree. YS's stunning record seems to speak to our inner dreams of what rave has been and could still be, it hits nail-on-head in turning the emotions of surreal walks home post-club with friends into beautiful, understated yet grand synth overtures. It never forgets that heads down and ethereality are not opposites, but instead two halves of the same passion, and thoughtfulness is really the only secret ingredient in the dance music spectrum.