Back in stock: Ambient/Drone

Review: Arv & Miljo's new album delves into radical environmental activism and draws from the Swedish Plogbill movement's early 90s actions alongside Earth First! and Earth Liberation Front. Mixing monologues, interviews, protest songs, and site recordings with raw kosmische synth music, the pair crafts a mesmerising audio collage. Chaotic yet harmonious, disorienting yet soothing, the album reflects dedication, passion, and the spirit of change. Originally a limited CDR release in 2021, it quickly became a highlight in Arv & Miljo's discography. Now on, Jorden Forst offers a multi-faceted journey through environmental activism and the human spirit's resilience.

Review: For their latest must-check full length, Swiss ambient and jazz enthusiasts WRWTFWW have offered up a timely reissue of Satoshi Ashikawa's previously Japan-only 1982 album "Still Way". In some quarters it's considered a triumph of Japanese minimalism - an ambient set that was equally as inspired by Erik Satie as Brian Eno. The sounds are sparse, atmospheric and alluring, with simple harp, vibraphone, piano and flute motifs taking it in turns to rise and fall across the soundspace. It's intricate, soft-focus and hugely poignant, evoking memories of similarly lauded sets by Ashikawa's countrymen Hiroshi Yoshimura and Midori Takada. In other words, it's sublime.

Review: Following a run of superb collaborative releases - including sets created with Ana Stamp, Suzanne Kraft and his old pal Gigi Masin - Jonny Nash has finally got round to recording a new solo album. It's his first lone LP for four years and draws as much from his love of folk and acoustic music as the immersive sound worlds of ambience. As a result, his usual lilting, effects-laden guitar textures, stretched-out synthesiser chords and immersive electronic textures rub shoulders with finger-picked acoustic guitars, pedal steel-inspired motifs, strummed chords and echo and reverb-laden snippets of his own voice (a sonic ingredient he has not used for some time). The results are as magical and mesmerising as you'd expect, with Point of Entry crashing straight in to the list of Nash's strongest releases to date.

Review: Mika Vainio's "Olento" is one of the key albums from his fine discography and now, finally, it is available on vinyl for the first time. The sophomore album first landed in 1996 and laid down a new blueprint for minimal techno that has rarely been bettered since. The album is also a fine summation of the Finnish artist's sublime and singular style - icy ambient tundra that are vast in scale but minute in detail, warped synth oscillations that sound at once futuristic but also somehow like field recordings from a lonely part of the arctic circle, and brain melting sine waves that lock you in a trance. Essential.