Ambient / Drone Recommendations March 2016

Review: Having introduced Gigi Masin to a wider audience via the brilliant Talk To The Sea compilation back in 2014, Music From Memory is now attempting to do the same with Suso Saiz. Like Masin, Saiz was a new age/ambient pioneer in his country (in this case, Spain), releasing a smattering of obscure solo albums between 1984 and the present day. The material on Odisea - dreamy, stripped-back, evocative, occasionally breezy and largely built around vintage synthesizers and his own, Steve Hillage-like guitar work - is taken from those albums, as well as an obscure cassette-only release. As usual, the Amsterdam diggers have also included a number of previously unreleased tracks, drawn from the musician's extensive archives. It all ads up to another must have compilation from Europe's premier Balearic archivists.

Review: Prins Thomas doesn't do things by halves. Having recently released another triple-disc mix album - the rather fine Paradise Ghoulash - he's decided to make his latest album a quadruple-vinyl set. Intriguingly, it also sees him set aside "all conventional drums and drum machines" in order to create a series of epic, evocative, slowly evolving ambient pieces. These were seemingly equally as inspired by classic ambient house - think the Orb/Robert Fripp collaboration FFWD, early System 7, and so on - as IDM tracks of the 1990s. Whatever the exact inspiration, each of the 9 tracks is utterly beguiling, and hugely suited to horizontal home listening.

Review: Blackest Ever Black first plunged us head first into the "small hour tape experiments, noise etudes and basement-mildewed pop" of Ryan Martin's Secret Boyfriend project in late 2013 with the release of This Is Always Where You've Lived. That album granted Martin his debut vinyl outing after a raft of cassette releases through his own Hot Releases label, and he's now back on the good ship BEB with a new album. Some six tracks long, Memory Care Unit compiles material Martin recorded for a Grovl tape boxset released back in February along with previously unreleased music recorded between 2013-14. A few minutes spent listening to Memory Care Unit proves that Blackest Ever Black's description of the album as "poignant, isolationist machine music" is most certainly apt.

Review: Bristol's Subtext is now home to a stunning mixture of artists from all over the electronic sphere, and aside from being one of Roly Porter's birthing grounds, the label has released plenty of choice output from both Emptyset and Paul Jebanasam, among others. The latter is back this week three untitled snippets of sounds under the Continuuum heading, the first of which is a noisy chance of industrial feedback-funk, and the second a fluttering wave of lonesome sonics, and lo-fi glitches. Lastly, the B-side hurls in a load of pseudo beats, all rolling and disjointed, to go alongside the steely pile of noise drones that engulf your ears with fury.

Review:  Harmonious Angles was Ross Manning's debut release, and we can still remember the day back in 2012 when its free-riding blends of noise hit our digital charts; it was a breath of fresh air at a time when making gnarly noise music was still seen as a little too much for certain listeners. He's back on Australia's Room40 with another bunch of twisted pieces of brain dynamite, but his sharp brand of noise is a little more contained, a little more mature, and beautifully processed. Moreover, it's just on the right side of totally insane, something we look out for all the time. For fans of everyone from Dilloway to the Touch label.

Review: Germany's Thomas Koner is no stranger to ambient music, and the electronic veteran has been around since the mid 1990's, never shy of composing deep, textural soundscapes and provocative pieces of sonic design. In recent years, he's been active on the sublime Touch imprint out of London, and also the lesser-known, but equally impressive Denovali label. "Tiento De La Luz" comes in six parts, and each segment is about purity, mystique and subtlety. From the first part, we are immersed in a deep and melancholic sphere of sound which slowly progresses into darker, more brooding territories. Number 4 is perhaps our favourite moment, simply because it manages to add harmonics together with lo-fi piece of field recordings and a gorgeous FX manipulation. All in all, you can really hear that Koner knows what he's doing here, and that these sounds have certainly not been put together spontaneously; there is a studied and methodical approach to these beautiful glows of electronics.