2025 Mix For NYE

An hour long mix for New Year's Eve  featuring solely music released in 2025, ambient and largely instrumental although some voices creep in to the Keith Tenniswood remix of Deeply Armed's The Healing and Mogwai's God Gets You Back. 

I was going to do a second mix to go with it, a more uptempo, more vocals based hour long mix but time and circumstances conspired against me. It'll follow at the weekend hopefully. In the meantime this one gives some low key shimmer and emotion to the last day of the year. 

NYE Hour Long 2025 Ambient/ Instrumental Mix

• Death In Vegas: Lightning Bolt (Live at EartH, 2025)
• Jamie Lidell and Luke Schneider: The Story Of Your Life
• SUSS and Six Missing: Old Mission
• Robin Guthrie: Her Name Is Dulcinea
• Deeply Armed: The Healing (Keith Tenniswood Remix)
• Klangkollektor: Isle Of Stonsy
• Mogwai: God Gets You Back
• Andy Bell: Pinball Wanderer
• Sewell And The Gong: Communion Phase
• Kieran Hebden and William Tyler: Secret City
• Daniel Avery: Neon Pulse
• Moon Dust: The Glow (Slowed + Reverb)

The Death In Vegas track Lightning Bolt dates from 2011 and the Trans- Love Energies album but this version was recorded live when DIV played at EartH in Dalston this year, fragile, drifting ambience.

Jamie Lidell and Luke Schneider released A Companion For Spaces Between Dreams, Luke's pedal steel ambient- Americana crossed with Jamie's modular synths and tapes effects. Psychedelic inner voyage music. 

SUSS are also from the ambient- Americana/ cosmic country scene, a trio from New York. This song with Six Missing's electric guitar came out in November. 

Robin Guthrie occasionally tidies up his unreleased files/ shelves and releases music onto Bandcamp, tracks that didn't make albums released in the past- orphan tracks. Her Name Is Dulcinea is one of those, from 2012, that saw the light of day in November this year. Ambient shoegaze/ dream pop for which the word 'ethereal' seems a cliche but also very apt. 

Belfast's Deeply Armed released a 12" called The Healing in the spring complete with remixes by Death In Vegas, Andrew Innes with Brendan Lynch and lone swordsman Keith Tenniswood. The original is ghostly, shamanic psyche/ kraut. Keith strips it down with a primitive drum machine and heartbeat pulse. Low key beauty. 

Klangkollektor's Balearic/ dub instrumentals have been present in two releases in 2025- Dubtapes Volume 2 and The Stockport Tapes (recorded live at Bruk). Isle Of Stonsey adds pedal steel or Hawaiian guitar to the soundscape, a very chilled out, beatific excursion.

Mogwai's The Bad Fire opened with God Gets You Back, stellar guitar picking and FX that builds, going supernova in the second half when the synths, drums and vocals join in. 

Andy Bell's Pinball Wanderer album came out in February and has been played round here every month since. The title track marries late 60s acid folk guitar and cosmische rhythms with Andy's spacious, warm production. 

Sewell And The Gong's Patron Saint of Elsewhere has been one of my favourite records of 2025 and this track, Communion Phase, is as good as any from it- psychedelic, motorik and folky with an optimistic feel.   

Kieran Hebden and William Tyler's 41 Longfield Street Late 80s splices Kieran's laptop beats and productions with William's acoustic and electric guitars to make one of the most affecting albums of 2025- hypnotic, engaging, with an eye on the past (and on Kieran's Dad's record collection in the late 80s, alt- country and Nashville) but avoiding dewy- eyed nostalgia to create something entirely their own. 

Daniel Avery's Tremor album was a departure from his ambient techno of recent years and a swerve into channeling his early 90s industrial rock influences. He toured the album with a full band, guitarist, bassist and drummer kicking up a right old noise alongside his synths and machines. On the album's opener, Neon Pulse, he lulls us into a sense of ambient security, two minutes of gorgeous floaty sci fi synth ambience.

Moon Dust is yet another Richard Norris project this time with Lol Hammond from The Drum Club. Piano and FX, a slowed down and reverb laden way to drift out of this hour's worth of music. 

41 Longfield Street

Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) and guitarist William Tyler (formerly of Lambchop) released an album a few weeks ago, 41 Longfield Street Late '80s (Hebden's childhood address where part of his musical upbringing was his father's collection of country and folk music). The first track on the album is the dazzling Lyle Lovett cover, If I Had A Boat, an eleven minute long, softly played melding of ambient electronics and finger picked acoustic guitar that starts out with a hum and drone which becomes ambient noise. At exactly the right moment, Tyler's guitar, buried as part of the drone and wash suddenly snaps to the fore and becomes the song. Tyler's guitar playing, delicate and melodic, two parts, a finger picked top note part and a second descending one underneath, carry the song through the next eight minutes, chords and notes that never sit still with some gentle electronics occasionally wafting in and out. 

It's followed by Spider Ballad, the least Tyler sounding track on the album, seven and a half minutes of electronic beauty, everything Kieran Hebden can do so well- a synth part that rises and falls, move around, gradually altered by FX. Underneath the four four drum prods away, a gentle propulsion. 

William Tyler said he was surprised when he heard the album, that what Kieran had done with the guitar parts they recorded together had become something else. There's a guitar in there somewhere but its not the clean finger picking of If I Had A Boat, the late 80s country gone. As the synths gather and the rhythm becomes more insistent there's an emotive ebbing and flowing, melancholy and possibility- its very evocative. 

The album was recorded together and worked on by Hebden for a two year period, Kieran adding and filtering, cutting and pasting with Tyler's very human acoustic guitar subsumed into the electronics. It's a bit disjointed, the remaining five tracks (all on side two on vinyl) taking in a variety of sounds and feels- stretched out bursts of feedback and ghostly chords (I Want An Antennae) and pastoral folk (When It Rains), a wonderfully reflective five minutes of guitar playing, two or three parts combined, that sound like they were recorded in a log cabin while staring into the flames, that dissolves into squally feedback. Timber repeats the trick, electronic flutter and acoustic guitars piling up, a ringing topline taking the lead. Loretta Guides My Hands Through The Radio is two minutes of sound collage that turns into the album's closer, Secret City, a seven minute excursion that marries Kieran's laptop electronics and Tyler's guitar perfectly, a background cloud of FX and synth drones and some guitar parts- a strummed acoustic and an electric lead both equally central to the song, a song that is sweetly euphoric, cathartic even. Magical and uplifting, Nashville and South London, late 80s and 2025. 

Find it at Bandcamp. 

Monday's Long Song

Kieran Hebden (otherwise known as Four Tet) and William Tyler (guitarist in among others Silver Jews and Lambchop as well as a solo artist) may not seem like obvious candidates for a collaborative album but they share a love of folk, various cosmic sounds and it turns out late 80s country. There's an album on the way in September called 41 Longfield Street Late 80s and ahead of it is this eleven minute beauty, If I Had A Boat...

If I Had A Boat sets out with a long gentle drone, which builds and shifts, some feedback and static drifting in, and then two minutes in, the faint sound of finger picking on a guitar- then, suddenly the guitar is at the foreground on its own. The synths and Kieran Hebden production parts drift back in as Tyler picks away, and gradually everything is balanced again. This is only six minutes in, there's still half the track to go and the second half is a delight, constantly evolving and revolving, melodies and synths, drones and squiggles, round and round.

If I Had A Boat is a cover of sorts- a long instrumental re- interpretation might be a better description- of a Lyle Lovett song from his 1988 album Pontiac. Lyle was in the news a lot in the late 80s, his idiosyncratic take on country garnering a lot of praise. He was also for a while in a relationship with Julia Roberts after they met making the 1992 film The Player and married in 1993 (divorcing two years later).