From Academy Award® winning writer/director Chloé Zhao, Hamnet tells the powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet. Featuring powerful performances from Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, the film has already earned widespread acclaim, taking home the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Discussing his work on the Hamnet soundtrack, Richter explained: “In composing the score, I used the basic elements of Elizabethan music—period instrumentation, grammar, and sensibility—but applied them in ways that emerge directly from the story’s psychology. Having read the script before shooting, I sketched ideas reflecting themes of familial love and loss, our place…
Category: ambient
Fears are very individual, and how one person copes with theirs might not make their struggles evident to others. So while Argentinian artist aylu took a generally delicate approach to her latest album, she’s made explicit that it is an exercise in processing with the title Fobia.
aylu – real name Ailin Grad – sets a panicked tone with short, laboured breathing from the opening seconds of Fobia. Depending on your own mental state, this might be the only uncomfortable aspect of the album. But if your brain has ever played a round of pinball with your thoughts, Fobia will resonate in a different way.
Fobia is the sound of nervous energy and someone trying desperately to quell it. Afflicted with claustrophobia and agoraphobia,…
This is Independent Project Records’ own take on digging deep and unearthing revelatory treasures from its 45-year history. A trip through the past, present and future of a label that since 1980 has made the most prominent part of its name, that resounding “Independent”, not a trendy epithet but a mission. This two-album compilation is an invite to join the dots and find out what makes Afterimage – the early ’80s band the Los Angeles Times once called “LA’s own Joy Division” – and Alison Clancy – the artist making ethereal ambient dream pop in the basement of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, where she works as a dancer – kindred spirits. You’re invited to find similarities in the way The Ophelias reclaimed San Francisco’s unfettered psychedelic rock roots…
On his fourth release on Orindal Records, Matt Bachmann’s Compost Karaoke is a representation of “songs of change”, as he explains. It’s a transition from his previous years touring as the bass player for Mega Bog.
“At the heart of this transition was a personal struggle between the ‘clouds’ (art) and the ‘earth’ (the systemic problems of New York/US/world),” he says. “Doing this more earthly work and having less time for the clouds changed my relationship to music. I had been so inside the music world that I had become blind to its generosity – the way it brings us together and allows us to collectively feel, dream, and escape.”
Adding that this new project was an opportunity to work alongside old friends, Bachmann…
Cryo Chamber’s seventh entry in its ongoing Tomb series opens strongly with a pairing of Apocryphos & Pœna Sensus. Their track, ‘The Sigh of Archaic Tragedy’, is weighty and oppressive, built from deep drones, bass-heavy descending chords, and unstructured percussion that evokes places of burial and stillness.
The rest of the album explores similar themes in different ways. The variety on this compilation is remarkable considering that each piece adheres to a common aesthetic framework.
Dødsmaskin’s Messiaskomplekset’ is borderline post-industrial with rattling textures accompanied by haunting melodies and tones. Fractalyst’s ‘Those Who Slither’ is cinematic and varied, with abrupt changes in volume and palette.
Trinity, the third collaborative album between Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello, continues the pair’s patient, pliable musical explorations while marrying them with a unique collaborator — one per track — to map new territories.
Trinity presents five collaborations with acclaimed artists who work at the edges of sound and genre: Chris Abrahams (The Necks), improvising turntablist Marina Rosenfeld, Brendan Canty (Fugazi, The Messthetics), multidisciplinary artist Aki Onda, and the late contemporary artist and lowercase musician Steve Roden. The results deepen the music’s immediacy and directness, while pushing it in directions neither English nor Vitiello could have foreseen.
…In English’s words, “this record’s surprise…
As Farao, Kari Jahnsen has experimented with a range of electronic-acoustic palettes, setting her textured arrangements within indie folk, alt-pop, orchestral rock, glossier electronica settings, and combinations thereof.
With her third album, Magical Thinking, she leans into an R&B-inflected alternative dance sensibility that falls on the sleeker extreme of her output thus far, although it should be noted that both she and producer Ådne Meisfjord (120 Days) are credited with beats, synths, percussion, and, last but not least, zither. So, she hasn’t left her blended, psychedelic-leaning approach behind. It also isn’t entirely club-friendly. The album was recorded between Berlin and Oslo, Jahnsen’s former and re-adopted base, respectively.
The album title is a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which includes the phrase “what steps forth, in holiday clothing, out of the great darkness.” Cellist Clarice Jensen regards the image as a metaphor for the creative process, which often begins in isolation before its public unveiling.
The title track is separated into two parts, a trio of other tracks in-between. One can hear an obvious appreciation for Bach, although the compositional process is vastly different; the cello lines are played, layered and looped to create the illusion of a small ensemble. After a melodic base is established, the counter-melodies begin to develop, growing ever more assured. If a track could be recorded behind closed doors,…
Klein used to work as a “logger” on a reality TV show, where she would record what cast members were doing in excruciating detail for use in B-roll shots. In an interview with Pitchfork, Klein noted how easily TV can be manipulated by people willing to distort the narrative, as when her fellow loggers would exclude activities by certain actors to make them look bad.
Klein is the complete opposite. She puts everything out as it comes, raw and unfiltered. It’s obsessive and mundane in a different way, suffused with meaning even at its most impenetrable. After two albums of searing guitar noise, sleep with a cane feels like a retreat into the shroud of her earlier work. She finds solace, and intrigue, in the billowing folds of ambient…
Doperider, the fourth release from The Utopia Strong, is mainly a record of great and giving calm. The cover’s lettering may suggest Hawkwind at their most planetary, but this record is not a full on, pedal-driven dive into deep space. Rather, Doperider often encourages an investigation of its immediate surroundings, by way of some lysergically-tinged soundtracks.
Opener ‘Prophecy’, maybe the most narrational track on Doperider, is also its lodestar in terms of what to expect. The pleasantly wriggling synth sounds initially suggest we are present at a secretive undertaking in a lab somewhere. The slightly mycological patterns formed by the synths suddenly give way after two minutes to a crunchy beat (one of the few on the record)…
Tangerine Dream are unquestionably one of the most influential electronic groups of all time. Their music has made an immeasurable impact on ambient, new age, techno, trance, and progressive rock, as well as modern film score composition.
On August 1, 1987, Tangerine Dream performed a landmark open-air concert in front of the Reichstag in Berlin, celebrating the city’s 750th anniversary. Held at the Platz der Republik and drawing over 100,000 attendees, the event unfolded near the Berlin Wall – a powerful symbol of Germany’s division at the time. The band’s signature electronic sound, paired with stunning visuals and fireworks, made for an unforgettable experience. It’s even said that the music could be heard across the border in East Berlin.
Designed in 1962 by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the concrete dome in Tripoli, Lebanon was intended to be one of 15 structures that housed a permanent International Fair, expected to welcome over two million annual visitors. By the time civil war broke out in 1975, construction had not yet been completed, leading to the suspension and eventual abandonment of the project. The Dome Sessions, conceived by audiovisual artist Firas El Hallak, is a series of recordings that captures musical performances in the space of Niemeyer’s unfinished concrete dome, and also serves as the soundtrack to an upcoming documentary about the dome’s position in Tripoli’s cultural history. Each piece features a different artist, both solo and ensemble,…
Memories of conflict are very much on the mind of Yara Asmar, who splits her time between Beirut and upstate New York and tries to make sense of it all. Or perhaps there is no making sense, only a box of pieces from many puzzles. “There is no future to yearn for,” Asmar writes. “There is a big, sprawling, horrifying present that eats everything in its path.” Pouring her grief into instrument-making and playing, she creates an elaborate musical tapestry of deconstruction and reconstruction. One of the symphomioms she builds is large enough to sit inside, and she invites listeners to “sit inside the sound” with her.
The white noise and whirring that open the album connote absence, swiftly countered by the sounds of traffic and chimes.
British composer and multi-instrumentalist Roger Eno’s releases his 3rd album for DG Without Wind, Without Air. The project follows on from the success of The Turning Year (2022) and the skies, they shift like chords (2023). The latter was described by Spectrum Culture with the words: “a remarkable release that unsettles with haunting lines and simultaneously makes one tingle with warmth at a display of beauty”.
The new album includes both solo piano pieces and tracks orchestrated for various combinations of clarinet, guitar, bass, strings, synths, percussion and electronics. There are guest vocal appearances from soprano Grace Davidson and Roger’s daughters Cecily and Lotti Eno, with Roger himself singing on The Moon And The Sea.
Night CRIÚ evokes clandestine ceremonies in forest glades, covert rituals taking place in the depths of a cave. Crepuscular and ghostly, this is a realm where an intoned, reverberant voice meshes with ritualistic choirs, undulating brass, methodically bowed strings and unhurried percussion.
Musically, the lineage could be the solo work of Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard or Anna von Hausswolff at her most reductive. If the fifth solo album from the Ireland’s Hilary Woods were employed as the soundtrack to the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová or Werner Herzog’s 1976 Herz aus Glas, it would be a seamless transposition – this music exists beyond place and time.
For Woods, getting to this point has not been linear. From 1999, she was the bassist of…
This third album from the Lebanese duo Snakeskin vibrates with intention from its opening seconds, trembling on the blocks with an eagerness to surge forward. In the opener, “Ready” electronic distortion buzzes around Julia Sabra’s crystalline voice, which undulates, ever so slightly with an Arab tonality; you can discern, but just barely, her Lebanese origins. The piece trembles with anticipation, and swirls up with organ-like overload, a hymn, a prayer, a plea for justice. We Live in Sand took shape in 2024, as Israel’s war on Gaza spread north.
Sabra lived close enough to hear and feel the impact of an August 2020 explosion in the port of Beirut. She and her partner Faddi Tabal have had a close-up view of the destructive currents…
Brooddark (Yaroslav Gavrilyuk) releases his second album on Cryo Chamber this year, following an excellent collaboration with Tsarewitch. On Overvoltage, he employs some of the same sounds – dense drones, roughly-hewn textures, and a wealth of background elements, from sculpted static to broken percussion and rhythmic lines. Chromatic sweeping takes thick chords up or down a few notes in pitch, providing a dramatic feel.
Indeed, these pieces are quintessentially cinematic. Described as “futuristic and industrial” in the liner notes, there is a strong science fiction theme with dark overtones. One can easily envision the spaceships being infiltrated by alien life forms.
After starting off in a more busy and unconventional direction, Brooddark brings…
In the midst of a career writing, creating, and recording music with a wide array of influential popular artists and for television and film, Grammy award-winning Nashville-based producer and musician Emery Dobyns is releasing his debut album, Improvs, on Hammock Music Label.
A series of 16 improvised works, Improvs sees Dobyns step from the fast-paced environment of the studio and into a world of glowing ethereal ambiance, where time slows and rays of hope and poetry illuminate life’s quiet moments and days full of wonder and promise.
…Improvs is Dobyns’ first album, but he’s racked up over two decades on the other side of the mixing desk, producing and engineering for multiple artists from Mary J Blige, through…
Grounded in personal loss and the trauma that accompanies such an experience, sound artist Arvin Dola presents eight mid-length tracks of experimental ambient music. As suggested by the title, the album explores the concept of ghosts – not necessarily in a literal or supernatural sense, but in how both the past and unrealized futures can haunt the present.
These ideas are based on the works of Mark Fisher and Jacques Derrida, and are commonly referred to as “hauntology.” The latter has a rich recent history in the darker side of modern ambient music, with entire albums dedicated to exploring its aesthetics of memory, absence, and grief.
Dola’s take employs a typical set of building blocks – droning synth chords, subtle guitar,…
As well as making atmospheric electronic compositions, the Baghdad-born, Barcelona-based musician Dania also works night shifts as an emergency doctor. These nocturnal hours are the influence behind her new album Listless: all seven tracks were composed and recorded after midnight, while the artwork features the spindly flower of the Japanese snake gourd, a plant that only blooms after dark. But there is little trace of the chaos of her late-night schedule here: instead, the record embodies a quiet calm that is sometimes blissful, sometimes eerie.
Meeting somewhere between trip-hop, shoegaze and ambient, with a touch of pop, the textured tracks slink along dreamily, propelled by washes of synths and, for the first time, drums.
An utterly abysmal set of reverb drenched mediocre songs. Those R.E.M. covers are so catastrophically tone-deaf it’s a wonder Michael…