The AbstrAct Observer
We make music.
We run our own abstract project.
“The Dawn Identity” is out on Bandcamp.
▪ Here is a video for the opening track “e: to stack, to decay“.
▪ Here is a video for the third track “π: to whirl, to pulse“.
We regard music.
We write notes and share voices about independent releases: ambient, instrumental, electronic, contemporary, experimental, minimalist, whatever.
Submit yours here.
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Our first release is out.
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voices #38
◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
here we got:
Modern Silent Cinema
answering some questions. We have already observed his experimental / concrete / electroacoustic work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “Surveillance Film” that we prefer is “Nexus”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Modern Silent Cinema: Surveillance Film is my fifth score for filmmaker Matt Barry, and with each new score I like to try something a bit different from what I did before. In terms of the amount of recorded music, this would be the longest project yet–requiring nearly an hour of music. And so, to counter that scope, I wanted to reduce the compositional palette and work with repeated motifs and sounds as a fun creative challenge.
At the time, I had recently seen Claus Boesser-Ferrari play guitar at Downtown Music Gallery in NYC, I was really struck by his performance, which embraced the totality of the guitar, the wood, the shape, the depth, the strings, every aspect of the instrument had potential for sound and he explored all of it, and for me that inspired a new relationship with the guitar (I’ve been playing for over 30 years). Claus greatly influenced how I approached this score, playing the whole guitar, and not just melodies and chords on the strings. It also inspired me to consider how other objects could be used for sound (I used my water thermos for percussion on several tracks).
So, for “Nexus,” I started with a Philip Glass type of minimalist rondo, which originally appears earlier in the film but played on a thumb piano. I repeat it on multiple instruments throughout the score–but here it is played on a piano (technically on a MIDI synth, since I don’t have access to a real piano at the moment). I also wanted to do more than just repeat the melody, I wanted this to be its own piece, so I used an acoustic guitar to create scrapes, percussive bangs, and other twangs to create a soundscape as a musical counterpoint. Electroacoustic dynamics is an overarching interest for me–that intersection of a real instrument with electronic manipulations, and I try to explore that throughout all the Modern Silent Cinema albums. For “Nexus,” I wanted to contrast the serene piano melody with these more abrasive noise elements. I also wanted to have a contrast between the intentional, structured melody and the improvisation of the guitar sounds.[2. CREATION]
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Observation n.74
Bee Resort
Hivemind
○ Oct 2025 | Label: Independent
■ Genres: Electronic / Ambient
■ Rating: 6.8/10
■ Favorite track: “A Constant Struggle For Air”► The atmosphere is built around a stratified, pulsing synth that glows with steady, hypnotic energy. Each layer expands the harmonic field, creating a sense of gentle propulsion without overwhelming the calm. Beneath this luminous swell, a minimal IDM rhythm flickers with precision — crisp clicks, soft taps, and subtle syncopations that add movement while preserving the track’s spacious serenity.
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Voices #37
◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
here we got:
karsino kuuni
answering some questions. We have already observed his experimental / lo-fi / electronic work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The section from “und die ganze welt sang mit mir…” that we prefer is “und die ganze welt sang mit mir (thank_you)”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► karsino kuuni: I started working on this song in september of 2024, a few months after releasing my first album ‘people should get drunk, even if they are on fire…’. That album was my main musical focus for years, so in retrospect this song feels like a palette cleanser. I started by playing around with a sample of an old italian tv jingle from the 80s, not sure yet what I was going to make with it. After a while I just ended up slowing it down a bunch and looping it and then playing a couple of synth pads on top of it. For a while it stayed this way and went by the working title ‘Certified ambient classic’ (hopefully it will be just that one day in the future). As time went by I added some field recordings I had on my phone from times I’d been on planes and at airports. But it was still missing something.
That missing piece came on the 28th of december 2024 when I listened to the song in my DAW while dozing off and the phrase “nothing/everything in the world sang it with me” popped into my mind. I keep a journal for dreams and phrases heard in hypnagogic states from which I draw a lot of inspiration for my music. From that phrase came the name of the song (and the whole EP) “und die ganze Welt sang mit mir…” (german for ‘the whole world sang with me’). I started writing lyrics for the song which I later sang into audacity, recorded with my laptop microphone only. The concept had formed: climbing up and down the sky between time and space, revisiting your own past.
The EP started forming as I realized this song went together really well with two other ambient pieces I had made earlier but didn’t know what release they might fit on. Together they tell a story of living in the future with a new found confidence and then traveling back to the past, back to your lowest moment and saying one last goodbye to your childhood, then seeing yourself from a distance before returning back home. The EP works as a companion piece to the album released prior. Going over a lot of the same themes and events but rather looking at them retrospectively, instead of expressing something felt in the moment.
One last sample on this song, which I added as I put the EP together to create a transition between this and the next song, was from a noise session with my stylophone gen x-1. In it I had fed the drum track from Sublime’s ‘Santeria’ into the synth and then messed around with the delay. The section I sampled I had actually already used once before on a track called ‘mää lähestyn taivasta’ (Finnish for ‘I’m approaching heaven’). That track was more in the style of vaportrap but thematically centered around flying as well so it only felt fitting to repurpose it here.[2. CREATION]
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Observation n.73
Glinca
Tament
○ Jul 2025 | Label: Fluid Audio
■ Genres: Ambient / Experimental
■ Rating: 7.3/10
■ Favorite track: “Swoq”► At first there’s this abstract loop speaking, both fluid and mysterious. As the loop swells and dissolves, an upright piano enters in fragmented, cascading phrases, each note tumbling softly into the next with blissful abandon. The melodic shards feel spontaneous yet deeply expressive, drifting like memories resurfacing through haze.
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observation n.72
Jēkabs Ošiņš
Live 1409
○ Sep 2025 | Label: Independent
■ Genres: Experimental / Live Improvisation / Electronic / Noise
■ Rating: 6.8/10
■ Favorite track: “part II”► This is immersive, gritty, and boldly exploratory. Metallic scrapes, thuds, and environmental textures collide with oscillating synth tones and bursts of processed signal, creating a dynamic interplay between the physical and the digital. The performance feels alive —unpolished, responsive, alert — capturing the thrill of discovery as each sound provokes the next. This sounds vivid.
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voices #36
◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
here we got:
Ince B
answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / drone work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “altered buoyancy” that we prefer is “baseload drift”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Ince B: Ince B is the name of a defunct and demolished power station which was very near to where I lived as a child. The red aircraft beacons shone across fields and dairy farms to my bedroom. On the other side of the house, there was the huge oil refinery Shell Stanlow that had a heavy and brooding presence, especially when the flare tower lit up the night sky with its burning pulses. Every Saturday morning, they would test the emergency sirens which sent an eerie whine across the fields. As you got closer to the refinery, you could hear its constant drone. I can hear and feel all of this in baseload drift; it is a response to the intensively industrialised landscape of my childhood.
Musically, it started as a simple A Minor chord droned with textures added through my use of these little contact mic instruments that I made myself. I wanted to see how much I could do with just a single chord. Then I started to wonder about layering different textures like waves throughout the track. I was using a lot of looping prior to recording this but, en route to the recording session, the power supply for my looper got damaged, so I ended up working in a different way recording sound-on-sound. For the entire length of the track, I played drones over the top of drones through different effects and with different amounts of distortion, this is what gives the track the feeling of something that pulses and changes throughout even though it is just a single chord.[2. CREATION]
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Observation n.71
Perry Frank
Atlas
○ Jan 2025 | Label: Cyclical Dreams
■ Genres: Drone / Ambient
■ Rating: 8.5/10
■ Favorite track: “Desert Plain”► This is a little, precious gem. There’s this graceful melodic passage built around the 4th, 5th and minor 7th degrees of a major scale, creating a sound that feels both sublimely uplifted and subtly bittersweet. The sustained drones provide a warm, enveloping foundation, allowing the melody to hover above like a slow-moving light. God is in the details.
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voices #35
◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
here we got:
Akira Film Script
answering some questions. We have already observed his drone / ambient work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “Autumn’s Dawn” that we prefer is “Capturing The Flag”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Akira Film Script: The whole album is built from meditations on my youth – before each session, I’d do an extended meditation on some point in my childhood, pre-internet, then upon exiting the meditation, I’d go straight to my machines and document how I felt, in sound. ‘Capturing the Flag’ was created when exiting a meditation focused on the final moments of actually, finally, successfully capturing and delivering the other team’s flag in an intense game of Capture the Flag, ultimately winning the game. When I was a kid, before the area I live in today had become so built up, there was this incredibly large field, with a large ditch running through it (in hindsight, it may have been a water way for when the rains came through, letting excess runoff out to the bay). The ditch became our midline, and we’d establish our forts on either side of it, then raise our flags. It was a winding ditch, so there were plenty of areas to pass though it and emerge on the other side without being caught – if you were lucky; there wasn’t much coverage up top of the ditch on either side, save a few bushes and overgrown fox tails. If you were lucky enough to make it to the opposing team’s fort, unseen, then the real fear set in – now you had to successfully get back to your fort. This was a nerve wracking experience, filled with anxiety, fear, dread, heightened senses – true fear. But if, and when, you saw you were in the home stretch, guaranteed to win, all the dread washed away for instant euphoria – YOU DID IT! YOU MADE IT! That was the moment that I set out to capture in ‘Capturing the Flag’ – the glory of a successful round, the washing away of the fears, the true elation of victory, and not in hindsight, but in, and of, the moment itself. Harps have always felt heavenly to me, and I love a rising portamento synth or string and how it can lift a movement in a song, so the combination of both were my target for capturing that feeling, that moment, of capturing the flag. Add to it, somehow drone-based ambience has always felt like a moment in suspension to me, so while I could have composed an uplifted, rising musical movement in hopeful keys and progressions, it suited the capturing of the moment – the polaroid nature of it all – to make a drone around these uplifting inputs.
[2. CREATION]
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Observation n.70
RAUSTE
Never started never ended
○ Oct 2025 | Label: Independent
■ Genres: Drone / Ambient / Experimental
■ Rating: 7.5/10
■ Favorite track: “5 steps”► That feels simultaneously familiar and dreamlike: calm and mystery coexist. The natural field recordings ground the piece in organic matter, while the reversed tones and airy chimes blur time and direction. The piano, sparse and emotive, acts as the emotional core, offering fragile moments of clarity amid the ethereal swirl. That’s where real and surreal meet.
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Observation n.69
H-M O
Misty Lake
○ Oct 2025 | Label: Ingrown Records
■ Genres: Drone / Ambient / New Age
■ Rating: 7.0/10
■ Favorite track: “Misty Lake”► Breathing in intense cycles of expansion and release is not easy as it seems. Deep, sustained tones form vast sonic spaces, while subtle new age elements add gentle movement. The interplay generates a meditative tension, evoking both earth and air, presence and transcendence. It’s a soothing yet quietly dynamic soundscape.