■ The A. O.: Can you tell us how the the track “Nova Mistero” came to light?
► virabelo: Nova Mistero (which is Esperanto for ‘New Mystery’) happens to be the sister track of Monolito (‘Monolith’). The two tracks share the same synthesis approach while also being the same total track length, which wasn’t hard to end up that way as they both share the same 60 bpm tempo. While Monolito is much darker in mood, I found that Nova Mistero has a much more lighter and open feel. Originally, the album was going to be called Monolito, with the album’s title track being the final track on the album. After later composing and naming the Nova Mistero track, I found that the track title sounded much nicer for the album name, and also felt the overall vibe of it was perfect to begin the album while the sister track, Monolito, closes the album.
► This evolves in broad, patient movements, with layers of electric guitars drifting like slow, rolling waves. Each line melts into the next, forming a dense yet fluid sound mass that feels both expansive and intimate. Sighs of light tension, sustained tones and gentle feedback create a sense of endless motion, as if the music were breathing at its own pace. There’s a quiet emotional pull in the repetition, a feeling of calm tinged with longing. The track resists dramatic shifts, instead embracing gradual transformation.
► This ambient / post-rock track builds a vast, immersive atmosphere. That’s done by layering shimmering electric guitars over slow, pulsing bass lines, all carried by a hypnotic three-note synth arpeggio. The arpeggio acts as a steady current, allowing the guitars to swell, recede, and intertwine like waves of sound. Patient and expansive, the track unfolds with cinematic grace, offering a powerful blend of repetition and evolution that invites deep, focused listening.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Cartography of Sleep” that we prefer is “Catastrophic”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Droning Cats with NRV: Catastrophic emerged the way much of this album did: in an unplanned moment where intuition quietly leads the way. During one of our sessions in Brussels, a cluster of bird-like modular tones appeared almost out of nowhere, hovering over a deep, grounding drone. It felt like stepping into a dreamscape — familiar yet shifting. Christophe’s guitar responded instinctively, tracing a melodic path through this fragile sonic terrain. As with the entire album, the recording was then sent across the world to NRV in Japan, who expanded the space with his subtle atmospheric signature—pads, reverbs, a softened horizon that allowed the track to breathe and unfold. It’s worth noting that Cartography of Sleep was created entirely at a distance. Although Droning Cats and NRV have never met in person, the collaboration formed a kind of long-distance resonance: Brussels and Japan connected through sound, intuition and shared sensibility. The title Catastrophic was given by Christophe’s ten-year-old son—a spontaneous suggestion that captured both innocence and emotional scale. We kept it immediately.
► This ambient electronic track unfolds around a dreamy atmospheric loop. The sound design feels light and immersive, as if floating through a half-remembered landscape. Nothing rushes: each element breathes and dissolves naturally. It’s an introspective, soothing piece that rewards attentive listening while remaining inviting as a background companion. A delicate, serene composition where repetition becomes hypnotic and atmosphere takes center stage.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Dwam” that we prefer is “Inbound”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Tó Anjo: This is the track that really got the album process going for me, and since its inception it felt like an opener. There’s the sound of a train arriving at a station and people stepping out on the platform which kind of divides the track in its two sections and this, along with the title of the song, really ties everything into the theme of arriving somewhere and starting something new. Most of the tracks came after this idea and as a continuation of this sound.
► This is immersive and solemn, balancing reverence and unease. A slow bass pulse that feels both sublime and tense grounds the piece in a ritualistic sense of anticipation, while a whispered voice with a sacral tone weaves through the texture like an invocation. Notes from strings rise and fade in restrained gestures, intertwining with fractured electronic fragments that shimmer and decay at the edges. That’s such a powerful and deeply absorbing work in its slow, deliberate intensity.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Atlas” that we prefer is “Desert Plain”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Perry Frank: Desert Plain was written and recorded during an evening session together with Leave No Shadows On The Ground. They were basically written with guitar, while making experiments with reverb and delay pedals on my pedalboard after watching a documentary about the Amazon deforestation. Main drones features a combination of the Strymon Cloudburst and the Hologram Electronics then I’ve added a bass line with the Volcakeys. Basically there are only three or four tracks in this song. I usually record my songs on tape cassettes with my Fostex X18 multitrack, often when they feature not so much tracks, then I record the tape on my Mac. Titles came to me while thinking about a future when all the trees have been cut down, all around there will be only desert with no shadows on the ground.
During this first year of activity we’ve sifted through countless independent releases, following faint signals rather than hype. These 10 tracks stood out not for volume, but for intent. They move between ambient drift, instrumental focus, electronic tension, contemporary composition and experimental minimalism, often blurring those lines entirely. What connects them is a shared patience: sounds are allowed to breathe, structures either unfold or fall slowly, ideas trust the listener. Together, they form a small map of the year’s most compelling independent music — works that reward attention and linger well after the final note fades.
Here is a mix set of all tracks (click on each track link for more info) ▼
► Here’s a vessel for elevation and release. Sustained tones drift freely, unmoored from rhythm or structure, giving the listener a sensation of endless suspension. The sound is airy and expansive, yet this very openness carries a subtle anxiety — there’s no clear anchor, no ground to return to. That’s both soothing and unsettling, capturing the paradox of freedom without support. Yet we surrender to weightlessness.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Never started never ended” that we prefer is “5 steps”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► RAUSTE: I needed to close my EP, and I wanted to end it with a positive note especially because the rest of the EP is quite dark in the way it was conceived. I needed some hope. I remembered an old video I took of my son, who was 4 years old at the time, playing the piano for the very first time: 5 notes, 5 movements, 5 steps to a new world. (Fun fact: today, years later, that world completely belongs to him.) The melody was already there; I just needed to shape it the way I liked by creating different samples, working on pitch, reverse effects, and so on. The final touch, the element that gives the sequence its unity, is the sampled birds and wind chimes. For this, I have to thank the artist Lonetapes, who kindly shared these sounds with the whole community.
► Well, you’d better take 5 minutes of your time for this track. Guitar lines slowly evolve within a sea of spacious, enveloping layers of atmosphere. Sun is quietly rising all around. The progression is patient and immersive, inviting the listener to sink fully into the sound. Each swell adds depth and scale, transforming simple phrases into something vast and cinematic. Resistance is futile.
■ The A. O.: Can you tell us how the track “Misty Lake” came to light?
► H-M O: I live in northern Finland and spend a lot of time in nature – one beautiful morning in August I woke up in the wee hours to a sudden urge to go outside and enjoy the first rays of the sun. As I stepped outside, I was enticed by this sweet mist to a nearby lake. And there I could do nothing but stare at the water, breathe in the balmy air and record the soundscape all around me. So, the whole track is built on and around one single field recording from that morning. All I tried to do was to capture the feeling of staring at the lake at sunrise, by emphasizing the natural soundscape with soft and smooth and meditative electronic elements. My aim was to keep it calming yet quietly suspenseful, as that morning, or the whole natural world actually, felt and often feels to me. It was an almost transcendental experience, as if a whole huge lake was evaporating into thin air…and condensing back into a single drop on a blade of grass.I also took many black and white photos on my film camera of that lake on that very morning, which then ended up forming the cover art for Misty Lake as well as the music video (for which the link is this: ▼)
► This unfolds like a dream in slow motion, guided by an uplifting piano that glows at the center of the soundscape. Each piano note lingers, suspended in a haze of soft pads and shimmering textures that stretch time into something weightless. The harmonies rise gently, creating a sense of quiet optimism and emotional warmth, while the electronic layers drift like distant light. The pacing is unhurried, allowing every sound to bloom fully before dissolving into the next.
■ The A. O.: The track from “On the Grounds of Indecency” that we prefer is “This river”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Swoop and Cross: There is this quote in Ishiguro’s Never let me go: “I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart.” The track is largely inspired in this idea of trying to hold on to each other in a turbulent world, hence the feathering in and out of sounds that try to overtake the looping motif that extends throughout the piece and that symbolises the attempt for stability, which keeps being disrupted by the flow in “this river”. From the starting idea, the track was then just a technical exercise of musical composition and layering. Like most pieces, it wrote itself.
► 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.
► 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.
■ 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.
► 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.
■ 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.
► 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.
■ 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.
■ The A. O.: The track from “uoying” that we prefer is “horrow (feat. Canaan Balsam)”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Euan Dalgarno: Canaan Balsam and I first connected while we were both putting out music on Modern Obscure Music. Since we’re both based in Edinburgh, it was only natural that we started exchanging ideas, tracks, stems—and the occasional beer. When this track called for a bit more grit, I gave Canaan a shout and he sent over a few pad layers, some of which had been run through a RAT distortion pedal, giving the track just the edge it was missing.
► Yeah, this is clearly a river. Trembling strings provide a mournful, cinematic backdrop, while spoken-word fragments drift in and out like a memory echo, half-heard and deeply human. Each piano note adds both fragile purity and dissonance to the hazy atmosphere. The combination of these elements somehow generates a real masterpiece. Poetry needs to be unclear.
► That’s a deliberate march to an unknown horizon. Each step feels purposeful yet uncertain, carried by subtle pulses that suggest both movement and hesitation. The soundscape is wide and enveloping — textures drift and intertwine like shifting clouds, creating a sense of vastness tinged with melancholy. Time is slow, but it cannot be stopped.
► This feels ineludible — like a presence that’s always been there, firmly waiting to be heard. Despite its minimalism, the track holds a magnetic pull, drawing the listener deeper into its luminous stillness. It’s a study in slow revelation, where time stretches and sound becomes pure atmosphere — both haunting and comforting, endlessly fascinating in its quiet, unstoppable ascent from silence.
■ The A. O.: The track from “After the Slow Fade” that we prefer is “Footprints”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Craig Aalders: Footprints came to light in a moment of inspiration based around a particular sound combonation of electric guitar, modulation pedal, and tape delay. Compositionally it began with the opening trem melody that starts the track and continues throughout.
► We are wrapped in a gentle harp arpeggio flowing over a warm, uplifting drone loop. The harp’s delicate plucks shimmer like ripples on water, while the drone anchors everything in a soft, embracing bliss. Still, there is this feeling of interrupted flight, as if we were suspended between sky and ground, between the desire to rise and the fear of falling. Isn’t that what always happens to us?
► In our humble opionion, that’s simply one of the tracks of the year. The gentle interplay between piano and xylophone establishes an atmosphere of innocence and calm, before slowly dissolving into darker textures. As layers of synths and distant echoes emerge, the instruments seem to fade, pulled gradually into a vortex of abandonment. The descent is mesmerizing — graceful yet unsettling — capturing the beauty of letting go.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Changes” that we prefer is “RainSong”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► David Aimone: Well, about half way through making these tracks I realized there was a theme that was loosely about seasons. I love a nice rain storm, just like waves at the ocean, and can zone out on these sounds. I decided to create an atmospheric piece, fairly straightforward, to end “Changes”. I used two guitar like arpeggios, left and right, to emulate the steady rain through phases of harmonic changes. I backed this up with actual rain sounds, and some contained but expressive musical motifs in the background. I ended up using environmental sounds in most of the songs on the album, not always depicting specific seasons or weather events, but also atmospheric sounds to place the music into a place and time. Meadow sounds, distant church bells, thunderous synth recreations, and so on.
“Each song is thoughtfully made for a variable in Euler’s Identity and feels like its own carved out imaginary space. Notes trickle and dance through time to create moments that straddle the line between chaos and order, never quite settling in, always fluid in their direction and motion. The mood is peaceful and consciousness sparked into a wakeful state to appreciate the cloudy soundscapes with transient sounds of, at times, sharp contrast and fizzing, and at times, tranquil winds blowing. The album culminates in slow brain rattling pulsations”.
■ The A. O.: The track from “A Marble Sentiment” that we prefer is “this cloud won’t rain on me (thankful)”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► cinchel: I had to go back to the ableton session to figure out what parts made up this track. It looks like I had this nice slow, almost organ like chord progression on the guitar that I looped. I do remember thinking that I really wanted to make more pieces that are not mostly guitar. So I listened to this chord progression and tried to find some chirpy and rhythmic settings on the Moog matriarch. From there I still felt it was a bit to dark so I moved over to the Rhodes piano and banged out some ghostly higher register intervals. I took some of the Moog improvisations that I liked and slowed them down by dumping them out to reel-to-reel and playing it back at half speed. I love the kinda warm bass tones that come from slowed down tape. The organ like sound from the guitar really guided me through the mixing of this piece, I like the cathedral like reverb and the resolution in the chord progression that had a feeling of a church choir.
■ The A. O.: The track from “station” that we prefer is “they all agreed, it was harmonic evidence”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Paul Beaudoin: For the past year, I’ve traced how sound holds memory—personal, cultural, and inherited—and how those memories can be altered, overwritten, or erased. While I work across media—painting, text, and video—sound feels uniquely attuned to the workings of memory. Most of us experience sound in sequence, gathering what comes forward while continually referring. Retrospectively. It’s a remarkable human act. My earliest sonic memory is the piano. My mother aspired to be a cocktail lounge pianist in the 1950s and 60s. After school, she’d gather us to sing while playing a familiar rotation of classical and popular music. That daily, participatory listening shaped how I understand music. The piano was the first instrument I “learned”—not through formal lessons but through experimentation. I still remember plucking a string too hard and snapping it in half. That accident stayed with me, not only because of the sound, but also because it sparked my impulse to explore the instrument physically, conceptually, and emotionally. station is a collection centered on memory and trace. Each track is a “station”—a place or time where something sonically residual remains. they all agreed, it was harmonic evidence draws from childhood music and my earliest encounters with music theory around age 15. That’s when I began composing seriously, fully immersed in theory—an obsession that lasted through my PhD dissertation on a Beethoven cello sonata. (So yes, I suppose you could say I’m legally obligated to find harmony wherever I go.) My music isn’t linear; it rejects the formal narratives many listeners expect. This shift toward non-narrative listening came from conversations with John Cage. He taught me to hear sound not as a path but as an environment—something we enter, inhabit, and exit without hierarchy. I was especially drawn to his idea that each sound is a living object, a notion he borrowed from painter Lyonel Feininger, who believed every line or form had an independent life. That idea stayed with me. It changed how I hear, compose, and remember. The phrase harmonic evidence holds several meanings. It nods to early theory lessons—the desire to name, analyze, and prove—but also points to sound itself as a form of evidence: a rarely accepted proof, yet deeply tied to memory. The track layers these tensions—between analysis and emotion, structured harmony and personal trace. I think of it as a sonic self-portrait: part archive, part analysis.
► This is a weightless dream. We move seamlessly between the tonic and subdominant major chords in a vast atmosphere, that feels both intimate and infinite. Each moment dissolves delicately into the next, reminding us that beauty still exists and asks no questions.
■ Genres: Ambient / Electronic / New Age ■ Rating: 7.0/10 ■ Favorite track: “RainSong“
► We feel like we are listening to an acoustic reproduction of Penelope’s canvas. The fascinating choice of harmony is woven together and moves back and forth like a single wave, which arises and dissolves in itself with geometric rigor.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Limbic Atlas” that we prefer is “Lirae”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Eir Drift: This is the first piece I made for the Limbic Atlas album. Lirae was ultimately born spontaneously even though it was the result of a long reflection on how to approach ambient composition. My goal was to merge the illustrative music I’ve been working on for years with a minimalist ambient format built around slow progression. Cinematic composition, for me, is about crafting a build-up that tells a story — with a beginning, a sense of tension, and a resolution. The idea was to experiment with that kind of narrative structure in a very slow ambient appropriate progression. I started with a suite of 4 piano chords that I wanted to be both tense and ethereal; I then transcribed, looped and slowed everything down in a sequencer… I had this ambient bass sonic base with a gradual build that you could get lost in and dream within. From there, I added textured layers and smooth one note drone to emphasize the transitions and builds. In the end, “Lirae” runs 16 minutes and holds a surprisingly introspective, experimental dimension that I hadn’t entirely anticipated.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Seven types of silences” that we prefer is “VII”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Marko Josipović: That track came to be similarly like all the other ones of the album. I found a motif or a melody on the guitar, then I would sit with it for some time, and the composition/arrangement would very naturally reveal itself through that. I often work very sporadically and like to jump from idea to idea, but this album unfolded quite linearly, so the piece had a “definitive” feel whilst making it. I remember I wanted it to feel like a forceful emergence from the sea, violent, but also purified at the same time, leaving just enough space for the things to come. That tension between violent transformation and a kind of subtle holiness is what I intended to run through the whole album. The imagery of water and sea also played a big role in how I shaped the sound of this album in general.
■ Genres: Ambient / Drone / Noise ■ Rating: 7.5/10 ■ Favorite track: “they all agreed, it was harmonic evidence“
► Distant noises flow like wind through empty corridors. Amid this abstract backdrop, the piano emerges—fragile, slow, and emotionally resonant—carrying a sense of longing and memory. Everything evokes a dreamlike tension, as if recalling something lost in time.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Blue Radiance” that we prefer is “A Vast Profound”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Natas Kunas: Good pick! It was actually the very first track made for the album. I had just quit my day job and arrived at a month-long residency in rural Estonia. Filled to the brim with emotions I started playing and condensed that fleeting moment into “A Vast Profound”. Nearly all of it was done on a portable modular synthesizer, using four voices (parts), with great focus on tonal quality and additional layering of the same, but differently processed/altered tracks. During that month in Estonia I did almost the entirety of the album.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Materia Vibrante” that we prefer is “Mundus Imaginalis”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Susana López: Both Materia Vibrante (the album) and Mundus Imaginalis are products of a very particular period in my life, a period marked by an existential crisis. It’s almost as if all the tracks could be combined into a single piece, sharing a common emotional core, instrumentation, and mental state. Mundus Imaginalis is inspired by that intermediate dimension that connects the intelligible with the sensible: the imaginary world, where vision and vibration merge, according to Henry Corbin and Ibn Arabi. The most notable feature of this track is that it is made almost entirely with my “sonic triangle”, a sound object that I built several years ago. It is the physical element that initiates the vibration.
► This track unfolds like a slow sunrise. The harmonic path is built around resonant chords that radiate introspection and depth. The pacing is deliberate, allowing every passage to breathe fully, evoking feelings of calm, quiet wonder. A precious listening.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Nocturnal Reverie” that we prefer is “Sewer Sea”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Risbo Tazeg: I wanted to create an album that could be a film soundtrack but without being connected to an actual film. I wanted it to be really evocative, to have strong – but abstract – narrative components. Sewer sea in particular involves improvisation sessions. I started with one layer of synth, and made a 10 minutes long drone-like track. I had no plan in mind, just wanted to play. I then added a 10 minutes layer of cello on top of this drone. Listened to the whole and got rid of some parts of the cello. I did the same with another synth, listened, carved. I repeated the whole process several times with several synths, with the cello and another string instrument. There has been quite a lot of editing and I don’t think there is anything left from the first 2 layers but somehow the structure that emerges organically from the first few improvised sessions is still there. The rest of the album has been planned a bit more in advance, but for Sewer Sea I would just play, observe the outcome, edit, repeat. Layering and carving.
► These sounds show a very peculiar tension. Layers of deep, resonant and/or dissonant tones draw a haunting soundscape that feels both unsettling and strangely inviting. Fractured textures ripple across the surface like distant storms, keeping the listener locked in a mesmerizing cage.
■ The A. O.: The track from “d | d | d” that we prefer is “distanz”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►lebenerde: I was preparing for an upcoming music theory exam and had to learn chord names lol. I used an old Yamaha keyboard to play along with the example chords and then I had these two chords that I really liked. Somehow I forgot the exam and just ended up in Ableton, throwing the Yamaha sounds in a granulator and then started just adding effects to find timbres and textures I like. I wanted to have this degradation of sound quality over time and really did not want to hurry with it and just let it take its time. That’s true for all three songs on this EP actually. I never made tracks this long before. I think it’s because I thought that nobody would listen to something this long but I figured that’s stupid. The duration allows you to just be in it.
► Drifting can be sweet at times, just as shipwrecking can be saving. This track feels like drowning in amniotic fluid. Remember when you were floating there? Likewise, at least for a moment, memory forgets itself here, and if there is nothing to remind there is nothing to suffer from.
■ The A. O.: The track from “The Bee Resort” that we prefer is “A Mind Consumed By Meaningless Data”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Bee Resort: This song was born during a time when I felt quite overwhelmed by work, and at the end of each day my brain would feel drained. One night I sat in my little synth corner and just let everything out, and that’s how that song came into this world, I believe it was created in a single, refreshing session. The title if I remember correctly comes from something a music critic said about Thom Yorke’s style of writing lyrics; that sentence came to my mind while working on this song and it just seemed perfect to describe how I was feeling.
■ Genres: Ambient / Drone / Atmospheric ■ Rating: 7.0/10 ■ Favorite track: “this cloud won’t rain on me (thankful)“
► It’s always time to stop and breathe to find yourself again. Here there ‘s an opportunity. Gentle, evolving layers of tone create a sense of calm, while subtle electric pulses add depth and movement without disrupting the tranquility. The track strikes a delicate balance between stillness and motion in a sonic world of quiet beauty.
► Here there’s little to say: if you like ambient and/or electronic, allow yourself to listen to this. There are no falls, there are no negligible moments. This album can easily be considered an instant-classic of the genre. The experience is completely immersive and beneficial, we are facing 50 minutes and more of pure bliss. Simply one of the best works of the year so far.
► With your eyes closed, please. Everything here flows into a powerful crescendo that feels both cinematic and deeply personal. As the track rises, it evokes a profound sense of hope, clarity, and renewal. All is full of grace.
■ The A. O.: The track from “A Possible Wind” that we prefer is “Atmospheric Drag”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Alan Graves: For more than a decade now I’ve been taking a field recorder with me everywhere that I travel and recording the sounds of the atmospheres that I find myself in. I had been going back through my archive and pulling recordings of wind from different environments to use as the foundation for this record. For the track ‘Atmospheric Drag’ I used a field recording I had taken of the wind while hiking through a bamboo forest in Hawaii. I started the track by running that field recording through a series of hardware filters and effects and turning it into the basis of what I would build the track on top of. I created patches and performed synthesizer improvisations to those field recordings in layers. It was actually the first piece that I made for the entire record, and it helped inform where the rest of the project would end up.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Mana” that we prefer is “Kella”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Asha Patera: The album is a collection of tracks inspired by my surroundings. ‘Kella’ is the name of an area about four miles from where I live – it is so small as not to even be a village, just a few houses in the winding countryside lanes, but the name is evocative of dreamy summer afternoons, idling away time, and I tried to capture that in the music.
► Oh, we simply love this kind of jagged electronic music. Abrasive textures and stuttering pulsations buzz and convulse like exposed wires, while sudden drops and bursts of distortion keep the listener on edge. Still nothing is chaotic, everything seems skillfully carved.
■ The A. O.: The track from “painting the sky” that we prefer is “a bridge above, a river below”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► ellipses: “a bridge above…” came to me while on one of my daily walks. there is a great walking bridge near me with a small park at the end of it. While standing on the bridge overlooking the park, i heard some great bird sounds, wind through the trees, and the sound of water below me. I quickly pulled out my phone to start recording the sounds i was hearing. I had started getting into field recordings before this, having quite a few sitting on my phone for a while. Once i started working on this track, I realized i was really into field recordings and it drove me to buy an actual field recorder. This track and one other (a far pavillion, which was the first track i recorded for the album) are the only once to include the original phone recordings i had done, as a reminder of where i started in my journey.
answering some questions. We have already observed his field recordings / drone / dark ambient / ambient work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “The Drowning of Guanacaste” that we prefer is “The Blood Spilt From the Lizard Will Return To Wash Over Us All”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Sunrise 2×4: Sure, this track was mostly made up of aggravated acoustic guitar samples, recorded onto a microcassette and fed through various effect pedals. The guitar for this specific track was a fuller recording I had earlier from Jarret Luttrull who did the original sample of my older tapeloop song “music for your dying plants ii” The electrical hums are inspired by the constant rain and lightning storms that we worked under, and every day they seemed to show up out of nowhere and drown out everything around us. I remember walking a mile on the beach back to my room from the bar, which would have been blissfully picturesque but in the distance I could see a lightning storm move closer and closer to the direction I was heading. So even at moments of complete peace, being alone on the beach there was always a looming threat of electrical storms. At one point a lightning strike took out all the cameras and electronics in one of the rooms we had set up and fried tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. The title of the track came from an unfortunate event with the passing of one of the older lizards that lived on the property. He had always sunbathed in the same spot near the restaraunt we all ate at, and he passed during our residency there. It’s hard to believe it wasn’t collectively our fault for being there.
► We’re in a swamp, darling. We ended up in “Apocalypse now”. The prevailing feeling in listening is: imminent danger. This is accentuated by an extremely wise use of space: the sounds are not only around us, but – literally – rain down on us from all directions.
answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electronic / dark ambient / experimental work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “Anachoreisis” that we prefer is “Flooding”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Auditor: My functional memory was hijacked many years ago. I imagine I was probably teaching myself to play a Gymnopedie or Gnossienne and listening to them on repeat. I have a sampler, an SP-404. I likely fed it things that were then abstractly regurgitated and reassembled by hand and heart.
