○ Jun 2025 | Label: Independent
■ Genres: Drone / Ambient / Experimental
■ Rating: 7.3/10
■ Favorite track: “Owls Cry where Harpies Lie“
► 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.
[1. IDEA]
■ 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.
[2. CREATION]
(more…)○ Aug 2025 | Label: Independent
■ Genres: Ambient / Electronic
■ Rating: 7.5/10
■ Favorite track: “Lirae“
► 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.
[1. IDEA]
■ 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.
[2. CREATION]
(more…)○ Jul 2025 | Label: Ingrown Records
■ 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.
○ Jun 2025 | Label: Independent
■ Genres: Ambient / Electronic / Electroacoustic
■ Rating: 8.7/10
■ Favorite track: “VII“
► 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.
○ May 2025 | Independent
■ Genres: Ambient / Drone / Noise
■ Rating: 7.5/10
■ Favorite track: “A Vast Profound“
► 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.
[1. IDEA]
■ 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.
[2. CREATION]
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[1. IDEA]
■ 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.
[2. CREATION]
(more…)○ May 2025 | Independent
■ Genres: Ambient / Electronic / Noise / Drone
■ Rating: 8.3/10
■ Favorite track: “distanz“
► 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.
[1. IDEA]
■ 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.
[2. CREATION]
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[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.
[2. CREATION]
(more…)○ May 2025 | Label: Audio. Visuals. Atmosphere.
■ Genres: Experimental, Drone, Noise, Ambient
■ Rating: 7.9/10
■ Favorite track: “Momentum (Inner Cycles)“
► 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.
[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.
[2. CREATION]
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[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “A Crooked Stick” that we prefer is “Ceterus Paribus“. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► House Of Quiet: That particular track was born out of a feeling to add gradually to a simple framework without overwhelming elements. A single looped chord fed by prepared guitar, radio static, staggered delays and predominantly clean work.
[2. CREATION]
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[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “gateway” that we prefer is “how to get away“. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Passage: “How to get away” is the only song on the album that was recorded in separate sections. The first of the two sections has the only original sound on the album that doesn’t come from a guitar or a synthesizer, instead, what you’re hearing is a music box being played very slowly through a pedalboard. In an earlier version of the track, there was a short acoustic song during the intro, and the track was called “waves” in reference to one of the lyrics. Like the rest of the tracks, I came up with the final title while uploading the album to bandcamp. The title “how to get away” represents, at least for me, the existential dread of living under the American regime.
[2. CREATION]
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[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “shift #2” that we prefer is “shift #2.2“. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► rsn | N: “shift #2” is a collaboration album with the ambient/drone guitarist N. I worked with him a lot with my band [ B O L T ]. We met for a session together in our studio and started developing ideas without any pre-planning. It soon became clear that we wanted to work with just a semitone shift to create different atmospheres. This resulted in 5 songs, 3 of which ended up on “shift #1” and 2 on “shift #2”.
[2. CREATION]
(more…)○ To be released June 2025 | Label: Elevator Bath
■ Genres: Ambient, Drone, Experimental
■ Rating: 7.8/10
■ Favorite track: “Mundus Imaginalis“
► The synths pass through us, the harmony is fluid, amniotic. But everything is filtered through an opaque lens, which gives the sound a trembling subsoil, as if you were waiting for a restless time. As if you don’t want to leave the present.
○ May 2025 | Label: Dragon Trax
■ Genres: Electronic, Drone, Ambient
■ Rating: 7.5/10
■ Favorite track: “Xylophonics V (Asha Patera Remix)“
► This is a powerful and relentless march, punctuated by a syncopated bass that dictates its tempo. Although the drone is totally immersive, the horizontal space of the sound spectrum is intelligently preserved by percussive elements and digital cascades, panned all around our head. It’s time to travel again.
○ April 2025 | Label: Bathysphere Records
■ Genres: Ambient, Electronic
■ Rating: 8.3/10
■ Favorite track: “Atmospheric Drag“
► This music moves like a wave. When you sail, circumstances can change rapidly, and the short synth phrases that pop up cyclically are there to remind that. This uncertainty is emotionally precious: the result reveals a dreamy expectation, and it’s up to you to define its color.
○ March 2025 | Independent
■ Genres: Ambient, Soundscapes
■ Rating: 8.4/10
■ Favorite track: “A Cetacean Thought“
► Some Floydian vibes here, and that might be enough. But there’s more. This is a paradigmatic example of “functional” use of natural acoustic elements that really gives strength to music. Something, to be clear, that goes beyond the simple “Oh, that’s nature ambient, let’s put some more birds here”. The result is blissful.
○ March 2025 | Independent
■ Genres: Drone, Ambient, Dark Ambient, Noise
■ Rating: 7.1/10
■ Favorite track: “shift #2.2“
► We face a long journey through sonic paths. As the piece develops, subtle shifts in tone color bring in moments of either fragmentation or expansion, encouraging deep listening, reflection and a sense of timelessness.
○ March 2025 | Independent
■ Genres: Drone, Ambient, Dark Ambient, Experimental
■ Rating: 6.6/10
■ Favorite track: “how to get away“
► We are alone in the middle of the storm. Resistance is useless, surrender is sweet. So let us fall to infinity, disperse without guilt or hope, into oblivion.
○ December 2024 | Independent
■ Genres: Ambient Piano, Minimalism, Contemporary Classical
■ Rating: 8.2/10
■ Favorite track: “Rippen 115892“
► When it comes to minimalism, it’s easy to talk past. “Even I could have done that!”, people always say. So try, if you can. Try to create something so liberating, so saving, so pure.
○ February 2025 | Label: SeeHear Recordings
■ Genres: Drone, Ambient, Electronic
■ Rating: 6.4/10
■ Favorite track: “Reynisdrangar“
► It’s cold out there. The wind blows hard. No time to figure out how to protect yourself. No way to find a direction in this desert of ice. Only regret for being there, trapped in boundless spaces, alone in the unspeakable white.
○ March 2025 | Label: See Blue Audio
■ Genres: Ambient, Electronic, Drone, Atmospheric
■ Rating: 7.0/10
■ Favorite track: “Voyage Beyond“
► This synth, in all its purity, envelops us and leads us on the journey. The evocation of interstellar space appears natural. The opening major7 arpeggio has the color of discovery; the rest of the harmony reflects the fear of revelations, along with their necessity.
○ December 2024 | Independent
■ Genres: Ambient, Experimental, Soundscapes
■ Rating: 8.4/10
■ Favorite track: “Symphonic Descent into the Beast’s Lair“
► This work, in all its nuances, is truly remarkable. The natural sounds, often trivialized in this genre and its derivations, are concretely functional to the development of the soundscape this time. Despite the sound complexity, the production of the album is perfectly blended.
○ December 2024 | Independent
■ Genres: Field Recordings, Drone, Dark Ambient, Ambient
■ Rating: 7.9/10
■ Favorite track: “The Blood Spilt From the Lizard Will Return to Wash Over us All“
►Although the music advances with the patience a windless wave, the main feeling is restlessness. The circular anxiety is exacerbated by guitar interventions, inserted with ingenious incoherence in the sound picture. The choice of instrumental timbres is clever and seductive.
○ December 2024 | Independent
■ Genres: Drone, Ambient, Electronic, Post-Rock
■ Rating: 7.3/10
■ Favorite track: “Kella“
►There is something liberating and threatening at the same time. The bass is like a snake crawling at your feet, but the cascades of high-frequency drones make you look up, searching for shooting stars to ask for hope. You’d better act.
○ February 2025 | Independent
■ Genres: Ambient, Electronic, Drone
■ Rating: 6.2/10
■ Favorite track: “a bridge above, a river below”
► There is a warm drone, and we all know what is going to happen. It will probably last forever. But not here: there is a sudden harmonic modulation, two steps above keeping the major key, and after that another minor, ascending climb to the summit. It’s time to close your eyes and breathe.
○ February 2025 | Independent
■ Genres: Ambient, Electronic
■ Rating: 7.0/10
■ Favorite track: “Let Them Eat Flowers“
► The synth phrase is really charming. Even though it’s in a loop, it’s not easy to find the beginning and the end of it, and that’s its secret. Maybe it is not the right way to say it, but it’s like Boards of Canada have gone on vacation.
○ February 2025 | Independent
■ Genres: Experimental, Ambient, Noise, Lo-Fi
■ Rating: 6.6/10
■ Favorite track: “Ceterus Paribus”
► There is a guitar and a beautiful repeated ninth chord, suitable – in its harmonic indeterminacy – to adapt to the emotional state of the listener. A desert at sunset lies before our eyes. We must cross it, whether we like it or not. Distant noises will accompany us on the way.
○ January 2025 | Independent
■ Genres: Electronic, Ambient, Dub
■ Rating: 8.5/10
■ Favorite track: “I Feel Like“
► Well, just to be clear: this track is quite a masterpiece. There’s something charmingly hypnotic about the words, the syncopated beat, the echoes. We got totally captivated by the texture, every spark of this beauty has become precious and necessary in our head. And when the synth gets in: oh boy. We won’t forget this music.
○ January 2025 | Independent
■ Genres: Ambient, Electronic
■ Rating: 7.8/10
■ Favorite track: “A Mind Consumed By Meaningless Data“
► There is a kind of inevitable circular path that digs a deeper and deeper furrow. Minor add2 chords paint a disperate picture. The synth bass moves 4 steps downward over and over again, buried within Freud’s repetition compulsion. This path is interrupted in an extremely significant pause around the middle of the track, only to resume inexorably.
○ January 2025 | Independent
■ Genres: Experimental, Ambient, Electronic
■ Rating: 6.8/10
■ Favorite track: “Sewer Sea“
► In the midst of dark drones echoes, synhts phrases burst in. That’s intriguing because it emerges as an act of rebellion against the swamp that surrounds us. We can stand, somehow.
○ January 2025 | Independent
■ Genres: Ambient, Experimental, Electronic
■ Rating: 7.0/10
■ Favorite track: “The Hand“
► Listening gravitates around a distant kick drum. As much the synths create an underlying tension, this pulsing core offers a safe haven. The harmonic use of bichords is cleverly elusive. The Doric mode reflects, in its resolutions, the search for relief from background noise.
○ January 2025 | Label: See Blue Audio
■ Genres: Ambient, Electronic, Atmospheric
■ Rating: 8.0/10
■ Favorite track: “Welcome Home“
► This can make you either hunter or prey. It’s up to you. You can follow the main beat and march, mirroring the strength of your stride, or run in circles trying to escape your fears. The space is wide, you cannot be alone.
○ January 2024 | Independent
■ Genres: Ambient, Drone, Electronic
■ Rating: 6.8/10
■ Favorite track: “Overture“
► We all love warm drones but, in our opinion, they need to be shaken up in some way. Here it happens. The use of inversions and sixth chords is clever. This creates slight imbalances and interesting ambiguities that lead unexpectedly to synth storms.
○ January 2025 | Independent
■ Genres: Ambient, Electronic, Dark Ambient, Experimental
■ Rating: 6.8/10
■ Favorite track: “Flooding“
► You may recognize Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1. In this reinterpretation of the masterpiece, lulling nostalgia seems to founder in a maelstrom of torment. What could have been when hope was still alive is gone. It is a brilliant aural rendition of a surrender.
○ October 2024 | Independent
■ Genres: Ambient, Electronic, Drone, Installation
■ Rating: 8.0/10
■ Favorite track: “Mae“
► There is something really significant about the use of space. Panning acquires the dignity of a real creative tool. The choice of samples is skillful and, at times, moving; their deconstruction is simply masterful.
○ January 2025 | Label: Mortality Tables
■ Genres: Ambient, Electronic
■ Rating: 7.3/10
■ Favorite track: “Deeper Blue”
► The reassuring harmonic solutions are sometimes disrupted by unstable passages, which give the track a variety of contrasting yet perfectly balanced colors.