■ 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.
► This long, obscure drone track unfolds as a bleak sonic landscape. The piece moves with unrelenting weight, its textures grinding slowly forward and stretching time into something heavy and disorienting. Only toward the end fragile sonic fragments begin to emerge — faint tones, softened harmonics, hints of melody — that gently temper the harshness. These late arrivals feel tentative yet meaningful, offering a subdued sense of release after prolonged tension.
► 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.
■ 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: ▼)
■ 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 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.
■ Genres: Experimental / Field Recordings / Drone ■ Rating: 7.7/10 ■ Favorite track: “it’s the thinnest and brittlest of veils”
► This infuses the stillness of drone music with a striking sense of urgency. Beneath the steady, immersive hum lies a pulse of tension — like an inaudible clock ticking. The radio fragments never resolve into clarity, instead hovering like lost messages from a distant crisis. Subtle oscillations and tonal shifts widen the atmosphere, giving the impression of scanning an unknown horizon for signals of meaning or safety.
► 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.
► 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.
► 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 “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.
► Is meditation nothing more than the highest and/or the most desperate form of distraction? This is what this track asks. Is the gradually deconstructed pulsation of the minor guitar phrase an invitation to merge with the world or to alienate ourselves in the dark? We still don’t know.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Absent” that we prefer is “Chloral Suicide”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Paul Padilla: I was messing around on a Moog Subharmonicon, a fun and chaotic semi-modular synthesizer. Once I got the sequence that’s heard in the track, I decided to record it, which I did, while haphazardly patching a lot of random parameters to each other. That’s where a lot of the stutters and detuned notes come from. After I had the recording on my computer, I manipulated it in a few different directions and layered the results. The final track became an interflow of the original recording with its mangled counterparts. I still don’t even really know what key it’s in.
■ 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.
► That’s a raw, immersive descent into chaos and texture. Harsh, distorted layers clash and dissolve. Metallic screeches, glitchy fragments and pulsing static collide in a soundscape that feels unstable yet intentional—like a broken machine struggling to breathe.
■ The A. O.: Can you tell us how “WOG 2206“ came to light?
►STGLTZ: I recently moved in with my girlfriend and as I went through my stuff, I came across this old function generator, which was given to me by a friend some years ago. It has WOG 2206 written on it. I ran it through several effect pedals, liked the sound and recorded it, that’s how the foundation of the track was made. Then I played around with different things, for example a noisebox, to add more sounds and textures.
► 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.
■ 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.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Low Endings” that we prefer is “Eyes Inside”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Devin Sarno: There is an overarching theme across this E.P. of exploring crescendos. “Eyes Inside” is very much that: a slow and very tense build. Around the 4 minute mark the piece begins to expand and bloom. In some ways it is an homage to Glenn Branca. Some of his early symphonic pieces (like No. 3 or No. 6) have stayed with me even after all these years. I always loved the unrelenting force he created through the use of multiple instruments driving in unison. I tried to pay respect to this approach in my own way: with one (layered) bass guitar.
► 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.
► We are moving on a black carpet. We are struck by electric flashes, mechanical echoes. We drag ourselves in chains to a forced destination, surrounded by hostile forces. Having no choice, somehow, lifts us from all remorse.
■ 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 “Boredom And Other Evil Spirits” that we prefer is “Solitary Happy Hour”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Catapult Elpam: So this track is the oldest one on the record. It came about from playing around with some textures and the guitar itself. Sonically the whole arrangement is rather simple then complex with subtle variations every now and again. I remember playing a vinyl record and placing the needle on the label not instead of the grooves. The result was this really cool scratchy rhythmic texture that goes in the background. I always like to sample and experiment with really weird and unusual sounds, reverse them, stretch them etc. Towards the end of the track, the rhythmical section switches to this galloping beat, which is actually the hooves of a galloping horse used as the rhythm.
■ 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.
► This music seems to come directly from Lovecraft’s pen. There is an eerie sense of presence and unease. The track unfolds hypnotically, blurring the line between wait and dread. Whether we like it or not, we are forced to descend into the darkest recesses of our conscience.
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.
■ 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.
■ 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”.
► 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.
► 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.
► The horizontal amplitude of granular noise is remarkable. The din faces a fully tonal harmonic development by the pads. The result is that you can choose your favorite shade of grey while you are listening.
► 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.
► The rythmic construction and the guitar phrase are mesmerized hypnotically. The use of space is interesting and helps not to flatten listening. The subtle variations of the two key elements and the alternating use of silences cleverly sweeps away any static.
■ 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.
► 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.
► 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.
■ 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.
►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.
► Here it comes something really abstract. There is this dark drone going on with minimal variations, like something deeply inevitable. This is what the background noise of our lives might sound like. Silence is lost. Harmony, if it ever was, is over.
■ 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.
► We are in Eliot’s “Waste Land”. There is no matter, nothing can be seen. The echo of a sacred chant rises and falls on the first three deegres of a major scale, like a lifeline in a desert of ice. Does salvation exist?
► 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.
