RIP. A weekly roundup of releases on Bandcamp and Soundcloud selected and delivered by Aidan
My second son turns 3 today. Isn’t that a marvel. Time keeps on slipping. Time marches on, never ending, time keeps its own time.
Radio on Sunday night! Ambient special. Don’t believe the anti-hype, ambient is cool.
This is daring and exciting, a dark and dub-laden monster of a track from Manchester’s Clemency. Sounds bubble and swirl, offering a look into a terrifying undergrowth. Around four minutes in what seems like a total tempo switch-up appears. This is a record on the club-focused 2 B REAL label, yet I can only imagine the carnage and confusion this would cause for all but the most open-minded of dancers.
What if Zomby was Burial? What if Burial was Zomby? It’s extremely reductive to cite those two artists but this release takes the muted tones and ghostly samples of Burial’s darkest work and posits them in the rave-centric throwback mould fashioned by Zomby on his first major release. The title says it all. The musical choices are the artist’s own, however, not least the bass line that runs throughout ‘I Miss Dancing With You’ alongside classic ‘Sing Sing’ breaks. There are ambient segues, ravey moments, vocal samples and voicemail snippets. Imbued with borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 90s (I don’t actually know how old the artist is).
Felisha Ledesma - Golden Mirror
Delightful and mournful at once, this lengthy piece extends the stellar run from ECSTATIC lately.
Lovely short piece from an unknown. Who is sicu?
operaa - Falling To The Point Of Floating
Three tracks of drifting ambient from another unknown, operaa, on Barcelona’s xenonyms imprint. Can you say imprint about a digital label? The title makes me think of this conversation between Donna Hayward and Laura Palmer in Fire Walk With Me:
DH: Do you think that if you were falling in space... that you would slow down after a while, or go faster and faster?
LP: Faster and faster. And for a long time you wouldn't feel anything. And then you'd burst into fire. Forever. And the angels wouldn’t help you, cause they’ve all gone away.
Well, maybe not the last few words.
C Powers - Listening to the Music
Proper French touch-sounding filtery house from C Powers on the BEST2S label.
This track is gorgeous, and it sounds like Sade produced by Yamaneko.
Steve Hadfield - See the World Anew Vol. 1
See Blue Audio and Steve Hadfield, two must-check entities, team up for this release. Gorgeous ambient sounds, as ever, with wifting and wavering synths as well as piano sounds over dense beds of noise (eg ‘Mesosphere’, a personal favourite). ‘Orbit’ is strangely atonal, while ‘Gravity’ is a strange and unsettling ending.
A rather stunning compilation featuring music from across Asia. Deep and chasmic sonic explorations, psychedelic journeys, crunchy noise experiments, dubby techno workouts, ambient flotation, it’s wonderfully curated and sequenced.
This is a selection of different songs recorded over a period between 2016 and 2020. As you might predict or expect from that time, the songs are full of sorrow, anger and confusion. There’s an overall mood of sombre reflection, at times opting for a bluesy shuffle, at others going for a languid drift, spoken word and non-vocal singing leading the way. It’s an album of many layers, both in terms of its styles and sounds but also the content itself, which speaks of current issues and experiences while speaking to cycles of existence through the centuries.
Another great release on All Centre, following the recent SHE Spells Doom effort (and, you know, just a solid back catalogue in general). This one comes from soltura, an Irish producer based in London. The title track opens with what sound like church bells used as synth sounds, before crashing into a head-nod thump replete with intricate percussion patterns, wobbing bass and shrieking synths. ‘London Fields At Night’ is a more downcast affair, gentle birdsong meeting ambient scapes, and muted drums and trance-like blips.
Finally this week, a song that looks at the passage of the seasons.