Music Beyond Airports
This collection of essays on Ambient Music provides a series of provocations, observations and reflections that each open up seams for further discussion.
Category: other-news
Machinefabriek Exclusive: Transform II * Michel Banabila
Celebrating 13 years of Ambientblog with an exclusive (and free) Machinefabriek track download “Transform II” * Michel Banabila‘s latest album re-explores his musical past (and also contains the original “Transform”)
DreamScenes – October 2018
“No hay banda: there is no band. This is all a tape recording… And yet we hear a band… It is all recorded. It is all a tape. It is an illusion.”
(Silencio scene from Mulholland Drive, 2001)
Your opinion needed…..
Your opinion needed: Should a blogpost be published if the physical edition of the album has quickly sold out before the publishing date?
Please answer these poll questions….
Ales Tsurko – Microscale
Ales Tsurko‘s Microscale is a web-based generative album, that uses a set of six randomly picked Wikipedia articles as input for its score.
DreamScenes V2.0
Introducing DreamScenes v2.0: a monthly radio broadcast on Concertzender radio (www.concertzender.nl) – also available on-demand for international listeners.
10th Anniversary Celebration!
This month ambientblog celebrates its 10th anniversary.
Here’s a short preview of the anniversary project: a special mix containing exclusive tracks especially submitted for the occasion!
Apart from the download version of the mix and all separate exclusive tracks, there will also be a credit card USB version featuring the mix, all tracks ánd extras!
A beautiful little gem that hold over 60 hours (!!!) of sonic immersion!
Sleeping, or what….? (+ Folio_Archive)
In case you are wondering about the recent lack of activity here: don’t worry – there’s a good reason for that:
Apart from the short holiday I enjoyed, I am now busy preparing an exciting project to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Ambientblog, later this year.
Details will follow soon – and it will definitely be worth the wait!
(And to fill the gap: here’s a Mixcloud link to the archive of radio shows I compiled for NPS Folio from 2006 until 2009).
Undisclosed – 7C858C
One of the most active and vibrant websites about electronic, experimental and instrumental music I know, Headphone Commute, has even found the time to start a new side-project called “Undisclosed”.
“The project allows each musician to explore a particular sonic territory, while remaining detached from all of the previous associations with their notable name. The series also invites the listener to strip away all of the predisposed concepts and instead focus on the only thing that really matters — MUSIC”
New Site Live
(Subscribe now and win a download code)!
When you read this, the new ambientblog site is live!
To celebrate this, 30 FREE ALBUM DOWNLOAD CODES can be won.
The winners will be randomly drawn from all email subscribers that have entered their address in the first 48 hours (counting from October, 21)
Birthday News: FREE GIVEAWAYS!
On tuesday, October 21, it is exactly NINE years since the very first blog post.
And exactly five years since its name was changed to Ambientblog.net.
It is also the day this weblog (and all of its content) will be migrated to a new software platform.
To celebrate this, I have 30 FREE ALBUM DOWNLOAD CODES to give away!
Introducing: DreamScenes
Some of you may remember that before this blog became “Ambientblog” in 2009, it was called “DreamScenes“.
Although still a ‘niche genre’, the interest in ambient/electronic/experimental music has kept growing, and currently there seems to be much more music than I could ever write about here.
Which sometimes leaves me with a slight guilt about not presenting music that is definitely worth listening!
Time to revive the “radio show” format…..! (in a way)
Starting October, 3,, the DreamScenes ambient music channel will be published to MIXCLOUD monthly – ánd of course here on Ambientblog.
Rust (Mix) – The Video Version
When publishing the mixes for Ambientblog, I have always been looking for a way to ‘visualise’ the artist credits for the mix.
Most of the fragments and samples used in the mix-collages are almost indistinguishable, yet the interested listener might want to find out about the release details.
This is why most mixes on ambientblog also feature a ‘sequence scheme’ image which shows the building blocks of that particular mix.
For my most recent mix, “Rust”, I decided to try out a different feature: a video version, which is showing the track details at the very moment they are used in the mix.
Mixcloud App
Android users already had “on-the-road access” using the Ambientblog Android App, which unfortunately is not available for iPhone/iPod/iPad users.
But the Mixcloud App now provides a great way to access the ambientblog mixes while on the road: just install it, start it and search for “ambientblog” (user), and you’ll find all mixes that are published on Mixcloud.
And of course there are quite a lot of other great mixes to be discovered apart from Ambientblog!
The Mixcloud app is offered for free while in Beta, so don’t hesitate and install it right now!
Don’t forget you can also subscribe to the podcast for ‘offline access’:
Janek Schaefer – Asleep at the Wheel…
Janek Schaefer’s website presents an impressive list of site-location projects that are very interesting to investigate, because they demonstrate Schaefer’s perfect balance of concept, visual and sound.
(A few of them, Unfolding and Extended Play, were presented on Ambientblog earlier).
As the Artist in Residence for the 2010 Milton Keynes International Festival, Schaefer presented “Asleep at the Wheel…’: a location project for which he completely transformed the deserted Sainsbury’s supermarket into a three-lane highway at night, a ‘ghost road of cars’, where the audio is played from the in-car sound systems. From the car seats, visitors could listen to presentations and interviews thematically dealing with sustainability and the future of the earth, and how we can be able to improve that future.
“The exhibition is a thought provoking and immersive sound installation for multiple car radios, that contemplates our future. Exhibited in a vast disused supermarket, three-lanes of cars dissect the darkened interior, as the multiple hazard lights illuminate the space, revealing the finite road of our consumer driven daydream.”
Sonic Acts XIII – The Poetics of Space
If you’re in or maybe even anywhere near Holland (Amsterdam) between february 25 and 28, you definitely should not miss Sonic Acts XII – “Spatial Explorations in Art, Science, Music and Technology.
This bi-annual festival must be one of Holland’s most important event in experimental electronic music. But not ‘just’ music: the multimedia event also presents expositions, installations, conferences, sound walks, and of course a lot of other immersive aural experiences.
Charles Spearin – The Happiness Project
It’s not ambient, and it’s only remotely electronic.
Still, when I discovered this album last week (it was released in march this year), it left me completely speechless and utterly fascinated.
The Happiness Project is a concept created by Charles Spearin from Toronto, known by some for his contributions to Do Make Say Think and Broken Social Scene.
For this project he has been interviewing some of his neighbours in downtown Toronto, and used their recorded voice to create the musical track.
In these sample-laden times that in itself does not sound very spectacular, but Spearin focussed on the melody of the voice and doubled it with a musical instrument fitting the voice. The pitch of the voice is never changed, but rhythmic and melodic patterns are created by repeating some of the phrases. Thus resulting in a sparkling and engaging kind of experimental jazz music.
Hibernate Sampler, Vol. 1
A nice present from the Hibernate Recordings label to help you through the dark winter days: The Hibernate Sampler, volume 1 sampler collection.
Hibernate Recordings is a new independent label, focussing on ambient and electro-acoustic music. And, judging by the artists released in their first half year of exisence and by the works on this sampler, I guess their name will be mentioned on this weblog on a regular basis.