Another shortlist for the last days of this year: beautiful soundscapes from Monolyth & Cobalt (Mathias van Eecloo, including reworks by many of his friends), Steve Roden & Stephen Vitiello, Gateless Gate (exploring the vast Siberian Landscape), How Hot is Your Cloud, and the surrealist music of Black to Comm.
Another roundup of very interesting album releases, featuring Joe Frawley, Francesco Giannico; Man Eats Fish; Koshshi Kamata and Off Land.
A shortlist with a tinge of Christmas, but also looking forward to the fresh air of spring…
New albums from Memum, Chris Russell, Sava Marinkovic, Halcyon Chamber and – to conclude – a free christmas present from the Dronarivm label artists.
This mix is built around mysterious vocals. Vocals that may guide you, or lure you, into distances unknown.
Often, but not exclusively, female, and some of them not even human – like the beautiful flute-playing by Jean-Christophe Bonnafous, or the mysterious singing sound of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko that was recently discovered during the Rosetta space missions.
With just a little fantasy you can imagine the Philae Space Lander being attracted by the comet’s song – ultimately leading it to an untimely death.
December Drones Shortlist: featuring Kissy Suzuki, Suisen, Darren McClure, Yann Novak & Fabio Perlette and Hakobune.
With its cinematic soundscapes, distant dub-techno references an subtly constructed ambient soundscapes, “Sea Island” is an album that defies genre tagging.
Maybe it’s because Loscil is defining his own ‘genre’ more strongly with every release.
The music of “Sacred Ground” is created for a documentary film (by Tim Grünewald and Ludwig Schmidtpeter) about the Wounded Knee and Mount Rushmore memorial sites in South Dakota:
“Two memorials in the heart of America. Two hours’ drive but worlds apart. Mount Rushmore is an icon of the United States, attracting millions of visitors each year. The Wounded Knee Massacre Site receives just a handful of visitors each day.”
It is also inspired by (and dedicated to) Florian Fricke, who created soundtracks with Popol Vuh for many Werner Herzog movies.
“With electronic music, it’s hard NOT to create huge amounts of sound… and to me it’s often about taking things away” – Kenneth Kirschner
An overview of an impressive multimedia project on the Tokafi website, showcasing the versatile music of Kenneth Kirschner, a 20-track, 4 hour remix album and much (much!) more.
Enough material to fill your coming Christmas holidays!!
Right from the opening track it’s obvious that “Aerial” is something else, almost beyond comparision!
It took me some time to grow accustomed to this album. It requires some dedicated listening, on the right moment.
But ultimately, the raw beauty of the distictive textural palette grabbed me, and didn’t let go.
Only to leave me wondering why I had not heard of Anna Thorvaldsdottir before.
