Comprised of medieval-style choral music sampled, distorted, looped, and layered, Sapiduz approaches the listener like ice forming on a lake, taking the free-form and slowly building structure out of it through interruptions as much as consistency.
1 CommentBiosphere Shortwave Memories Rises on the Horizon
Legendary floaty nebulous ambient band Biosphere returns with a new album due out January 21, 2022. Following previous efforts, the soundtrack-influenced background sound with evocative themes the listener must meet halfway remains, and the sample track almost trails off rather than conclude definitively.
No CommentsBiosphere – Angel’s Flight (2021)
Biosphere started out with songs that roughly followed a looping pattern, adding different sounds in layers, but with Angel’s Flight, aims to use themes more thoroughly, building each song around a melody and multiple counterparts in both sound texture and other phrases.
1 CommentInstitution D.O.L. – The Thelema Tales (2021)
Some of the best musical genres consist of styles that are easy to imitate but hard to do well, and ambient music generally qualifies, but power electronics doubly so. You never know when you are listening to a carefully-plotted work or air conditioner feedback, but Institution D.O.L. have been at home in this genre for a quarter century.
1 CommentAppreciating Music With Purpose
Every time possesses its own culture, since culture exists in transparent layers based on who you are and where you are. Your civilization, often an empire, is the lowest layer, but then you add nation, social class, religion, general life philosophy, and any elective layers like enjoying death metal.
8 CommentsTags: Ambient, ambient music, cycles of music
Beherit Releases Bardo Exist Ambient Soundscape
Trailblazing Finnish black metal and ambient pioneer Beherit unleashed its latest creation, Bardo Exist, on November 12. Given the complete autophagy of black metal, this redirection of the genre shows it how to continue as itself in spirit while the carcass decays.
26 CommentsTags: Ambient, beherit, Black Metal
Hagathorn – Hartwold (2020)
Hagathorn makes what might be called medieval ambient folk music, mostly implication of melody through guitar strumming which gradually gives way to a shifting texture of themes that dreamlike combine and dissolve, leaving behind an altered version of the original.
No CommentsShibalba – Nekrologie Sinistrae (Orchestral Noise Opus I) (2020)
Industrial music means pounding machine-like rhythm and city noise, but to that Shibalba add keyboards and ritual patterns to make a disturbing but pleasant soundtrack for all of your anti-modern experiences. This is both the strength and weakness of this music: it makes for good but sparse listening, better as background than focus.
No CommentsTags: Ambient, Industrial, Ritual, shibalba
Triptykon featuring The Metropole Orkest – Requiem (Live At Roadburn 2019) (2020)
This album will make waves because it is going to divide audiences based on who will give it a chance and who will categorically ignore it; this, like trolling, is the pure provocation that forms a necessary part of Art as opposed to Entertainment. The album possesses a fatal flaw, but makes up for it with some of the more interesting experiments within the notion of doom — dark, melancholic, sentimental, but not self-pitying — sounds, going beyond metal and rock in composition.
9 CommentsTags: Ambient, atmospheric, celtic frost, death metal, hellhammer, triptykon
RIP: Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk
Years go by, and more of the greats of the past move on to either afterlife or nonexistence, leaving us to wonder what the point of it all is. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” We must announce that sadly, Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk perished today at the age of 73.
6 CommentsTags: Ambient, electronic, electronic music, florian schneider, kraftwerk, synthpop