Here comes the Empire. Time to resist. And an extra Ambient Sunday with Lingering Tones.
Lingering Tones is from Hawaii and by way of biog offers only “inspired by tea, incense, and impermanence.”
The featured track is Moss And Leaves from the album The First Collection.
Moss And Leaves is a fragrant blend. There are some quite solid beats for an ambient track. But they’re quite metronomic and the other sounds are spaced and spacious.
This is horizontal hip hop. And it’s quite experimental without being difficult.
There’s quite an almost Japanese feel to the gentle chimes that merges well with the echoed hip hop. Melodies are kept spartan but have a properly karmic feel to them.
This is a gateway to something more and very promising for a first collection.
Ambient Sunday chooses Denmark over the US with tracks from A Tree For My Bed, and Valdrion.
A Tree For My Bed has appeared here before. It’s the name for Copenhagen-based Danish-French artist Mathieu J. H. Hansen. His work is “Rooted in an ongoing personal archive spanning over 20 years of home videos and sonic sketchbooks.”
Image Plane is the third single from his debut album Aperture, “an audiovisual work that incorporates videos, visuals and an online game in the making.”
Image Plane is filled with found sound from nature. This gives the track an organic feel.
The gentle sounds make everything seem in harmony with nature and the natural world.
There are slow beats which don’t dominate the mix. The foreground is some gently swirling keyboards that fade into hazed tones.
Just a lovely track.
And the album:
And so to Valdrion. They may be from the US. I can’t find out any info – except that it’s also the name of a World of Warcraft character.
So, on with the music. Here’s Dust And Echoes from the Forgotten Sanctuaries release.
It’s a lovely gentle track. There are no beats but there is a sort of plucked bass line that almost performs the same function.
Otherwise, this is a lovely weightless ambient track. It floats along on hazy drone and quietly bobbling tones.
A track best appreciated by tuning out from everything else and letting yourself get submerged and lost in among the beautiful sounds.
It’s been raining steadily all day in London. Everything is sodden. But at least Jennrick’s shenanigans has offered me a wry smile. More substantively, here’s some gentle cheering lofi house from KNIPPMÄSS.
KNIPPMÄSS are a Dutch duo who describe themselves as “Tape enthusiasts from the Borderland.” Their biog adds that they were “Originally more into Phonk and Witchhouse, KNIPPMÄSS from the region of Gelderland continued their task to only sample from thriftstore tapes.”
Here’s their just released single Van Layer. They say that they “felt this 70s Prog Rock sample would make a sweet House tune.”
And sweetness is what they have delivered. This is a perfect organic house track. There’s a lightness and a cheeriness that combines with a bouncy tune to deliver the utmost pleasure.
Van Layer offers a gentle start. But soon it offers up the central hook which has an almost flute like air combined with a smidge of vocal sample.
It’s a breath of summer and bounces along with a warming sunny disposition. This is perfect for anyone in the Northern hemisphere wishing it were warm again.
Im not normally a fan of post rock. But I did like The American Analog Set. And D Majestic and the Spectral Band have that same sense of numbed wooziness.
D Majestic and the Spectral Band, hereinafter DMSB, is one person. That person is Daniel Moriarty who described himself as “Noise/jazz/electro/punk from Washington, D.C.”
Here’s It’s Gotta Be Off To Be On which was released just before Christmas. DMSB describes it as “A love letter to William Basinski (and, perhaps, Planning for Burial) penned in textures, pulses, and melodies.”
It’s Gotta Be Off To Be On is a lovely slow disoriented track. There are lonesome drums, a fragment of guitar melody and a whole bunch of bass drone.
There are whispers of offstage noises and that sense of trying to hold on as everything falls around you is perhaps a more pertinent sense of the US today than any number of political podcasts.
But more than that. This is a humanity struggling amid the noise.
A minimal and drone Ambient Sunday this week with the title track from Ehad Sikel and Adi Goldstein’s album Milo_
Ehad Sikel’s biog says he’s “a composer and producer known for blending melodic ideas across genres. With a distinctive sound shaped by diverse influences, he has collaborated with artists as a producer, arranger, programmer, and bass guitarist.”
Adi Goldstein’s biog says “Adi Goldstein is the fourth generation in a family of musicians, the piano seemed a natural path from which to start his passion for music. From an early age, Goldstein ventured into the realm of jazz music while seeping classical influences from his mother, a pianist in her own right.”
They both have a soundtrack and adverts background and that seeps into Milo_ with its quasi soundtrack quality and in the range of classical music references at work.
But Milo_ is more than background music. There’s a spiritual sense to the opening and a harmony with the natural world.
It opens with an almost found sound background while a gentle bass plays languidly. Strings are drawn into drones. It’s all very soothing and designed to lower your heartbeat.
There’s an introspective quality to it all which is only partially offset by a lovely little electric keyboard melody that plays in and around the drones.
It even gets to some bass driven almost Americana. A touch Paris, Texas. But this is its own thing given time and space in which to develop.
A couple of chilled tracks for your weekend playlists from Dave Cotr, and Muuju.
Dave Cotr appeared here a year ago. As a reminder, Dave Cotr is from Italy. He describes his work as “guitarist/composer” which doesn’t begin to explain the wonderful strangeness at work here. Dave studied at the Conservatorio Stanislao Giacomantonio in Cosenza (2014), privately with M. Bruno Marrazzo (2016) and at the Conservatorio Cherubini in Florence, graduating in Jazz Guitar in 2021.
Here’s new single – released two days ago – Fukushima Rising Again. Whereas his last track was techno and break beats, this time it’s a more chilled eerie atmosphere with retrained beats.
This starts quietly and gradually builds. There’s a light Japanese influence here in some of the instrumentation. Presumably, the link to damaged nuclear power plant Fukushima.
But what makes this track is the swirling electronic sounds that give this track a psychedelic twist. And of course the discomfort of the clicking Geiger counter in the outro.
Muuju appeared here six months ago with something quite minimal. This time the minimalism is given a dreamy twist on strata.
As a reminder, muuju is a French-Austrian producer based in Berlin. Andreas Schütz is also known as one half of the duo il:lo. With muuju, his biog says that “Andreas steps into a more intimate and naive space—guided more by feeling than by form.”
Strata was also released a couple of days ago. This is a lovely delicate track.
There’s a blend of a dreamy quality to the light tones and a lovely study beats percussion with a muted quality.
The melody is a mix of reverbed keyboards and some manipulated background vocals. It is these that give the track its slightly unreal dreamstate quality.
After the killing in Minneapolis you wonder what’s going to happen next in America. I’m withdrawing to safer chilled areas with Shadow Pulse Lanterns from Laukki.
Laukki seems to be based in Sweden but their website says “Laukki fuses Japanese ambience with 90s rhythm — music that breathes between bass and silence. Born in the intersection of underground Tokyo nights and lo-fi meditation, each beat is a story told through texture, space, and movement.”
Shadow Pulse Lanterns was published on Christmas Day so I’m assuming plenty of people will have missed it. And that would be a shame as it’s a laid back classic.
The track is a mix of some woozy funk bass, some light and dusty hip hop beats and a ripple of melody.
This is a light and airy sound. Flutes riffle about to give the track a fluttering quality.
A track that’s gossamer light and manages a lovely blend of 70s, 80s and 90s to offer sophisticated relaxation today.
Fresh orange for you, Sir? Here’s a just released track from McDead. It’s Orange Armada and is strange electronica apparently about Wombles.
McDead (Kev Edinborough) is a British archeologist based in Australia. But he’s been in all manner of bands in the 1990s and 2000s. He’s appeared here regularly over the last four years.
The new single Orange Armada features a Womble on the cover. McDead does say Orinoco was his favourite. Quite what the track has to do with recycling animals on Wimbledon Common is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it’s an oblique political reference.
Either way, this is McDead pulling on the gamut of his musical threads. This is electronica but infused with the strange psychedelia of Captain Beefheart.
There’s a nice chuggy quasi hip hop beat. But there’s also warped and stretched guitar magic going on here.
The track manages a woozy lurch around, lost in its own k-hole. Electronic psychedelics are just what the doctor ordered for 2026 given how it’s started off.
ACID TED 
