I put this together on a hot afternoon in the apartment to cool down. A mix of recent ambient tunes touched by soundtracks and cyber themes with some downtempo beats at the end. The melodies and harmonies carry a beauty in their simplicity, repetition and textures.
Thin Air – Floating Points
Hear Me Out – Huerco S.
Weathered Sunrise – Talbot Fade
Fuwatto – 2 8 1 4
Angels of Comfort – Iasos
Spirit – J.G. Biberkopf
Shishapangma – Simon Fisher Turner
They Broke His Pelvis – Cliff Martinez
Backwards – My Panda Shall Fly
Holding Horses – Colleen
Come In – SENKING
Way Home – Eazy Haze
Induction – DJRum
Debauchery (feat Thundercat) – Zack Sekoff
Perspectives – Christian Scott
It’s time for me to pull together another satisfying wrap up of sounds and atmospheres, rhythms, tones and trends from the last year of my music shopping and listening. I wouldn’t call it a best of list, moreso an evocation. When I first became enraptured with music, it was through 50’s and 60’s jazz, the avant 20th century composers, the dj ready dubbed out psychedelia, soundtrack styles, hip hop neck breakers, and futuro drum & bass breakbeat swirls which put the hope of sonic states to the reality of modern states. It was the energy and ambiguity that gave glimpse to the magical and mystical realms.
Touching upon club styles, but relying more on the slowly emerging. Trance through repetition, texture and space. I suppose some might call this experimental or head music. Maybe my neurons are firing a little more often these days. One of the things about music I love is a sound’s ability to transport us to fictional spaces, imaginative landscapes. Sonically to travel time and space in an instant and for sustained periods. The music herein evokes this sensation and touches down for a couple vocal points of reference that man or machine, we are living in the same dream. Different states of play, sleep, pain and desire. Points of view, assumed or real.
Tanzawa II – Sharp Veins
Atomic #80 – Errorsmith & Mark Fell
Samsung India Software Operations II – D’eon
Adult – Egyptrixx
Sect – The Fear Ratio
Like an Amplified Heart – Lily
Gomenasai – Kelela
Twin Warriors (Murlo Remix) – JT The Goon
Ruff – Dressin Red
Be A Man featuring fLako – Seven Davis Jr
Neusa (Afro Trance) Club Edit – Normal Nada
Calypso Fugitive (Original Mix) – Mr One Hundred
Mirage – Kode9
Mint – Lifted
Dreams – Robot Koch feat. Stephen Henderson
Hold Tight (Peaking Lights Dub Mix) – Sinkane
Every Second feat. Perrion – Onra
Deep Court – Nadia Khan
Balance Spring – LV
Gugur – Senyawa
Big Slug (Instrumental) – Pinch & Mumdance
Approach & Identify (Demdike Stare Cross Border Incursion Remix) – Source Direct
Pedal – Fis
Track 3 – Mark Fell & Gábor Lázár
Da Best Thing I Can Affar – Traxman
Untitled – Pearson Sound
444Sure – Rustie
I’m in love with little boxes that can make and play sounds. I was never much of a doodler in my younger days except for a few squiggly lines, lots of concentric circles and jabbing acute angles. These days my doodles are sonics. Sound clears the mind, compresses and stretches time, and is seemingly infinitely permissible. Just let my nephew and niece tool around for a half hour on these little boxes! I love all the buttons, sliders, knobs and keys, too!
With that in mind, I have a few DJ vignettes to share. Just 30 minutes each. Electronic in nature, mostly without vocals, but varied in content and energy. This first one moves between dub techno, minimal uk grime rhythms, cosmic synthesizer textures, acid bleeps and industrial noisiness without settling in one space for too long.
An hour of selections ambient, synthetic, warm, gauzy and hazy, alien and foreign, swinging hats and loping kicks, nothing too far below the medula. The music floats along to a summer’s day or evening with minor shifts in tone. The artists are some of my favorites from the last year. It’s an hour long. Download or stream it. Please leave a comment below.
Silver – Lifted
Alone in Da Sun – Beat Spacek
Miss U – Shigeto
Sunspots (i. Event #1, ii. Event #2, iii. Event #3) – ASC
The Customs of the Age Disturbed – Craig Leon
Dance Of The Drunken Drums – Theo Parrish
난 괜찮다고 또 웃으며 Good Bye – death’s dynamic shroud.wmv
Da Best Thing I Can Affar – Traxman
? Question – Mark Pritchard
Tick of the Clock – The Chromatics
They Broke His Pelvis – Cliff Martinez
Under Your Spell – Desire
dreaming on crunk 