In 'Dreamies' we hear an awakening of the world. The slow trickle of water, the unfurling of leaves, the bursting of snowdrops through wet solid soil. It is a soundscape for the thawing of things, a farewell to winter while still on the threshold of its realm, with bare trees sparkling with crystallline fragments of rain.
Created by the Sendai-born, Toronto-based composer and musician Masahiro Takahashi, the track is our first glimpse of his new album, In Another. For this project Takahashi builds on collaborative approach that characterised his previous album Humid Sun (2023), adding a small orchestra's worth of musicians to enact his creative vision.
The result of this – of his "trading Ableton sequences for lead sheets" – is a rich, full sound evolves with an organic quality of live music, an unseen magic in the air. In this musical mapping 'Dreamies' feels like an aestheticised symphonic tuning up, simple and synthesised to begin with, adding textures and different qualities of sound in a veritable sonic buffet, as if filling out the lines of a painting.
But there is also more than just a nod to the embryonic chamber pop that Brian Wilson brought to life on The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds — the intricacies and chimes and dynamic progressions of 'Let's Go Away For Awhile', for example, and the lavish layers in the final third of 'You Still Believe In Me'. In this regard, Takahashi's own singular vision and vocal additions in 'Dreamies' feel very kindred.
In 'DO NOT LOOK AWAY' Pittsburgh-based producer and visual artist FLOOR BABA (Jesse Martin) takes us on a journey to the suburbs where all is not what it seems. Well, it's more than seeming not what it is. Panning over low-poly renders of greenery-lined streets, playgrounds and parking lots, we see trees fragmented in post-exploded stillness, trucks chewed by digital rot, skies sinking into corroded community pools.
Over this, with no regard to x or y axes, stomp faceless figures remiscent of Zelda: Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask-era ReDead (for those unfamiliar, see here). As the title suggests, in Martin's animated illustration we are privy to the things we usually look away from — in the melted, corroded visuals we sense the unease that lies behind apparent perfection, while the ReDead-esque figures symbolise those who trample unchecked over the green grass and picket fences and, by extension, over the lives of others.
It's all soundtracked perfectly. Cricket-like chirps and destructed background fuzz add supplementary percussion the boom-tick of a forboding beat, while echoing detuned synth vox flutter unsettlingly on a bed of disarmingly warm chords that move in impresonal lounge-flavoured progression. In the final third, we enter a quasi-West Coast groove with a flute refraining a simple melody over clanging synthetic plucked strings. Martin mixes ambient textures with a more attention-forward dynamic to create an atmosphere that is at once detached but invested in the accompanying scenes.
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For more FLOOR BABA fun, you might want to check out their most recent album waking, self-described "experiments in soft music" that are full of incredibly pleasing noises and soundscapes. You can do this by tapping or clicking here to move your digital attention to Bandcamp.
The connection between music and place is inextricable, both the power of the former to soundtrack the latter, and for location to alter our listening experience. This is deftly put into practice by Tokyo-based producer and musician aus (Yasuhiko Fukuzono) on 'Below the Surface We Shimmer and Shine', a track originally intended to be listened to whilst bathing in an onsen — a hot spring, thousands of which are nestled in the forested folds of Japan's mountainous interior.
This piece of ambient music, with additional production magic courtesy of Manchester-based the humble bee singularly encapsulates the onsen experience. In its granular textures are promises of mineral goodness, countless intricate rough-hewn gemstones that speak of hygiene in body and mind, while a golden glimmer of sound illustrates a refraction of light in the hot spring waters.
Not only the onsen itself and its ephemeral liquidity but its surroundings, captured by aus in his field recording work, are brought to life. A coarse backdrop echoes a bristling tree-clad mountainside and the vast unknowable nature that surrounds the onsen town. Icy tuned percussion hints at frigid winter air contrasted with the waves of warm synth representing the steaming hot spring waters themselves. (A warm bath outdoors is super nice).
Though there's a contrast between human warmth and our desire to control nature (i.e. bathing in an onsen, comfortable hotel surroundings), and nature in its giant forboding splendour (i.e. the reason hot springs exist naturally, the harshness of the mountains), here they exist timelessly and harmoniously etched in sound.
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'below the surface we shimmer and shine' is taken from the collaborative album Chalybeate, which is scheduled for release on 13 February via flau. Originating as a sonic document of the onsen (hot spring) town Ikaho, Gunma Prefecture, by aus during a month-long stay, he enlisted the humble bee (Craig Tattersall, known for his releases for labels like Dauw and IIKKI) for production and mixing duties.
A broad spectrum of ambient, instrumental music is written about on yes/no. Rarely does it follow a formula; creativity has a way of being unpredictable, even within the constraints of adherening to particular aesthetics espoused by whatever genre one has sought to somehow inhabit. But still when we think of "ambient music" there is a certain mental image that pops up.
Why? Being ambient does not have to be the sonic equivalent of clean lines and polished concrete. Be unobtrusive, yes; create a calm atmosphere, yes; but there are many ways to be and create such things. Case in point: 'Across the Ocean'.
A collaboration between musician Joss Jaffe, award-winning guitarist Jim West (decades-long guitarist for "Weird Al" Yankovic) and shakuhachi master Kazu Matsui, who's contributed to movie scores from Willow to Jumanji, this piece of music takes a different path to reach the meditative, refraining realm at the heart of ambient music.
Jaffe had already recorded two albums with West – Aum Akua (2022) and Santhi (2024) – but it was a chance meeting with Matsui that led to his involvement in the project. Jaffe explains that he was performing with TAKURO (Takuro Kubo, guitarist for Japanese rock band Glay) in Tokyo when Matsui was brought on as a special guest. "We hit it off," he says via email, thanks to their shared experience playing with many different world music artists.
In 'Across the Ocean' the trio find a singular groove that summons the vast ocean under a vaster sky. Flowing chorused guitar melody sets the piece in motion, a drum heaped in considered reverb deepening the sense of space as it and guitar begin a slow swaying call-and-response, as if between continents. The texture of Matsui's shakuhachi adds to the shifting momentum of the piece, like running a hand over raw silk — soft but teeming with organic detail.
The track is a fluid mix of post-rock jamming and the reflective nature of suizen (literally "blowing meditation", the Zen practise of mindfulness while playing flute). Though uncharacteristic of what may be called ambient music, there is no lure to snag listeners into feeling any particular emotion, no lyrics to inform you of the musicians' own feelings. Instead we have a mesmeric, fitingly oceanic sense of calm.
'Across the Ocean' shows that ambient music – an evocative blend of sounds and spaces between intended as a canvas daydremaing and soundtracking the everyday – can take many different shapes.
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You are free to listen to, and purchase a digital copy of, 'Across the Ocean' over on Bandcamp. You may also stream it on Spotify among other platforms for such things.
⌾ LISTEN TO HIDDEN FORT, DREAMS FROM THE ROLLER PALACE ⌾
It's new music time. As you may or may not (probably not) know, YES/NO MUSIC has launched a record label. Called Pleasant Place, it is dedicated to all manner of instrumental music that summons worlds, allows listeners to escape or relax, and provides an undemanding but imaginative sonic space. You can learn more about it on our dedicated page or you could even head over to http://pleasant.place yourself to check it out.
Our first release is an album called Dreams from the Roller Palace by Hidden Fort. This is a "musical tour" of Maida Vale Roller Skating Palace and Club, which was to all intents and purposes an Edwardian roller disco and pretty much London's top spot for skating between 1909 and 1912 (when it closed). Many years went by and it later became home to the BBC and is now best known as Maida Vale Studios. It was up for auction recently; thankfully composer Hanz Zimmer brought it in partnership with several others, sealing the fate of the iconic studios, but hopefully for the best.
Hidden Fort, a transcontinental duo (one in Tokyo, one in London) who would seemingly prefer to remain anonymous, have created a pretty gorgeous love letter to the heritage of the studios. It's new music, of course, but Dreams from the Roller Palace feels utterly timeless.
We are very happy to be the label home for this rather stunning debut release; yes, we're biased, and yes, it would be a conflict of interests of we were to write a long, gushing essay about how intriguing the concept is, or what wondeful flights of fancy are summoned by the smorgasbord of vintage instruments are used throughout, or comment on just how unusual their mix of ambient and postclassical structures is. But it's cool, and we hope you think so too.
It's time for some new music from Lindsay Lowend, the human Detroit-dweller, educator and game composer, Tony Mendez. Differently from his recent releases, the chiptune-heavy Chiptunes 2022 (clue's in the name) and the demoscene-dedicated Nectarine (also released in 2022), the focus on this EP is a real instrument: the guitar. It's appeared in his high-energy frenetic VGM-flavoured compositions before — LL 2020 - Volume 3, for example — but never with such prominence as to be the crux of the release itself.
That's where Braddock Run is different. Named possibly after a tiny little river in Pennsylvania, or maybe not, the five-track EP is characterised by the same Lindsay Lowend lyricism, all those refraining melodies and addictive, looping progressions — take the splashy chords in the calypso-inflected 'Smokestacks', a sunny number that also retains the emotive soft synth goodness that Mendez is known for. Little avenues of guitar work with the synth, different melodies folded into each other, perhaps most noticeable on the virtuoso, math-leaning melodies that skip and skitter in 'Blue Nun'.
High reverb on the synths give a gossamer backdrop to tracks on Braddock Run, providing a suitably seasonal scattering of frost and fog to the atmosphere. 'HΓΆfner' displays this nicely, with a stutter of sharp synths and a repeating tract of delayed guitar disappearing as if down a sparkling wintry lane into the low, sheltered hills beyond. We even get a taste of outdoors on opener 'Horseshoe Crab' with its crispy field recordings. Mendez is no stranger to field recordings; his redubs can be found on Vimeo, where he once uploaded an exercise in foley in the form of redubbing environmental noises in Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Contrasting with the cool temperatures, but wholly coexisting with them if not codependent on them entirely, is the warmth of indoors. You can't be cosy without the cold. It evokes a table set with breakfast items, a pluming mug of coffee, a steamed-up window with a vista of some hivernal scene.
The thudding rounded tones of the beat throughout provides this — especially the slightly distorted drums in title track (and final song) 'Braddock Run', crackling like glowing hearth-bound firewood — as does the bass, creating unobtrustive grooves like a quilted coat. Simplicity rather than elaboration in the beat-and-bass foundations provides the stable conditions to press pause on your day and be caught in the music.
There's a sense of end-of-the-day resolution, a kind of sunset finality, on the EP's closer, the meldoy skipping upwards but falling back with melancholy-tinged contentment. The guitar on this track exemplifies the guitar on the entire EP, the melodies affectionately layered over each other, each a copy but differing just so. Compare it with 'Horseshoe Crab', with its introductory feel, its Animal Crossing gentleness.
While the feel of Braddock Run may be more "real" than Mendez's previous endeavours, the sense of everyday escapism, of familiar fantasies, is heightened with his command of the fretboard, working with synthetic elements to create a composite daydream of chilled — and chilly — proportions.
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Listen to Lindsay Lowend's Braddock Run EP all you like over on Bandcamp. You can even buy it on a name-your-price basis.
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The cover photo for the EP is by Detroit-based artist and designer Nick Tilma, who also designs some wonderful furniture.
⌾ LISTEN TO HORSES, GHOSTLY ON THE HILL BY MARY LATTIMORE ⌾
What a piece of scene-setting, no, scene-conjuring music. Ostensibly and most lazily labelled "harp music", this new song from LA-based harpist Mary Lattimore takes the harp to dizzying new heights, escaping the confines of earthly planes to float and jostle among unnameable ethers in fury of string bending and hefty effects experimentation.
With its emotive title, 'Horses, Glossy on the Hill' stamps into being an equine freedom, acheiving this majesty with shining strings, a procession of tumbling percussive sounds like so many disembodied hooves. Wild flutters of the harp jump and play, buck and canter; even a slice of chiptune finds its way in there, glowing with retro warmth, an animal cosiness emanating from it.
Its final third is characterised by such heavenly sweeps of the harp, mingling with those same sounds but in reverse like otherworldly birds. It's a soundscape like no other, speckled and beglittered with pinprick minutiae on the highest registers of the harp, with dark rumbles of synth eliciting mystery behind the playfulness as the scene fades. The horses, galloping off, disappear from view.
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'Horses, Glossy on the Hill' is taken from the new Mary Lattimore album, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada. It's releasing 6th October via Ghostly; pre-order it on Bandcamp, if you like.
This interview with Barry Leitch, composer behind dozens of games including Top Gear, is the inaugural feature in our EXP series, showcasing the stories behind some of the world's most iconic and interesting video game soundtracks
Top Gear was one of the first racing games to appear on the SNES in 1992. It was also one of the best racing games for the nascent console. Fans of the game often cite its simplicity: choose a car (some are faster than others); what country you want to represent; automatic or manual; and away you go.
And, though probably true for any two-dimensional racers, the way the cars whipped and screeched around corners — while in reality they were stationary in the middle of the screen — was exhilarating. It was transportive, too, whisking young gamers to places they’d barely heard of let alone visited — Bordeaux, Hiroshima, Stockholm — with the help of neat scrolling backgrounds.
But Top Gear fans also cite its music. Combining rock sensibilities with breakneck Europop, the soundtrack featured driving rhythms (no pun intended), with pulsing drums, juddering low slung bass and leads that spun sparkling, simple melodies — as well as some famously glittering arpeggios — Top Gear sounded good. Really good.
"It was decided that I would spend the week either sleeping in the office, or on some programmer’s living room floor"
Top Gear was developed by Gremlin Graphics, a now defunct studio then based in Sheffield, U.K. The game's musical maestro was Barry Leitch. Born and raised in Strathaven, a “nice wee town… full of the usual Scottish influences” just outside Glasgow, Leitch, 51, cites video games as an early creative outlet.
“Me and some of my friends who got computers around the same time simply embraced them,” he says. “I sold my first game soundtrack when I was 15 years old, just shy of my 16th birthday. That was 35 years ago.”
Seven years later, Leitch began working on Top Gear.
Was there a brief? “Fuck no! ‘Gremlin are doing a driving game, can you go down and do the music for it’ — that was the brief,” he says, adding that he had no real idea about the tracks or locations that would be involved in the game. Levels were still being made at the time Leitch joined the team.
Far from any luxurious studio endeavour, creating the music for Top Gear sounds like a much more rock-and-roll experience for the game development world.
“Gremlin were about an hour away from where I worked in Dewsbury, too far for public transport, and I was too poor to own car,” Leitch says. “So it was arranged for me to be delivered to Gremlin, and that I would spend the week either sleeping in the office, or on some programmer’s living room floor.”
In this Sheffield base, he acquainted himself with what he had to work with. The development manual was in Japanese, but one of the programmers found a source code file for the music, which Leitch started “messing around with.”
“I put in an arpeggio for my favourite chord progression (the one in the Vegas piece), just an arpeggio going up and down to test how many octaves I had, how things sounded etc. Just making sure shit worked,” he continues.
“I found the echo command [which was] amazing!” he says. “I set it to maximum and it sounded glorious.” But there were limits to the technology at the time: the echo was using all the memory, and there would literally be no game with the echo set so high. Leitch settled with minimum. “It sounded ok…” he recalls.
"I wrote a few soundtracks for games where you have to kill everyone, but it takes a personal toll. There is no upside to shooting games: It's all just death"
Aside from the new technology in synthesising music, constraints in the number of channels that could be used at any one time led to innovation in composition. The title theme, for instance, features a lead arpeggio with a secondary arpeggio playing between the gaps; what with the short notes and additional arpeggios of the bassline, the drums and lead melodies, it feels more like five or six channels, not just four. “Electronica always sounds great on sound chips that use wavetable,” Leitch notes.
That glittering, echo-heavy sound, prevalent throughout the Top Gear soundtrack, was quite groundbreaking at the time. “It was the first sound chip to have a built-in DSP (Digital Signal Processing) effect like this, and I totally dug it,” Leitch notes.
After the arpeggio, he extended the melody, adding drums, bassline, and more arpeggios. “By that time it was Tuesday afternoon.” He'd arrived on Monday, and that was one track.
The sheer reality of having to spend so long not only composing music, but also programming it, meant Leitch would have been spending more than a week crashing at the Gremlin Graphics. The solution was to recycle some of his previously written music.
Leitch grabbed pieces he’d composed for Lotus Turbo Challenge 1 and 2, both for the Amiga, and essentially remixed them, taking the choppy, somewhat harsh and staccato sounds of the Amiga soundtracks into the more glimmering aesthetics of Top Gear. The Top Gear title theme, for example, is the Lotus 2 completion music but remade with new, better hardware.
“I got finished in time to go home on Friday.”
The legacy of Top Gear continues today. It could be down to the gameplay, but key to any visual or motor memory is audio. It could also be down to the genre of the game itself, which is one that Leitch can get on board with.
“I like writing music for racing games,” he says. “I like a lot of powerful and energetic music, that whole melodramatic edge to things, I love that stuff, so writing a bunch of tunes that make it sound like you could win the championship any second, or go straight into a tree at 200mph is a lot of fun.”
Shooters — less so. “I wrote some game soundtracks [for games] where you had to kill everyone, and it takes a personal toll on you, because the outcome is always the same,” he says. “[You’re] killing everyone. There is no upside to that: It’s all just death.”
Specifically, Top Gear enjoys a large fanbase across South America, in particular Brazil. Leitch puts it down to price: “When the first PlayStation was released, it must have been too expensive for these markets, and as such the SNES had an extended lifespan,” he says.
The popularity and renown of Top Gear in the region has seen the game spiritually remade in the form of Horizon Chase Turbo (2018), by Brazilian developers Aquiris Game Studios, again with Leitch on music-making duties; he’s also given talks in Brazil, at Feevale University, Novo Hamburgo, to name one venue.
Being a game that’s almost 30 years old now, memories of Top Gear for many people — whether they’re from Sao Paulo, San Francisco or Surrey — come complete with nostalgia.
“You have no idea how many times people have told me heartwarming stories about how they used to play TG with their brothers, their fathers, their sisters, their mothers while they were growing up,” Leitch says.
“Those melodies have become theirs now, and when they hear them, it instantly transports them back to that time.
“It’s a beautiful thing to be a part of that.”
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EXP is an interview feature series dedicated to sharing the stories behind some of the world's most iconic and interesting video game soundtracks, and showcasing the composers who created them.
| EXP000 ← | | EXP001 | | → EXP002 |
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For a split of reworked tracks taken from both Top Gear and Horizon Chase, head over to Barry Leitch's Bandcamp.
Highlighting negative with glossy, unobtrusive columns of bass, Inwards aka Kristian Shelley throws handfuls of sparkling synth into the air — clean clusters of beeps, tracts of phasing fizz — for his latest track ‘Raindrops’. Throughout, amorphous vocal samples snap like elastic, burst with watery clarity, matching the track’s title.
Though lacking its techno thump, ‘Raindrops’ recalls the freestyling antics of the synth at work in the Chao Lobby theme from Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. Perhaps it’s that carefree reminiscence, or maybe it’s the sheer cartwheeling joy involved in Shelley’s soundscape, but ‘Raindrops’ is like a sonic expression of innocence.
The warm bass envelops you, the vocal samples and synth spin like toys, the percussion hopscotches along like a clapping game, then there’s that nostalgic 8-bit element. Shelley's track inches very close to being a small portal opened on an idealised, pixel art remix of your childhood home; yet at its core yawns a bristling void of detachment, an inane world-weariness.
Behind the eminently evocative title of this track, JodΓΆvade (aka Jodie Primadonna) conjures more than the simple action of deliberate social denial. The world of ‘It’s Not Ignoring You If I Turn My Phone Off’ is expansive and glacial, the bass boom providing a gloopsome contrast to the playful mundanity of the modular synth chords and melody, padding like phantomatic footsteps throughout; the wibbling, wordless vocal chops like unheeded words of someone you wish not to heed. (Why do any of us turn our phones off, right?)
An additional clatter of beats and the angularity of those synths give JodΓΆvade’s track an excavatory feel, the twist and turn of cavernous corridors — the sonic shoulds and coulds of life.
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'It's Not Ignoring You If I Turn My Phone Off' is out on Contre Jour Records. You may alternatively stream and/or purchase the track on JodΓΆvade's Bandcamp.
Pulsing to the velcro snap of hip-hop infused drums, yawning ambient synths roar at the base of fiveighthirteen’s ‘some questions are answers’. But being the chimeric track it is, there’s more to it than that. It’s a mix of sensitive drones and legible grooves, an urgent, infiltrative bassline, a shuffling math rock spirit, with an indefinable synth melody played in soft, mythic sweeps.
The bass becomes distorted, rampaging in a steady gallop in the track’s most propulsive parts, with officious vocal samples (reminiscent of Public Service Broadcasting) topping it off like a psychedelic trip through archival ruins centuries from now.
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'some questions are answers' is taken from fiveighthirteen's upcoming album a fever of rays due out on 13th August.
To hear something from Iceland that isn’t solely gently electronic or obviously introspective is a huge gulp of fresh air. ‘Look At Pretty Things’ begins with a mesmeric fumble through tracts of bubbling synth, an oscillating hot tub of thick relaxation, but this serves to lull your ears into a state of malleability.
For Icelandic musicmaker Γgir, clearly this is the ideal ground on which plant his bumper crop of barrelling breakbeats. These come into earshot like a mob of metallic beetles — the snarling snap of snares slapping the air while the kick drum thunders and quakes.
Γgir’s background as a hardcore drummer gives the percussion a living-and-breathing feel; the sense of direction in the beat, despite its speed, is expertly crafted. Overall, ‘Look At Pretty Things’ is a cross between an alien abduction and a sweaty basement gig: weird, but 100% worth it.
ΓUCE expands on the original, accenting it with shivering sweeps of the keyboard, adding clinking percussion, straining strings and a foundation of mythic drone. The original is synonymous with Guru-Guru, a character from both games, whose sudden angry face must be etched in the minds of all who saw it; accordingly, the fragile atmosphere of ‘Guru-Guru’s Windmill Waltz’ pries open the polygons and takes a look inside the fraught mind of this unhinged character.
What a wonderful noise this is. It’s a frenetic collection of objects thrown together, a series of chaotic collisions, unidentifiable percussion and cartoonish sound effects, that gives Gralitsa’s track its spark. Titled ‘Morning Bustle In The House Of Intelligent People’ (as if that wasn’t enough), this truly is the horror of waking to last night’s detritus, the morning routines, pouring cereal into bowls.
Like a sort of Dadaist folk song, it’s a soundtrack of all the switches and buttons we press, the doors and compartments we open and close, all little noises we make on our way to working our way out of the door, and how we deal with that. A semblance of calm composure wavers behind in the form of wobbling synths, and finally the day begins: chords reverberate out of earshot, resonating onto the street.
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Gralitsa’s ‘Morning Bustle In The House Of Intelligent People’ is taken from their album Little Mosquitos Are Sleeping This Night. Stream and purchase it on Bandcamp.
The organ is the original drone and ambient instrument from way back when, let’s be honest. It’s a wonder that it isn’t used in more tracks, as Matthias Gusset has expertly employed it in ‘Farewell’. The track’s chord progression is simple enough, a switching oscillation between two chords, then another, in cyclical rotation from start to finish. This provides a soft backdrop, dim lighting, for the emotive action that follows.
Melodies rise up from the bright drone of ‘Farewell’, at first like birdsong, or the dappled light of the sun twinkling on bough-shaded paths, and then in more prominent, layered stretches, calling out from the grove and its summer flowers and its butterflies a warm, pastoral goodbye.
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Taken from Matthias Gusset’s Inbetween Birdsongs, out now on Radicalis, which you can purchase and/or listen to on his Bandcamp.
The natural world. That’s the overriding force at work in ‘Bird Ambience’ by Berlin-based vibraphonist and composer Masayoshi Fujita. But that — signalled by the track’s robust percussion, tumbling marimba and keen ceramic reverberations — is only half of the story here. For all of its organically glossy and glomping collisions of beater against solid object, there’s a smattering of inorganic glitch, sharp and harsh, zooming around within; an ancient computer of some forgotten century still whirring brokenly amidst vast trees and choking vines. And all around, ghosts — the nebulous vocals of singer Hatis Noit cooing through the canopy.
The sheer space between each knock, each tap, hit and plonk — and the constrasting soft, sheafing ambience of each successive contact — gives Fujita's ‘Bird Ambience’ an empty-yet-full feeling: Navigating the voidsome depths of woods, its trees and the heavy air between the trunks and branches. There’s an essence of kankyΕ ongaku or “environmental music” here, with textural elements reminiscent of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s ‘Time After Time’. There's less in the way of melody, of rigidity, Fujita's track instead creeping along almost at random, solidly and yet as if it were mist.
‘Sail On’ is an apt title for jazz guitarist Juhan Ongbrian’s masterful piece of music. Not only does this song seem to travel effortlessly on gentle waves of sound, like a heavenly sailboat, but it seems to be a spiritual and sonic successor to ‘Albatross’ by Fleetwood Mac.
For sailors, to kill an albatross while at sea was considered a bad omen; so the equally oceanic ‘Sail On’, perhaps, is the sequel here — in the timeline that no albatrosses were harmed, at least.
While the bass guitar (Austin Smith) creates a gloopy groove of stepping notes, like the sturdy materials of a seagoing vessel, or the shape of waves; the slow, calculated drums (Adrian Michael) represent the rhythm of the sea itself, the gentle tick of water lapping against the hull. Ongbrian’s guitar — dropping in at 1:38 — is expansive, a veritable sky of sound, exuding endless possibilities and a moment of bliss all at once.
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You can stream or download Juhan Ongbrian's 'Sail On' from whichever service on this list is your absolute favourite.
We always have time for Ymir. This time, the ambient artist is carving out the slow, aching sounds of molten rock in ‘Magma Ocean’. Starting quiet and thin, the ebb and flow of synth in this track soon rises above its initial glassy waves, seeming to summon the Earth itself in the thick, textured triumphs of sound.
Keeping it harsh around the edges, Ymir still allows a crystalline gleam to shine through like the glow of magma itself, while piling on a beautiful, billion-year-old breadth to the billowing swells of his music, showing a complexity at work in the depths of the seemingly simple track. Vast but very minute.
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Check out more of Ymir's unreleased electronic work on his SoundCloud.
'Monoc' by Japanese digital artist and producer Satoshi Kanno appears like a electronic spectre on a nocturnal city street. Sparse chopped vocal samples merge with flickering percussion, skittering on a bed of bumping kicks and the soft bursts of distortion. Its angular structure feels mechanical, industrial almost, as the track moves into a moody footwork-infused midsection.
The splicing sounds and fusion of elements in 'Monoc' was a result of Kanno's approach to the track.
"I was inspired to compose this piece to reflect on the ways and meanings of communication between all things in our time," he says to yes/no via email. "The noise in the song refers to nature, animals, plants, machines, and humans, and even though each form remains the same, when they overlap each other, they transform into another form."
The track ends up as a "collective form", each element adding to a whole that brings together its fragmented parts to a sonic sum: a reflection of how an individual is ever-transforming, reacting to their situation, the times in which they exist.
There's more meaning behind the title 'Sixth Week' than an arbitrary measurement of time. It actually refers to when UK producer Visco City actually created it: during the sixth week of the country's nationwide lockdown due to coronavirus.
As such, the track bristles with anxiety — tracts of clattering metallic sounds, gnawing and insectoid, appear crushed and crinkled like the sound of a car crumpling sped up a hundredfold. But there are hints of hope here, optimism (or nostalgia for "old times") spelled out by a melody dancing over it all, thick warm plumes of bass enacting a sonic embrace.
The focus, Visco City tells yes/no via email was "to try and highlight the contrast between something anxious and something beautiful." And though shattered lines of chaos spark through 'Sixth Week', in essence it is a lush soundscape of better days, a slice of blue sky beyond the giant clouds.
