Back catalogue: Ambient/Drone

Review: Different Rooms finds its footing in the blurs between studio process and improvisation; lived space and constructed sound. Made across late 2024 and early 2025, it hears LA-London-Hamburgers Jeremiah Chu and Marta Sofia Honer fold field recordings, granular textures, and multi-layered viola sessions into a viscous yet meticulous shape. Core material stemmed from real-time editing and in-studio performances, interwoven with improvisations recorded back in 2023 alongside Jeff Parker and Josh Johnson. Compared to the outward gaze of their debut, Recordings From The Aland Islands, this second one turns inward, coming rooted in urban soundscapes: train stations, streets, domestic interiors.

Review: This new collaboration between Swedish producer Civilistjavel! and Lebanese artist Mayssa Jallad is both a conceptual inversion and a sonic ghost of Jallad's original record. Refracting material from her Beirut-focused album through sparse dub techno, Civilistjavel! transforms narrative-rich compositions into abstract, often beatless forms where Mayssa's voice floats disembodied in a fog of delay and reverb. Tracks like 'Baynana (Version)' and 'Holiday Inn (March 21 to 29) (Version)' feel haunted by memory, with structure hinted at but rarely resolved. It's a remarkable shift in context, but one that remains emotionally aligned. Civilistjavel!'s production avoids spectacle in favour of slow erosionivocal fragments hover, dissolve, re-emerge. Even more rhythmic moments like 'Kharita (Dub)' maintain an eerie restraint, built on slippery grooves and shimmering decay. Both artists are working far from their geographic homesiMayssa in Boston, Tomas in Uppsalaibut the result sounds uncannily unified. It's a record that holds grief and beauty in the same hand, illuminating the quiet force of Mayssa's voice and Civilistjavel!'s deft minimalism. Not so much a remix album as a parallel reality: austere, spectral, and deeply moving.

Review: Built as a continuous 55-minute suite split into nine movements, Marconi Union's The Fear Of Never Landing hears the duo recapture a state of exhilarating levity. Their 12th studio album, it finds them in refreshed head and soundspace, having come a heck of a long way since their 2003 debut Under Wires And Searchlights. The record emerged slowly over two years, during which the Manchester duo (Jamie Crossley, Duncan Meadows) grappled with creative uncertainty, reconnecting with their foundations through live experimentation. The catalyst came while scoring the cult 1975 film Downhill Motion, an experience that rekindled their affinity for cinematic composition and set the tone for this surefire introspection aid. From 'Eight Miles High Alone', a hypnotism which finds its inducer in sequencer-driven pulses, evoking isolation, weightlessness and quiet tension.

Review: OK. Let's face some facts. The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack to Drive is up there with one of the best scores ever put together. And that goes for the compositions of Cliff Martinez as much as the guest bands and artists drafted for the other songs. Where else are you going to hear Riziro Ortolani and Katy Ranieri's operatic overture, 'Oh My Love', and The Chromatics' low sung, mood-building electro tracker 'Tick of the Clock', side by side? The answer is, of course, nowhere. And that's just skimming the surface. Deeper inspection take us to some stunning pieces of ambient and drone. 'I Drive' is a remarkable example of gong bath on record, 'Skull Crushing' is overwhelmingly heavy thanks to its use of distant sound and up front quiet. It feels like you're in a pressurised chamber. We could go on, but that wouldn't save any room to mention the trophy piece - College and Electric Youth's spectacularly emotive synth stunner, 'A Real Hero'.

Review: Madrid duo Pablo Miron and Juan Vacas return with their second album, En Perpetua, which delves deeper into their signature decayed collage and psycho-acoustic soundscape while building on their debut Of No Fixed Abode. This time out they also embrace new creative confidence and the possibilities offered by a fresh Madrid studio and use violin, harmonica, voices, guitars, a looper, FM radio and diverse array of field recordings-from the Spanish countryside to exhibition sounds-to bring it to life. They craft eight re-pitched meditations that explore fractured music and rhythmic patterns which unfold through their distinctive, open-ended and immersive tonal journeys.

Review: Serbia's Abul Mogard inaugurates his Soft Echoes imprint - after many a career-spanning stopover with Ecstatic, VCO and Light-years - with Quiet Pieces, an inward-looking suite unearthing stillness and submerged emotions scraped from the edges of memory. Assembled from archival sketches and fragments inspired by a late uncle's collection of 78rpm classical and opera records, the album reimagines faded moments through manipulated samples played at altered speeds, filtered through effects, and folded into new compositions. The result is a dream-static fusion of past and present, where Mogard's own recollections blur with an avuncular other's. The pieces shimmer with spectral density and tactile distortion, edging into abstractions influenced in part by Phill Niblock's Boston Tenor Index; Mogard pushes into rawer and rawer dissonances over the record's course. Marja de Sanctis's cover photograph, taken at the Temple of Jupiter Anxur, captures that same interplay of decay, reverence, and resonance.