Journeys in Sound & Music
The guitar is an instrument for all seasons, but there is just something especially alluring about it as the waning days of summer give way to the golden light of autumn. In that spirit, here is a round-up of six excellent albums some of which released earlier in the year and some still to come…
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Gondwana Records is an independent record label founded in Manchester, England by composer/musician/producer Matthew Halsall in 2008 to shine a light on the talent he heard in the local clubs. Since then, it has become blossomed into a genuinely international label with additional offices in Berlin and London and a roster that boasts such well-regarded artists as GoGo Penguin,…
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Ishmael Cormack is a British sound artist living in rural Somerset in South West England whose practice as focuses on the “gathering and weaving found sound with acoustics”. His first label release was Ammil on Krysalisound which I happily featured here when it came out in April. Since then, Cormack has gone on to release three more…
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The days are growing shorter and the last leaves of autumn are fading embers that will soon disappear. The transition of fall into winter seems especially dispiriting in a pandemic year, but there is still comfort and consolation in the anodyne effects of music. The six albums that comprise this journey come from artistic voices…
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After a relatively sparse 2019, it is very nice to see a flurry of new activity over at hibernate recordings, the Yorkshire-based ambient label founded a little over a decade ago by Jonathan Lees. The catalyst has been something called the 2.6 challenge, a charitable initiative intended to fill the void left by the cancellation…
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Affectionately named after a tiny room in Belo Horizonte, Brazil where a group of friends would gather to quietly rehearse and record new ideas, La Petite Chambre Records has been publishing a uniquely warm and colorful style of experimental music for over a decade. The label has created their own space for artistic expression in…
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Since its inception, Harry Towell’s Whitelabrecs label has been nothing less than prolific with release after release that seems to bring out the best in any artist that appears on the roster. In fact, Whitelabrecs made more appearances in my 2019 retrospectives than any other label. Given the creative impetus that represents, perhaps it is…
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When I first began to really diving into ambient music I was surprised just how much of what I liked what what was classified as ‘drone’. The name just seemed off-putting. For the uninitiated it appears to promise something monotonous, something to zone out to rather than tune into. As I quickly learned, however, in…
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By my count, Whitelabrecs has come out with nearly 70 releases in the four years since it was founded by Harry Towell (aka Spheruleus). For the first three, the label strictly followed a set formula in which each release came out on vinyl-effect CDs in a limited run of 50 copies. This year, Towell has…
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Stationary Travels 