A fortuitous splurge in the outpourings of this planet's best musical space-farers demands a pre-launch briefing for would-be audio outlanders everywhere. So cast aside for a moment your anthemic chorus lines, middle eights, and repeat-to-fade verse threes (with interweaving chorus harmonies) and strap yourself in for the ride of an inner-lifetime. For here are the very best post-ambient solar-stewards to guide your own personal listening shuttle through the outer-reaches of song and sound.
When Cameron Stallones says his music is "pretty committed to the true psychadelic ethos of mantric ideals", you tend to wish the 26 year-old safe passage to next dimension - because if there's anything about this world of which you can be certain at the moment, it's that it is not going to be gentle on our under-valued dreamers. Thankfully, Stallones' fourth long-player issued under the Sun Araw monicker is a veritable force-field generating spectral refuge fo the ears and mind. With the record's sparsley placed pockets of density, it genuinely feels like you're island hopping in a sparkling ocean of tuneful drone between luscious outcrops of trans-musical terrain. Sun Araw: Ancient Romans by alteredzones
Julianna Barwick's The Magic Place is a respirator for the mind. The intersection between place and time, technology and nature, is the setting for this modest yet astutely ambitious post-ambient recording. The intimacy of Barwick's vocals are perfectly counterbalanced with a cathedral-scale grandness and a deft reinvention of the echoing musical landscape, which is replete with present-day characters and experiences - rather than some swooning period cliche in flowing white full-length doilies. The careful placement of interweaving refrains at either end of a long and resonant hallway delivers the listener to a place you'll instantly fondly remember and long to return to again and again. Julianna Barwick - The Magic Place by Mistletone
Get Lost, Mark McGuire's follow-up to 2010's Living With Yourself, is a full-length album of shimmering guitar-synth motifs, assembled (and then disassembled) into song-like structures which rise up in the middle of an ocean of sound then gently slip back beneath the blueness to reveal an unbroken horizon. You almost need to ask yourself, "did you just see that?" McGuire's ability to develop authentic and unforseen textures from an instrumental array which can sometimes lead to, in lesser hands, a one-dimensional guitar-loop drone assault on the listener, is astounding. Our chosen selection below represents an early "incantation" of Another Dead End from Get Lost and gives precious glimpses into the early inner-workings of a true resonance craftsman who invites us to "get lost" in sound.
Julian Lynch's Terra, the follow-up to last year's weirdly compelling yet wholly laid-back Mare, arrives with the warming full-body embrace of a deep yawn, wiping sleep and other sounds from its eyes, and embarks on what can only be described as the kind of noise-jam you would make if you awoke in a strange and remote mansion and started playing drums and piano in your pajamas. Even Lynch's surprisingly up-in-the-mix nasally falsetto is perfectly cast alongside a veritable playroom full of other toys - all of them high performing state of the art musical instruments played almost entirely by Lynch himself. Who'd have thought that harmonising saxophones and a banjo had such right of place in an ambient soundscape such as this? Wake up to the music and majesty of a new day.
Now to launch this ambio-listening-pod truly out to the furthermost outer reaches, we ask you please to step aboard this daringly collaborative, genuinely universal, musical mission accepted by one artist and his namesake telescope to render a singular soundscape for the vision of our cosmos. Ben Greenberg, aka Hubble, delivers a carefully crafted ambient sound-space set to deeply resonating fret work as part of his new long player, Hubble Drums'. This cut, "Hubble's Hubble", dares spawn a soundtrack to the almost unbelievable cosmic imagery captured by The Hubble Space Telescope.
A fortuitous splurge in the outpourings of this planet's best musical space-farers demands a pre-launch briefing for would-be audio outlanders everywhere. So cast aside for a moment your anthemic chorus lines, middle eights, and repeat-to-fade verse threes (with interweaving chorus harmonies) and strap yourself in for the ride of an inner-lifetime. For here are the very best post-ambient solar-stewards to guide your own personal listening shuttle through the outer-reaches of song and sound.
