Los Thuthanaka sounds like nothing else. It's joyous, jagged, and sounds like it's being blasted out of a broken Bluetooth speaker in your neighbor's backyard - it's glorious.
Lachlan Turczan's practice sits in the space between physics, optics, and environmental art, as he works with lasers, water, mist, and custom-built lenses to produce sculptures made entirely from light.
Eileen Collins stated, 'The space shuttle flights were normally one to two weeks, and we were very busy. It seemed like we were always behind schedule. When I listen to music, I really get into it, so listening while I'm working doesn't work.'
Butterfly unfolds across four unique versions of the same song, each exploring different genres and emotional depths while maintaining a cohesive melody and lyrics.
Guests on Lavender Networks include Zola Jesus, Brothertiger, Naliah Hunter, Lipsticism, and Angel Marcloid's wife, Liverfire, and sister Sling Beam. A more off-piste guest, Americana singer Jennifer Holm, also features.
Her slowly shifting synthesizer compositions and quiet, meditative pieces for acoustic instruments continue to inspire a deep immersion in their audiences, and her recordings and writings have influenced multiple generations of musicians worldwide.
Galen Buckwalter, a 69-year-old research psychologist and quadriplegic, participated in a brain implant study to contribute to science that aids those with paralysis. The six chips in his brain decode movement intention, allowing him to operate a computer and feel sensations in his fingers again.
Tim Zha is looking for the soul in the machine. While some might hear Auto-Tune as masking a singer's humanity, the London-based artist filters his vocals to highlight technology's inseparability with our notions of self. This is ground well-trodden by Afrofuturist techno pioneers, Atlanta trappers, and PC Music hyperpoppers; for Zha, Auto-Tune represents what he calls the "coincidence of human subjectivity and the networked machine system."
When people talk about the quintessential music of early 2000s New York, it's often scuzzy new rock bands like The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the burgeoning dance-punk scene led by LCD Soundsystem, or the city's ever-booming hip hop movement. But there's arguably one album that in its own quietly revolutionary way, may just be the most significant work of that city's fertile period: Basinski's The Disintegration Loops.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Laurie Spiegel for the site. As preparation for the interview, I spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks revisiting Spiegel's records, most notably The Expanding Universe, her 1980 masterpiece that blends synth experimentalism with early examples of what would eventually be called ambient music, and algorithmic composition techniques. It's a marvel that sounds both nostalgic and cutting-edge at the same time.
His first albums under his own name, 1995's Earth & Nightfall and 1996's cult classic Ten Days of Blue, were blissful-sounding ambient techno records that took the melodic sensibilities of the local scene to their cosmic extremes. Every beep and blip was in harmony with a lush string line, the rhythms less like breakbeats or programmed drums than trance-inducing hammered dulcimers.
In the five years that they've been active, it sometimes seems as if Purelink are dissolving right before our eyes. They've never again released anything quite as corporeal or propulsive as their debut EP, which paired visceral dub techno with rolling drum'n'bass. On their 2023 debut album, , glitchy drums crackled in a pastel haze, and last year's was even more ethereal; the trio's individual identities melted together under cover of amorphous arrangements that suggested fogbanks, blizzards, and other zero-visibility conditions.
Black metal has been chummy with ambient music since birth, but Ulver's commitment to the genre is something else. Their debut album, (1995), released when singer Kristoffer Garm Rygg was 18, inspired a whole universe of nature-drunk folk metal; meanwhile, Nattens Madrigal (1997) is a prime example of the most scabrous and distortion-encrusted recesses of black metal. Between the two was the ambient Kveldssanger (1996), which proved they could work well at a lower altitude, but that still didn't prepare anyone for 2000's Perdition City:
Take the title of The Spiritual Sound as a kind of syllabus, and you'll find a heady list of musical reference points that Agriculture aim to exalt. The jarring intros of black metal songs that make you feel like a portal to Hell has opened inside your headphones. The sound design on later Scott Walker arrangements meant to conjure a Biblical plague. The slow, majestic build of post-rock epics that hold back their climax for maximum transcendence.
The new album from Joshua Chuquimia Crampton takes its name from the Andean ceremony Anata, which gives thanks for the harvest before the rainy season. Made up of seven dense and distorted instrumentals, the record is the California-based Aymara musician's attempt at capturing the energy of ceremonial music not some rosy, polished version, but how it might sound recorded on a phone, clipping and all.
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