Ether

Delta

Constructs of Still (feat. KMRU)

Taken from 'I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night' LP/Download [ELP063]

Sublime debut of lilting sketches for guitar x synth by manc bosom buds Celestial, quietly resplendent in a classic vein of soft touch Balearic blues and kosmische hues that comes very highly recommended if you’re into anything from The Durutti Column to Vincent Gallo’s classic ‘When’ album or even the instrumental splendour of HTRK at their most diaphanous.

Bathed in moonlight, ’I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night’ is the gorgeous debut by childhood friends Celestial, arriving in the glistening wake of 2021 gems on the same label by Romance, Not Waving, Spivak, claire rousay & more eaze. Convecting a richly sanguine sound gleaned from a Sequential Circuits Sixtrak synth and Fender guitar with the results mottled to frail AGFA tape, it’s the modest and warm soul on display that speaks to a quieter side of the rainy city psyche, picking up a fine thread of etheric inspiration that leads back to The Durutti Column via Ry Cooder’s ‘Paris, Texas’ soundtrack and Iasos’ intoxicating new age, with a fragile, gauzy vision of instrumental songcraft ripe for getting lost in dappled fantasy.

Practically synaesthetic in their spatial sensitivity and psilocybic tactility, the six songs make a real virtue of reverb, echo and tender hiss that swaddles their lyrical phrasing with a cottony texture. Subtly but crucially favouring analogue enigma over digital clarity, their sound unspools with a kaleidoscopic, nostalgic quality surrendered in shimmering waves of bliss and back-of-the-eyes swirl between the hash haze of ‘Endless’ and northern gothic tone of ‘Lonely Weekend.’ Tape hiss resembles drizzle outside in the lowlit langour of ‘Hat Full of Rain’, and we can practically taste the petrichor in ‘The Perfumed Garden’, leading to ASMR levels of synth tingles with an unmistakeable northern melancholy of ‘At The Rivers Edge’, especially in its gloaming coda.

A reel low-key stunner.

Mastered by Alessio Natalizia

Buy!

CELESTIAL - THE PERFUMED GARDEN [ELP063]

Taken from 'Fringe' LP/Download (E064, Ecstatic 03/09/2021)

A gorgeous swell of intimate soundscaping from Felisha Ledesma on this simmering stunner for Ecstatic, despatching two extended, richly absorbing pieces weft from everyday detritius; synths, strings, voicemail, found sounds - hitting a similar spot for us as Ulla’s diaristic 'inside means inside me’ but with a more defined play of sound-as-light that gently and memorably tugs at the earlobes and heartstrings. 

Exploring a music of presence and ultra subtle inference, ‘Fringe’ is the 2nd release by Ledesma, student of Berlin's estimable Universität der Künste, following from a debut for Enmossed x Psychic Liberation earlier this year. Using AMQR - a software synthesiser built by Ledesma together with Ess Mattisson - both pieces here shimmer with elusive timbres that occupy a realm that feels lost between worlds - neither electronic nor acoustic, but more a sort of observational sound that radiates togetherness and warmth. 

Operating at insightful levels of synaesthesia, Ledesma poetically turns ostensibly humdrum sources into clouds of smoke - emails, voicenotes, walking along the water, a poem attached to an email, walking alone in New York during lockdown, going for a swim at sunset in the desert - all turn into a smudge of memory. When ‘Beamsplitters’ opens with a tangible human presence - a voicemail from a friend - it startles with its earthly pull, eventually getting lost in a tangled spool of found sound leaving just a trace of iridescent, intimate reverie. 

On ‘Golden Mirror’ Felisha gently diffracts a lonesome guitar phrase into a humming thizz with a steeply uncanny ability to jog the memory in a similar way to how olfactory stimulus can conjure feelings of nostalgia. It’s a trick familiar from an emergent new realm of lower case composers creating something like submerged, small scale symphonies that work counter to notions of classical excess or anodyne ambient, instead focusing on microcosmic, highly peronalised sort of worldbuilding that’s impenetrable, yet somehow entirely open.

Felisha Ledesma - Golden Mirror [E064]

To Remain/To Return

The concept behind this series is to present a series of binaural beats for brainwave entrainment. The user can then create playlists or sequences of these for meditation or relaxation.

These beats, or oscillations, are on a carrier tone of 216 hertz (an octave of 432). The monochord creates a drone in the background. The monochord is closely associated with Pythogoras. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochord) The tuning system with A equaling 432hz is also called "Pythagorean Tuning". -- sonicyogi.com

These oscillations are technically only "binaural beats" when wearing headphones. This is because the "beat" (wah wah sound) consists of two tones heard in the left and right headphone. However, they are still effective when listened to on a phone, computer, or other player, because the beat can still be heard. In this case it would be a "monaural beat" because it is being heard without headphones. In either case it is effective for brainwave entrainment.

From wikipedia:

"Brainwave entrainment, also referred to as brainwave synchronization or neural entrainment, refers to the observation that brainwaves (large-scale electrical oscillations in the brain) will naturally synchronize to the rhythm of periodic external stimuli, such as flickering lights,[1] speech,[2] music,[3] or tactile stimuli.

As different conscious states can be associated with different dominant brainwave frequencies,[4] it is hypothesized that brainwave entrainment might induce a desired state. Researchers have found, for instance, that acoustic entrainment of delta waves in slow wave sleep had the functional effect of improving memory in healthy subjects.[5]"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwave_entrainment

Read more about brainwaves and binaural beats here:
www.healthline.com/health/theta-waves

Download

Pythagorean Dream - 5hz Binaural Beat with monochord (Theta wave)

I Miss You

Stars Of The Lid - The Evil That Never Arrived

from Touched 3 by touched
http://touched.bandcamp.com/album/touched-3

Crystal (mixdown)

Strands

steve hauschildt 'strands'

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy


Dirty Beaches - True Blue

Track taken from the upcoming album 'And His Many Seas' by Moss Covered Technology...

Audio: Moss Covered Technology
Mastering: James Plotkin
Design: Daniel Crossley
Label: Fluid Audio
Release date: 30.04.18

'Sea #4' - And His Many Seas - [Fluid Audio, 2018]

http://brian-eno.net
Small Craft On A Milk Sea album released: 2 Nov 2010 (15 Nov 2010 in the UK)

Small Craft On A Milk Sea

Emerald and Stone

Brian Eno with Jon Hopkins & Leo Abrahams - Emerald and Stone (taken from Small Craft On A Milk Sea)

Everyone Is Here

Trio for Cello, Piano and Violin

from the album 'the man who died in his boat' available 2/4

grouper 'vital'

track 2 from "tumbling towards a wall"
LP out now
https://boomkat.com/products/tumbling-towards-a-wall

DIGITAL DIRECT: https://ullastraus.bandcamp.com/album/tumbling-towards-a-wall

soon at a store near uu

tumbling towards a wall

leaves and wish

Written and Produced by Agustín Mena
Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Studio (NY)
Photography by Alexander Kopatz
www.go70north.com
Archives66 // ArchivesCD47
Archives / 2020

life

Buy Vinyl/CD/Dig/Cass

Warmth - Roads

Written, recorded and mixed by Janek Sprachta at Einraum Studio Berlin.
Violin played by Susanna Lundgren. 
Mastered by Nils Frahm at Durton Studio, Berlin. 

Novembre

Watching The Snowflakes Fall

Buy Novembre

Boards of Canada - In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country

track from self-released album by @perila "i had a dream i don't remember"
https://perilazone.bandcamp.com/album/i-had-a-dream-i-dont-remember

big floor energy celebration.
floor as a blank canvas as grounding as a center to feel and stay connected with oneself. how floor touching the body and resonates trough the sound and voice.
______

suddenly autumn
slapped me in the face
grey zone
over?
no
but
words here unnecessary
we bear the silence
pouring coffee through the mouth
the vessel
i had a dream i don’t remember

Perila – This Story Doesn't Make Any Sense

Taken from Not Waving & Romance - Eyes Of Fate [E065, Ecstatic]
 
Not Waving combines with Romance on the free-floating grandeur of ‘Eyes Of Fate’ : nine tracks of mythological, Old Testament ambient.

The first new music from Not Waving since 2019 and the first pairing with label mate Romance 'Eyes Of Fate’ explores the fertile territory between secular and religious music that has long fascinated artists, allegories on the divine and existential bliss and terror in equal measure. 

From the curdled invocation of opener ‘I Bowed On My Knees’ to the enrapturing devotional of ‘While My Heart Still Beats’ to the final judgement of ‘Kneel For Mercy’, the album wrenches highly emotive textures utilising a blend of centuries-old chant styles and orchestration consisting of  chamber strings, tape loops and plangent processed sounds.

Ether

Ihortx