Ambient
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Here is edition two of The Moderns OSMR. As I explained last week, my goal here is to share as many new releases with you as I can. At the same time, I hope these one-sentence reviews help our artists friends promote their work at a uniquely difficult time.Be well, and be good to one another.…
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I’ve been giving a lot of thought this week to what kind of small role The Moderns can play in light of the COVID-19 crisis. It’s clear that artists around the world are suffering, economically and otherwise. Please do what you can to support them financially. Buy their recordings. Buy their merch. Many have just…
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London duo Hanging Valleys is out with a new EP that is near breathtaking in its tenderness. Thom Byles and Michael Phillips describe their music as “ambient-indie,” which is both accurate and woefully insufficient as an expression of what they do. Byles and I connected by email last week. How did you meet, and what…
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The title of Jason T. Lamoreaux’s latest is more than a poetic turn of phrase. That House of Light is in fact the office or Dr. Light, with whom Lamoreaux has been receiving mental health treatment. “I thank Dr. Light for his incredible talent as a doctor and caregiver,” he writes in the album’s notes.…
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There has been a lot written about the ability of sad music to trigger memories, which can either make us feel better or worse. A 2016 study run out of Durham University in the U.K. and Finland’s University of Jyväskylä found that participant reactions tended to fall under three categories: “pleasure, comfort and pain.” For…
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The 73-minute piece that makes up Rafael Toral’s new Constellation in Still Time was originally composed in 1992. A guitar performance of it appears on his debut Sound Mind Sound Body. At the time, “AER 7” was a continuation of a series he wrote between 1987 and 1990. He says in the album notes that…
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