Ambient
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We should never take artists who also work as curators for granted. The ego (not to mention energy) required to make a lifetime commitment to art is considerable. When those rare individuals find ways to balance their own creative output with support and promotion for other artists, they deserve special recognition. Los Angeles-based Yann Novak…
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You may remember Scott Gray from a September blog post about his solo project The World Next Door. The musician, author, label runner and heaven-only-knows-what-else is releasing a new two-hour-plus album from Lunar Lemur, a character with a rather murky backstory, Dec. 31. Here’s how Gray tells it: “Lunar Lemur [is] a person (?) I…
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This November cassette/digital download release from solo artist NGC 4414 will absorb you and your surroundings like an audio black hole. The deeper you go into these seven tracks, the more ominous your world will grow. No matter if you’re on a park bench enjoying the sunshine or hunkered down in a windowless basement. This…
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Greece’s Vasilis Angelopoulos has a rich, dark ambient five-track cassette release for us called My Body, Your Temple. Recording under the name Conjecture, this tape will resonate well beyond the genre he’s best known for. Works like this tend toward the dramatic, which is fine provided the composer steers clear of melodrama. Angelopoulos has things…
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Artists have long sought to break down the barriers between themselves and those who enjoy their music. While some view that separation as fundamental to their method (or simply their ego), for others the desire to bridge that gap is always there. This summer, the team at Naviar Records presented an event dedicated to “exploring…
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The noise genre is sometimes criticized for its lack of subtlety, as if it were the death metal of electronic music. It is an unfair generalization of course, but you have to invest a good chunk of time in between a pair of headphones to hear it for yourself. Yavor Grancharov’s new 10-track cassette, recorded…
The Moderns 