Posts Tagged ‘Ambient’

Elkeyes – Elkeyes

Posted: 23 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Bearsuit Records – 23rd January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a little while since our favourite label for oddball quirky stuff, Edinburgh’s Bearsuit Records, tickled our eardrums with new noise, but they’re kicking off 2026 with the eponymous debut from Elkeyes, a new addition to the roster. And suffice it to say, it’s a good fit in their catalogue of curious compositional contortions. And since we have Wolf Eyes and Hawk Eyes, KATSEYE, and, er, Eagle Eye Cherry, why not Elkeyes? It’s an interesting choice of creature, but one which seems appropriate for this intriguingly leftfield musical project – although my eternal internal game of Mallett’s Mallet leads me to conclude that Elkeye Brooks should also be a band name. Christ only knows what they would sound like, but surely it would be no stranger than this twisted concoction, which should be filed in the ‘experimental electronics’ section.

‘Trial’ conjures the disorientating bewilderment of Kafka’s labyrinthine novel via the medium of sonic collage which brings together warping synths, clinks and clatters, disembodied, ghostly voices, sweeping string and echo-laden horns which add the most incongruous – yet somehow fitting – jazz element imaginable, plus fizzing blasts of extraneous noise.

‘Yamanote Line’ twitters and flaps its way into the realms of ambient abstraction, building atmosphere and an air of the uncanny. It’s not dark in the horror sense, but sets the nerves jangling, particularly in the quieter passages which evoke bleak moorlands and deserted cemeteries. This is the beauty of abstract, ambient, instrumental works, works which are free from the constraints of conventional form: rather than direct the listener in a specific direction, they encourage the opening of neural pathways and invite the formation of visualisations and ideas by free association. The scraping, trilling string sounds, stark piano chords, and random chimes which reverberate through the haunting ‘Thalassophobia’ (the fear of deep bodies of water, such as the ocean, seas, or lakes’).

Ironically, ‘The Dark Forest’ is the most light-hearted piece on the album, skipping oscillations and chiming chanks like dappled sunlight skips around this way and that on the album’s shortest track, although it does fade to darkness with a gong-like rumble and some dissonant chimes at the end.

There are vast expanses of minimalism. Soft tones drift. Time sits in suspension. Voices ring out – operatic, ghostly – amidst spacey swirls of phase. ‘Breathing the Blues’ is barely there at times, and the final cut, ‘Fallen’ is similarly sparse.

Over the course of these eight tracks, Elkeyes wander into some dark places, riven with static and low-level rumbles which disseminate tension, scrape at the cranium, gnaw at the intestines and fuck you up by stealth. In places, this feels like a slow unpicking of the seams of musical conventions. It’s sparse and transportive, hypnotic and simultaneously tense and soothing. Elkeyes are all the contradictions. And that is reason to love them.

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Cindytalk – Sunset And Forever

Posted: 20 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 30th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Cindytalk has been going almost literally forever, at least in terms of the life cycle of bands. A brief scan of my own archives reveals that the last time I wrote of Cindytalk was way back in 2013, covering A Life is Everywhere, released on the esteemed experimental label Editions Mego. The musical vehicle of Scottish musician Cinder, with an ever-shifting supporting cast, Cindytalk has been in a constant flux and perpetual evolution since the project’s formation in the early 80s – emerging from the post-punk scene and exploring every direction since, a career defined, as they put it, ‘by a continued process of disintegration and regeneration’. This is the very essence of the avant-garde, which was built on a manifesto that said that its function was to destroy the old to build the new. And implicit within that concept is the need to destroy its own creations in order to progress. Cindytalk has very much espoused that ethos over the course of the last forty years or more, with a career defined by perpetual reinvention.

Described in the press blurbage as ‘a labyrinthine opus, one that returns to the themes of the sacred and profane that have rippled through all of Cindytalk’s recordings’, Sunset And Forever opens with the eighteen-minute exploration which could reasonably be described as a (dark) ambient work. And it is dark. Spectral voices and spirits haunt every second of this unsettling drone-led work.

‘Labyrinthine opus’ is a fair description for an album which begins with a sprawling eighteen-and-a-half-minute ambient monolith, where falling objects cascade in caverns of reverb before slowly undulating drones gradually grow and turn. At times dense, at other more nebulous, around the mid-point, the scraping trickle of ‘embers of last leaves’ turns into a darker place, and is ruptured with percussive crashes and unpredictable extranea, while haunting voiced fade in and out through the swelling churn of abstract noise. This first piece, alone, feels like an album.

With seven tracks and a running time of around sixty-mine minutes, Sunset And Forever takes it time in exploring sonic contrasts, with graceful sweeps of watercolour synth washes underlaid with scratches and hisses and harder, uneven textures, the sonic equivalent of cobblestones underneath a velvet rug – or somesuch. Put another way, the soft and gentle is rendered uncomfortable by something altogether less soft or comfortable beneath, and hidden beneath a pleasant surface, and those hidden elements are reason to tread cautiously or risk twisting an ankle. It’s almost as if each track contains two compositions overlaid, a kind of collage or a palimpsest of a gentle ambient work and an altogether less gentle noise construction.

On ‘tower of the sun’, the dissonance and angularity rises to the fore to make for a skin-crawling ten minutes, while ‘my sister the wind’ screeches and scrapes, shards of drilling treble buffeted along by a train-track rumble.

The sound – and the meaning – of Sunset And Forever is forever just beyond grasp. For as much as the sounds and textures rub against one another and create discomfort, as a whole, it’s vague, indirect, hazy. It concludes open-ended, with questions unanswered and leaves a sense of uncertainty.

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Machinefabriek – Spelonk

Posted: 12 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Crónica – 20th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

As time passes, our tastes change. For some, they narrow and become more cemented, more deeply entrenched. There’s a broad acceptance that people become more conservative as they grow older – which may explain why, with our ageing population, we – that’s the western world – has become more in favour of conservative values, such as low tax and a belief that the past was a golden age in which hard work was rewarded, and of course, music was better. There is certainly more than a grain of truth in the boomer stereotype. And as a Gen X-er, I’ve observed people I grew up with, and /or have known for many years become set in their ways and their listening habits, locked in the 90s in their musical tastes, and becoming increasingly churlish about the youth of today and the like.

I consider myself fortunate to be surrounded by friends and acquaintances, both in real life and in the virtual world, who are deeply invested in new music. The fact I get sent new music of all kinds from around the globe is only half of the story, as it would be so easy to sweep vast swathes of it aside to listen to, and review, nothing but goth, contemporary iterations of post-punk and new wave, grunge, and reissues. In fact, I could devote my entire listening time and run a website dedicated to nothing but reissues and still be incredibly busy. It would probably garner a huge readership, too. But no: I am constantly encouraged to listen to new music, and the fact of the matter is that I thrive on it, and never fail to get a buzz from new discoveries. As such, since I began this journey as a music writer, my horizons have broadened beyond a range I would have ever imagined.

A measure of this is that my first encounter with the music of Rutger Zuydervelt, back in 2014, was marked by a most unimpressed four-star review, in which I said that Stay Tuned was ‘a bit of a drag’. While I don’t feel particularly inspired to revisit it now alongside my writing of this review, I feel I would likely have been more receptive to its longform minimalism now.

Spelonk is not quite as long in form – three compositions spanning a total of forty-two minutes, and sees Zuydervelt taking some time out from his dayjob to indulge in the act of creating for pleasure – or, perhaps, more accurately, creating out of the need to experience freedom, to feel that metaphorical – and perhaps literal – sigh of release.

As he explains, ‘Most of the music I make nowadays is commissioned for film, dance, or other projects. And I love it — it’s the best job in the world! — but sometimes I have to pull myself away from it, and make something purely for myself. My 2004 release Omval was one of these works, as is now Spelonk. These projects are always made in short bursts; once I start creating, things fall into place quickly, as if the ideas were (unknowingly) already there and just needed to get out of my system.

The three tracks that comprise Spelonk (simply titled I, II, III) are built with “hardware jams” that I recorded with my live setup. It’s all quite hands-on, with effects pedals, an oscillator, and electronic gadgets. The magic happens when combining different recordings, layering them, and hearing what happens. Listening is always a favorite moment in the process, with a welcome element of surprise. I guess it’s all about creating alien landscapes — alien also to me too — that are exciting to explore.’

‘Alien landscapes’ is a fair description of these sparse works, constructed with layers of ominous drone. On ‘Spelonk II’, there are chittering sounds which scratch like guitar string scraping against a fret, or perhaps a ragged bow dragging against a worn string, but by the same token, untranslatable voices come to mind. The drones are eerie, ethereal, and hang low like mist or dry ice: it’s not nor merely an example of dark ambient work – there is very much a 70s sci-fi feel to it, hints of BBC Radiophonic Workshop emerge between every surge and crackle as slow pulsations reverberate among the unsettling abstraction. Over the course of the track’s eighteen minutes, there is movement, evolution, and just past the midpoint, there is a shift, where trilling organ-like notes and digital bleeps emerge, evoking recordings from space travel, and, as rippling laser sounds begin to burst forth, vintage sci-fi movies and 70s TV.

There are moments of near silence as ‘Spelonk II’ drifts into ‘Spelonk III’, also eighteen minutes in duration. Here, clanks and bleeps bubble and bounce and echo erratically, unpredictably, over a backdrop of low hums and reverberations. The low-end vibrates subtly but perceptibly, and while the experience is not one which instils tension, the cave-like digital drips and sense of space, as well as darkness, is not relaxing. You find yourself looking around, wondering what’s around the corner, what’s in the shadows. And while there’s no grand reveal, no jump fright here, the second half of ‘Spelonk III’ grows increasingly murky and increasingly squelchy and unsettling.

Over the album’s duration, Spelonk grows in depth and darkness, becoming increasingly dark, strange, and unsettling. Rutger Zuydervelt makes a lot out of very little, to subtle but strong effect.

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Bell Barrow – Saltire

Posted: 7 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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16th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

2026 is certainly off to an interesting start: did anyone seriously have what looks quite feasibly the first move in World War 3 on their bingo card? Consequently, the level of noise has simply exploded. There is shock. There isn’t much awe, but there is bewilderment, there is panic, and infinite speculation. And infinite noise.

Thankfully, 2026 is already offering up some interesting noise on the musical front, and for my money, the most effective way to tune out all that other noise is by turning off the TV, putting the phone down – or better still, switch it off and leave it in another room – light some candles, pour a drink and listen – properly listen, and engage, with some new music.

Saltire may not be the most soothing soundtrack to push aside all of the external turbulence, an obvious balm to calm a psychological spasm. In fact, it’s pretty grim at times, a big blanket of darkness which drifts and envelops, riven with top-end trilling whistles and a host of wide-ranging elements, both sonic and stylistic, which clash hard. But relaxation isn’t necessarily what the Dr ordered. Sometimes, the best remedy is one that shocks the system to the extent that all the other shit is displaced.

The band say of the album, “Through a time-based, panoramic view of past, present and future, the album’s composition is a dissection of familial cyclical patterns of violence, abuse and addiction, and whether supernatural events or one’s own choices impact fate. Each track is a voice spanning multiple dimensions and time frames of reference. Is our eventual destruction predetermined and independent of will? Or can we control the course of events through determined pleas at salvation?”

Right now, it doesn’t seem that many of us have any control over anything, particularly global affairs, and while some aspects of history do seem to be repeating themselves, this moment in time feels like a huge rupture in the flow of modern history. And all we can do is watch as things unravel, and at pace. It’s terrifying, and anyone who isn’t scared is deluded or simply burying their heads in the sand. But taking time out to bury my head in the sand for the duration of an album is necessary. And clocking in at over seventy minutes, this is a decent slab of time to pursue this objective.

From the outset, Bell Barrow’s Saltire brings some uncomfortable noise. ‘Death Lullabye’ is dark, droney, unsettling and uneasy. In contrast, the frenetic noise rock explosion of ‘Breath of an Acrobat’ sits in the field of the wild angular noise of, say, Daughters, while at the same time introducing a frenzied jazz element, and propelled by black metal drumming, but with the treble cranked to the max. ‘Cor Orans’, too, is a frantic blast of lo-fi gothy metal. This is tempestuous stuff, and with the treble up in the mix, the sound slices the top off your head, while at the same time slamming you in the gut repeatedly with a lump of wood.

Wide-ranging would be one way of describing this expansive exploration, which ranges from drone and ambient to New Age, from prog to post-metal.

The seven-minute ‘Beyond the Labyrinth’ is quintessential weird darkness, warping, droning, while the nine-minute behemoth that is ‘Sybian Interval’ builds dense, billowing clouds of dark noise, rumbling, swirling, heavy, oppressive, but rent through with screams of treble and whines like a dentist’s drill, which are counterbalanced by soft, vaporous watercolour sweeps. ‘We Reek of Utopia’ arrives in a muffled package of irony before the squalling assault of the title track applies scissors to the brain in a wild explosion of jazz-metal discord served with a heavy helping of ‘what the actual?’ And this is good. This is healthy. Music should challenge. Art should challenge. Saltire challenges on many levels: there are no songs to speak of, and the pieces veer wildly in stylistic terms. ‘A Carrion Call Rings Out’ plunges into heavy industrial noise, and it hurts.

They do threaten ‘an obvious tension and release feel to the style’, and they deliver on that, although the tension is significantly greater than the release, proportionally speaking. Saltire offers no pause for reflection, no sigh of relief, no time to simply sit back and reflect: it swings between atmospheric states most unexpectedly, most dramatically. It’s hard work, but at the same time elevatitive and revelatory.

By no means an easy album, Saltire offers angularity – and some significant reward.

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Bell Barrow - Saltire - Cover Art

Gareth Jones – 53_StOlaves : Response

Posted: 5 January 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 5th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Mortality Tables’ Impermanence Project has grown legs over the course of the last year, and has offered some remarkable, striking, and intensely personal responses to the theme. And as the title of this latest addition to the expanding body of work emerging under the project’s auspices alludes, Gareth Jones’ 53_StOlaves : Response is a response to a response, so to speak, adding layers of interpretation but also a certain kind of dialogue to the project.

The original St Olaves (St Olaves : Catharsis) was recorded label owner and project curator Mat Smith and released in June, and stands as one of the most intense and deeply personal pieces, a churning whorl of noise distilled from a field recording made by Smith at St. Olave’s, Hart Street, London. Amidst it, there are footsteps, voices, all vague and barely audible in the overwhelming wall of sound. The accompanying notes relate, ‘For a brief moment, you settled into silence. I said that I loved you again. It seemed to sink in who I was and why I was calling. It would be the last time that I truly connected with you, and I am convinced that despite the blur of the drugs and your Alzheimer’s that you understood.

‘The moment lasted barely a couple of seconds during our nine-minute call, but it felt like an eternity. You began saying that you were about to be taken away for tests, but you didn’t know what the tests were. Except they weren’t tests: you were being taken to theatre.

‘Two hours and five minutes after our call, at 1405, you passed away during surgery.’

It hits hard.

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And so we arrive at 53_StOlaves : Response, a field recording made by Jones while on holiday in Greece. He writes, ‘I was moved to create a response to St. Olave’s in the spirit of impermanence understood as, viewed through the lens of, transformation.’

53_StOlaves : Response is a similar duration – meaning it contains just over nine minutes of buzzing, jarring waves of background noise. It glitches frequently, the volume suddenly surging unexpectedly after an ebb, tapering to an elongated organ-like drone before altogether more optimistic-sounding ripples emerge. It has a wistfulness, a certain air of melancholy, but over time, this too dissipates, leaving gentle, dappled ambient hues with understated beats fluttering to the fade.

If St Olaves : Catharsis is the soundtrack to raw anguish and the howl of loss, the staggering bewilderment at the fragility and brevity of life, 53_StOlaves : Response feels like the emergence of acceptance over the passage of time. And this is where Response really comes to add to the theme of impermanence, and it feels like a subtle reassurance that while we likely never necessarily ‘recover’ from those deepest losses, that the wounds will forever remain psychological scars, the pain does ease, eventually, through, as Jones puts it, ‘transformation’. Nothing lasts forever. We transition. We transform. 

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Ulver – Neverland

Posted: 22 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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House of Mythology – 31st December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Ulver’s fourteenth studio album is described as ‘a journey into undiscovered lands’, and promises ‘more traditional song and production structures’; than the preceding three, as well as marking ‘a new chapter in the revered Oslo band’s history’. By this, they explain that “With Neverland we embraced a more ‘punk’ spirit – more dreaming, less discipline – freer, quite simply”. For a band which started out black metal before shifting towards electronica and ambience, this does seem like another substantial shift, at least on paper. This is encouraging, as some recent releases – not least of all The Assassination of Julius Caesar had seen them push quite some way into pop territory, and not in a good way.

It begins promisingly enough: ‘Fear in a Handful of Dust’ presents a collage of tweets and chirrups, jungle birdsong and a suitably bombastic spoken word narrative, which sounds quintessentially sampled, reverberate across atmospheric ripples and washes of synth, paving the way for some melancholic neoclassical piano work on ‘Elephant Trunk’. Glitches and static haze cut across this as atmospheric electronics build, and before long we find ourselves in expansive electronic post-rock territory, the likes of which sits neatly alongside the likes of Nordic Giants.

The transitions are subtle, and the changes creep up on the listener in such a way that one finds oneself nearly halfway through the fourth track, ‘People of the Hills’ to the nagging awareness that this is some quite upbeat trancey dance tune which doesn’t feel in any sense out of place. I mean, it’s not fucking Pendulum and there’s a meaty bass groove and some rather pleasant progressive stylings going on, but it’s a bit pop, a bit commercial-sounding, too.

‘They’re Coming The Birds’ blurs the lines still further: the samples are warped, the synths cinematic, the bass in places a deep, dark post-punk groove, but the beats veer from gothy electronica to more club-orientated fodder. In contrast, there are some magnificent widescreen ambient moments to be found, as on ‘Horses of the Plough’ and ‘the evocative and stirring ‘Quivers in the Marrow’, while ‘Pandora’s Box’ is an exploratory noise work which delves deep into dissonance amidst a swirling quasar of sound where Krautrock meets late 70s early 80s industrial. But then ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ returned to some pretty naff ‘90s new age dance tropes and it feel corny and cheap. There are dudes all over tinkering away with expensive gadgetry in the back bedroom and trying it out to twenty people at EMOM (Electronic Music Open Mic) nights up and down the UK and around the globe creating stuff so, so much better than this. And perhaps this is the frustration with not only Neverland, but Ulver’s work more broadly: some of their compositions are great, absolutely outstanding, rich in atmosphere, big on texture, the concept and execution so perfectly aligned, but a similar number are just lazy and frankly shite.

Neverland is definitely an improvement on The Assassination of Julius Caesar and the Sic Transit Gloria Mundi EP – which deterred me from bothering with the next few releases – but it’s still very hit and miss, with the emphasis on very here. Experimental and varied are one thing, but this is simply wildly uneven and unfocused.

In their summation, they proffer questions as to what Neverland actually is: ‘Pop music from in-between worlds? A sonic hallucination? Or better: a collage of dreams. It’s up to you’. It’s generous of them to leave it open like that. A collage of my dreams would be a lot scarier and more intense, and would consist of buildings collapsing, ruins, cars crashing, being late, being lost, being chased. Neverland certainly isn’t that. It seems that in pushing the question to us, they’re trying to avoid the question of their own identity crisis. Come on then, Ulver, what is it? What is it supposed to be, and is what you’ve given us what you intended when you set out? Is it?And is it punk? Really? Really?

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Falling You – Metanoia

Posted: 17 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Projekt Records – 1st December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Having recently written on the retro qualities of Lowsunday’s latest release, the latest hot landing in my inbox is from another act which is preoccupied with a previous time – and who can blame them? I am painfully aware that old bastards like me constantly bemoan the shitness of the now while reminiscing about the golden era of our youth, and it’s no different from boomers still banging on about The Beatles and the music of the 60s and 70s as if time stopped when they hit thirty or whatever. There is a lot – a LOT – of exciting new music coming out right now, and much of it is pushing boundaries in unexpected directions. I for one will never cease to excited by this. But there is a significant amount of music emerging that draws its primary influences from the eighties and nineties, created by artists who simply cannot be drawn by nostalgia. Falling You are a perfect example.

Metanoia is pitched as being for ‘fans of 1980s 4AD dreampop (This Mortal Coil, Dead Can Dance), ‘90s shoegaze (Slowdive, Lush), or the darkwave / ethereal / ambient-electronic releases of the Projekt label (Love Spirals Downwards, Android Lust). It’s quite a span, but the fact is that this is a release with its inspirational roots well in the past. It pains me to be reminded that 1995 is thirty years ago when it feels like maybe a decade. The cover art of previous releases very much state shoegaze / dreampop, and while this album accompanied by altogether moodier artwork, which may in part serve to reflect the album’s title, it’s nevertheless hazy and evocative at the same time. ‘Hazy and evocative’ would be a fair summary of the album itself, too, and the dreamy / shoegaze elements are countered by some really quite unsettling spells of rather murkier ambience.

It starts strong with the bold swell of steel-stung acoustic guitar and a strong vocal – I’m not talking about a Florene Welch lung-busting bellow, but a controlled and balanced performance that really carries some resonance, and it’s mastered clear and loud… and then things swerve into a more electronic, almost dancy territory. Immediately it’s clear that this is going to be less an album and more a journey, and ‘Demiurge (Momento Eorum)’ immediately affirms this with its spiritual incantations and sonorous, droning rumblings.

‘Alcyone’ is the first of the album’s ten-minute epics, and it uses the time well: that is to say, with shuffling drums, spacious synths and layers of lilting vocals, it’s very much distilled from the essence of The Cocteau Twins, and slowly unfurls with an ethereal grace. A delicately-spun pop song at heart, the extended end section tapers down to a softly droning organ.

While the atmosphere is very much downbeat, downtempo, understated, one thing which is notable is the album’s range: ‘Ari’s Song’ is built around a soft-edged cyclical bass motif, around which piano and synths swirl, mist-like, the drums way in the distance, and even as a disturbance grows toward the end, it’s so far-away sounding, and the song itself, beyond that ever-present bass, barely there, and the same is true of the dank, dark ambient echoes of ‘Inside the Whale’. If ‘Ariadne’ is another shimmering indie tune hazed with fractal electronic ripples, the second ten-minute epic, ‘They Give Me Flowers’ provides a suitable companion piece to ‘Alcyone’, swerving from a brooding country and folk-tinged song with hints of All About Eve, and the album’s final track, ‘Philomena’ effectively completes the triptych, pulsing along gently and dreamily before slowly tapering away to nothingness. It’s a fitting conclusion to an album which at times is so vaporous and vague, it’s barely there – which is precisely the design. But in between the hazy drifts and particle-like waftings, there are some beautifully atmospheric and utterly captivating songs with strong leanings towards the dreamy pop side of indie. In terms of achieving an artistic objective, Falling You have absolutely nailed it with Metanoia.

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Klôvhôvve – öljud

Posted: 6 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Dret Skivor – 5th December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

This last week or so has been good for noisy, weird, abstract, experimental stuff. It’s pure coincidence, but these things to very much arrive in waves. There’s no thyme nor reason to it: Some weeks I’ll find my inbox abrim with guttural metal – and I’m by no means complaining – but sometimes I will crave noise, and there is none. Not proper noise, anyway. That said, this isn’t abrasive, full-on noise, but a work of abstract ambience dominated by field recordings, mostly of birds and billowing winds.

The last klôvhôvve release, which came out in the spring of 2024, was recorded live in Nottingham just a few weeks previous, and similarly this one was recorded live in November of this year. That’s about all you’re likely to learn with a dret release, although the accompanying notes are generous in their praise to the album’s contributors: ‘Thanks go to the wonderful animals and nature of Hammarö whose sounds you can hear being manipulated by klôvhôvve’. This is laudable: we don’t thank or celebrate nature nearly enough. There are gulls aplenty here, among other creatures less obvious by their calls (at lest to me).

It begins with the rumble of thunder, and it grows closer and more menacing. And then comes the rain. I assume it’s the rain. I’ve heard enough of it in the last couple of months. It feels like it will never stop raining. Again. Öljud rumbles and creaks and billows: a lot of this sounds like heavy rain and high winds, conditions which simply make me want to hibernate rather than reconnect with nature. There are quack and quarks, and all kinds of trilling sounds. Nothing much happens – if anything, really. It doesn’t need to.

Is it ok to drift off to an ambient work? I would have to argue that when listening to a studio work that’s particularly tranquil, it’s a compliment rather than an insult. Öljud is subtle, rumbling. Not a lot happens, and what does happen takes place slowly. Very slowly.

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Ov Pain – Free Time

Posted: 22 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 / A Guide To Saints – 7th November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Free time? What’s that? Who actually has free time anymore? Something seems to have gone awry. Every technological advance promises more leisure time: from the industrial revolution to the advent of AI, the promise has always been that increased productivity through automation would give us more free time. So where the fuck is it? I don’t know anyone who isn’t constantly chasing their tail, running just to stand still, who doesn’t feel like they’re losing the plot or on the brink of burnout simply because the demands of working and running a household is close to unmanageable, and making ends meet is a major challenge… and the stress suffered as a consequence. N

Ov Pain – the experimental duo consisting of Renee Barrance and Tim Player seemingly scraped and made time to record this album, a set of live improvisations (saving the time required to write and rehearse compositions), whereby, as Tim explains, ‘We recorded four different synthesizers – two apiece – straight into a computer pulled from a skip.’ This is how you do it when there’s no free time and no spare money. Although not explicitly detailed in Tim’s commentary, these factors are quite apparently central to the album’s creation, and by no means unique to Ov Pain. There’s a reason many acts peter out when the members reach a certain point in life: jobs and families mean that creative pursuits require some serious drive to maintain.

Tim adds, ‘One thing that is important to us is the immediacy and economy with which it was made and how that immediacy and economy becomes the thing itself.’

For all of its expansive soundscapes and layered, textural sensations, there is very much a sense of immediacy to Free Time. But, by the same token, for an album recorded quickly, it certain makes the most of time, in terms of space. There are long periods of time where little happens, where drones simply… drone on. The sounds slip and slide in and out, interweaving, meshing, separating, and transitioning organically, but not without phases of discord and dissonance.

The first track, ‘Fascia’ – with a monolithic running time of nearly eleven minutes – is a tormenting, tremoring, elongated organ drone, soon embellished with quavering layers of synth which warps and wavers, .it; s like watching a light which initially stands still but suddenly begins to zip around all over. It sits somewhere between ambient and extreme prog, with some intricate motifs cascading over that monotonous, eternal hum. Towards the end, the density and distortion begin to build, making for a climactic finale.

‘Slouching Toward Erewhon’ tosses in a neat literary allusion while bringing a sense of bewilderment and abstraction to proceedings, before ‘Comparative Advantage’ slowly pulses and trills, then crackles and buzzes, a thick surging swell of noise which is uneasy on the ear. And yet, the seconds of silence in the middle of the track are more uncomfortable… at least until the throbbing distortion bursts in atop stains of feedback and whirring static.

It may have been building for some time, but this is one of those evolving sets which after a time, you suddenly come to appreciate has expanded, and gone from a fairly easy drift to a heavy-duty drone assault.

Over the course of the album’s seven pieces, Ov Pain really do push the limits of their comparatively limited instrumentation. ‘Slander’ is a squalling, eardrum-damaging blast of gnarly treble that borders on extreme electronica, a straight-up assault on the ears and the mind. It hits all the harder because there is no let-up, and the frequencies are harsh and the sounds serrated. Around the mid-point, it goes darker, gritter, more abrasive, making for a punishing six minutes. Further layer of distortion and screaming noise enter the fray. It’s not quite Merzbow, but it’s by no means accessible. The final track, ‘Pusillanimous’ presents seven minutes of slow-pulsating ambience, and is altogether more tranquil to begin with, but before long, there are thick bursts of distortion and overdrive, and low rumbles heave and grind in ways which tug at the intestines. I feel my skin crawl at the tension.

Free Time is an album of surprises, and, more often than not of discomfort. It’s the sound of our times.

AA

AA

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The Azimuth Tilt – Alignment

Posted: 21 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Sinners Music – 1st October 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Sinners Music – the label established by electronic music maestro and one-time music shop owner, Ian J Cole, continues to offer up new music that’s interesting and unusual. There are some context where ‘interesting’ is somewhat dismissive, diminishing, and people of a certain age will remember snooker legend Steve Davis being given the nickname of Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis ironically… although the double irony emerged that he was genuinely interesting, as his work with The Utopia Strong abundantly attests. Here, my use of ‘interesting’ is neither ironic nor dismissive: it’s meant sincerely, as there is no specific ‘house’ style or overt genre specificity evident. This is one of the reasons why boutique microlabels can be worth following – you never know quite what you’re going to get from them, but you can guarantee if won’t be ordinary. And this release by no means ordinary.

As for The Azimuth Tilt, their bio informs us that this is the work of ‘a solo ambient electronic project exploring the liminal spaces between sound, memory, and landscape. With a name drawn from the alignment of a real to reel tape head, the project orients itself toward the unseen—subtle shifts in perception, emotional resonance, and the hidden geometries of the natural world… Blending atmospheric textures, glacial rhythms, and immersive sound design.’ There are no clues as to who this is the project of, but it matters not, and in fact, the less we know, the better. This is the joy of abstract ambient works: all you need is the sound, and all you need from the sound is to let it drift, to carry you away. And this is what Alignment does.

On a certain level, it does very little. On another, it is a quintessential deep ambient album. Alignment features just six compositions, but has a running time of some fifty-seven minutes. The soundscapes which define it are sonically rich, with soft, drifting, cloudlike contrails merging with lower drones and contrails. In combination, filling the entire sonic spectrum, Alignment does a lot.

From nowhere, halfway through ‘An Unqualified Person’, a raucous sax breaks out.

And the layers build. Against scrawling spacious drift, it’s quite a contrast. And then there’s some subtle piano intervention, and from hereon in, the piano and sax alternate in leading. It’s nice… and not in a turtle-neck top kind of way. It’s nice but… a little strange. But ‘The Exquisite Space’ crackles and swirls abstractedly, with some supple motifs rippling and intertwining with a mellow mood exploration which arrives at more sax. Always more sax.

This seems to be a dictum The Azimuth Tilt are happy to follow, although it’s melted into the echo-soaked atmospherics of the final track, ‘And the Band Played On’. Alignment is not a dark album, but it’s one which feels unsettled, uncomfortable, unsure of its destination – and whatever it may be, the journey is worth the exploration.

AA

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