Posts Tagged ‘Nature’

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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Watch: ‘Your Eyes Are Mirrors For The Stars’ by ATMAEN

Posted: 15 November 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Italy-based melancholic ambient artist ATMAEN has released the song ‘Your Eyes Are Mirrors For The Stars,’ taken from the artist’s new EP Lullabies From The Dark Ether out on December 12th via Inertial Music.

The song is inspired by (and dedicated to) someone who’s dear to the artist who has “eyes made of stars.” Someone who can look beyond and deeper, who can give shape and color to invisible energies and fantasy worlds. It’s also an invitation to follow our own inner vision, trusting our intuition and heart to navigate the unknown and still feel that we are a part of the whole.

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ATMAEN is a project created by Valentina Buroni. She’s a singer, a songwriter, and a researcher in the field of sacred ritualistic chanting and of self-transformation through sound and music. Her songs are prayers, invocations to the spirits of nature, sacred chants to connect with the spiritual dimension, medicine chants, sonic journeys and meditations to expand the consciousness. She creates dreamlike, magical, otherworldly atmospheres in her songs. She is influenced by Celtic music, folk music from Western Europe, ritualistic chants of contemporary indigenous cultures, electronic music, ambient music and movie soundtracks.

Valentina is trained in early music singing, modern singing, Irish traditional singing, overtone singing, Gregorian chant singing. She also plays the frame drum. She is a dance therapist and a professional holistic operator with more than 20 years of experience in the use of voice and singing for personal growth and well-being.

She has released 7 full-length albums with different music projects (Dragonheart Records, Standing Stone Records, Inertial Music) ranging from heavy metal, to electro-acoustic ambient, to world folk music. She has played big festivals like Triskell Celtic Festival, Nomad Dance Fest, and Wave Gotik Treffen.

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ATMAEN Photo 2 by Roberta Lo Schiavo(1)

Watch: ‘Midnight Pad’ and ‘Sun Halos’ by Paris Music Corp.

Posted: 14 November 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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As we approach winter and the solstice draws closer, Texas-based electronic composer Paris Music Corp. a.k.a. John Andrew Paris presents two new tracks – ‘Midnight Pad’ and ‘Sun Halos’ – that juxtapose light with dark, similar to how night turns to day and to night once again.

Nature and cycles are themes explored on his new Ecotone album as he takes us on an electronic odyssey that is both deeply personal and geographically-inspired. This record is rooted in the artist’s relocation to his childhood home in Brownsville, South Texas, just miles from the border and the coast. Paris wrote, recorded, mixed and mastered this at Tarantula Studios over the past two years.

“’Midnight Pad’ was another late-night writing excursion using some mind expansion influence. Another piece that started with my phone and ended up with hardware synths and drum machines in the studio one it was built. And ‘Sun Halos’? Creating a song just happens sometimes. Brian Eno always talked about his main theory in that “music just happens”. It’s really like a magic trick sometimes when what you turn out is an earworm of a piece that is memorable,” says John Andrew Paris.

Originally from Austin, John Andrew Paris has spent decades creating music and collaborating with artists, including Arthur Brown (The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, perhaps best known for his hit single ‘Fire’), as well as DJ Rev Kathy Russell, DJ Lucas Ray, Catastrophe Ballet, Le Reve, Life’s Eyes, Beast of Eden, OBOYO and Don Wigwam.

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“The Ecotone album made sense to me because you have a transitional zone, where two different ecological communities or ecosystems meet and intermingle, often resulting in high biodiversity. I feel a lot closer to nature.. Some of my song titles reflect where I am. I actually lived in this area as a child and have come back to my roots,” says John Andrew Paris.

“A lot of these pieces were started on a phone app called Ableton Note. With this application you are able to scratch-pad a lot of cool ideas and then import them into you music workstation and finish them out. When I first moved to my new place I didn’t have a spacious studio setup and I wrote a lot just sitting up all hours of the night writing ideas on Ableton Note.”

Known for his cinematic and ethereal music, on this album, Paris Music Corp.’s music also shows its dark underbelly and futuristic imagination. Often with elements of 80’s darkwave and ambient soundscapes, his trademark sound includes heavily processed guitar and bass instruments locked into layered loops and further manipulated using software. Also employing live hand percussion, these dense soundscapes take the listener on a sonic journey to otherworldly places.

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Watch: ‘Mycelium’ by Mayshe-Mayshe

Posted: 29 September 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Mayshe-Mayshe has released new single ‘Mycelium’, and an accompanying video.

This is a song is about autumn and decay, rainy woodland walks, lonely adventures, and setting off on a journey at nightfall. (Snufkin setting off on a journey to be specific.)

It’s mellow, and we rather like it…

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Xqui – 17 Minutes (Menace Men RIP)

Posted: 14 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Mortality Tables – 1st August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The latest instalment of the ambitious and wide-ranging Impermanence Project curated by Mortality Tables is a document, as the artist explains, simply and succinctly: ‘This is the sound of my footsteps. I walk through some woods every lunchtime when I’m at work. I try to take a different route every day. The recording starts and ends at the office door. There are two gates which separate a lake – one of several – from the woods.’

This simple premise of recording a walk – a few seconds short of seventeen minutes in duration speaks on a number of levels: the first, in context of the project’s premise, is also the context of the walk itself – the lunch break at work. A brief window in which to seek separation from the work and the workplace. Too few workers really use this time as their own, with many scoffing a sandwich as their desk, or nipping to a canteen or a supermarket for a prepackaged meal deal, instead of something more beneficial to both physical and mental health. I must stress that I’m not judging, and it’s not easy, but as a walker myself, when I was office-based, I would make a point of getting out on a lunch-break, and now home-based, divide my day with a walk. This time out from work is but brief, but affords an opportunity to decompress, to recalibrate.

The fact the artist reports trying to take a different route every day is interesting. Treading new ground, or even walking a known route in the opposite direction, or otherwise questing for variety keeps things fresh, and opens one’s eyes to new sights. These things are often in the detail, but also change with the seasons, noting the changes in the colour of the leaves, a toadstool, hearing birdsong. The world is ever changing, and while work can all too often manifest as a groundhog day of ‘same shit, different day’ which often feels like ‘same shit, same day again – and what day even is it?’ the outdoors paints a different picture. Even when the realisation hits that it only seemed as though Spring was beginning to break mere weeks ago and now summer has past and the air smells of Autumn, and that nagging sense of another year having evaporated and life slipping past settled awkwardly in the gut – a soft but palpable blow which serves as a reminder of how short life is, the outward signs of the passage of time are evidence of being alive.

Listening to 17 Minutes, we get to accompany Xqui on their walk in real-time. They keep a decent pace, too, and as one tunes the attention, changes in echo, background sounds, the metallic scrape of a gate hinges, the different terrains underfoot, all become significant. There is traffic. There are few people, at least speaking along the way. I abhor having to listen to people’s conversations as I walk. And yet I find I’ve been unable to listen to music while walking since lockdown, and simply have to hear everything.

Although documenting a walk through woods, the backdrop to 17 Minutes sounds somewhat urban, or at least overtly inhabited, a setting where human presence dominates nature. A couple of minutes from the end, a gate swings and clangs shut. Although we’re not yet back at the office door, it feels significant. I even feel myself slump a little inside, feeling that passing through this gate – which in the opposite direction represents the opening up of a path to freedom – signifies the end of this escape. And with this, comes the hard appreciation of the fact that nothing last forever, especially not a lunch break.

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Watch: ‘Trick of the Light’ by Charming Disaster

Posted: 24 March 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Ahead of the release of their new album, The Double, Brooklyn-based goth-folk duo Charming Disaster have unveiled a video for the track ‘Trick of the Light’.

The Double invites listeners to step across the border of an alternate reality, where spells are cast, time travel is possible, plants are taking over civilization, and vampires lurk in the shadows. Adventures in the darkness lie beyond the threshold.

The album’s ten songs include ‘Black Locust,’ a lullaby about mortality; ‘New Moon,’ a magical nature ritual; ‘Trick of the Light,’ a reimagining of Bram Stoker’s Dracula; ‘Time Machine,’ in which Charming Disaster change the past and start over again; ‘Scavengers,’ a walk in the woods with vultures and bones; ‘Beautiful Night,’ a defiant response to struggles with depression; ‘Vitriol,’ a tribute to artist Thomas Little, who turns guns into ink; ‘Haunted Lighthouse,’ a swashbuckling sea voyage; ‘Gang of Two,’ a true crime adventure; and ‘Green Things,’ a love letter to what grows between the cracks (and its inevitable takeover).

The album features an array of talented collaborators. Co-producer Don Godwin, who has worked on Charming Disaster’s entire discography, contributed bass, drums, and horns as well as engineering and mixing. ‘Haunted Lighthouse’ features Broadway percussionist Mike Dobson along with circus composer Peter Bufano, who played piano and accordion and engineered the track at Cirkestra World Headquarters in Boston, MA (with additional tracking at Tonal Park). ‘Scavengers’ features cello recorded by Kate Wakefield of the duo Lung, who also created the string arrangement for ‘Beautiful Night.’ Stefan Zeniuk of Gato Logo contributed saxophone to ‘Green Things.’

In conjunction with The Double, Charming Disaster is releasing the second edition of their “oracle deck” (similar to a Tarot deck). The Charming Disaster Oracle Deck contains 72 cards (including 12 new cards for the second edition), each representing one of the songs from Charming Disaster’s discography. The cards feature illustrations commissioned from more than thirty different artists. The deck can be used as a divination tool, or as a visual accompaniment to Charming Disaster’s music. The duo themselves use these cards in their live performances to determine the set through the element of chance.

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04 Charming Disaster photo by Isaac Harrell

Nomad Tree – I: Awakening The Ancestors

Posted: 4 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 29th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Creativity can have immensely therapeutic effects. The psychology behind it is likely complex, if it’s even fully understood, but immersing oneself in something creative, be it music, writing, or visual arts seems to uncoil the mind in ways nothing else can quite manage.

With I: Awakening The Ancestors, described as ‘a profound journey through sound, blending experimental folk, noise, and shamanic practices’, Stuart Chalmers, under the moniker of Nomad Tree, presents ‘the culmination of an 18-month exploration from burn-out and self-doubt to discovering a new voice. Using feedback techniques, contact mics on frame/bass drums, amplified dulcimers, gongs, and percussion made from natural materials, the album creates a dark, hypnotic soundscape. Recorded in unique locations like Cathedral Cave and Luds Church, the tracks evoke a sense of ancient connection to the land and spiritual practice. It’s a cathartic release aimed at healing and altered states of consciousness’.

And so it is in Chalmers’ case, perhaps, that the creative process, paired with reconnecting in some way with nature, and with places which inspire a sense of ancient history, a time before religion as it now exists, before civilisation as we know it, even, has provided a sense of escape from the all-pervasive shit of the now.

I: Awakening The Ancestors consists of three longform pieces, each over ten minutes long, and these are compositions laden with dense atmosphere. ‘On Sorcerous Wings Take Flight’ is so dense as to be oppressive: heavy, thunderous percussion rings out across barren moorland and reverberates around thick forests. Winds blow and the very earth moans and mumbles. Darkness creeps ever closer, growing ever heavier. There is a sense of a presence, but, at the same time, the absence of anything which feels overtly human is conspicuous. Although the track’s evocation is ancient mists, my mind takes me to a most contemporary on-line discussion around the hypothetical question ‘If you were alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a bear or a man?’ It’s a talking point around women’s safety, but in the last year I have taken to going on ever-longer walks in a quest to be in nature, but away from people. As Brion Gysin said, ‘man is a bad animal’, and as unnerving as the unknown and the unseeable may be, the prospect of encountering other people is considerably scarier.

‘Seeking Through Deepest Fears’ careens into dark space with droning, melancholic string sounds, wheezing, rumbling, polytonal tension and low, slow-building layers, to which primitive percussion eventually joins. There’s an oddly psychedelic sheen to this piece as it settles into a hypnotic groove overlayed with what sounds like scrawling, scraping walls of feedback, and it lands somewhere between Black Angels and latter-day Swans in terms of the listening experience: intense, almost overwhelming, but also uplifting on account of the complete immersion it engenders.

If the liner notes imply a sense of progression, a narrative arc, or any sort of linearity, the actuality of I: Awakening The Ancestors confounds that expectation in its merciless gloom. With tribal beats bashing away, hard, ‘Amongst Forest Spirits Or Wild Beasts’ conjures a sense of tapping into something elemental. It eventually tapers away to silence amidst a clamour of chimes, leaving a sense of emptiness, and much to reflect on.

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Watch: ‘Hertan’ by Wardruna

Posted: 7 April 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Amidst Wardruna’s songwriting hibernation, the group resurface to offer a taste of their next album with the single release and music video for the song ‘Hertan’ on 5th April.

About the new single Einar comments: “’Hertan’ is the proto-Scandinavian word for ‘heart’ and that is exactly what we explore in this in this song and film. The duality of the heart with the rhythm, flow and pulse we can see, hear, and feel in nature and in all forms of life – and the more abstract idea of the heart, The rudder on the ship of emotions, our decisions, and our true desires.”

Once again, Wardruna teamed up with Finnish director and photographer Tuukka Koski for the video production of Hertan. Koski has previously directed Wardruna´s videos for ‘Raido’, ‘Voluspá’, and ‘Grá’. This time, the production mainly took place during some freezing nights in northern Finland at the island of Hailouto.

“It is always a true pleasure to create art with Tuukka and his colleagues at Breakfast Helsinki! His experience and eye for detail as well as the ability to always conjure up next-level material, is very inspiring to be part of. Three days, three locations, no sleep but a lot of heart. This is how it went down. Hope you will enjoy the result!” – Einar Selvi

You can see the result here:

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Photo credit: Tuukka Koski

Hem Netjer – The Song Of Trees

Posted: 19 February 2023 in Albums
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28th February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Something about ‘Elemental Cry’, the lead single from Song of the Trees struck a chord and resonated on a subliminal level. It landed with me at a difficult time, personally. Admittedly, most times are difficult, but some are more difficult than others. More often than not, music helps me through those times, and it’s not always the music I’m expecting. Sometimes, old favourites provide the least comfort and are simply too painful. Perhaps I was clawing for something spiritual, music that provided an escape to another realm. Truth is, I’m eternally seeking something. This sweeping, soaring epic channels something that goes beyond notions of derivative Nordic cosplay cal to forge something powerful beyond words.

This is a quite particular and specific thing about music: sometimes it’s not the music itself, but your state on receiving it. I was, and am, in a state, and words aren’t easy. They are a slog. I don’t want to be here, but must power on. And so that transportation, that being lifted to another place, is perfect in terms of needs. Combining heavy synth drone, spacious piano and metallic twangs, The Song Of Trees is tense and atmospheric. It twists at muscles and nerves as drones undulate, hover and hang in the dense air. As the title suggests, it’s rich and earthy, intertwined with nature and the elements, an album that evokes a sense of the vastness of the great outdoors, the space and freedom that instils life into our bodies, and has for as long as we’ve walked the earth. Only now, contemporary living has separated us from nature to the extent that to walk in woods, or to find a place unsullied by human impact feels like some sort of a special treat. This means that while it’s perhaps harder to feel an attunement to the natural world in daily living, experiencing it is something to be cherished all the more dearly. This, then, transports me from the dingy confines of my poky rectangular office space and to somewhere I can feel free.

Given the taster, and the album’s opener, the expansive ‘Void’, ‘Salt and Tears’ lands as an early surprise, being quite beat-driven and overtly electronic with something of a glitchy leaning that’s far from natural or organic. It’s powerful, and it’s all about the dominant percussion, which works well, although it’s not nearly as powerful as third track, ‘Eldur’: the beats are again dance-orientated, but the vocals are positively operatic. It’s a song that registers on a number of levels. In combining the natural, the earthly, the spiritual, and the ultra-modern, with technology-orientated sounds, this could be a clash if not handled with due care and sensitivity, but Hem Netjer create with a sense of balance and equilibrium, which in some way conveys our conflicting, divided existences.

I suppose there are elements of more mainstream artists as well as the likes of Zola Jesus and the wave of Nordic metal acts which seems to be emerging all blended together here, and these imbue The Song Of Trees with a power that’s greater than the sum of the often quite minimal parts. If ‘Freedom’ characterises the album’s more commercial moments, there are plenty more that carve a different space. ‘Elemental Cry’ arrives as the penultimate track with it thunderous drums and steely strings and its power remains undiminished, and it’s the clear highlight of the album.

And elemental is the word: The Song Of Trees has, despite electronic sounds being so integral, a purity that is rare indeed – and that’s both powerful and moving.

The six-minute closer, ‘Otherworld’ is epic in every sense: sparse in instrumentation yet ultimately vast and immersive, it makes for a strong finish to a strong album.

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Hem Netjer – Elemental Cry

Posted: 21 December 2022 in Singles and EPs
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James Wells

You’ll always find black metallers and pagan neofolkers in the woods. I don’t mean that whenever I go for a walk in woods near me that I happen upon people in cloaks and corpse paint lumbering around clutching instruments, but how often do you see a video where they’re exploring scenes of urban squalor or even indoors? Do you think any of them would last a winter out there – or even a night? Could they construct a shelter, do you think? Could they light a fire, or spear some wild creature to feed themselves, in those threads?

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I’d wager not, but Canadian trio Hem Netjer seem more the type to venture into the woods to commune with nature than to live as part of it, and the video captures them meditative contemplative, cross-legged on a large rock.

The last single from their forthcoming debut album, The Song Of Trees, scheduled for release at the end of February 2023, ‘Elemental Cry’ is dark yet somehow celebratory, with dense synths swirling about a thumping tribal beat and overlaid with tense strings and a soaring vocal performance.

The atmosphere is thick and murky, the production favouring the lower and mid-ranged that give the track an earthy feel, and it’s bold and cinematic and it doesn’t really matter if some of it feels a shade cliché with its lyrics about death and trees and moths, because it’s a ‘big’ tune in every way, not just the fact it’s almost six minutes long, and RavenRissy’s vocals are more operatic than folk, and are outstanding and send a shiver down the spine.

A strong song with a strong message, ‘Elemental Cry’ is pretty powerful work that reaches the primal depths of the psyche and speaks to senses long lost in the name of ‘progress’.

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