Five records I’ve found myself returning to recently, connected less by genre than by the fact that each one does something I find difficult to neatly categorise. This is what I hear in them.
Lusine - Farewell (Melting Days LP) [Ghostly International]
I have a slightly complicated relationship with ambient music. At its best it can be completely immersive, but a lot of it feels more like an underscore to an environmental experience, creating mood and atmosphere without necessarily demanding your attention.
Lusine’s Melting Days is different. There’s enough diversity and inspired sound design across the album to keep pulling me back, but Farewell in particular has really lodged itself in my head. There’s an emotional weight to it that feels perfectly aligned with the title: warm, enveloping and organic, but with a buried kinetic energy that stops it ever becoming static.
Soft pulses drift in and out of focus, occasionally suggesting rhythm and tempo before receding again, leaving enough headspace for your imagination to wander. I find myself inventing little vocal fragments, melodic lines and even rhythms that aren’t actually there, so that by the time the track finishes it somehow feels much fuller than it really is. It’s a wonderfully deft piece of audio sleight of hand, and one of those rare tracks that stops me in my tracks. When it finishes, my instinct is simply to play it again.
Beacon - Over In No Time (How To Drie A Cinder LP) [Apparent Movement]
At just one minute and 52 seconds, Over In No Time feels almost like a fragment of something bigger, but I’ve played it dozens of times now and each time I find myself hoping that somehow, miraculously, there might be more.
It’s effectively an evolving chorus, built through several beautifully restrained iterations as extra vocal layers and pads gradually appear, giving the whole thing a sense of glowing and growing in stature. There’s a glorious end-of-days quality to it, underpinned by the simplest of harmonic movements, and throughout you keep expecting a verse to emerge through the ether. It never does.
There’s something fascinating to me about using brevity as a creative tool in itself. Rather than feeling abbreviated to satisfy diminishing attention spans, this feels entirely deliberate, like waking from a dream before anything has quite had time to formalise. The exquisite amount of space around the sounds invites you to fill in the gaps, while its incompleteness keeps drawing you back into that dream world in the hope that perhaps, this time, you might understand a little more of it.
It’s rare, beautiful and almost painfully brief… and maybe that’s precisely why it works so well.
James Welsh - Something Red (Filaments LP) [Phantasy Sound]
I only came across James Welsh relatively recently, but his album Filaments on Phantasy Sound is an exquisite piece of work, blending electronica, cinematic atmosphere and emotion with echoes of post-rock and drone music. It’s not an easy combination to pull off, but Something Red somehow manages to encapsulate much of the album’s aesthetic within a single track.
There’s something about it that feels almost like glacially-paced levitation. It begins in a wash of cinematic ambience before gradually going through the gears, with distant drums and percussion emerging through shimmering layers of sound that seem to drift in and out of tune, and in and out of your attention. By the latter stages those rhythms have moved to the foreground, but the journey through the landscape is so beautifully textured that you’re never particularly conscious of the route you took in traversing it.
Welsh created Filaments while living in a remote part of North Yorkshire, and perhaps I’m projecting my own experiences of living in similarly isolated places in the UK, but I can hear something of that environment in the music. There’s a warmth and organic quality to the way everything blends together, a sense of space and introspection that feels somehow removed from the pace and hard edges of city life. That’s something that comes from feeling somewhat insignificant within the scope of the environment you’re in.
It’s immersive, consuming and quietly unconventional, and a track I seem to disappear a little further into with every listen.
Joal - Voice (Sunburst LP - Various Artists) [MoodMusic]
I’ve always loved about the repetitive minimalism of post-modern composers like Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. A single musical idea can repeat for minutes at a time, yet through tiny shifts in timing, texture and emphasis it somehow remains completely hypnotic. ‘Voice’ takes that same principle and applies it beautifully to electronic music.
At its heart there’s really just one rolling sequence of notes, but it never feels static. Resonance gradually pulls new overtones from the sound, layers appear that emphasise different clusters of notes, while subtle changes in saturation, space and texture constantly alter your perception of what is essentially the same musical information. As a result of there being fewer musical elements to compete for the listener’s attention, it exudes a sense of confidence - it feels like we are in safe hands.
I often describe tracks like this as kinetic because they have an inherent sense of propulsion, and ‘Voice’ feels like it’s perpetually moving forward without ever needing to introduce and impose a big new musical statement. It’s also a great reminder that, as producers, we’re often searching for the wrong thing when a track needs more. Sometimes you don’t need another riff or another layer… you just need to give the ideas already there enough space to move, breathe and change.
Pantha Du Prince - Mother Drum (Sebastian Mullaert’s Holds The Sky Mix) [Modern Recordings]
There are certain tracks that have an innately relaxed and restrained quality that’s really hard to put your finger on, and they’re often equally difficult to classify. In this case, much of that feeling comes from the looseness of the rhythm, particularly the little stab that percolates throughout the track, sitting just slightly behind the beat and somehow making everything around it feel more relaxed.
It’s the difference between leaning forward on a motorbike, pursuing the road with purpose, and sitting back in Easy Rider mode, simply cruising through the landscape and giving it permission to unfold. The latter gives you more space to connect with the world around you, and this track has that same quality. It invites movement, but never imposes it, with musical ideas that seem to exist on the periphery of your vision rather than being overtly needy in demanding your attention.
I was immediately transported back to the long sunrise sets I’ve played over the years, particularly at Burning Man, and that wonderful collective feeling of people coming together again after a disparate night spent exploring and raging. There’s a gentle spirit to this track that feels perfectly suited to those moments, when the flamboyance has disappeared and people are moving almost imperceptibly, eyes closed, simply inhabiting the music.
The final minute and a half is particularly beautiful, as the pulse and energy gradually withdraw and the track seems to fold back into the landscape from which it came. As a DJ, I can imagine few better records for setting that particular scene.
Just bough the album Voice is on, Simon! (good job; I normally buy from my own digging!)
I love the type of subtle modulation that Voice has... and now having written subtle modulation I must see if Downfall Recordings has released anything lately!
love Sebastian Mullaert's work. always transports me back to the playa