Saffron Slumber – Somnogen

Text taken from Resting Bell

Kevin Stephens has been writing music under the name of Saffron Slumber since 2004. Originally started as a project to explore ideas in ambient music, the project has continued to evolve over its lifespan to include aspects of noise, drone, and other forms of experimental composition. Former releases could be found on Pocket Change Records, Skrow!Media, Zenapolae, Luxus-Arctica Records International, and Circlesandlines Recordings.

"Somnogen" consists of 6 tracks and has a complete duration of 36 minutes. The first five tracks are three to five minutes long. Beginning with the noisier "Möbius Thought", it becomes more calm and droning with the following three tracks. Fragile melodies are woven together with meandering, droning sounds and glimmering organic patterns. "Onyx" returns to the noisier, darker ambiance of the beginning and serves as a bridge between its melodic predecessors and "Oneiric Sun" - a massive 18-minute track, slowly breathing and evolving from a dark and mellow foundation to a burning star and back again.

Enjoy this wonderful and warm piece of drone- and ambient-music.



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Maps and Diagrams - A Pulsating History

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Jarguna - Reflex of a Reverberation

Text taken from endlessascent

Reflex of a Reverberation is an abstract long-form release developed through visionary inspirations following a previous album entitled "Explore from Satellite".

Through observations of images of deserted places on earth reproduced by satellites (geologic formations, rivers, coastlines, etc), abstract forms can be seen to such a point that the eye loses them in geometries and fractals by traveling into ones own imagination.
The paradox of the title "Reflex of a Reverberation" is that what we perceive as reality is really a mixture of colors and geometries that influences our mind.



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Seetyca - Seetycan (Grue & Bleen)

Text taken from endlessascent

Inspired by thoughts of Nelson Goodman, Seetyca created two disks of music originating of the same sound sources but seen and reworked in different times. So see what's green and what's blue...

Recorded and mixed between december 2006 and december 2008 by Seetyca. Exclusively designed for corresponding 2-album-release and mastered by Seetyca and Artin Mucht.

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Mayfairgrin - Empyrean

Text taken from Webbed Hand

Mayfairgrin's "empyrean" begins as serene ambient and adds beats and other musical details over the course of the album.

"'empyrean' fuses and explores elements of piano, 80's new-wave, classical, shoegaze, film score, and IDM. recommended for any one that appreciates progressive ethereal/ambient works from artists like Moby, The Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus, Slowdive, Mortal, Brian Eno, Massive Attack, and Tangerine Dream." -- A. Latham
Credits:
andrew latham - composition, analogue synth, guitar, process

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Eleven Steps – One Week Early

Text taken from ropeswingcities

Steve Scherrelies returns to Rope Swing Cities with One Week Early his second release of beautifully nostalgic guitar based soundscapes. We’ve been waiting for more since the debut of A View of the River last summer, and we couldn’t be happier with the eleven well-crafted songs that comprise this album.

Eleven Steps always features his manipulations of the guitar at the center of his pieces, weaving a tapestry of field recordings and other sound creations around the focus of each track. With almost no percussion to speak of, the rhythm of each piece is communicated in the motion of the tones and washes of sound, creating an atmosphere of the peaceful swish-swaying of leaves in the breeze. Inspired by travel and the exploration of the world and oneself, Scherrelies presents a contemplative train ride through the country side, or a hushed wander through the anonymous bustle of the city streets.

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Brian Grainger & David Tagg – Sawdust Aromatics

Text taken from ropeswingcities

With nary a concrete rhythm in sight, the sounds that make up the four tracks on this EP create an internal cyclic rhythm, building on spontaniety to create a cohesive whole. Sawdust Aromatics represents a place of safety and comfort that exists inside all of us. The nostalgic magic of childhood can most always be felt in Brian’s music, and he has found a perfect partner in David Tagg. Flowing timeless music, perfect for exploration of the inner core; we recommend headphones and darkness and a little bit of empty time to fully take in the lovely Sawdust Aromatics ep.

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Celer – Bells EP

Text taken from ropeswingcities

Celer makes their debut on Rope Swing Cities, with Bells, a soothing Ep of beautifully rendered soundscapes. Characterized by huge, sweeping washes of sound stretching out over minutes and creating an all encompassing atmosphere, this release is perfectly suited for quiet meditation, alone in your room.

Ambient music in its purest sense, Bells is truly a soundtrack for all moods and moments, being able to seamlessly insert itself into pensive, thoughtful moments, or triumphant risings of the sun, every inch of the release can fill the void and offer up solace or joy. As you allow yourself to become immersed in the release, the many subtle layers that build the entirety of each piece shows itself in minute detail, revealing a full spectrum of sounds in which to lose oneself.

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offthesky – Subtle Trees

Text taken from phlow-magazine

Jason Corder's Ambient music rises from the ashes of a thousand instruments like fume from a wasted fireplace. It escapes the crashed corpora of violins, guitars and chimes. It's fluid and ghostlike, drifts from here to there, but once it had entered your ears, you can't get it out of your head. His tickeling textures swarm with micro-tonalities and bring forth that wonderful richness offthesky can be recognised by in all his releases.

In a way, Corder appears like someone who rather captures sound, more like a scientist who knows where to point the microscope to to reveal the beauty of the unseen. For a music video, I'd put someone catching insects with a butterfly net on a late Summer hayfield. In slow motion and back light. Humble beauty! Listen to "Swallow Shallow" and join my praise. A veritable Ambient masterpiece, you name it.

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Jannick Schou - Against A Backdrop Of Blue Hills, They Were As Beautiful As A Lullaby

Text taken from jannickschou

Another release?! Yes, my archive is filled to the brim with finished songs and projects: I might as well release some of them.

I've always had a thing for tapes, and during the last couple of years I've frequently recorded small ambient/drone pieces using tapes as the main recording media. By now I've gathered a pretty substantial amount of "tape-drone-tracks", so I thought I'd release some of them (for your possible pleasure). Eerie, noisey, melancholic and uplifting! Everything and nothing at the same time.

This "album" was not in any way meant to be a fully fleshed out project, but it turned out remarkably coherent. Initially, it lasted around 4 hours, so i've had to cut out some tracks. These 11 pieces are the ones I felt fitted well together. Take a listen. You might like it - in that case, great! If not, well, be glad you didn't waste any money on it. Should you like it, please spread the word.

Thanks!
credits
released 10 March 2010
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Jannick Schou 2008-2010. Title is a quote from the book "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera. Cover by Jannick Schou, 2010.

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Motionfield – The Sound Of Snow

Text taken from passagemusic

No words this time, just listen to the snow and enjoy you stay on Earth.

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Lexithimie - Leontopodium

Text taken from Resting Bell

Lexithimie is a sound solo project founded by Alexis Béchu with focus on healing sound, extended classic, modern ambient and with care for minimal details and natural color. After a bunch of releases on various audio labels such as ropes swing cities, October Man, Hibernate recs and Under The Spire lexithimie’s music creates synthetic spaces from processed instruments, field recordings, layers of repetitive tones and sound infusion.

His two-track EP "Leontopodium" is a beautiful example for this. 24 minutes full of decent soundwalls, layers full of sublime melodies, slightly shifting and processing. The strongest motif in "Leontopodium" is in my ears the aspect of nature. Both tracks have a very organic, warm and natural feeling. They are also perfect examples for building ambient music with minimal structure and melodies, and changing both elements over a long distance of time in a very subtle and gentle way.

So you get the perfect soundtrack for drifting away, coming back and drifting away again. I recommend to listen to this with headphones which let you even more explore the depth and space of Alexis's work.



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Audio Gourmet - Subconscious Substance

Text taken from Webbed Hand

This is an album to play when you are sitting along, reminiscing about bygone times. Subtle, restful melodies and sounds of nature guide the mind to positive, yet nostalgic reveries.


from the artist:

This album is themed around the idea of nostalgia, the subconscious and distant memories; that strange intangible feeling triggered by a familiar stimulus. The brain associates these stimuli with a dormant memory in the brain. Sometimes, these memories can be relived clear as day…others so feint a glimmer that you cannot possibly comprehend what your brain is trying to tell you.
This album should hopefully capture the essence of nostalgia, and also serve as a preservation for the sound that I have lifted from every day life.



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White Rainbow - Sea Thru

Text taken from whiterainbowpizza

This is a digital re-issue of a cassette released on Gnar tapes & Shit last year in an edition of 100.
Music for a Circular Room was originally made for a Doug Aitken installation in 2008.
The other two tracks ("Skys Position (for Tom Blood)" and "Gnar") were originally intended to be the 3rd LP of New Clouds, one song per LP side, but for various reasons were left off of the eventually released 2xLP/1CD.

These songs are all very deep, long, minimalist drone cloud washes, meant for deep or background listening.

This is the first time these tracks have been officially digitally released!

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Lumina Magica - Searching for heaven

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On his bandcamp page, there are more free albums.

He also has a bandcamp page under the name Crystal Clear

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River of Ashes - Breaching the Fabric

Text taken from Webbed Hand

Breaching the Fabric is a collection of long-form dark ambient soundscapes crafted from effects guitar and other sources.

River of Ashes is a dark ambient collaboration between The Ghost Between the Strings and Lusruta. This is their first collaboration under this name, but not their first time working together. "River of Ashes" was the album title of a prior release on the Aesthesea netlabel.



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Drone Wallah - Rain 2

Text taken from Webbed Hand

The second release by Drone Wallah for Webbed Hand's long-form ambient "Rain" series, a relaxing drone work with much subtle movement in the harmonics.

Drone Wallah is C.P. McDill's project devoted solely to expansive drone works.

Rain is a series of conceptual tracks produced for Webbed Hand Records. Each “Rain” is a CD-length ambient recording ideal for quiet listening while meditating, writing, or going to sleep. Typically the recordings in this series are minimalistic soundscapes, with motifs played out cyclically rather than progressively, in order to induce relaxed states.

Credits:
Recorded and produced by Drone Wallah (C.P. McDill), December 2010.
Cover art by Aria Nadii (arianadii.com)



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litmus0001 - Fear In A Gaze Towards An Unknown Horizon

Text taken from BFW Recordings

The first release on BFW recordings from litmus0001 is a beautiful, lush soundscape of looping guitars and synths. Rooted in the beginnings of ambient, it draws comparison to Fripp and Eno's collaborations. But this is the work of one man, Jonathan Ewald. The music is recorded in one live take and completely improvised.

Improvised and recorded in a single take on April 24th, 2010 at Worthless Research Laboratories in Madison, WI.



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Seetyca and Thom Yeesland - Wallis EP

Text taken from Treetrunk

Treetrunk is proud to present another project by front-running ambient artist Seetyca. This release is a collaboration with skilled guitarist Thom Yeesland. An incredible set of combinations of drone work and percolations, "Wallis" is recommended to all ambient fans for deep listening.



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Gastón Arévalo - Habitat

Text taken from Passage

Stunning harmonious passages and a kind of mystical environmental sonic poetry with an exceptional natural ambience and the genuine depth. Every second of this enveloping soundscape comes a real revelation.



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Gastón Arévalo - Marea

Text taken from Passage

Authentic, deep and truly organic ambient streams touching the heights of nature through digital forms of existence. This smooth, atmospheric and profound sonic sculptures full of inner lifeforms are definitely perfect for a long dreamscape diving or in-depth structure research of surrounding matters. See the living beauty.



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Gimu - Beluga

Text taken from audiogourmet

For the final Audio Gourmet EP release of the year, we welcome a little-known sound designer from Brazil called Gimu. His earlier music career was based around a pop/electronic band called 'Terrorturbo', in which he was lead singer. As the members of the band went their separate ways over time, Gimu found himself left alone and unsure as to what would be his next move.

It was at this time, that he'd grown very tired of lugging equipment around, endless wires, instruments and even of the sorts of chord progressions and conventional aspects of playing that had been the mainstay of the band.
He had in fact grown tired of writing 'songs' altogether and began to seek new methods of artistic expression through sound.
He decided to strip away all of the structure and rhythm of these 'songs' for his solo work, concentrating on ambient soundscapes with a focus on repetition. He began a fascination with how repetition can take you to a new level of consciousness to the point where you suddenly feel as if you are listening to things that may not even be present in the recording.

For his debut EP here on Audio Gourmet, Gimu has assembled two beautiful tracks that are a perfect representation of the sort of soundscapes he has been inspired to produce in his quest as a solo sound artist.
Through the two tracks on 'Beluga', Gimu tributes this work to close friend Patricia; a constant voice of encouragement and support to his music. This soundtrack is thematically based around the dead dreams of a biologist, the ocean and hope...

We hope you enjoy this body of work and keep an eye out for future output from this emerging talent!
credits
released 14 December 2010
Written and produced by Gimu
With special thanks to Patricia

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Frequent Sync - Coalesce

Text taken from Earth Mantra Netlabel

We've noted many times how much we enjoy meeting new artists, one of the great benefits of running a netlabel. Just as cool, however, is to hear new collaborations from folks who are already established as Earth Mantra contributors, particularly when those folks are some of our favorite artists anywhere. Such is our pleasure today, as we unveil the new release "Coalesce" by Frequent Sync, the ambient partnership of Darren Harper and Jacob Newman.

Regular listeners will know how much we enjoy the work of both of these two musicians. So it was with great anticipation and expectation that we hit the play button the first time we listened to this submission. And folks, we were not disappointed.

Jacob and Darren are both well known for their deep, immersive ambient drones and soundscapes. Clearly both are masters of the ambient tone poem and are well adept at sculpting dreamy sonic vistas that are as suitable for meditation or background mood as they are for active listening or contemplation. But taken together, there is a lovely synergy at play here, a subtle feedback effect in which their separate points of view dovetail into a whole new thing of beauty. Indeed, the music of "Coalesce" has an effortless quality, a seamless and polished feeling of unity where it is impossible to tell where Darren takes up and Jacob leaves off. It is not easy for two artists to accomplish such a homogenous blending of their disparate styles; it requires hard work, clear communication, and good chemistry between the two. But Darren and Jacob make it look easy.

For the music on this album is just heavenly, a bottomless collection of carefully crafted textural ambience that we want to hear again and again. Born from various improvised studio sessions between January and August of this year, the pieces reflect a balance between organic drifts and diffusions, as well as more synthetic environments that contain subtle amounts of rhythmic movement. We would go so far as to say that this is among the best work either of these two artists have ever produced, and that is really saying something. Clearly the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. One can only hope that Jacob and Darren continue to collaborate, so we all can enjoy the fruits of their labor.

So it is with great pleasure that we unveil "Coalesce", the new album by Frequent Sync. Surely one of the top releases of 2010, and an album we could not be happier to distribute to our listeners. Highly, highly recommended.



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Darren Harper - Whispers

Text taken from Earth Mantra Netlabel

As winter descends at last upon the northern hemisphere, we at Earth Mantra don our soft flannel pajamas, curl up in a big comfortable blanket, fill our cup with piping hot tea, and ease ourselves back in our listening chair for another season of delightful ambience. Our favorite time of year is the cold months, when the winds outside blow fierce from the arctic north, but inside we relax snug and warm, the perfect setting for ambient music. And amid this setting, along comes the newest release from Darren Harper, called "Whispers". Shorter than his usual fare, clocking in at only forty two minutes and change, this release nonetheless perfectly mirrors our love for the winter, a wondrous sound track for contemplation as the temperature falls.

Darren describes the release as a collection of "transition pieces", which still carry a bit of summery warmth but with anticipation of autumn's chill. He reports that as he composed the pieces in September of 2010, the scenery where he lives in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains changed quickly, from mild warmth to sudden snow, something Darren lovingly interpreted in this music as "whispers of a changing season". Indeed, the sense of enigma and change can be found everywhere in these pieces, echoing the passage of time and the winter transformation of the natural world.

Musically, these pieces could be described as lighter drones, with chimes, suspended synths, piano, and acoustic guitar, but really we would simply call them sublime. The sounds drift soothingly along, like leaves blowing quietly in the wind, with a constant sense of direction but imposing no requirement on the listener to ascribe any purpose at all to the music other than repose. Ambient music comes in a lot of forms, but one of our favorites is the pure undiluted kind, the ambience that just 'is', in a very present and zen-like sort of way. We consider "Whispers" a nearly perfect example of such a creation, the kind of music that becomes a constant companion for those quiet times as the skies grow dark and heavy with snow.

So with great pleasure we unveil the latest release by Darren Harper, an album of great beauty and profound depth. This is a release that we are very proud to bring to our listeners on Earth Mantra, and one that leaves us hoping for much more from Darren in the future.



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Digital Mass - Wind Labyrinths

Text taken from Eg0cide Productions

We at Eg0cide Productions have no idea where Digital Mass come from, and even less where they are going/taking us with each new recording, but we are always ready to follow them in their sound experiments. For this new album their anonymous members have recorded atmospheric improvisations on acoustic instruments that were later processed and filtered, but not edited. No synthesizer/looping/sampling was used on these 3 tracks just instinctive playing and empirical sound processing.
For the best listening experience, we suggest you to lay down in the dark with an empty mind and a calm heart, expect nothing, and get lost in these foggy labyrinths like while contemplating smoke curtains.



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Fosel - The Enormous Room

Text taken from Eg0cide Productions

Eg0cide is glad that The Murk has gained attention by experimental/ambient composer Kurt Nimmo aka Foseld : he offered us not only a great remix of this Digital Mass track, but a full album of mysterious, spacious soundscapes. The album has a very well chosen title : "the enormous room" and should appeal to fans of deep, experimental drone.
It also contains a remix of Andrew Deakin's Pannus Mihi Panis, taken from the compilation album Field Notes released by Earth Monkey Productions



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Mister Vapor - Trackless Depths

Text taken from Eg0cide Productions

"Trackless Depths" is another fine work by Thomas Park, signing this time as Mister Vapor. This gorgeous drone piece made with sounds of unknown (to us) origins is blurry and ethereal in the same time, quiet and minimal but everchanging. Ideal listening while daydreaming, meditating or sleeping.



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Shinobu Nemoto - Melting Loop Trip

Text taken from Resting Bell

Shinobu Nemoto is a sound-artist from Kanagawa, Japan. You might know "Summons of Shining Ruins", his solo-guitar project or "Dark Side of The Audio System ", a tape-loop-experiment. Under his real name Shinobu Nemoto mainly releases guitar-improvisations and field-recordings. He also runs the label "MOUFU-ROKUON" and did collaborations with Brain Grainger, Jason Adams and Danielle Demos.

"Melting Loop Trip" is a collection of sixteen loops, each loop between six and thirteen minutes long. Each loop is a beautiful analog picture. Very athmospheric, very warm and very, very meditative. You can fall back into a cloudy bed of hushed noises, shimmering melodies and wonderful echo-structures.

You can go ahead, pick your favorite loop and listen to it on repeat. Or you can listen to the complete release from track to track. In addition to Shinobu's musical output illustrator Kati Meden created an artwork-concept for the complete release as well as for every single loop based on her colour-alphabet.
release date 2010-12-12



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