Ambient – Page 3 – 7th Level Music

Review: Rival Consoles – Landscape from Memory

Ryan Lee West, known to many as the man behind Rival Consoles, has put together his ninth album, Landscape from Memory, “from a scrapbook of discarded audio snippets” (according to a press release sent me) and synths and sounds made in hotel rooms and other spaces after taking a year off from music and, for a little while, losing his creative spark.

Thankfully, Rival Consoles found the energy and drive again and has released a fine record of ambient music, dance grooves, and atmospheric sonics. “In Reverse” starts the album with Radiohead-like synth bumps and bubbles and acoustic guitar that drifts in and out of those synths like happy birds coasting between trees. The beautiful “Catherine” is a song for West’s love, who helped him rediscover his love for composition and creating soundscapes.

“Drum Song” is well-named for its thumping, bumping beats. “Soft Gradient Beckons” is the sound of a happy, robotic bird waking up with the sun. It perfectly floats into “Gaivotas,” and that nicely drifts into the almost-industrial dance track “Coda.” “Known Shape” is an almost weightless dance track that feels like something you’d hear in a spaceport lounge. The fade out of “Nocturne” will make you feel like you’re calmly walking into or out of a fog.

“Jupiter” pulls you in like its namesake’s gravity and gets your toes tapping as you slide into orbit and feel your molecules vibrating. “In a Trance” (made in a New York hotel room) might put you there, and the ethereal “If Not Now” will help you stay in that meditative state for a while longer. The synths on “2 Forms” sound like they’re half-awake but still helping you dance at 3am.

“Tape Loop” has a twinge of suspense to it, and the title track closes the album with an uplifting energy – the kind that West found while making the track and the rest of the album while dealing with…well, everything everyone is dealing with right now.

Memory is often fuzzy, and creating or describing a landscape from it is often wrought with inaccuracies. This landscape created by Rival Consoles, however, feels lush and familiar…even in the darker parts. It feels like the right place at the right moment – which is right now.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to George at Terrorbird Media.]

Review: Lorenzo Dada & Leo Benassi – Island EP

Don’t let the cartoonish cover fool you, Lorenzo Dada and Leo Benassi‘s Island EP is a solid house record with plenty of bounce and bump in it.

The opening bass of “Midnight Piano” alone will make your head turn and your hips shake. The tapping beats of “Slow Ride” mix with subtle horns and softer bass for a smooth make-out groove.

Apparently, there are “No Flamingos in Salinas,” but there are plenty of smooth, lush beats and grooves on this track. It’s bright and bouncy and something you’ll probably slide into a dozen mixes this summer. The EP ends with the dreamy “Dream On,” bringing in bubbly beats and looping synths to create a groove that I’m sure a lot of hip hop DJs will slow down and sample.

I’m sure you’ll dig this and drop it into many sets of your own, too.

Keep your mind open.

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Sally Shapiro’s new single asks, “Did You Call Tonight?”

Today Swedish italo disco / synthpop duo Sally Shapiro share new single “Did You Call Tonight” from their upcoming album ‘Ready To Live A Lie’, which is due May 30th via Italians Do It Better.

On the track, the band said “Microcheating is the theme of this new single. Musically it’s inspired by 80s electro breakbeat, a bit slower and funkier than our usual style.”

“Did You Call Tonight” on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=vYtgddi4xps
“Did You Call Tonight” on other streaming services:https://idib.ffm.to/didyoucalltonight

Made up of producer Johan Agebjörn and an anonymous female vocalist who uses the pseudonym Sally Shapiro; the duo are known for their dreamy, melancholic sound and nostalgic homage to 1980s Italo disco and gained international recognition with their debut album Disco Romance (2007), which was then followed by My Guilty Pleasure (2009), Somewhere Else (2013) and their debut for Italians Do It Better Sad Cities (2022).

The name “Sally Shapiro” has always referred to both the duo, as well as the enigmatic anonymous singer whose real name is something else. But “Sally” is also a third entity: the fictional character singing about her love stories. It’s now been 18 years since Sally Shapiro’s debut album Disco Romance, that took influences from italo disco and indie pop with a naive and youthful flavor, as if everything “Sally” did was to “walk in the moonshine thinking about my love affairs”, as she once put it.

Ready To Live A Lie may, however, be the duo’s darkest album yet. The lyrics have shifted from the euphoria of first love to exploring “Sally’s” struggles in long-term relationships—love triangles, boredom, resentment, and the lingering sense of loneliness.

Ready To Live A Lie is out on Italians Do It Better on May 30th and includes the duo’s acclaimed Pet Shop Boys cover Rent.

Taking inspiration from synthwave, italo disco, nudisco, indie pop and bossanova, the album becomes their fifth studio album & their second for Italians Do It Better – again mixed together with label founder Johnny Jewel (Chromatics, Glass Candy, Desire).

Sally Shapiro’s forthcoming album ‘Ready To Live A Lie’ is now available for preorder on vinyl 2LP (pink vinyl or transparent electric blue vinyl), CD and digital from their Bandcamp page.

Pre-order album: https://sallyshapiro.bandcamp.com/album/ready-to-live-a-lie
Pre-save album\: https://idib.ffm.to/readytolivealie

Keep your mind open.

[Did you subscribe tonight?]

[Thanks to Frankie at Stereo Sanctity.]

Review: j.o.y.s. – self-titled

Ramon Narvaez is also known as j.o.y.s., which stands for “Jump Out of Your Skin.” It’s an acronym for stepping out of your comfort zone and trying on something new. For Narvaez, that meant teaming up with has pedal steel-playing pal Justin Gaynor to finally put the musical improvisations they’d been creating into a self-titled album of intriguing ambience.

“dastardly” opens the album with simple synth chords and guitar drone notes that swirl like a vortex opening in space and time. The bending of time was a central theme while Narvaez and and Gaynor were creating the album, and they nailed the feel of it right away. “yucca valley” is perfect for desert meditations, as it seems to stretch beyond your senses and center you in stillness.

“river / road” curls along for over eight minutes, with Gaynor’s pedal steel helping your brain drift like a leaf on the water and your hand sway up and down outside the car window as you drive at a leisurely pace. Speaking of water, “blue water prison” is something you won’t mind being in, as it washes over you and then drains away tension.

The guitars on “lee & leo” are reminiscent of lonely border towns or nearly empty roadside diners on a side highway. “heights” almost fades out before sliding back in to bring you back to Earth. The long title track is a back-and-forth conversation between Narvaez and Gaynor’s guitars while quiet synths moderate them. By the time we get to “96 (jumping cholla),” we’re either falling into or awakening from a dream.

It’s a lovely record, and a nice meditative journey if you’re looking for one.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Ryan at Clandestine Label Services.]

Kara-Lis Coverdale announces first new music in eight years.

Kara-Lis Coverdale — “one of the most exciting composers in North America” (The Guardian) — announces her first new album in eight years, From Where You Came, out May 9th via Smalltown Supersound, and shares its lead single “Daze.”

A dynamic and sublime work steeped in emotion and sensitivity, From Where You Came unspools as a series of nocturnal transmissions, altered-state refinements, and vivid stories, rich in vibrant, illuminating qualities. Drawing together 19th century programmatic music, mid-’70s jazz, and her distinctively colorful and multi-dimensional approach to composition, she conducts emotional resonance like currents of charge, hard-wiring the purely felt into electronic signals.

Though written and recorded across several continents, including at the GRM Studio in Parisand the Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm, From Where You Came was completed in rural Ontario, Canada. Featuring contributions from multidisciplinary sound artist and cellist Anne Bourne and GRAMMY award winning trombone prodigy Kalia Vandever, the album’s eleven expansive yet condensed compositions incorporate strings, woodwind, brass, keys, software and modular synthesis, inscribing a musical language that resonates animations with unfiltered, striking clarity. “Anything can have a voice,” says Coverdale. “For me, voice is beyond human”.

Reckoning with the experience of grief, dislocation, and the pressure of total freedom and independence, Coverdale yields supernatural capacity to transfer tribulation into highly imaginative and inspiring fantasy epics of sound. Lead single “Daze” feels like the joy of flight — wind choruses dance and twirl in ornate cycles as dissonant portamentos ascend to soaring heights, gliding across turbulent gales to new pockets of harmonic plateaus.

Listen to “Daze”

Born in Burlington, Canada and of Estonian heritage, From Where You Came is Coverdale’s first major new work since Grafts (2017), Aftertouches (2015, Sacred Phrases), and A 480 (2014, Constellation Tatsu). Coverdale has performed concert halls, clubs, and festivals throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia headlining and touring with Big Thief, Caribou, Gagaku Ensemble and Floating Points (including as a part of his Promises ensemble at The Hollywood Bowl in LA). She has previously collaborated with with Actress, Yasuaki Shimizu, Caterina Barbieri and Lyra Pramuk and has created compositions for film, theatre, dance, symphonic instrumentation, and installation, including Cello Octet Amsterdam, Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, Vanemuine Theatre, NYC Contemporaneous Ensemble and Ludens Choir with pipe organ a connective tissue throughout much of her work.

Pre-order From Where You Came

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Ahmad at Pitch Perfect PR.]

j.o.y.s. releases “heights” from upcoming debut album.

“heights” is the second single from j.o.y.s.– the moniker of Ramon Narvaez’s ambient project. j.o.y.s. is an acronym for “jump out of your skin” – an apt expression for Narvaez’s project that views the album as a documentation and definable marker of a life always in flux.

From Ramon on “heights”:

“heights” is the second single from j.o.y.s. Broken into two parts, it follows myself and my collaborator Bestamo as we contemplate our residencies in the neighborhoods we existed during the making of this record; the neighborhoods of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles and Crown Heights in Brooklyn. As with our previous single, we meditate on this instrumental music with a companion poem:

“well no shit, i’m like sisyphus,

because unlike many in this metropolis,

my parents are not funding this.

it’s all a near miss, to wait here wishless;

on a waitlist for a wish list,

just because i’m your one puerto rican friend,

doesn’t mean you’re not a little bit racist.

and just because i’m puerto rican,

doesn’t mean i’m not participating in the inevitable gentrifying of all of it.

awake from a sound sleep, there’s no forgiveness.

our disease is our disease.

on my knees, no company to keep.

you say it can’t always be a crisis,

when it is in fact, constantly a crisis.

gliding between life and death,

but i digress, i guess.

this one goes out to boyle heights, humboldt park, crown heights and all the rest.”

After years of trying to maintain some semblance of an art life while maintaining odd jobs, I began thinking of how truly difficult it can be to not have extra financial help while the cost of living rises seemingly indefinitely. This triggered the unfortunate realization that some of the people I chose to call friends were able to continue to live in these ever gentrifying neighborhoods due to some form of immense privilege. All the while playing a part in the suppressing of the innate culture within and living in a place with “affordable” rent myself only contributed to my ambivalence further.

It’s prompted me to look a bit more closely at what it means to be a somewhat assimilated Puerto Rican person having spent time growing up in central New Jersey and the Bronx, all the while the under the continued pressure conform to a society in a country that has bastardized the island where my true mixed ethnic roots originated.

How far have I distanced myself from the eleventh floor of a high rise on Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx that my grandparents rented? The one that always smelled of Puerto Rican cooking and had doors that remained open to the little community within the building. How many of those communities are continuously being uprooted by a greedy developer so those aromas of home cooking are replaced with some hack instagram recipe cooked by a tech bro that pays $4000 a month to live out his dreams of big city adjacent livin’?

The cover art features a reenactment of orcas attacking a yacht which signifies to me a true act of mother nature hopefully get us all back on the right track. A track where “community” isn’t some sort of performative buzzword.

Love,

Ramon 2025

—

While ostensibly an ambient record, the musical touchstones of Ramon Narvaez and his collaborator Justin Gaynor span from 90’s alternative and the gnarliest of shoegazers to Daniel Lanois’ seminal Goodbye to Language. These expressions are presented unpretentiously on j.o.y.s. highlighting the serpentine path out of the New Jersey hardcore scene to Narvaez’s current home in Los Angeles. Both scenes live and converse on this record. Brutalist slabs of noise are stretched across the desert landscape and met by elegiac pedal steel.

The album is presented beautifully. A 14 page companion zine comes with a poem written by Narvaez for each composition. The result is a metacommentary and trenchant observation of being a D.I.Y. artist in the world of celebrity artists, trust fund modular synth bros and A.I. generated ambient music.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Ryan at Clandestine Label Services.]

Review: Lonnie Holley – Tonky

Lonnie Holley is singer, songwriter, artist, educator, and poet…and, surprisingly to me, a trip hop artist. I knew that his new album, Tonky (named after his nickname from growing up in and around honkytonks), would be full of gripping tales from his life and views on the current American landscape. I didn’t expect it to be layered with found sounds, electric beats, and trip hop touches.

The opening track, “Seeds,” is the longest at over nine minutes and has Holly telling about how fields he worked as a child until he was exhausted or often beaten so bad he couldn’t sleep. The string instruments strum out growing tension while simple synth chords are like the hums of spectres watching from the other side of the veil. “Life” is a short poem of hope with Holley encouraging us to use small actions to grow big change.

“Protest with Love” is the most punk rock song I’ve heard in a long while, and it’s wrapped in a lush trip hop track. “If you’re gonna protest, protest with love…Let love do its thing,” Holly advises. Loving thy neighbor, heck, just being nice, is one of the most rebellious acts you can do in 2025. In the jazz and post-funk (Is that a thing?)-inspired “The Burden,” Holley tells us all that it’s on us to remember those who came before and how we need to honor them (“The burden is like a spell that’s been cast upon you. Burdens of our ancestors to unravel and clarify in history.”).

“Let those who have ears, let them hear…We might not have it all together, but together we have it all,” Holley preaches in the beginning of “The Stars” — a powerful track about how people brought over on slave ships saw the same stars we now see, but how much have we progressed since then? The included rap by Open Mike Eagle is so slick it might drop you to the floor.

Holley makes sure you’re paying attention on the growling (and slightly funky) “We Were Kings in the Jungle, Slaves in the Field.” “Strength of a Song” has some of Holley’s strongest vocals on the record as he sings about finding hope and power in music. Near-industrial drums make “What’s Going On” sound like a roaring muscle car engine. “I Looked Over My Shoulder” is psychedelic jazz mixed with dark-wave synths.

“Wait a minute…” Holley says at the beginning of “Did I Do Enough?” Good heavens, haven’t we all thought that at some point — especially if you’ve been through a tragedy, or someone close to you has? The song is just Holley’s heartfelt vocals above ambient synths that build to gospel-like grandeur and it’s a stunner. “That’s Not Art, That’s Not Music” has Holley firing back the criticisms aimed at black music and culture upon their detractors.

The album ends with the hopeful “A Change Is Gonna Come,” but Holley asks, “Are we ready for something to happen?” One has to recognize the signs, when to stand up, and when to take flight. We have to be willing to accept change from divisiveness to inclusion. “How can I love God without loving you?” a woman asks not only herself, but also all of us. It’s the main message Holley wants to convey, and one we all must hear.

This is already one of the best albums of the year.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Sam at Pitch Perfect PR.]

Photay releases “Jet Stream” from an upcoming extended version of his “Windswept” album.

Nearly six months after the release of his album Windswept, Photay (Evan Shornstein), returns with Windswept: Expansions, out March 28, 2025 via Mexican Summer. The expanded album features two new tracks from the album’s surplus of exceptional sound alongside the producer’s own remix of standout single “Air Lock.” The first of these new tracks, “Jet Stream,” is out today.

“Pushing past the dynamic ceiling of Windswept, ‘Jet Stream’ peaks in our upper atmosphere, and as a result, it didn’t fit on vinyl,” explains Shornstein. “At the start of 2025, on the other side of Windswept tours, I lost my home and studio to the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles. Although this piece (and Windswept) were made well before this disaster, for me they grow in relevance. I use sound to understand the greater elemental forces and our vulnerability to them. I believe music will continue being a source of uplift and clarity amidst intensifying weather and atmospheric conditions.”

Following headline tours in the US and Asia in 2024, Photay will perform at London’s Polygon Live LDN Festival this May.

Photay’s Windswept is, in the producer’s own words, a nine-track sonic exploration of the wind as a “powerful, deep, unpredictable and at times overwhelming spirit.” Traversing IDM, ambient-techno, and jazz funk electronic modes in unpredictable, undeniable ways, Windswept blew away those familiar and new to Photay’s music, even being named the #1 album of 2024 by Juno Daily.

The album is primarily reliant on Shornstein’s fresh, home grown electronic textures and acoustic drumming. Numerous friends also add instrumental touches including Randall Fisher, Will Epstein, Carlos Niño, Laraaji, Nate Mercereau, and Mariana Bragada. Windswept’s compositions were largely written-out and specifically produced, though a couple were also turned into “songs” out of improvised sections. But all were under the spell of the wind, of climate change and weather phenomena — from their titles on down.

One reason that Windswept may especially feel like an organic solo statement is that the previous handful of projects Photay had been involved in were all explicitly collaborative. There was the new age improvisation albums with Niñoand friends; there was the album he produced for London-based Indian-American drummer Sarathy Korwar; and there was WEMA, a kind of studio supergroup involving members of the Afro-Latin dance band Penya and Tanzanian gogo master Msafiri Zawose. Each of those projects took Shornstein in very specific directions he did not dictate. Windswept was a response to those experiences, an opportunity to reconnect with his own vision, and apply newfound lessons.

There is admittedly a higher quotient of direct-towards-dance-floor energy to Windswept than recent Photay recordings have featured. Stretches of tracks are moderately home-rave-ready, but there is a thematic balance with moments of reservation as well, and of Evan’s voice embracing the moment. These songs — gorgeously sweet melodies and tart textures, layered synths and instruments, off-kilter rhythms and treated voices, all gliding from structure into another — contain much of the warmth and fresh-air that’s made Photay’s various sounds so distinctive and unified through the years.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to George at Terrorbird Media.]

Big Thief’s James Krivchenia’s new solo single, “Probably Wizards,” is out now.

James Krivchenia (drummer and producer of Big Thief) announces his new album Performing Belief, out May 2nd via Planet Mu, and shares its lead single, “Probably Wizards.” This spring, Krivchenia will play his first ever live show on Tue. June 17 at Elsewhere in Brooklyn, NY (tickets are on sale this Friday and will be available here).

Featuring contributions from electric bassist Sam Wilkes (Wilkes/Gendel) and double bassist/multi-instrumentalist Joshua Abrams (Natural Information Society), Performing Belief builds rhythmic thickets from gathered sounds interwoven with synths, drum machines and other samples. At the core of Performing Belief is a lush, opulent matrix of percussion ranging from the familiar—hand claps and drum machines—to the mysteriously verdant, sampled largely from Krivchenia’s own field recording collection. Lead single “Probably Wizards” was created alongside Wilkes and carries a profoundly fresh sense of time, blurring the edges of the quantized grid and the boundaries of electronic music.

Listen to “Probably Wizards”

Krivchenia’s previous release, 2022’s hyperkinetic Blood Karaoke, was composed mostly from hundreds of tiny samples of unwatched YouTube videos. Performing Belief sees Krivchenia turning from online realms to the natural world. For years, Krivchenia would record his musical encounters with natural objects: performing on a particularly resonant log on a hike, throwing rocks into a pristine pond, tap dancing in the mud. This archive of sounds became the fertile soil out of which the tracks on Performing Belief grew. Having built these rhythmic nests, Wilkes and Abrams bring the presence of a grounding human witness to the undergrowth, providing a centering and even at times melodic voice to the gathering. This rhythmic language, set in Krivchenia’s long-fermenting electronic musical palate, feels like a revelation — it calls back not only to his wonderfully elastic timekeeping behind the kit, but also to his prior work in computer music as well as his deep study of the vast human archive of drumming.

Performing Belief is in good company in the rank and file of the legendary Planet Mu label. From the foundational early releases of the likes of Jega and Venetian Snares, to the contemporary envelope-warping work of Jlin and hundreds of brilliant releases in between, Planet Mu has been a beacon of forward-thinking rhythmic music for decades, informing Krivchenia’s own sense of the weird metaphysics of musical time since he was a kid. Krivchenia’s contribution to this history calls to mind the principle of organic danceability that subtends Mu’s whole catalogue, while bending our sense of rhythm in new and gracious dimensions.

Pre-order Performing Belief

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Ahmad at Pitch Perfect PR.]

Review: Lust for Youth & Croatian Amor – All Worlds

Lust for Youth & Croatian Amor looked to the stars for inspiration on their new album, All Worlds. Specifically, they focused on the idea of the “Golden Record” set into outer space by NASA in 1977 to greet anyone who might find it. They wanted to create a portrait of a world in where each song evoked a sense of place and time.

Starting with “Friendzone,” the album gets off to a trancey-dancey start with arpeggiating synths and thumping bass. A lot of the songs on All Worlds are about belonging and the quest to find community and kinship. “Friendzone” is a wake-up call for those put in it. The smart ones accept the assignment. “Passerine,” with guest vocals from Emma Acs, adds shoegaze guitars to snappy electric beats as Acs sings about being disconnected to the world around us.

“Dummy” reminds us that “It’s all right. These hearts were built to fight.” It’s an uplifting track. “Everything changes,” they say. Things can turn around if you give them the chance. “Akkadian” reminds me of early Orbital tracks with its vocal loops, trip-hop beats, and clockwork synth riffs.

“Lights in the Center” adds Alan Watts Zen philosophy to soft synthwave. A woman claims, “I don’t know where I went.” at the beginning of “Kokiri.” She might’ve gone to the dance floor, judging from the great house beats in it. “Nowhere” feels like a cat stretching in the sunlight beaming in from a living room window as it dreams of strolling through a park as busy humans run to and fro.

“Fleece” would be a good song to play while drifting along the Voyager spacecraft carrying the Golden Record, because it feels like zero gravity under your feet. “Velella Velella Wind Sailors” is minimalist techno as a woman speaks about animals washed up on a beach and schools of jellyfish that resemble blue coral. Closing with “Still Here,” the song reminds us that we can persevere. We can survive. We can thrive.

It’s a neat experiment by a cool team. Each track has its own pulse. They paint several pictures for you. It’s easy to get lost in them. Go ahead and try it.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Kate at Sacred Bones Records!]