Do you need to chill out? Are you looking for music for meditation, yoga, sleeping, or romance? Does your reality need a shift? Then give Cicada Wavesby Ben Seretan a spin.
The idea behind Cicada Waves is beautifully simple: Hit record, play some piano in an Appalachian Mountains dance studio, and record whatever happens with no second takes, edits, or polishes. It captures moments in time in Seretan’s life and gives them to us to experience. Ambient piano criss-crosses with sounds of rainfall, thunder, wind, cats, birds, and the titular cicadas. It was recorded in isolation yet sounds expansive. It is hypnotic yet enthralling.
“Cicada Waves 1” has the critters’ buzzing as soft drone undertone while Seretan muses away on his antique Steinway without hurry. “3pm Rainstorm” is perfect for slowing down the rush of whatever is overwhelming you. “Cicada Waves 2” seems a little melancholy compared to “Cicada Waves 1,” but it’s no less lovely. The cicadas blend into more white noise on “Rain and Cicadas” while Seretan’s piano backs them.
I meditated through most of “11pm Sudden Thunderstorm” and can tell you it was a nice experience. Seretan’s piano riffs off the rain and thunder quite well. His piano work on “8pm Crickets” is a bit more playful and active, surely inspired by the insect chorus outside the studio. “Fog Rolls out Rabun Gap” moves as easily out of your speakers or earbuds as its namesake.
It’s a lovely record that you’ll want for many moods, travels, and situations. I wouldn’t listen to it while driving, however. It might lull you into a dreamland across the centerline or into a ditch. Play it at the rest stop while you take a power nap during a long trip. Open the window while you play it and you won’t be sure where the album ends and nature begins.
Keep your mind open.
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Today, percussionist and electronic producer Booker Stardrum announced his third album CRATER will release July 2 via NNA Tapes. Along with the announcement, Stardrum has shared “Diorama” — a texturally rich and rhythmically dense sound sculpture.
CRATER is the sum of countless dynamic, highly active, moving components. Not just percussive phrases, but melodies, textures, sound, noise, and the cracks and crevices of vacant space between these bodies. Stardrum’s creative approach is a multi-tiered process — ideas discovered during improvisation feed into live performances, which then fuel compositional concepts, cycling back and forth until the final arrangements emerge.
As with the majority of Stardrum’s works, percussion is the epicenter, the nucleus from which all else grows. But the music splinters off and transforms from there, growing and evolving into the distinctive final form that is Stardrum’s solo work. Melody plays a prominent role as well, but it’s journey feels dictated and influenced by the unpredictability and spontaneous, human fluidity of the percussive action.
Another important piece of Stardrum’s process is collaboration. Both inspiration and sounds were provided in varying capacities by Stardrum’s musical peers and close friends, whether they performed in-studio, or provided the artist with source material to then be sampled and processed into the structure of the tracks. The foundation of CRATER was recorded in-studio with long-time collaborative partner John Dieterich (Deerhoof), who also handled the final mixes and mastering. These recordings were then further dissected by Stardrum in a solitary headspace through digital editing processes, eventually revealing the nine individual pieces that make up the album.
A sustained tension carries the listener from track to track, which plays out like a narrative structure using a purely sonic language. The result is an overall sound that feels expansive and immersive, where the listener can truly feel held and embraced inside the music that Stardrum has created. Through deep listening, one can feel contained in this sound world, with enough dimensionality inside to move around freely and explore one’s surroundings.
Read the full bio and pre-order CRATER from NNA Tapes here.
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to NNA Tapes and Cody at Clandestine Label Services.]
Throwing Snow, a.k.a. Ross Tones, will release his new album Dragons on June 25th via Houndstooth. Today he’s sharing the first single from the record, “Brujita“. Speaking about the track, Throwing Snow said “‘Brujita’ is about the breaking of aural tradition and the suppression of cunning women and men. It’s a eulogy to lost folk wisdom.”
Throwing Snow’s fourth album is the audiovisually-augmented Dragons, a work that occupies the space between science and ancestral wisdom. It links music back to its prehistoric capacity for transmitting knowledge to new technology that can untangle the complexity of the contemporary world. Dragons’ ten tracks of heavy primal rhythmic productions incorporate the physicality of acoustic sources, from ancient ritual instruments to modern drum kit, and each track is accompanied by visuals generated by a neural network.
Throwing Snow, aka Ross Tones, developed Dragons’ neural network with artist, designer and technologist Matt Woodham. The structures and changes in Tones’ music trigger corresponding changes in accompanying moving images, which combine life in three scales, from microscopic views of rocks to large scale maps. “Everything that happens musically triggers the algorithm to do something,” Tones explains. “This isn’t controlled or predictable, and the music becomes an instruction for the algorithm to make its own decisions about datasets, images, speed, movement and other manipulations.”
The tracks on Dragons match Tones’s ambitions for the album in weight but not complexity. They are intentionally dazzlingly simple in their means, for maximum effect, with repeating motifs, locked basslines, cosmic patterns and full-frequency mids. Often built from four or fewer elements, Tones allows sound to accumulate into his unique take on ritual music for the 21st century. Throbbing ritual dances contain half-remembered earworms revealing glittering night skies of synthesizer patterns – ‘Halos’ stabs and stutters like a dance atop a longbarrow; ‘Purr’ reverberates in silky vibrational motifs; the heavyweight ‘Brujita’ is nu-metal for a past-future ceremony of uncertain purpose.
Tones says he often uses his music as allegory and container for the concepts and theories he’s immersed in – he studied astrophysics, and is fascinated by crafts, archeoacoutics, history, evolution and psychology. In Dragons, he wanted to explore the purpose of music from the beginning of human history. “We have Palaeolithic minds but find ourselves in an increasingly complex and interconnected world,” Tones explains. “Music and art have always been ritualised as a tool for memory, knowledge and emotion, and humans make sense of existence by using tools. Songs were tools of understanding, passed down from our ancestors. Now, things are complex and interrelated, so we can’t use that ancestral knowledge, and need to invent new tools – that’s where machine learning comes into it.”
As is typical for Tones’ Throwing Snow project, the album contains a bold and eclectic mix of instruments, from a bodhrán and daf to cello, with their uses rooted in their inherent acoustic properties. Tones also essentially built his own sample pack for the percussion patterns, working with drummer Jack Baker (Bonobo, Kelis, Alice Russell, Planet Battagon) on an intensive two-day session.
Tones is a Houndstooth stalwart, and Dragons is his fourth full-length album on the label, along with a string of 12”s and EPs. His first album was Mosaic in 2014, followed by Embers in 2017, and Loma in 2018. Originally from the North Of England, for the last few years he has worked from The Castle, his studio an hour outside Bristol/Bath, where he can both forage his own food and find the headspace to make music and experiment with modern technology. He is currently recording a new album with his trio Snow Ghosts, and a soundtrack for a Netflix documentary.
Dragons is a new form of inter-disciplinary album, which is neither wholly electronic nor acoustic, sonic or visual, and pulls from an equally diverse range of inspirations, from texts such as Steven Mithin’s The Singing Neanderthals and Margo Neale and Lynn Kell’s Songlines to the 1982 animated film Flight of Dragons. “I’m into putting music back into history,” Tones explains. “I want to make you think about what music is, what its purpose has been. I’m asking about the scientific aspect to folklore and ancient knowledge, and looking at why it’s still useful. This album is a doorway – if you choose to listen like that.”
International Anthem announces a new Carlos Niño & Friends album, More Energy Fields, Current (out on digital music platforms May 7th, in stores on LP/CD June 25th), and share the lead single “Pleasewakeupalittlefaster, please…” (featuring Jamael Dean). More Energy Fields, Current is a definitive new peak in the recorded continuum of Niño, a prolific producer, percussionist, and self-identified “Communicator.” Featuring heavy contributions from many of the most exciting instrumentalists in the creative music constellation of Los Angeles (of which Niño has been a central force for over two decades) including Dean, Nate Mercereau, Sam Gendel, and Jamire Williams, the album collects ten pristine gems of collaborative communication helmed by Niño, elegantly presented in his unique “Spiritual, Improvisational, Space Collage” style.
Lead single (and album opener) “Pleasewakeupalittlefaster, please…” articulates an Earth-loving, universalist ethos that imbues the entire 44-minute program, and comes accompanied by liner notes from Niño: “We’re all in this together. I look forward to living in a much higher, much more conscious, harmonious state, here, with You, on this Magical Planet Earth.” The track also features a gorgeously-keyed canonic infinity by pianist Jamael Dean. “I first met Carlos when I was in high school,” says Dean. “I was playing at The Del Monte Speakeasy in Venice around that time. Carlos invited me to play every month with my own band. It gave me an opportunity to try out a lot of new music with my homies. ‘Pleasewakeupalittlefaster, please’ came from an idea Carlos asked me to play, at one of his concerts. I played it again over the track he sent me, when I went back to New York because of College. I remember talking to Carlos about all the misconceptions about the history of music and the importance of proper education.”
More Energy Fields, Current is ripe with ambient passages that function like open portals between moments of consonance and clarity. But even in the occasional absence of drums, there is a powerful pulse implicit in the program’s frequency of consciousness. It’s a testament to Niño’s foundations as a DJ. His distinct ability to craft kinetic, cinematic sonic experiences from dozens of independent, often rhythmically-ambiguous improvisational archive memories is more fluently displayed on More Energy Fields, Current than anything we’ve heard from him to date. It resonates, lucidly, with the way Niño’s mentor Iasos – who is known to the world as an original founder of New Age music – has described his work: “Real Time Interactive Imagination, Flow Texturization.”
More Energy Fields, Current Tracklist: 01. Pleasewakeupalittlefaster, please… (with Jamael Dean) 02. The World Stage, 4321 Degnan Boulevard, Los Angeles California 90008 (with Sam Gendel, Jamael Dean and Randy Gloss) 03. Nightswimming (with Dntel, Jamael Dean and Jira ><) 04. Now the background is the foreground. (with Adam Rudolph, Aaron Shaw and Jamael Dean) 05. Thanking The Earth (with Sam Gendel and Nate Mercereau) 06. Salon Winds (with Jamire Williams, Nate Mercereau, Jamael Dean and Aaron Shaw) 07. Ripples, Reflection, Loop (with Laraaji, Jamael Dean and Sharada) 08. Togetherness (with Devin Daniels and Jamael Dean) 09. Iasos 79 ‘til Infinity 10. Please, wake up.
There are many albums that convey a sense of place. Sometimes the place is an entire town or nation, other times it’s a small bedroom. Nick Schofield‘s excellent new ambient music album, Glass Gallery, conveys the energy of part of Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada. The gallery is full of high ceilings and massive windows, creating a space full of light, air, and meditative quiet.
“Central Atrium” immediately puts you into the right headspace for the record with its warm synths and simple, relaxing chords. Listening to “Mirror Image” is like listening to a prism with light shining through it. I’m not sure I can describe it better than that. “Getty Garden” blips and bleeps like a happy robotic cat. “Water Court” seemingly drifts along without effort, and “Molinarism” sounds like the theme to a Blade Runner spin-off TV show.
“Travertine Museum” and “Snow Blue Square” are luxurious meditations. “Ambient Architect” is a good way to describe Schofield himself, as the song weaves intricate yet relaxing patterns of synth chords over and through each other. “Garden Court is a nice compliment to “Water Court.” “Kissing Wall” is as intriguing as its namesake and a perfect song for androids who want to make out, with humans or other synthetic beings. The album ends with the subtle, but no less hypnotizing, “Key of Klee.”
What makes this album even more impressive is when you consider it was made with just one synthesizer – a Sequential Circuits Prophet-600. I couldn’t make this with ten synthesizers if he, Gary Numan, and Giorgio Moroder were coaching me. It’s a lovely piece of work.
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Gabriel at Clandestine Label Services.]
