Happening Again #63
Accidentally Ambient Number Two
Hello!
I’m heavy on the ambient records again this issue. There must be something in the water. Or maybe it’s the weather.
In case you missed it, you can read my words on Dohnavùr’s ‘We Owe Each Other Everything’, the final album from the Scottish duo in last week’s Moonbuilding Weekly. And after that, read today’s issue.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve been spinning recently…
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Fief
VII
Out Of Season
The seventh album from Salt Lake City, Utah musician Fief is awash in medieval melodies and atmospheric synthesis. ‘VII’ almost feels like a dungeon synth record that loops all the way round to the origins of the genre, in a very Music For The Middle Ages way. He takes archaic strings, fluttering panpipes, and assorted found sounds (you can hear more than one grunt from a pig) and augments them with an array of electronics and it all just works. Take ‘Echoes Of The Apse’, all chorus over static, like someone tuning a temporal radio to Middle Ages FM. And then a minute in the angels join in. The impish ‘Fool’s License!’ bounces from tambourine to tambourine, while strings and flute snake like a sine wave throughout. ‘Peasants’ Vigil’ is a real change of pace, sombre and forlorn, the patter of rain encompassing swelling drones, textured with literal coughs. But ‘Meet Me When Turrets Notch The Setting Sun’ should be your first port of call if you’re still not convinced; a proper fusion of electronic dungeon synth and acoustic European instrumentation. There’s lots of interesting stuff going on in this record, and it’s more than well worth your time.
Starthrone
APHELION
Bandcamp
UK-based Starthrone is another Instagram discovery, but a very welcome one nonetheless. I really love how these three tracks combine the darkness of dungeon synth with the dreaminess of ambient sci-fi. ‘SYS//001/The Sword Of Orion’ starts off all sinister and foreboding, before those star-sailing synthlines start soaring, like shooting stars across the sky. And I’ll never not love thick and heavy drones, like the ones on ‘SYS//002/Sorcery On The Seventh’. For a quid this is a steal. Hope these weren’t just a one-off.
Hunter Complex
CALL OF THE WILD AND VOID
SFI
The sixth album by Dutch electronic musician Lars Meijer is finally in the wild and it’s glorious. Meijer is a dab hand at this sort of thing, having been tinkering away within the scene since the late 1980s. Now on ‘Call Of The Wild And Void’ he’s recruited Aquiles Navarro on trumpet and Kat Epple on flute just to up the ante even more. And it all pays off. Opener ‘One More Drift’ has a 1990s Encarta-like feel to it the second those pipes kick-in, as electronic textures sparkle in the background. I can’t get enough of those drifting synthlines on ‘The Lure Of The Animal’, fronting a key melody that saunters into focus. But ‘Losing The River’ is my personal favourite - it slowly builds, looping piano motifs gliding across spectral tones that dissipate like mist off a river. Everything is turned up a notch when those bassy drums make their entrance, before it all leisurely subsides, a staggered exit of instruments walking stage left one-by-one. Make sure to nab this on Iridescent Seafoam vinyl as well. It won’t hang about.
Don Slepian
SEA OF BLISS: NEW MUSIC FOR DIGITAL ORCHESTRA
Bandcamp
Thank you to Gavin “worriedaboutsatan” Miller, who switched me onto not only this album, but Don Slepian himself. It feels like he’s a bit of an unsung pioneer of the ambient scene. Music technologist Slepian was initially a computer engineer before becoming an ambient composer at the end of the 1970s. ‘The Sea Of Bliss’ was originally released on cassette in 1980, but Slepian has given it a new lease of life on his Bandcamp page. ‘Sea Of Bliss’ ebbs and flows with tides of warm synthesis as an overlay of starlight chimes shimmer endlessly. The yang to the yin of ‘Sonic Perfume’, shading its ethereal melodies on the darker side, as deeper, expansive drones yawn chasmically below light fluttery textures. It’s no surprise that this is his most well-known record, and deservedly so. It must be deep-dive time again; looks like I’ve got another back catalogue to peruse.
Bill Nelson
CHANCE ENCOUNTERS IN THE GARDEN OF LIGHTS
Cherry Red
I can viscerally remember the morning a certain Neil Mason waved the double CD boxset of this record at me from across his desk in the Electronic Sound office. I hadn’t come across Bill Nelson before. “You’ll like this,” Neil said, as he turned the volume knob of the ES sound system to the right. He wasn’t wrong. Yorkshireman Bill Nelson has a back catalogue that stretches half a century and all manner of record labels. His music spans prog, art rock, glam rock, post-punk, and new wave (and then some), but it’s this ambient record that really turned my head. ‘Chance Encounters In The Garden of Lights’ was Nelson’s third consecutive instrumental album, and one that he calls his “most personal and yet least demonstrative”. Spanning a whopping 63 tracks, this was originally released as a double LP back in 1987, with an accompanying seven-inch EP called ‘Ecclesia Gnostica’. It’s Gnostic influence lends it an occult quality (that’ll be the influence of Austin Osman Spare); if there was ever a big budget adaption of Alan Moore’s ‘Jerusalem’ (and there never should be) you can imagine this scoring that. Rich with electronic choirs, twinkling synths, swelling chords, and snippets of sampled speech, it’s a proper epic in every sense, and probably one of my favourite ambient albums of all time. We should champion Bill Nelson more often.
That’s it for this time. As always you can find my ramblings elsewhere in both print and online in Electronic Sound. I am going to tentatively dip into the world of microblogging again, so follow me on Bluesky if that’s your sort of thing.
But before I go, here are some Stray Thoughts and things from across the internet that have caught my eye…
// Solidarity to all those losing their jobs through no fault of their own as the video games industry goes through another dreadful period, because C-suite executives at Xbox have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.
// Not content with Xbox taking all the attention, PlayStation announced that they will no longer be making physical game discs from 2028 onwards, apparently without telling any of their partners. That’ll be a digital-only PS6 then. That’ll likely cost more than a grand.
// Does anyone want to buy me this? Thanks in advance.
Great stuff, Fin. Big Bill Nelson fan here. I used to be in his fan club!