Ambient / Experimental
Top 100 Chart placements for Ambient / Experimental
Updated 22 hours ago
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#2
Feat. New Releases in Ambient / Experimental
Rain Man
Kalanis debut album Rain Man is a downpour of electronic excellence. A spell-binding journey spanning the electronic music spectrum where sound design and composition are at the core of everything. Let the analogue rain fill the lakes and rivers of your soul.
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#15
Feat. New Releases in Ambient / Experimental
The Melodies In Between EP
A few weeks back, Solar Paint, the debut EP of international sound explorer Sebastian Mullaert and vocalist Layla Rehana, gifted us with four tracks that felt as if theyre inviting us to solve a sun-drenched mystery. Now, the companion EP The Melodies In Between follows a similar path but explores it in a different fashion. In comparison, the duos sophomore offering feels more song-based, it presents more structure in a classic sense and flirts with beats and different rhythms - the underlying emotion luckily stays the very same, though. Its about transience, a gentle musical stream of consciousness thats tracing a memory of moments you havent experienced yet. Although were slowly but steadily entering the annual phase of shorter and darker days, their sun clearly sets only to rise and shine again.
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#26
Feat. New Releases in Ambient / Experimental
Rain & Cymbals
12th Isle founding member Stewart Brown and London-based percussionist Pike present six tracks born out of preparations for live shows at Cafe Oto and The Three Wheel Drive festival, the culmination of collaborating on No Direction from the first Material Things album. Inspired by various traditions of experimentalism, the pair touch upon reference points such as Eliane Radigue and Nurse With Wounds Soliloquy for Lilith (on Coastal Town), as well as the wider canon of motorik, dub and drone practitioners over the past 60 years. Concerned with the interplay between early exports of free jazz and more modern electronics, Rain & Cymbals builds on the projects first outing with a more refined approach to production and a clearer modus operandi, combining ambient pads with additional synth work by Dan Macintyre, multifaceted percussion work and heads-down, emotive minimalism.
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#28
Feat. New Releases in Ambient / Experimental
7 Modes for a Revolution
Since 2015, Olof Cornéer has maintained a parallel practice alongside Night Gestalts album releases, pressing B-sides from singles onto one-off vinyl records and burying them in the ground. Each disc is unique. The audio doesnt appear on the album proper, isnt uploaded to platforms, and wont be reissued. After cutting, the files are deleted from his hard drive. Only rough coordinates are shared publicly—one single physical copy on Earth. To date, thirteen records have been planted in different parts of the world. The outcomes vary. Some have been found and exhumed; others remain in place, drifting from precise memory into rumour. The locations are intentionally imprecise—close enough to prompt a search, vague enough to let chance, terrain, and time play a role. Cornéer frames the series as archiving in reverse: instead of maximising access, it narrows it to a point, testing what music becomes when scarcity is absolute and discovery is contingent. I love how a future civilisation—even after all our knowledge is lost—could find these and play them, he says. The scenario is speculative and physical at once: vinyl survives in soil; a turntable, now or later, might exist; context might not. The fragility is part of the design. One listener reported reaching the posted coordinates only to find a new motorway laid over the site. For Cornéer, that counted as a successful outcome—the record is still there, entombed by infrastructure, folded into the landscapes next layer. As Night Gestalt, Cornéer works in ambient, electronics‑only modes; under his own name, he composes contemporary classical music and creates sound art. The burial practice sits between these lines: a piece of distribution logic treated as artwork, a small counter‑gesture to algorithmic circulation. For documentation and broader work: www.olofcorneer.com.
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#31
Feat. New Releases in Ambient / Experimental
The Mountain Holds a Dagger
Creating ecstatic, alien fusions of industrial, UK bassline and Afro-Portuguese dance music, 2rana 3crana - the project of Gum Takes Tooths Jussi Brightmore - announces their new EPThe Mountain Holds A Dagger for release November 28thon Infinite Machine. Shaped by a period of personal tragedy and physical incapacitation, it is a strange, vital celebration of life and movement. The records title comes from another story of being pushed to the brink. Prior to achieving lasting fame as an occultist writer, in 1902 the mountaineer Aleister Crowley was embarking on the first expedition up K2. One of his party fell ill, according to Richard Kaczynskis 2002 biographyPerdurabo,and feverishly told Crowley there are three of me: two are well, but the third is a mountain, which holds a dagger. This passage chimed with Brightmore, whose sense of self had undergone its own strange unravelling. After years making crushing, airless EBM with the acclaimed London band Gum Takes Tooth, Brightmore set out for a fresh start between the lockdowns - moving to an area just outside Lisbon with his young family. Soon after, however, he experienced a crippling abdominal injury which left him bedridden. Moving so slowly opened the door to this really intense self-enquiry, he says. Having had his mobility ripped away, he resolved to never take it for granted again: to celebrate movement, by focusing his creative efforts on dance music. He would combine this with a costumed drag persona, reminiscent of Johannes J. Jaruraaks work as Hungry. To dress up, to give rise to something within oneself, Brightmore claims, is another celebration of living. Regaining his mobility, he became a fixture of Portugals strange underground club-nights. Having already drawn influence from the area sonically, his industrial leanings melding with locally-popular Afro-Portuguese rhythms like batida, these gigs gave his love of dance music a political dimension. Many of these nights featured no program, trusting artists to arrange themselves in running orders, and involved clubgoers jumping in to help out with the bar or cleanup: a utopian social vision, where everyone takes care of each other. Just as the project was taking off, in Autumn 2023 Brightmores brother was diagnosed with cancer, and passed away. It took up all of my mind and heart, Brightmore says. Making dance music wasnt fitting with my state of mind, and he considered abandoning it altogether. A year later, Brightmore was attending Supernormal Festival with his family, and Repeater Radio invited him to play some tracks on their sound system. Using the shelved, work-in-progress 2rana 3crana tracks on his USB to perform an impromptu DJ set, Brightmore magnetised the crowd. People kept on coming and coming - dancing, having fun. He even left the decks himself to dance with his young daughter. The Quietus co-founder John Doran was so excited by the set, he invited Brightmore to release an exclusive EP for the websites subscribers, following his debut EPVerniz Ripplein January of this year. It charged the whole thing up again, Brightmore smiles. Two of the songs onThe Mountain Holds A Daggerwere performed, in an early state, at that course- changing set. One isCrash Era, bouncing between gelatinous, interdimensional takes on batida, grime and UK garage. The other is the hedonistic title-trackThe Mountain Holds A Dagger: a stormy, techno- adjacent stomper. New creationCutting Beamis the most unruly of the trio - a writhing, slippery industrial dance track, centred on sliding frequency sounds Brightmore likens to a drill in the forehead. Not belonging to either the plasticky fairgrounds of hyperpop or industrial wastelands of EBM,The Mountain Holds A Daggeris weirdly evocative of the natural world. Brightmore notes his use of glistening, semi- organic, digital animal sounds, like the low cyborg howls on Crash Era, but then theres the noise washes on the title-track - eerily reminiscent of crashing waves. As much asThe Mountain Holds A Daggerrepresents a deeply original kind of dance music, however, it remains rooted in the art forms basic principles: the crucial value that I place on underground club culture as a social experience, Brightmore says. Having navigated losing his ability to dance, then his motivation for making dance music in the midst of terrible grief, his love for this art-form now seems all-consuming. Being together, moving to the same music in the same place, he says, is more important than ever.
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#32
Feat. New Releases in Ambient / Experimental
Chaos and Order
Chaos and Order is the new project from B E N N, a Taipei-based producer/ DJ and founder of label Over My Body, operating at the intersection of sound, philosophy and abstraction. Chaos and Order is an auditory study of rupture and resonance, an experimental soundscape shaped by modern sonic fragmentation. Drawing inspiration from Taoist cosmology, B E N N weaves fractured rhythms, collapsing structures, and granular forms of digital decay to embody the shifting interplay of Yin and Yang, entropy and order in constant flux. Across the EP rhythms become rituals, and forms become states of perpetual disintegration and reassembly, where glitch is not error but in essence an aesthetic of imperfection and transformation. His work resists resolution, favoring inward collapse and constant transformation: Intimate yet conceptual, narrative driven yet defiantly non-linear. His work is continuously shifting between post-club terrains and more abstract sonic inquiry.
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#34
Feat. New Releases in Ambient / Experimental
Forest Dwellers
Seeking out the inspirational intersection between free improvisation, rave and ancient mysticism, Plants Heal deliver an album of kaleidoscopic, organic beatdowns to Quindi. Plants Heal is a collaborative project between Dan Nicholls on synths, Dave De Rose on drums and Lou Zon (aka Louise Boer) on visuals. The roots of the project are entwined with Dan and Lous London-based event Free Movements, which began in 2018 to explore how instrumental music could merge with live electronics and DJ sets. Dave and Dan found themselves playing together frequently at the event and as part of Daves free improv project Agile Experiments, with their accomplished track records as multi-instrumentalists reaching across many layers of music culture. The particular synergy of their partnership taps into the subliminal, surreal and transcendental soundscapes, but theyre reliably anchored by instinctive rhythms and driven by a natural flow-state. From the tentative steps of their first collaborations, Dan and Dave coalesced Plants Heal as a more pronounced project with Lous live visuals, culminating in a first self-released album in 2021 and since organically fed and watered through continued performances across adventurous festivals and intimate club spaces. Every incremental step along the path of the project yielded new surprises and the deepening sense of a unique, powerful energy. The trio opted to pour this energy into two days of studio sessions at Sonic Playground Studios in Athens, maintaining their unplanned approach and letting the music and visuals unfold in the moment. The end result is Forest Dwellers, a sincere document of truly free music that uses the rhythmic structure of dance and trance music as a springboard into heightened consciousness. Throughout the album you can hear hints of the familiar - dub techno shimmers, trip hop boom-bap, kosmische momentum, snarling bass modulation, new age ambience and even the odd sizzle of disco. But none of these references are explicit, and they weave in and out of less placeable expressions deeply bedded into Dan and Daves sonic practices. The end result is a swirling tapestry of unspooling groove, wide open and agile enough to shift gears mid-flow - just as comfortable letting the propulsion melt away as locking into a four-to-the-floor throwdown. From the slippery syncopation of Avena Moon to the angular bait-and-switch of Alien Hardware, Yarrows starry-eyed reverie and the rolling, warm-hearted funk of Space Ballad, the Plants Heal sound world is expansive and equally enthusiastic for immediate musical motifs as much as wild abstraction. Lous visual practice is an intrinsic part of the project. During performances she improvises with analogue footage from her library run through video mixers and synthesisers, focused on medicinal plants such as yarrow, hawthorn, nettle and thistle. All those plants feature in processed form on the cover of the record, which was designed in collaboration with Lous brother Arthur Boer. Meanwhile, Lou recorded additional footage in Athens during the recording sessions to feed into the continued cycle of the projects live evolution. Forest Dwellers meaning honours this cycle and its reflection of the eternal undulations of the natural world. Its also a sincere tribute to the spiritual importance and radical potential of the dancefloor, drawn from the freedom taught by jazz and dedicated to reclaiming lost ideas about community, agency, bodies and the enduring allure of the unknown.
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#39
Feat. New Releases in Ambient / Experimental
Transition LP
Denise Rabe presents her first full-length album, a personal work that reflects her artistic maturity and the evolution of her creative path. The record is a conceptual project of 11 tracks, moving away from the dance-floor and focusing on detailed sound design, rhythmic experimentation, and sequencing that breaks with the standards of contemporary techno. A brilliant work that places Denise among the most talented producers in todays electronic music scene. Scenes from the vastness of the void are captured by the machinery created to measure our position in the universe, during their solitary effort to traverse the context we inhabit. Emerging within the difference between soundscapes and soundtracks, the abstract and the found sound encountered within a place as its means for self description. Environmental noise of alien landscapes, organically organizing into patterns and melody, before dissolving into mist and reintegrating into the atmosphere. A rare archeological object equal parts geological formation and architecture, where noise, texture and rhythm are both pure expression and forensic evidence.
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#42
Feat. New Releases in Ambient / Experimental
LMNL005 - wild at heart
Ghostly whispers and crisp soundscapes drift through low-slung dustiness on doris danas wild at heart EP - the latest in Oscilla Sounds Liminal series, a hazy transmission from the borderlands of memory and dream.
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#44
Feat. New Releases in Ambient / Experimental
Mantis 17
Carving vast chasms of space with exacting sound design and deadly poise, Katatonic Silentio returns to the Mantis series for another round of highly detailed leftfield techno exploration. The Turin based sound artist continues to plot her own path through contemporary electronic music, taking cues from soundsystem pressure and dubwise minimalism as much as glitchy experimentation and the meditative repetition of techno. While her output across many different labels can reach to noisy extremes and beatless atmospheres, on her latest for Mantis the Italian artist zeroes in on a hypnotic, mysterious sound cast in the icy moods of late 90s tech step and early dubstep. At all times she finds space for surprise interference even in the most austere of situations, creating a palpable tension that amplifies the deep dancefloor potential of her music and moulding powerful physicality out of subtle elements.
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#46
Feat. New Releases in Ambient / Experimental
My Machines Sound Human
Machine music, yes, but reimagined through a deeply human lens. Matthias Vogts latest work hums with circuitry, yet it breathes, stretches, and falters in ways the quantised world forgot were possible. Theres no grid here, no cold precision, no recycled loops of cultural nostalgia. Instead, Vogt crafts sound in its purest form: unsampled, unbound, and untethered from the genre architectures that usually hold electronic music in check. Recorded entirely solo, this album is less a collection of tracks than a solitary ascent. Vogt climbs beyond the machinery of club tropes, jazz improvisations, and urban ambience toward something more elemental. At its peak, the music feels alpine: clean air, open expanse, the flicker of sunlight refracted through a thin atmosphere. Pieces like Resilience and Our Vivid Memories move with a quiet, unhurried vitality, ethereal yet muscular, contemplative yet alive. This is synthesizer music, but not in the lineage of minimalism or retro futurism. Vogts compositions are introspective and focused. When the album reaches Love Is A Pure Sensation and A Perfect Picture, two luminous hymns to tenderness, Vogt reveals another influence, an echo of Paddy McAloons romantic architecture filtered through the circuitry of the self. The closing moments feel almost deliberate in their openness. This is not closure, but continuation, a door left ajar. Vogts journey through sound, solitude, and synthesis doesnt end here; it merely pauses at a plateau, the air thinning, the horizon still calling.
