A collaboration between two of the best-known names in ambient music, the Japanese musician Ryuchi Sakamoto and the Austrian electronica artist Christian Fennesz, CENDRE is a hushed delight from start to finish, containing stately, minimalist pieces such as "Aware," "Kuni," and "Amorph." Fennesz provides the weightless electronic backdrop, into which Sakamoto drops precise chords that ripple the aural surface like smooth pebbles dropped into a pool.

Cybernetic disco maestro Patrick Cowley returns to Dark Entries with From Behind, a collection of grooving and ecstatic covers of 60s garage and soul cuts. Best known for his chart-topping disco anthems, Cowley left us with an incredible body of work before his tragic death in 1982 due to AIDS-related illness. Since 2009, Dark Entries has been working with Cowley’s friends and family to uncover the singular artist’s lesser-known sides, including his soundtracks for films on compilation albums School Daze, Muscle Up, and Afternooners. From Behind reveals yet another facet of Cowley’s myriad influences; garage and soul. As a tripped-out teenage music freak who arrived in 60’s San Francisco, it should come as no surprise that these psychedelic sounds, both heady and visceral, infuse Cowley’s oeuvre. Recorded during Cowley’s most productive period, ‘80-’82, these tracks show the master flexing his virtuosity while paying loving tribute to the songs that shaped him.

David Darling’s Other Worlds is a unique New Age album that includes his signature pizzicato, vocalizations, solo and choir cellos; while exploring new canvases of piano, electronic music and percussion, expanded with additional soloists. Guest performers include virtuosos Jiebing Chen (Erhu, Zhonghu) and Lili Haydn (Violin). From the meditative “Amelia,” the trance state of “Voyager,” the blending styles of “Other Worlds,” the drivingpizzicato of “The Benedictine,” the emotional “Rendezvous,” and the other compositions, the listener is invited to explore Other Worlds. As a GRAMMY award–winning cellist, composer, teacher, and collaborator, Darling redefined how the cello is played and how music is taught from teaching students, to directing orchestras, to performing on stage. An innovative improviser, he draws on classical, country, jazz, rock, new age, and world music to create compositions that tap deep into listeners’ souls and through which listeners can bring to life their own stories, meaning, and consciousness. "David Darling played the cello the way Georgia O’Keefe painted mountains; decisive, delicate and dedicated to his truth. He could play joy and grief at the same time, the way they occur in life". - Kate Munger

The title Horse Rotorvator is explained in the liner notes as a device large enough to "plough up the waiting world," created from the bones of the horses of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Bay City Rollers this isn't. On the group's second full album, Coil continue the refinement of brute noise and creepily serene arrangements into a truly modern psychedelia, from tribal drumming and death march guitars to disturbing samples and marching band samples and back. Balance shares the same haggard, mystic vocal delivery common to fellow explorers of the edge like David Tibet and Edward Ka-Spel, but he has his own blasted and burnt touch to it all. His lyrical subjects range from emotional extremism of many kinds to blunt, often homoerotic imagery (matched at points in the artwork and packaging) and meditations on death…

A group whose distinctly ethereal and gossamer sound virtually defined the enigmatic image of the record label 4AD, Cocteau Twins were founded in Grangemouth, Scotland, in 1979. Taking their name from an obscure song from fellow Scots Simple Minds, the Cocteaus were originally formed by guitarist Robin Guthrie and bassist Will Heggie and later rounded out by Guthrie's girlfriend Elizabeth Fraser, an utterly unique performer whose swooping, operatic vocals relied less on any recognizable language than on the subjective sounds and textures of verbalized emotions.

The album "Liaisons Dangereuses: Cult Radio Classics - The Early Years" is a 2-CD compilation that commemorates the influential Liaisons Dangereuses radio show, which aired on the Antwerp radio station SIS in the 1980s. This show was a pioneer in promoting the New Beat movement, a genre that became highly popular in Europe, especially in Belgium. The compilation features tracks that capture the innovative and avant-garde music style that defined the show.

Versus is a long-gestating audio document of the collaboration between Detroit techno luminary Carl Craig, pianist Francesco Tristano, and French orchestra Les Siècles, conducted by François-Xavier Roth. All the aforementioned musicians (along with Germany's Moritz von Oswald, who serves as "spiritual advisor" for this recording) premiered Versus on-stage in 2008, reportedly to five standing ovations. Instead of taking the easy way out and just releasing a recording of the concert, Craig and company spent nearly a decade working on this album, taking full advantage of the capabilities of the recording studio. The orchestrations are rich and expressive yet intricate and fine-tuned, and they provide a hefty kick when necessary…

Dan Snaith's latest album, Honey, marks an intriguing new phase for Caribou. Over more than two decades Dan Snaith has had many guises. After putting every ounce of himself into Our Love and Suddenly, for his sixth Caribou album Snaith now pulls himself away a little in search of music that isn’t about any one person and is available to everybody. Huge dancefloor tracks twinkle, shimmer and surprise in a way only Snaith’s productions can but with a freshness that defines an artist who is too excited by music- making to ever truly settle into any one sound.

Steve Roach's new purely atmospheric statement hovers within a warm and embracing expression of etheric ambience. One Day of Forever pulls back the layers of memory, time and perception to express life’s amber-lit emotions, continuing an intimate, mystical-revealing vision within Roach's work. In this one day of forever the meditation on longing, nostalgia, connection, loss, grace and gratitude transmutes from fleeting moments into gentle epiphanies. This album furthers the refined intention within the elemental approach first expressed on his previous 2CD, Reflections in Repose.

Rave Tapes is the eighth studio album by Mogwai. With Rave Tapes, Mogwai's mastery of sound and space is firmly at its apex. The album is a lustrous collection mined from the same quarry as its predecessors, wreathed in painterly textures underpinned by increasingly electronic beats. Mogwai wrote and recorded Rave Tapes at the band's Castle Of Doom studio in Glasgow, Scotland, with Paul Savage, who also worked on their 2011 album, Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will. Japanese edition includes two bonus tracks.

Upon first listen, two things about Honey are immediately clear: First, it is an entirely new kind of Caribou record. Second, in being an entirely new kind of Caribou record, it is in keeping with Dan Snaith's discography, each new album marked by radical thematic and sonic shifts. Honey is not a departure from the Caribou we've known up to this point but rather the product of a lifetime spent listening to and crafting immaculate pop music. After two intensely personal Caribou albums (Suddenly and the Grammy-nominated Our Love), Snaith now pulls himself away a little in search of music that isn't about any one person and is relatable to everybody. It also brings Snaith's two personas, Caribou and Daphni, closer together than ever before. On Honey, Snaith fuses their strengths into a record that grabs you and moves you like Daphni before it uplifts you like Caribou. Huge dancefloor tracks twinkle and surprise in a way only Snaith's productions can, with a freshness that defines an artist who is too excited by music-making to ever truly settle into any one sound.

Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition) is due for release on Oct 4, 2024, celebrating the original album’s 30th anniversary. Written when Aphex Twin (Richard D. James) was in his early 20s, the album gained critical acclaim both upon release and retrospectively (10/10 Pitchfork review, #2 Best Ambient Album of All Time, 4 star Rolling Stone review + more). Aphex Twin and SAW II’s influence continues to grow and take new meaning across generations.

The audio companion to David Toop's excellent book advances the case he made, that Les Baxter, Aphex Twin, The Beach Boys, Herbie Hancock, King Tubby and My Bloody Valentine are all related by their effect on sound pioneering. A double-disc set, Ocean of Sound impresses not only with its incredible diversity of musical styles, but with how easily these artists work next to each other. The second disc includes consecutive contributions by Paul Schütze, the Velvet Undergound, Holger Czukay of Can, The Beach Boys, African Headcharge and Sun Ra. Besides illustrating Toop's point beautifully, the album is an excellent addition to the collection of any wide-ranging ambient fan.

Chappie was bound to be something a little special since it is composer Hans Zimmer’s first all-electronic score in 25 years. He also had a little help with this, with additional music by Steve Mazzaro and Andrew Kawczynski. But how did it turn out? Chappie, being a film about a robot that can feel and think like a child can, is quite an interesting movie for anyone to score. It has to have somewhat of a child element, while still remaining robotic and ready for action and intensity.
The first track, “It’s a Dangerous City”, seems like it would fit perfectly, given the OST’s nature, into an action sequence of a new Tron film…

Tilt was Scott Walker's first album following over a decade of silence, and whatever else he may have done during his exile, brightening his musical horizon was not on the agenda. Indescribably barren and unutterably bleak, Tilt is the wind that buffets the gothic cathedrals of everyone's favorite nightmares. The opening "Farmer in the City" sets the pace, a cinematic sweep that somehow maintains a melody beneath the unrelenting melodrama of Walker's most grotesque vocal ever. Seemingly undecided whether he's recording an opera or simply haunting one, Walker doesn't so much perform as project his lyrics, hurling them into the alternating maelstroms and moods that careen behind him. The effect is unsettling, to put it mildly. At the time of its release, reviews were undecided whether to praise or pillory Walker for making an album so utterly divorced from even the outer limits of rock reality, an indecision only compounded by its occasional (and bloody-mindedly deceptive) lurches towards modern sensibilities. "The Cockfighter" is underpinned by an intensity that is almost industrial in its range and raucousness, while "Bouncer See Bouncer" would have quite a catchy chorus if anybody else had gotten their hands on it. Here, however, it is highlighted by an Eno-esque esotericism and the chatter of tiny locusts.