New Journeys in Ambient – Stationary Travels

The last vestiges of Autumn’s colors are slowly fading and the inevitable retreat to interior life begins. This week’s ambient music journey features a selection of ideal sonic companions to attend the heart of the fall season and its warm introspections. Featuring recent releases by Daou (France), Federico Mosconi (Italy), Gray Acres (USA), and Rosales (UK/Canada).

Daou – Blue Ghost

https://daou.bandcamp.com/album/blue-ghost

It is not unusual to find an anonymous protagonist haunting the albums of Paris-based architect, musician, and multidisciplinary artist Georges Daou. He employs this rather unique device beautifully once again on Blue Ghost whose main character finds himself in an emotional seaside reverie reflecting on “those days when the sun seemed endless, when the sky was always blue and the world felt untouched by time.” The poetic narrative written to accompany the album is brought to life in ten episodic ambient soundscapes layered in vivid textures and filled with melancholy and longing.

… Far off, where sea and sky lean toward each other but never meet, silence takes the shape of a place he once knew or dreamed. The air carries salt and the dry sweetness of sunlit earth. A gull cries somewhere out of sight …

Blue Ghost is available from Ruptured Records in a limited cassette tape edition as well as digital & streaming. The album was mastered by Taylor Deupree.

Federico Mosconi – Eleven Steps to the Side

https://federicomosconi.bandcamp.com/album/eleven-steps-to-the-side

This year has seen Italian composer & musician Federico Mosconi experimenting with his musical approach, first in a collaboration with writer Mirco Salvadori and vocalist Barbara De Dominicis on his summer release Frammenti, and again this month with his solo effort Eleven Steps to the Side. For the latter, the instrumentation Mosconi has employed on his previous works remains largely unchanged, but he experiments with new methods for processing sound and recording his guitars which he says opened up opportunities to explore new compositional territory. Though the music remains largely introspective in nature, the cracked facade and bold reds & oranges on the cover hint at the vivid sonic colors and deeply resonant textures to be heard.

Eleven Steps to the Side is available directly from the artist on limited edition CD as well as digital & streaming. The album features cover art by Alessandro Nobis.

Gray Acres – Soft Erasure

Bandcamp (CD/digital) | Fluid Audio

Gray Acres is a collaborative project in which brothers Andrew & Michael Tasselmyer develop ambient music of a more subtle and restrained nature than they have as part of Hotel Neon. Soft Erasure, their first new full-length album in four years, is illustrative of this as it was developed with what an approach they describe as “more about dissolving sounds than constructing them”. Using sampled acoustic instruments, loops, and sound processing, they have created a collection of elusive, abstract soundscapes that seep into the liminal spaces between perception and feeling.

That idea of erasure not as violence, but as gentleness, decay, or transformation, felt like the right metaphor to latch on to. It speaks to memory, distance, and time, and how all of those forces shape and reshape our perception of sound and self.

Soft Erasure is available was released by Fluid Audio in a CD edition package available directly from the artists in very limited quantities and which includes cloth-backed Ordinance Survey Map fragments, vintage photographs, fragments of reel-to-reel field recording tape, antique travel stubs, and other ephemera. Digital and streaming options are also available.

Rosales – To Live

https://homenormal.bandcamp.com/album/to-live

Rosales is a guitar-ambient project from Ian Hawgood and Brad Deschamps that has seen a number of releases now since its debut in 2021. Two of the most prolific and widely followed artists in the genre, they create a memorable journey each time they go back to the well and that is certainly the case with To Live which was just released on Hawgood’s own Home Normal label. Guitar and tape manipulations remain the main source of the soundscapes they create, while bits of mellotron, synths and field recordings are interwoven to add depth and color to the lush atmospheres. But the sounds are not just beautiful and immersive. Both of these artists are known for imbuing their work with an expressiveness born of empathy and vulnerability making the music as emotionally compelling as it is pleasant to listen to.

To Live was released Home Normal in a CD edition which is sold out at this writing as well as digital & steaming.