Happy (very belated) birthday to us! Back in January of 2022 we celebrated the tenth anniversary of our blog. To celebrate, in this episode, we pull the curtain back a bit to talk with ten of the w…

This year’s Top 20 list is noteworthy for its variety, a reflection of the wealth of music on the market.  For every 200 albums submitted to ACL, only one makes our final list.  This makes it…

A Closer Listen received over 10,000 submissions this year, 7000 of them valid, and we listened to at least a segment of every one.  Now we’ve chosen 70 of them ~ one percent ~ to include in …

Thousands of submissions, hundreds of reviews, and it all comes down to this: The Top 20 Albums of 2022!  Our headlines: women dominate, filling the top five spots, and a former champion returns to…

If not for experimental musicians, music might never move forward.  These artists challenge what is while wondering what could be.  They ask if instruments might be played in a different manner, or…

Could this be the best fall slate we’ve ever heard?  We started to get this impression in mid-summer, as the autumn announcements gained momentum.  While summer may be the biggest season for …

Of the ten album covers below; four are mostly black, two black and grey.  This year’s drone list is dark and foreboding, a reflection of uncertain times.  Even the brightest cover portrays N…

If 2020 was the most surreal year in recent memory, 2021 was the runner-up.  A rollercoaster of emotion was supplanted by a mountain of malaise.  And yet, many artists broke through with the finest…

“What is the function of music?”, asks the Canadian sound artist and composer Tim Hecker in a recent New York Times profile. “Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for some…

Today is Bandcamp Friday, and we encourage our readers to support the artists and labels of Ukraine.  We’re scoured our resources to find 25 of the best instrumental and experimental releases…

creating a podcast dedicated to experimental sounds

One of 2020’s greatest ironies was a surge in dance music ~ while clubs were being shuttered across the globe.  The surge reflected the desire to dance, and people didn’t stop dancing, …

You don’t hear too many octogenarian trumpet players. The horn is a cruel instrument, in that embouchure collapse cuts many brass players’ careers short. (A good friend of mine was disa…

Have you been feeling anxious, worried, fearful or agitated lately?  Are you ready to embrace some music that’s calm, restive, peaceful, relaxed, bucolic, tender, gentle and mild?  These adje…

With over 200 releases listed, this is once again our biggest Winter Music Preview ever, and the largest instrumental music preview on the planet! Winter is a fitting season for ambient music, whic…

In 2021, Lawrence English’s Room40 was our Label of the Year and Lea Bertucci’s A Visible Length of Light was our #1 album.  This year they’ve joined forces on American Dreams.  C…

By our estimate, there was enough ambient music released in 2023 to fill every waking minute of every day.  How does one stand out in a genre that values slipping beneath the surface?  These ten ar…

German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, whose fiercely innovative style and explosive playing made him a towering figure in the world of European free jazz, died June 22 at his home in…

The natural world existed long before the creation of instruments: music made by wind and waves, birds and beasts.  During the pandemic, many people have rediscovered the aural joys of nature: musi…

In 2020, the global soundscape changed quicker and more significantly than it had at any point in history. The work of field recording artists was given added significance, as they documented sound…

Maria Chavez is a pioneer of Abstract Turntablism, a self-described practice she developed under the guidance of Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening. Born in Lima, Peru and raised in Houston, sh…

Folklore Tapes has been relatively quiet this year, but the label was not going to miss Halloween, especially when sitting on a tale boasting bunnies, the occult and the plague.  The 12″ Tale…

Over the course of the week, we’ll be bringing you nearly 300 albums to peruse: the initial salvo of what will eventually be thousands of spring albums.  We do this because we are fans first,…

There’s never a bad time for happy music.  Happy music comes in a variety of intensities, from peaceful and comforting to joyful and ebullient to silly and fun. The type of happy music one li…

Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson turns 50 today. To celebrate, Join Motion Pictures haveannounced that work has begun on a feature-length documentary about him

Starting today, we delve more deeply into the winter release schedule, which already includes hundreds of titles: a boon for those who have packed away their 2022 playlists and are looking for some…

Modern composition is arguably the most upscale of our categories, and often includes music composed for film, dance and theatre.  The genre lends itself well to conceptual projects and is strong e…

This is the sound of music’s future: collaborative, cross-cultural and genre-fluid.  On Rhizomes, Aho Ssan (Niamké Désiré) touches upon six of our seven genre categories (leaving out only fie…

Some field recording artists travel to the ends of the earth to capture sounds many of us will never hear in person.  This year’s selection includes magma, ice and hydrophone recordings.  But…

It may be an understatement to say that Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s time has finally come.  Not their musical time ~ that arrived when they first appeared on the scene a quarter century ago…

Happy New Year!  We’ve just wrapped up our Year-End Lists, and will soon publish our Winter Music Preview.  The amount of music listed there can be overwhelming, so we’ve decided to pic…

“Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him… Something up above was calling him imperiously… Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, alon…

Due to lockdowns and quarantines, most of us have not gone clubbing for years.  Thankfully, electronic artists have kept making music during the pandemic ~ although not all of it for dancing.  They…

Overflow is a dance album, composed for Alexander Whitley’s production of the same name; but some of the tracks have enormous club potential as well.  The album also manages the rare feat of …

The Greek composer trained as an architect, and created works of shattering visceral power that still astound today, writes Tom Service