Blog Posts

The Slow Music Movement Blog

Mostly we put our daily recommendations here for the blog readers among you, although occasionally we go longform.
Reading about music is a bit like looking at pictures of food - not nearly half as much fun as getting involved, so we scribble a brief intro to hopefully whet your appetite but you're better off just hitting play. Not very "slow" I know but there's a lot of music to check these days & hopefully you'll find the recommendations a handy filter.
Trust your ears, not opinions.

23/1/2023 0 Comments

Max Würden - Landmark (A strangely Isolated Place)

What YOu Ears Say & The Cover Looks LIke

What We Say

The new exploration of all things ambient by Max Würden is a compelling electronic affair shrouded in horizontal haze that combines field recordings, samples, DIY sound box, untuned piano & better functioning electronic devices in a seamless sonic narrative telling tales of the genre's electroacoustic, drone, rhythmic teasing, blissed out & darker, experimental nooks & crannies for A Strangely Isolated Place.

What The Release Notes Say

Max Würden returns with his second album on A Strangely Isolated Place after 2019’s ‘Format’, experimenting with a new style of music creation on ‘Landmark’.

Landmark sees Max Würden combine and integrate various external forces into his usual studio production process. Inspired by many paintings of powerful landscapes found in thrift stores throughout his hometown of Cologne, Max set out to bring various elements together as one whole over time - allowing an organic process of experimentation and collage.

Short phrases of music and field recordings that weren’t originally meant for each other were realized in isolation, such as sounds from his Klangkiste (sound box) built by Max himself, guitars, an old out-of-tune Schimmel piano, and samples of early jazz and classical music. These separate elements eventually, over time, connected and came together as Landmark - a recognizable moment and formation.

The collage of elements found throughout ‘Landmark’, expresses a number of different vantage points from which to gaze and focus your attention. From the more storied and instrumental-based ‘Reprise’ and ‘Range’, to the wide-scape visions of ‘Summiteer’, or the off-world portrayals in ‘Stereo A’ and ‘Stereo B’. Max can be found depicting a montage of intricately detailed moments that invite you to stand and ponder their storied creation, be it emerging from found sound, synthesizers, guitars, samples, or simply his own production sorcery.

Landmark is available on gatefold 2LP gold vinyl and digital, mastered by Rafael Anton Iirsarri and featuring original photography by Max Würden, and artwork by Noah M / Keep Adding.

There will also be a very special limited framed painting edition (10), created by Max, available to purchase on the ASIP website.

CREDITS
All tracks written and produced by Max Würden
Artwork by Noah M / Keep Adding
Photography by Max Würden
Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Studio, New York

For more restless ambient electronica check out the Slowtronic Playlist sometime

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22/1/2023 0 Comments

Low Chord - LC02 (Other Songs)

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

What We Say

If you need a Sunday poodling soundtrack then this suite of chilled studio noodling from Low Chord AKA Scott Orr & Gareth Inkster should fit the bill nicely as they throw some jazz tickled chillers, ambient piano fillers, field recordings & rhythmic minimal oddities together in this somewhat disjointed yet pleasingly cohesive listen for Other Songs.

What The Release Notes Say

Recorded throughout 2018-2022.

Piano by Gareth Inkster.
Sax by Murray Heaton.
All other sounds by Scott Orr.
Produced and Mixed by Scott Orr.

If you need more laidback listening then head over to the chilled but warm hearted Slow Balearic Playlist

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21/1/2023 0 Comments

évia - cold (Lillerne Tapes)

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

What We Say

A short but sweet ambient treat from évia for Lillerne Tapes is today's sofa soundtrack, but rather than being a cloud covered Nordic affair this is ambient music for those clear skied winter sunrises after a night of fresh snow, with a light breeze blowing the looser flakes into the air to refract the welcome light & amplify the magical silence.

What The Release Notes Say

Honored to be able to bring you èvia’s newest set of tunes as the first release of 2023. “cold” is an extremely beautiful collection of thoughtful, personal pieces of music that are perfect for a new season and a new year. Warm, shimmering, crystalline textures and melodies abound—and as sharp and finely honed as much of the material is, there remains an openness and space to each track that makes room for everything within it to be deeply considered. I’ve been completely enraptured by it all for quite some time, and I’m glad that you can finally get in here, too.
Edition of 100 professionally duplicated cassettes.
All music by èvia
Mastered by Rashad Becker

If you need more positively vibrating ambient sounds then check out The New Age of New Age Playlist:

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20/1/2023 0 Comments

Strategy - Graffiti in Space (Constellation Tatsu)

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

What We Say

Lock up your bassbins, Strategy is back with more low-frequency laden electronica that won't be kind to low budget speakers. On his new release for Constellation Tatsu he grabs the questioning techno strands of the dub continuum & creates an early morning twilight zone for the weekend warriors still twitching with dancefloor adrenalin who are coming to terms with reality after the club cocoon has closed its doors.

What The Release Notes Say

Releasing under the moniker Strategy, Portlander Paul Dickow’s latest album explores the space of dub techno, extending beyond the genre and making it his own. Graffiti In Space borders between experimental and dance with custom instruments leaning into the accidents of the process and the limitations of the gear. Variation in mood and tempo provides a reprieve from the techno framework while still working with the same sound vocabulary.

Music and graphics created by Paul Dickow in Northeast Portland, Oregon, Cascadia, 2015-2022

IF You need more post club reality engagement music then the Ambient House Playlist is here for you

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19/1/2023 0 Comments

The Slow Music Movement Radio Show #73

What Your Ears Say & Some of the Artists' Cover Art Looks Like

After a short hiatus the radio show is back to help ease you into 2023 and provide some laid back relief to the grey northern hemisphere skies or soundtrack your beach days in the southern region. Neoclassical piano, arsey folk, cosmic ambient, Hungarian oud, Norwegian poetry & jazz with an ambient house finale. Let's make 2023 a good one.

Ben McElroy & A Spot on the Hill - Pardon The Garden (The Slow Music Movement)
Tomoyoshi Date - 水 Mizu (45 rpm) (Laaps)
Takashi Kokubo & Andrea Esperti - Whales of Sirius (WRWTFWW)
Russ Young - Taiga (Audiobulb)
Hildegunn Øiseth [feat. Bugge Wesseltoft & Mats Eilertsen] - Under The Sun (Clap Your Hands)
Kobza Vajk - A gyermekkor vége (Self Release)
Stick In The Wheel - Robot (From Here)
Ivar Orvedal - Archimedes' Tear (Orb Compendium)
Arve Henriksen & Kjetil Husebø - Syntax (Smalltown Supersound)
Antonina Car - Emerging (Time Released)
Jake Botts - World Through A Raindrop (Self Release)
Nuno Estevez - At Home With House, Matthias Vogt Rmx 8 (Just Move)
Bluetech - Binmimetic Robotics (Behind The Sky)
Doc Sleep - Tomorrow is Beautiful! feat Glenn Astro (Tartelet)

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18/1/2023 0 Comments

Kitchen Cynics - Fractured Memories (Cruel Nature)

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

What We Say

Like everyone I'm sure Alan Davidson has problems, but with over a hundred LPs to his name writer's block isn't one of them. Happily his new LP for Cruel Nature is another acid-folk curiosity where light trails cling to the notes, machines are mischievously cajoled into hazy ambient & space folk-rock service & folk mundanity is viewed with wide open eyes & lysergically reimagined.

what The Release Notes Say

Kitchen Cynics is the musical project of Alan Davidson from Aberdeen, Scotland. Active since the late 80s, with over a hundred releases, Alan is a prolific and talented songwriter whose work draws on his own experiences as well as the characters and history of Aberdeen. Full of charm, his albums are tender, bittersweet, packed with a dry wit and an ear for a melody that can pluck your heartstrings, whilst the words resonate deep within.

Feature and interview with Alan (Terrascope, 2005) www.terrascope.co.uk/Features/Kitchen%20Cynics%20interview.htm

'Sounded to me like a cross between Anne Briggs and Robert Fripp' (Dylan Carlson, Earth)

'The Kitchen Cynics have been releasing great weird music from their hidden fortress in Aberdeen since the 1980s' (Byron Coley, The Wire)

"Having released albums every year since 1989, Aberdeen’s Alan Davidson has amassed quite the catalogue. Operating in terrain similar to Current 93 (with much more of an emphasis on the folk side of things) and Ivor Cutler"

CREDITS
All songs by K Cynics, recorded in 2022 in Room 9 at The Anatomy Rooms, Aberdeen.
Cover art by Alan Davidson
Design by James Watts

Thank you to the following for help/encouragement...
Francis Comyn
Simon Lewis
Phil McMullen
Roger Linney
Grey Malkin
Andy Nagy
Steve Strode
Irene Trudel
Rachel Winkworth
Melanie Xulu

If you want more Alt-Folk delights then check out the independent artists in the Slow Folk Playlist

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17/1/2023 0 Comments

Takashi Kokubo & Andrea Esperti - Music For A Cosmic Garden (WRWTFWW)

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

What We Say

Any LP with the word cosmic in the title is in with a fair chance of TSMM inclusion. Luckily this ambient opus from Japanese environmental music stalwart Takashi Kokubo & Swiss experimental trombonist Andrea Esperti for WRWTFWW lives up to all expectations, as it simultaneously launches upwards to distant galaxies, goes deep within via previously dormant neural alleyways & prises open doors to long ignored, much needed spiritual dimensions.

What The Release Notes Say

WRWTFWW Records is very happy to present a new collaborative album by Japanese ambient/environmental legend Takashi Kokubo (Ion Series) and Italian & Swiss trombonist Andrea Esperti (Esperti Project): MUSIC FOR A COSMIC GARDEN.

Recorded during the heights of the pandemic and completed in February 2021, the splendid ethereal soundscape created by Kokubo and Esperti is available in limited double LP, digipack CD, as well as digital.

Takashi KOKUBO is a Japanese environmental musician who produces healing music that gently resonates with people’s hearts. He has recorded “sound scenes from nature” in countries around the world using a binaural “CyberPhonic” microphone of his own invention, and incorporates these dimensional sounds of nature in his work. The founder of Studio Ion, he has released more than 20 albums that include the highly sought-after Ion Series. His track "A Dream Sails Out to Sea, Scene 3" was featured on Light in the Attic’s Grammy-nominated Kankyō Ongaku compilation.

Andrea ESPERTI is a Swiss trombonist and composer originally from Puglia (Italy). He plays in multiple genres (classical, pop, world, electro, jazz) in an eternal approach of exchange and encounters. He travels the world, listening to others and interacting with their cultures, crystallizing his globe-trotting emotions through music projects. More info at andreaesperti.bandcamp.com

For fans of environmental, ambient, cosmic escapes, meditative atmospherics, and gardening in space.

If you need more cosmic ambience in your life then further enlightenment can be found with the The New Age of New Age Playlist

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16/1/2023 0 Comments

Singles & EPs Round Up - January 16th, 2023

Reverse Death - Stretching to Infinity (Half Shell)

Vertical Divider

This is my favourite track from the new Reverse Death EP that got lost in the Xmas melee; its more insistent percussion giving it an extra hypnotic edge over the generally ambient, new age, acid-folk soundscapes that surround it, but the whole EP is well worth sinking into during a quiet moment. Check "Sweet Flower Moon" on the Slow Balearic Playlist.

Maxime Dangles - Matin Bleu (Lifeguards)

Maxime Dangles is making a dignified exit from the club scene & utilising his impeccable sound design in more spatial & cerebral musical pursuits these days, typified by this cultured, low key epic slice of enveloping neoclassical electronica. If you're still in a club on Saturday nights flip for the bumping, return to his roots house remix from Antena.
Find this track also in the Slow Neoclassical selection.

Vertical Divider

billow Observatory - Calque (Felte)

Vertical Divider

Nice to see Billow Observatory kicking off the new year in fine style with this start to finish listen, in which drifting electronic clouds thread through repurposed dub techno constructs; float over natural field recordings and are occasionally nudged along by unhurried rhythmic elements.
Check them out on the Slowtronic Playlist.

Rémi Fay - Funambulist: No.4 (Self Release)

Since working with A Spot On The Hill on the new TSMM label release my interest in & appreciation of minimal piano works has increased no end, so I was very happy to have stumbled across Rémi Fay recently whose unhurried approach and well chosen collaborations are ticking all my new found modern classical boxes.
Check him out on the Slow Neoclassical Playlist.

Vertical Divider

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15/1/2023 0 Comments

Alaskan Tapes - Who Tends A Garden (Nettwerk)

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks LIke

What We Say

Inspired by a collection of essays and poems on the reality and concept of a garden, the new compositional ambient LP from Alaskan Tapes for Nettwerk, is a horticulturally attuned, seasonally fluctuating, neoclassical graced ambient meditation on the nature connecting joys of an outdoor space in all its many shapes and forms. It also happens to be the perfect Sunday soundtrack.

What The Release Notes Say

Who Tends A Garden explores the metaphorical and literal meaning of a garden, whether it’s composed of sound or of the dirt in one’s yard. The concept for the garden theme came to me in an old bookstore on a trip to the Adirondack Mountains in New York, where I came across the book, Who Loves A Garden by Louise Seymour Jones, a title from 1935 filled with old poems and essays on the subject.

Mastered by Chad Skinner at Half Moon Audio

If you need a long ambient sound bath, you can slip into the Slow Ambient playlist anytime you want.

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14/1/2023 0 Comments

Harry Towell & Friends - Petrologist's Lens (Whitelabrecs)

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks LIke

What We Say

As the boss of one of ambient music's epicenters - Whitelabrecs, Harry Towell has combed through his bulging address book & enlisted 12 label stalwarts to collaborate with him on this sonic ode to the geological history of the earth. It's a cultured, captivating, suitably glacial sonic affair that utilizes the full gamut of ambient & modern classical strains to celebrate our somewhat underappreciated foundations.

What The Release Notes

Whitelabrecs label owner Harry Towell is perhaps best renowned for his long-standing Spheruleus project, with a discography listing releases on Lost Tribe Sound, Home Normal, Time Released Sound, Hibernate and Eilean, as well as his collaborations alongside Sven Laux, Guy Gelem, Ekca Liena and more. Harry returns to his own label, following 2021’s ‘Canvas Homes + Supplémentaires’ and EPs ‘Absent Frames’ and ‘Inaugurate’, in this special collaborative album called ‘Petrologist’s Lens’.

January is a month we usually reserve for a compilation album, such as our Sleeplaboratory series. This year Harry decided to invite 12 artists who had contributed more than 2 releases on Whitelabrecs to submit a short sketch or sample, and then he developed these into the tracks that make up this album. As with some of his more recent work, this album is created under his own name, but with ‘& friends’ added to credit the label artists and good friends which he has worked alongside.

The title ‘Petrologist’s Lens’ nods to the concept of this body of work, which is rooted in the ancient geological history of the earth. Harry studied the land history of the areas where his collaborators reside, to help form a title for each piece. Tracks are named after particular fragments of rock or sediments, land regions or fossils for example, and the compositions were developed in a way which mimics the layering of these. The layers tell a story, giving clues of how they came to be. Sonically, filigree details and eroded tape textures ride waves of modern classical orchestration, ambient drones and electronics.

The packaging for this release features cover artwork by Soraya Kornblum, an art student in Adrian Lane’s class, submitted to Whitelabrecs as part of a school project. Each of the 200 editions include a 16 page booklet with words provided by Neil McRoberts, who transcribed his thoughts after listening to the music and reflecting on the concept. Physical copies are split into two runs; a standard gold disc version and a special marble print deluxe edition.

CREDITS
Written and produced by Harry Towell
Additional production and inspiration provided by Adrian Lane, Andrew Heath, Blochemy, Edu Comelles, Glåsbird, Guy Gelem, James Edward Armstrong, Paweł Pruski, Phil Tomsett, Polaroid Notes, Simon McCorry, Sven Laux

Mastered by James Edward Armstrong
Cover Art by Soraya Kornblum
Booklet Notes by Neil McRoberts
Art and Design by Andrew Heath

If you need more contemplation encouraging ambient sounds then head over to the Slow Ambient Playlist:

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What YOu Ears Say & The Cover Looks LIke

What We Say

What The Release Notes Say

For more restless ambient electronica check out the Slowtronic Playlist sometime

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

What We Say

What The Release Notes Say

If you need more laidback listening then head over to the chilled but warm hearted Slow Balearic Playlist

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

What We Say

What The Release Notes Say

If you need more positively vibrating ambient sounds then check out The New Age of New Age Playlist:

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

What We Say

What The Release Notes Say

IF You need more post club reality engagement music then the Ambient House Playlist is here for you

What Your Ears Say & Some of the Artists' Cover Art Looks Like

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

What We Say

what The Release Notes Say

If you want more Alt-Folk delights then check out the independent artists in the Slow Folk Playlist

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

What We Say

What The Release Notes Say

If you need more cosmic ambience in your life then further enlightenment can be found with the The New Age of New Age Playlist

Reverse Death - Stretching to Infinity (Half Shell)

Maxime Dangles - Matin Bleu (Lifeguards)

billow Observatory - Calque (Felte)

Rémi Fay - Funambulist: No.4 (Self Release)

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks LIke

What We Say

What The Release Notes Say

If you need a long ambient sound bath, you can slip into the Slow Ambient playlist anytime you want.

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks LIke

What We Say

What The Release Notes

If you need more contemplation encouraging ambient sounds then head over to the Slow Ambient Playlist:

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