Essays
In 1999 a Volkswagen advert gave Nick Drake his only hit, twenty-six years after his death. This is the lineage that followed — guitarists, near-strangers to each other, who inherited not his sound but his economy of hush.
Essays
For fifteen years Frances Castle's Clay Pipe Music has treated the record as a hand-made object — illustrated, numbered, bound to a place. A field guide to a label that maps a minor, overlooked England and stays deliberately small.
Album Reviews
Drew Huddart faces the North Sea and listens. Built from subtractive analogue modular synthesis, Scholars of the Peak's album raises an architecture of watching — lighthouse, lookout, observatory — and trades nostalgia for the posture of the vigil: waiting.
Album Reviews
On Tsuioku, Tokyo Bedroom Orchestra turns cassette hiss, wow and flutter into the album's emotional language. Released by Kitchen Label, these pieces pursue memory rather than preserve it, finding beauty in imperfection and the fragile movement of tape.
Essays
In 1688 nostalgia was a disease you could cure by going home. In 2012 John Koenig named its terminal strain — anemoia, homesickness for a home that never existed, and therefore incurable. From Hofer to Mariya Takeuchi's Plastic Love, how the internet made an unlived past epidemic.
Essays
Liz Harris does not conceal her voice to create atmosphere. In Grouper, obscurity is a compositional method: words remain incomplete, rooms enter the recording, and the listener must finish what the song refuses to explain.
Album Reviews
For ten years Ana Roxanne kept her voice underwater, buried in reverb the way Grouper does. On Poem 1 someone wipes the glass clean: behind it, a woman singing full-voiced of a broken heart.
Album Reviews
Eli Goldberg — Ann Annie — recorded El Prado playing softly so as not to wake the neighbours, and that courtesy becomes its form. Traffic under the window turns to river; his birth surname Prado ("the meadow") returns by way of the Manila galleons. Pastoral folk, ambient and modern classical.
Essays
Between the Eighties and Nineties, Ciprì and Maresco broadcast a black-and-white Palermo on Italian state television: mask-bodies held still in a limewashed waste. Beyond satire lies a place, a jazz score, a southern hauntology of flesh — and a name that had to be coined for it: scialbìa.
Essays
There is a moment on every Grouper record when you stop trying to make out the words — and stopped wanting to long ago. Seven artists live on that threshold: Ana Roxanne, Cate Kennan, Lucy Gooch, Ekin Fil, IKEBANA, Dagmar Zuniga, Nivhek.
Album Reviews
Sixteen albums in, Sylvain Chauveau builds a record like a dry Zen garden: acoustic, unamplified, ruled by one discipline — never two sounds at once. The Complexity of the Simple (2026) is minimalism as ethics: taking away is harder than adding, and you loose the arrow by forgetting you want to.
Album Reviews
Their fifth album is also their oldest: a ghost that dictated the shape of everything before it finally took a body. Eighteen field-recorded miniatures that raise an atmosphere only to crack it from within — ambient folk as daytime hauntology, a fog that rises at seven in the morning.