Album reviews exploring ambient folk, hauntology, and pastoral drone — records examined not as products but as weather systems, turned over for the residue they leave behind.
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.
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.
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.
Album Reviews
Richard Bundy and Anna Phoebe turn Dover's chapels, tunnels and chalk cliffs into the material of the music itself. On Clay Pipe, From the Edge is less a border town than the stone beneath it — piano, violin, the Sacconi Quartet and the town's own reverberations.
Album Reviews
Gintė Preisaitė, Instruments of Forgetting and the Singing Bone on FELT: electroacoustic collage, prepared piano and a voice resurfacing from oblivion like raking autumn Baltic light.
Album Reviews
Named for the deaf cat who died too young, Tujiko Noriko's sixth album for Editions Mego rebuilds a whole world of sound for an ear that never received it. Seventy minutes of electronics, voice and domestic recordings: not an album about grief, but a temperature of grief.
Album Reviews
There's an imaginary dial beneath this record, and it doesn't tell the hour one would expect from Ruth Garbus. Profound lives at noon, not the late-afternoon melancholy of her past — the record in which she stops casting long shadows, and sings her ageing as vegetal ornament.
Album Reviews
Girls Blue by Cher1tide: guitar and voice from Tokyo, lo-fi dream folk that holds its focus instead of blurring. A serene pastoral haunted like early Grouper.
Album Reviews
There is a river Andy Cartwright crosses every week, always the same mountain path in the French Alps where he has lived since the late twenty-tens, and every time it is a different river.