[Music] Max Corbacho – Echo Of Longing

Ambient music composer Max Corbacho has been producing soundscapes for 21 years now, and in this (free) release, he explores drone in a way that washes over the listener like waves in an ocean.  It’s an all-encompassing release, worth your time and any contribution you can give to it financially.  From Max’s Bandcamp website:

Dear friends,

After the reissue of Ars Lucis, I am glad to greet you again. My new album “Echo Of Longing” is now available for digital download exclusively from my Bandcamp store. The CD version will be ready in a few weeks, I will let you know the exact day of release later. Exceptionally and only for a short time, you can download it on offer under the option “Name your price” (pay from zero to whatever you want). After a few weeks will be available for all other online stores at full price. Download here. Thanks as always for your support! Stay tuned, more news soon.

All the best,

Max Corbacho

Hypnotic and minimalist soundscapes of an artist in constant search for authenticity and depth. In “Echo Of Longing” Max Corbacho offers three long pieces that are a distant resonance of a feeling that lives inside the human heart and constantly pushes the soul in its search for self-discovery. Through soft sound full of details, such as echoes of perception beyond words, the minimalist and repetitive structure of these subtle sound worlds creates an enveloping sea of stillness. Under a protective mantle of silky incorporeality, as dark and blurred as distant waves, the three long tracks, lasting more than 73 minutes in total, cross silent corridors of sonic energy, slowly changing but always retaining a subtle main harmonic current that continues its way underground. The piece that gives the album its title was created during the sessions for the album “Future Terrain” in 2015, so they are twin pieces that share a common origin. Successive modifications during 2019 have resulted in the piece that now appears in this album. The remaining two pieces were created during the first months of 2019. As if it were the resonance of music spreading through space and time, the cover image also reflects waves expanding in an atmosphere of stillness and deep introspection. These long cyclic waves arranged in layers of blurred sound are one of Max Corbacho’s trademarks, a constant that we can hear in all his albums as if it were another resonance suspended in time and permeating all his works.

This album is an atmospheric and ambient work suitable for listening to at a subliminal level while it gently impregnates one’s space or when listened to at a high level, one can delve deeply into gaseous soundscapes. “Echo of Longing” has been lovingly and expertly crafted by an artist now celebrating a 21-year career without any concession to the commercial or mainstream, faithful to a genre and an audience.

[Music] King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Fishing For Fishes

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are an incredibly prolific band.  Every now and then, they release a crap album like Infest The Rats’ Nest, which is bad metal as far as I’m concerned.  Some of their fans like that.  Fair enough.  This album, however, shows them peaking as a band who can mix prog, psych, boogie rock and some pretty damn good, if weird, songwriting into a coherent bit of listening.  I’m happy to have this one in my collection.

[Music] Piero Milesi – Modi

Thanks kindly to Cuneiform Records, whose weekly $5 downloads are an affordable way to replace a few CDs lost to time and travel.

Piero Milesi was an Italian composer who started off his career in 1977 with the International Folk Group of Moni Ovadia.  His first break came from the now-legendary Cherry Red Records, which originally released this two-piece work in 1982.

The release itself doesn’t sit comfortably in any genre.  Obstensibly a classical music record of a sort, it also touches on chamber rock, art rock, jazz, electronic music, progressive rock, avant-progressive, film music and modern composition.  It was a breathtaking debut for a composer who would score a few more albums, and even arranging an album for Japanese pop star Kazufumi Miyazawa before succumbing to a heart attack in 2011.

[Music] Wayne Robert Thomas & Isaac Helsen – RÁS

Past Inside the Present Records are churning out incredible release after incredible release.  This one is a special gem, however, as guitarist and composer Wayne Robert Thomas & film composer Isaac Helsen pair upon a 30+ minute drone epic.  Though the who album floats beautifully, I have no choice but to declare the first track, a tribute to former Talk Talk frontman and producer of the greatest album I have ever heard in my life, Mark Hollis, who passed away in February of this year.  What a near-perfect collaboration this is!

[Music] BLURRR – Pain Is A Garment

BLURRR, a project of composer Aaron Kim, performs a type of musical wabi sabi.  In times like these, with so much pain and grief in the world, I salute anyone who is willing to mix this concept with Kosmische Musik.  Quite a nice EP.  From BLURRR’s Bandcamp page:

This album was heavily inspired by the term ‘wabi sabi’. This Japanese term has no real definition. It’s more of an instinctual feeling of peace through imperfection. Crafting this album was emotionally laboursome as I tried to emulate wabi sabi in my own interpretation sonically.

This is a concept album about the process of self-healing. Suicide rates, anxiety and general depression has seen a sharp rise as mental health issues seem to grow more commonplace in society today. My hope is that you, the listener, can digest this album as a therapeutic experience that can influence your core to improve yourself today. All positive change can happen, it just takes support. And just know that there are people around you.

[Music] Haram Tapes – Scorpions & Fountains

Haram Tapes is the side project of our friend Sumatran Black, and he’s really outdoing himself on this latest release.  Genres blend seamlessly here, with ambient music, old industrial-influenced electronic music, field recordings and synth music being balanced well enough to be creepy and engaging.  The material is very topical, quite political in a way that is not preachy or obnoxious, and it goes to show HT put a lot of thought into composing a story with this work.

A brilliant piece, but I expect this coming from Pete of SB.

[Music] Naujawanan Baidar – Volume 1

It’s not everyday you come across Afghan experimental music recorded in the Arizona heat.  Myrrors vocalist/guitarist N.R. Safi had composed these tracks as mere impressions (expect a Volume 2 to be released shortly), but the quality of these pieces stand out.  These could hold their own with the best of 1980’s cassette culture.  A brilliant debut, though Safi is planning to do a properly recorded album sometime soon, adding to his psychedelic CV.