Occasionally ambient can suffer from a distinct lack of low-end, making it feel almost entirely weightless. Often that’s the point: who doesn’t like drifting away from the world to a higher plane from time to time. Appleblim’s new album for quiet details, Liminal Tides, for all its soft synth washes and ephemeral moments, is anchored by the kind of heft you’d expect ...

Just the other day I was listening to Kelela’s excellent live album In The Blue Light from last year and wondering when we’d get some new music, and POW!… here it is. idea 1 is indeed fairly simple and stripped down, but not as disposable as the throwaway name suggests, and perhaps signals a shift in her sound, throwing in distorted, shoegaze-y guitars alongside her ...

The Canadian singer-songwriter on the spooky atmospherics of a song from a cult horror classic

The premise of One Track Mind is pretty simple: I ask artists to pick one track that means a lot to them – either something they’ve discovered recently, something that’s been with them for years, or one that reminds them of a specific time in thei...

Usually when couples break up, they don’t decide to write an album together. But in this case, I’m very glad JJ Weihl aka Discovery Zone and John Moods did exactly that. Dreaming for Miles is a collection of songs that were written over the past ten years or so and recorded between their basement practice space and at their home in Berlin. After spending over a decad...

Xylitol aka producer and DJ Catherine Backhouse shifts up the refinement and musical breadth for her second album Blumenfantasie, which landed earlier this month on Planet Mu. Blumenfantasie draws heavily on the work of Sarajevo-born minimal synth composer Miaux, whom she recognises as “a kindred spirit in terms of her directness and melancholy, as well as h...