Brian Eno - Small Craft On A Milk Sea

we all owe this one to the one and only Pituco and his great mustache. check out his bar, have a drink with the man and listen to some nice tunes while reading about his conversations with other fellow musicians.

gracias bigotín!

Bill Laswell, Atom Heart & Tetsu Inoue - Second Nature

Ambient excursions. Delve into the synthetic forest but be sure to leave a trail of breadcrumbs.

Triosk - The Headlight Serenade

the third and final album of a great trio with a unique sound that makes any moment an epic moment.

do it!

Triosk - Moment Returns

Triosk was from Sydney, Australia. Born 2001, died 2007. This trio comes from two musical persperctives, jazz and electronic music (not trance or house, but as in sampling, resampling, and digital signal processing, etc.) and they were definitely good at both. Moment Returns is their second album.

This album has intense textures and fades in and out of beats that can actually be followed, most of the samples aren't in sync or quantized, add to that Laurence Pike's (drummer) ability to play without a time signature (perhaps inspired by Ornette Coleman's free jazz movement) and you've got no back beat to hold on to, it's great. On the other hand, songs like Love Chariot, Two Twelve are heavily rooted in the beat, balancing it out nicely.

Sit back, dim the lights, listen.

Triosk - Moment Returns

Brian Eno & Jah Wobble - Spinner

Do I really need to do this?

Harold Budd - The Pavilion of Dreams

Budd's first proper album, originally released on Eno's label Obscure and produced by him. With contributions from Marion Brown, Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars, among others.

"The debut album of ambient composer Harold Budd, who is perhaps best known to progressive fans for his collaborations with Brian Eno, who produced this as well. The music of Pavilion of Dreams is a cycle of work composed from 1972-1975, marking Budd's resurgence as a composer after a period of disillusionment with contemporary avant-garde music. Budd's trademark is the major seventh chord (e.g., for a C chord, play these notes on the piano: C-E-G-B), which invariably lends his work a warm, sighing quality and can also be found liberally on this album.

In describing this period of his career, Budd said that he was "in full revolt" against the truculent, "tough" music of the avant-garde. The opening "Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim" immediately sets the mood of the album, with the sax of Marion Brown (who played on John Coltrane's Ascension) bathing in a pond of warmth established by marimbas, harp, celeste, and the very celeste-like Fender Rhodes. The final piece of the album, "Juno," brings this mood to its conclusion, with Budd's gushing waterfalls of piano. In the intervening 45 minutes or so, you have music whose primary goal above all else is to be devastatingly beautiful.

"Madrigals of the Rose Angel" remains my favorite track on this album, and indeed, I still think it is one of Budd's greatest contributions as an artist. A work initially conceived for performance by "piano, harp, celeste, topless choir, and lights" is bound to be controversial. In a 1997 interview, Budd himself called it with a grin, "blatantly sexist." Maybe so, but there's a flip-side to that observation. I am convinced that if women really want to rule the world, their best shot is to get together, collectively listen to and study this track, for there is no greater example of the power in the female voice to bring swooning males irrevocably to their knees. Anyway, "Madrigals" implements an interesting technique of using the choir and the instruments as pivots to guide the music along. Typically, the choir is static in melody while the instruments change chords, and the next moment the instruments are static as the choir continues along with the melody.

Though Budd also uses the adjective "shallow" in describing this, I do not have that experience at all as a listener receiving these sounds. There is one moment in "Madrigals," right after the choir hits their first note (i.e., a C# minor seventh chord ripples with a gentle crescendo into C# major seventh) that always gives me chills. There is something hypnotic and mystical that reaches in deep for just that one ripple alone. The logic in my head tells me it's a simple change of sustained chords. But what I feel — it's like the sound of a portal opening to a new place — undefinable. Maybe if you listen to it to you'll discover a similar feeling as well. It's those kind of moments that make listening to music such a rewarding thing.

The use of primarily acoustic instruments lends this album an organic quality that increases its already burgeoning appeal. There are many that cannot get into the basic, Paradisic sensibility of this album, possibly because they feel it's too over the top. While I can't fault them for their opinion, I sure as hell don't agree with it. For those who are interested in exploring Budd's work, I feel this one is pretty much a given. After Pavilion of Dreams, Budd would concentrate primarily on solo and collaborative work in various settings, before returning to ensemble writing in the early 1990s." - Joe McGlinchey

Madrigals

Colleen - The Golden Morning Breaks

Taken directly from allmusic.com

"On the surface, Colleen's second release is much like her debut, Everyone Alive Wants Answers. Born Cecile Schott, this young French artist with a determined D.I.Y. mentality still mixes melody and minimalism, favoring a warm, even dreamy sound which often sounds like a mixture of acoustic folk and Renaissance classical run through an electronic blender. [..] The Golden Morning Breaks has a more transparent and believable quality, and yet its wispy melancholy is still totally beguiling. Rather than approximating some sort of hallucinogenic dream-state, the music on Schott's second CD sounds like courtly chamber music of an ancient, contemplative and very wise civilization. And as interesting and celebrated as Schott's first CD might have been, the second represents a thoughtful movement into a deeper and more expansive musical world."

Bubbles which on the water swim

Blackfilm - S/T

The term Black film is the English traslation of "film noir". It's an apt title for music as cinematic as this. 

"Blackfilm's sound is a bricolage of downtempo, breaks, instrumental hip-hop, and an excellent selection of sampled modern classical strings.... Of course Blackfilm introduces his own cinematic and orchestral elements that move from fearsome, lonely frames to chaotic feelings of urban self-destruction."

Get it

Klaus Schulze - Dune

Schulze was a founding member of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, played on the Cosmic Jokers, Sergius Golowin and Walter Wegmuller albums, produced crazy duo Sand, and made impressive electronic constructions as a solo artist. On this one his wall of electronics and keyboards are complemented by Wolfgang Tiepold's cello and vocal contributions by Crazy Arthur Brown, conjuring visions of huge deserts and empty landscapes. The album's a tribute to writer Frank Herbert.

Dune

Popol Vuh - In den Gärten Pharaos (1971)

Werner Herzog might be one of my all time favorite directors. I feel it's only appropriate to post these guys' music since they have contributed soundtracks to Herzog films such as Nosferatu, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Heart of Glass and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Here's a little info on Popol Vuh courtesy of www.last.fm:

"Popol Vuh is a German proto-ambient experimental rock / krautrock band founded by Florian Fricke in 1970 together with Holger Trulzsch (percussion) and Frank Fiedler (electronics). Other important members during the next two decades included Daniel Fichelscher and Bob Eliscu.
It began with an electronic approach as heard on first album Affenstunde, inspired by the invention of the Moog synthesizer. This continued for only one more album, In Den Garten Pharaos, before Fricke largely abandoned electronic instruments in favour of piano-led compositions from 1972’s Hosianna Mantra forward. This album also marked the start of exploring overtly religious themes rather than a more generally spiritual feeling within the music. The group evolved to include all kinds of instruments: wind, percussion and strings, electric and acoustic alike, combined to convey a mystical aura that made their music spiritual and introspective.
Popul Vuh influenced many other bands from Europe with their uniquely soft but elaborate instrumentations, that took inspiration from Tibet, Africa, and Precolombian America. They created dream-like soundscapes along with psychedelic walls of sound, and are considered by some to be precursors of contemporary world music, as well of new age music and ambient."

The Wrath of God

Eno - Discreet Music

Eno's first dabblings in generative music and also his first "Ambient" album. Top notch, as usual.

Pachelbelanus

Badgerlore - We Are All Hopeful Farmers, We Are All Scared Rabbits (2007)

"Badgerlore is the collective effort of Rob Fisk (ex-Deerhoof, 7 Year Rabbit Cycle), Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance, Comets on Fire), Tom Carter (Charalambides) and Pete Swanson (Yellow Swans), Glenn Donaldson (of Jewelled Antler renown) and Liz Harris (of San Francisco’s Grouper). Each of these distinguished artists comes from a very different background, however in Badgerlore all their skills are focused into a very beautiful collection of sound."

Rumplestilskin's a good man