minimal

Kyle Bobby Dunn & Wayne Robert Thomas – The Searchers / Voyevoda Split LP

/ David James / 2 Comments

Before this year, Kyle Bobby Dunn’s singular shade of ecstatic ambient drone music managed to flit by in the periphery of my tastes. His album releases seemed like big occasions to many friends, but I only listened, it seemed, in the midst of ambient playlists and random spins through Spotify or Youtube. I always enjoyed what I heard, but my attention was swamped by the constant snowblind bliss of the experience – the entire point of listening to hours of ambient music at a time, lost in headphones.

For someone who wrote a list called the 32 best ambient albums ever made, I was hilariously surprised by how quickly I fell in love with his sound. The two tracks on this split LP, by Dunn and Wayne Robert Thomas, make a convincing case for the power of sustained ambient drone in the year 2018.

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Hampshire & Foat – The Honeybear

/ David James / 4 Comments

This is what I thought the first time I heard Hampshire & Foat: oh my god these guys, oh my god I need more.

That was just a couple weeks ago. I’d stumbled upon their 2017 debut Galaxies Like Grains of Sand by chance, hearing the opening track and instantly feeling the need to hear everything they’d made. Lucky for me, they were just about to release their followup, The Honeybear.

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Hiroshi Yoshimura – Music For Nine Post Cards

/ David James / 1 Comment

Do you ever hear a piece of music that feels like it was made exactly for you at exactly the time and place you’re hearing it? Music that just fits, wraps around you, slips into your mind like the first blush of sun coming in the window? Music so effortlessly enjoyable that its radical warmth goes unquestioned? I’m not talking simply love-at-first-listens; it’s a different thing. I mean music that feel as natural as breathing.

Music For Nine Post Cards does exactly that. Hiroshi Yoshimura may have recorded this album in 1982, but it slipped into my winter 2018 sound world without notice and quickly became the contemplative little heart at the center of the new year’s listening.

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Robert Hood – Paradygm Shift

/ David James / 1 Comment

Robert Hood is back with a new album that fires directly at his Detroit techno roots, serving as an evolved sequel to his iconic 1994 groundbreaker, Minimal Nation.

Unlike most examples of a “back to basics” album, this one hits just as hard as its inspiration, textured with two decades of stylistic evolution. Far beyond a throwback album, Paradygm Shift is a deep genre exploration, coloring the darkest corners of pure techno, highlighting the fresh pleasures this genre still has to offer.

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Oneohtrix Point Never – Good Time Soundtrack

/ David James / 1 Comment

In an interview with Pitchfork last week, Oneohtrix Point Never explained how he needs weird breakages and colliding contrasts to happen for music to feel truthful, and how this also applies to all good film scores. After listening to his soundtrack for Good Time, a new film by the Safdie brothers, reading this passage felt like a tiny lightbulb flickering on.

It’s the rough, distinctive patina surrounding everything he’s ever recorded, the philosophy underpinning the very reason his music is so often astonishing. It’s something he’s expressing most clearly on this, a movie score that basically functions as a proper new album.

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Chuck Johnson – Balsams

/ David James / 5 Comments

Chuck Johnson’s latest album Balsams was the first music I heard after my son was born. In its own low-key way, it was the perfect introduction to the world for a newborn baby. This is some of the most sumptuous, warmly crafted, undeniably human ambient music I’ve heard in years.

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Twin Peaks Is Really Back // Chromatics – Shadow

/ David James / Leave a comment

I can’t believe it, but it’s real. Twin Peaks is really, actually, totally back.

This is one of the weirdest moments in my art life, witnessing the full resurrection of a long-dead favorite narrative. It’s something I honestly never expected to happen, and was never sure I actually would welcome. I’m so thankful to be wrong.

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