Sun's Signature - Sun's Signature (2022)

This project managed to take the alternative music world by surprise: Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins and Echo & The Bunnymen and Spiritualized's drummer Damon Reece are a real life couple, but they decided to create something together in the music world as well. This EP is the result and it's as artsy and moody as could be imagined.

Fraser's theatrical voice and the music that balances between space rock, art pop and more experimental territories, together, bring this overwhelming feeling of higher art. And it doesn't matter if it's more about moody atmosphere in Underwater or about unassuming music fun in Golden Air. From Tori Amos- to Spiritualized-like, the music vibes here are taken from all over the place and it works. It does sound like music from a psychedelic, fairy-tale musical but it's only for the better. No wonder that it is being referred to as a "Alice in Wonderland journey through life and music" - everything checks: the weird, the psychedelic and the charming.  

Sun's Signature costs 5 USD.

Check: Underwater 

Country: UK

Genre: dreamy art pop

Label: Partisan Records

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WatchCamp July-August '22 with glaston, The Heart of the Sun, Jellies, Jiangnan Shangguan, T R E M O U R S

glaston - I Am Whole

Yet another fantastic project from Switzerland; but the Zurich's outfit are not new to the music stage, they are around since 2014 and have released one full length album. The new singles are filled with very moody post-rock with classical elements and I hope the new album is released as soon as possible. This one track costs 1 USD.

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The Heart of the Sun - Probably Not

Stockholm-based Filiph Antonsson leads this music project that goes with moody but also pretty complex compositions and very sad vocals ornamented with voice samples and finished with mesmerizing psychedelic passage. It's a real autumn kind of music. The single costs 0.75 EUR (8 SEK).

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Jellies - Always

Two artists, Adam and Tommy live on the other sides of the Atlantic Ocean but they manage to create something very dreamy and very melodic together. Especially the first track here creates particularly moody atmosphere in this bedroom pop kind of style. Two songs cost 2.5 EUR (2 GBP).

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Jiangnan Shangguan - No Beginning Where Everything Ends

A member of the Californian post-rock outfit In Lights, Jiangnan Shangguan, created a deliciously atmospheric, ambient pop-like experiment. There are emotional vocals here but distant and covered by noisy music all around. The track costs whatever you want to pay.

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T R E M O U R S - Affectations

The Lauren Andino-Glenn Fryatt duo comes from Los Angeles and, very much in the Californian noise/dream pop fashion, released an extremely airy piece of melodic music. Andino's vocals are utterly oneiric while still managing to bring catchy melodies to life. Three songs cost 5 USD.

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orobadion - floating world (2022)

Andrew Hoogheem creates his music as Orobadion and this year, he released another beautiful album filled with very moody ambient with neoclassical tropes. Floating world take the audience to the place where sadness meets beauty and they live together in a perfect balance.

The soundscapes on the album are built of heavy, overwhelming layers of distorted sounds on which the beautiful sparks of piano keys are put. This results in an album that at first feels utterly dark and depressing, but soon is able to charm its way into the listeners' hearts which is a beautiful skill. It goes on and on for almost an hour, but you can hardly notice the passing time mesmerized by the sounds.

floating world costs 7 USD.

Check: floating world

Country: Iowa, US

Genre: neoclassical ambient

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Delicate Noise - Hence (2022)

Hailing from Texas, Mark Andrushko creates ambitious ambient music based on very intriguing electronic sounds. I came across his music thanks to this year's EP called Hance but the artist's discography reaches 2009.

Accompanied by the beautiful daguerreotype cover art, the album is filled with this blink-and-you-miss-it kind of ambient music. It is so subtle and so quiet that it comes directly to one's subconsciousness and suddenly you feel like it has always been there. The compositions are very carefully put together to create this foggy and mysterious soundscape that is always a perfect place to dream.

Hence costs 5 USD.

Check: mellifluous

Country: Texas, US

Genre: subtle soundscape

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Alessandro Incorvaia - It Emerged to Hold Me (2022)

Alessandro Incorvaia comes from Italy but is based in London. Although his music career seems to be pretty rich, this year's It Emerged to Hold Me is his solo debut album. It is filled with heavy ambient that comes as a result of time it was created in.

Being created during the difficult months of pandemics at its peak, the album, as the artist states, became "score and soundtrack of those months and of the process that was unfolding at that time". And fittingly, it is based on layers of distorted synths and guitars, creating very peaceful but also dangerously dark atmosphere of loneliness and nostalgia. But in time, it can get some tempo and becomes a mesmerizing trip towards hope.

Finally, the most interesting fact for me is that the cover art was done by Uls Metzger whom I know personally. Crazy coincidence.

It Emerged to Hold Me costs whatever you want to pay.

Check: A part of me and I'll take care of

Country: Italy/UK

Genre: melancholic soundscape

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Deary - Fairground (2022)

I rarely post here demo albums, but, truth be told, Deary's Fairground hardly sounds like one. Sure, the sound is not perfect, but it's a subtlety that can easily be overlooked as the London-based duo's music is simply captivating and I cannot wait for more from their side.

It's clear that the artists are mostly inspired by the noise pop/dream pop genres and they draw from those with fantastic results. Their music is accordingly dreamy and ethereal with the female vocals adding to the oneiric charm. But I feel like there's also something from trip-hop's compositions here and indie pop's tunes. It reminds me somewhat of another London-based recent debuts by White Flowers, but Deary are faster and more rock-oriented I feel. Still, the work they do with the looped vocals in Heaven feels... just like heaven really.

Fairground costs 3,5 EUR (3 GBP).

Check: Heaven 

Country: UK

Genre: dreamy noise pop

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Lights A.M. - Clouds (2022)

Erlend Eilertsen comes from Norway and it's something that certainly is well audible on his solo album Clouds. The member of a synthpop outift Essence of Mind, brings a lot of synths to create an airy and out-of-this-world soundscape neatly packed under the Lights A.M. moniker.

From the very beginning, his music strikes with the ability to create dense and thick synth atmosphere that seems to be very close to ambient soundscapes of the highest oneiric quality. But this time, they are used as backgrounds for slow and moody compositions based on Eilersten emotional vocals. Together, this combination brings one of the most ethereal experience of the year, that also involves tons of emotions. There's a lot of dream pop's atmosphere here obviously, but the tunes are livelier. It's something from Ruby Haunt, something from Fireflies, sometimes heavier, sometimes lighter. It is how bright nights of Scandinavia probably feel like.

Especially that the artist can easily ditch the vocals and still create something utterly touching, as it is with The Last Dance: its long finish is truly mesmerizing. Not to mention What I Am Feeling and Inscecure's utterly melancholic synthy vibes. And yes, I feel like the feeling of this autumn-like, subtle but omnipresent melancholia is what dominates this beautiful album.

Clouds costs 9 EUR.

Check: Inscecure

Country: Norway

Genre: synth-heavy dream pop

Label: Alfa Matrix

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Pjusk & Chihei Hatakeyama - Svaberg (2022)

Jostein Dahl Gjelsvik aka Pjusk comes from Norway and creates some perfectly moody soundscapes. Especially when he can enjoy the cooperation with the iconic Chihei Hatakeyama as it is on their album called Svaberg.

Their music feels both warm and very dark. No wonder that half of the track titles contain the word "mørke" which translates from Norwegian to "dark". The soundscapes are dense and overwhelming, but also very warm and welcoming. It is not the unnerving dark ambient industrial music; the focus is set on beauty and the ability to spark a self-reflective moment in the listeners. The good news for the fans is that Gjelsvik already announced that there's more material coming from the duo.

Svaberg costs 5 USD.

Chihei Hatakeyama - Maybe (2017)

Check: Tussmørke

Country: Norway, Japan

Genre: moody soundscape

Label: Fnugg Fonogram

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Päfgens - Der Regen (2022)

Jana Kočišová and Filip Drábek, two modern nomads, come from Slovakia, they created their band in Warszawa, Poland and currently make their music in Berlin, Germany. Just like the artists, their music is also travelling, "moving from shoegazy and dreamy naive folk into loops and oscilative drones". The latter is reached on Der Regen.

Their new album "comes from nowhere, takes you to a place for a moment and leaves as suddenly as it came. Subtle, yet very strong." The subtlety is the keyword here: the music is based on acoustic sounds that get looped and changed all over so they create tiny mazes of mesmerizing sound. And those mazes lead us through tiny worlds filled with field recordings that make them alive. The strength of the duo lies in their ability to create soundscapes that generate so much atmosphere, one that may be lighter or darker, but they can also create some really unnerving pieces too, with the album's last, slowly building up Nylon that ends the whole album with gloomy sounds of bells.

Der Regen costs 5 EUR.

Päfgens - Der Sturm (2019)

Check: Nylon

Country: Slovakia, Germany

Genre: atmospheric ambient

Label: Solanum / Econore

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Ziggurat - HYPNOS (2022)

Ziggurat's PREFACE was an album I found particularly interesting on the post-rock scene back in 2019. Although years passed, the Texas band's eclectic and very broad definition of the genre hasn't changed. HYPNOS was meant to be released back before the pandemics hit and it took some years to finish after all.

Led by a grand piano, HYPNOS really feels like a fruit of many years of work. These compositions are very jazzy and chill-out-like. The pace is not very high but it's not the important thing here. There are still many things going on in every second of the album with the piano sounds cementing them together into the psychedelically diverse wholes. It was designed to meet the expectations of people of various musical interests who should be glad to taste this "musical smoothie [that] creates a refreshing experience" for all. It certainly makes the listener more relaxed, the mesmerizing compositions create a perfect environment for escaping the world's busy reality and, as such, the album should be praised.

HYPNOS costs 7 USD.

Ziggurat - PREFACE (2019)

Check: RETURN HOME

Country: Texas, US

Genre: piano-led instrumental

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Todaynovember - Spirit (2022)

Aleksandr Ivanov from Kyiv makes his music alone as Todaynovember. And it's one of the reasons why it is so impressive as it's one person creating the most atmospheric and epic kind of post-rock music. Spirit is a perfect example of how inspiring and uplifting this music can be.

This post-rock "with synthesizers and ambient sound and instruments" surely feels like taken from some intense movie scenes. No wonder that Ivanov calls himself both a musician and a composer. There is a high level of bombastic music here that is conveyed with orchestral-sounding strings and drums that accompany more traditional guitars and electronica sounds. The album surely feels as if it was created in the most monumental cathedral building. This music has this particular effect on the audience: while listening to this album you really want to go out and do things, you get the feeling that everything is possible and a huge amount of hope. Perhaps this is what we really need right now.

Spirit costs 7 USD.

Check: Spirit 

Country: Ukraine

Genre: atmospheric post-rock

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Total Wife - A Blip (2022)

Luca Kupper and Ash Richter make music together as Total Wife. Currently based in Nashville, the duo released their third album in two years (!) recently and it's filled with very ear-catching and very lo-fi sounds of noise pop.

A Blip is a curious marriage of very subtle, sometimes barely audible vocals with exceptionally harsh and shoegaze-like ear-hurting guitar sounds. The music is slow and certainly takes it time to properly engage the listener. It is also not very loud, most of the time, it feels like shoegaze transformed into cosy ballads and I love this approach. As said, the compositions are low in volume but sometimes this is deceitful as in Mid-Fi where the drone pop song eventually becomes a quite loud experiment (so it really is not lo-fi but mid-fi indeed). And yes, the artists highlight that their projects is all about "experimental music" and it really feels. Not only the love for the lo-fi form, there are some super interesting sonic experiments that come and destroy the dream pop music (One to You) and then let it rebirth again so the audience can get back to the lazy trance that comes with the album up to my favourite, organ-like backgrounds of Hello.

A Blip costs 10 USD.

Check: Hello

Country: Tennessee, US

Genre: lo-fi noise pop

Label: Warehaus Recordings

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Carlos Ferreira & Ki Oni - A Hundred Ways of Escaping (2022)

This is another geographically challenged collaboration I post about this week. This time it's Carlos Ferreira from Brazil, a musician I love from his work with Almanacs last year, and Chuck Soo-Hoo aka Ki Oni from California. They utilized the vast distance between them on a beautiful album called A Hundred Ways of Escaping.

Knowing Ferreira's work, it's no surprise that the album is filed with subtle but very lively music. It is both mesmerizing and filled with a multitude of sounds, I would call it a psychedelic soundscape as it unveils in front of our souls but in a very peculiar way. The music is accompanied by a picturesque short story that starts with a sentence "A single broken tree stands in a field of mud" and deals with a scary, poignant but also hopeful reality around us. Interestingly, Ki Oni's moniker comes from a Japanese monster who is supposed to be "a tree with a human face that spews flower pedals from its mouth". If it's just a coincident, one thing is clear: both musicians draw a lot from nature around us and it's very tangible in their work.

A Hundred Ways of Escaping costs 5 USD.

Carlos Ferreira & Almanacs - La Deriva (2021)

Check: Bounded Rationality

Country: Brazil & California, US

Genre: psychedelic soundscape

Label: Umé Records

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Wilt & Oceans - Wilt (2022)

Wilt are from Manchester, Oceans from Melbourne, but despite this obvious challenge as well as the pandemics' difficult reality, they manage to successfully finish their collaboration with a brilliant EP called Wilt. Which is especially impressive as it's the British outfit's debut release.

The three artists of Wilt dealt with music while Thomas Lee and Mayzie Cocco Wallen of Oceans are responsible for the dreamy vocals here. The results are extremely airy and utterly dreamy. The heavy guitars create a multidimensional space within which the listener is closed but can only appreciate this fact while the music rocks around them. It is a mesmerizing blend of heavy guitars and ethereal atmosphere. The latter is obviously very much dependent on the vocals and the vocalized backgrounds. It really makes me think of White Flowers and their sound - the vocals are what dream pop is meant for but there's also place for fresh and juicy stuff. It's probably best audible in my personal favourite, Blank Field, a beautiful song in which all the elements work: heaviness, ethereality and catchiness.

Wilt costs whatever you want to pay.

Check: Blank Field

Country: UK/Australia

Genre: dreamy shoegaze

Label: Shelflife Records

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black particles - loss function (2022)

Two years after their very promising debut EP called Wave Function Collapse, the Hungarian post-rockers are at it again releasing a short album called loss function. If you need some exciting and adrenaline-fueling instrumental music, this is one for you.

As it was the case with the EP, the Hungarians draw inspiration from science, this time the title's loss function is a function "representing some >cost< associated with an event" (as per Wikipedia) and we are most probably supposed to take it figuratively in which case it can apply to so many areas of our lives. Musically, they take this concept into the very fast and guitar-oriented post-rock music. It's not particularly loud (in the massive kind of way) but it certainly makes the blood pumping and adrenaline kicking with the rapid guitar sounds (as in a fractured view as the best example). 

The closer to the album finish, this guitar madness gets more and more impressive. There's little place to catch your breath on this album in general and so maybe it was the point to make it very fast but ultimately not too long for a post-rock release, sort of a sonic way of saying live fast and die young. Very rock'n'roll-like.

loss function costs 6 EUR.

Black Particles - Wave Function Collapse (2020)

Check: onward

Country: Hungary

Genre: guitar post-rock

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Animal Ghosts - Wallow (2022)

There's few artists who can create shoegaze's noisy and thick atmosphere right while working solo. One of them certainly is Animal Ghosts who, after his EP last December, released the fifth album in his career and it's all we love about his music.

The multi-layered noise of shoegaze balanced with extremely dispersed vocals is what we are here for. And the Portland artist delivers, as always. I loved his last EP and he doesn't seem to go beneath a certain quality level. Which is very high if I can add. The guitars here feel like proper shoegaze - not only because of the noise they generate, they feel like a love letter to the classic shoegaze of the 90s. I compared him with Ceremony last time I posted about his music here and it still feels that the level of the  noisy fun is similar. The guitar effects (like the ones in the title track Wallow) certainly feel nostalgic but there are some quite unique parts like the drums solo in Sugar. However, the main thing about this album is showing how catchy a noisy shoegaze can be.

Wallow costs 7 USD.

Animal Ghosts - Wake (2021)

Check: Wallow 

Country: Oregon, US

Genre: classic shoegaze

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Empress Ephemeral - Empress Ephemeral (2022)

There's something so attractive when a metal music is done by artists with a lot of love for experimenting. It certainly is the fact with the New Jersey's Empress Ephemeral in the music of which there's tons of post-metal heaviness but also so much more. The self-titled debut album shows it even too clearly.

In the band's music we can hear some traditional metal riffs. In fact, they are so traditional that sound out of place in the experimental post-rock and neoclassical surroundings. The cello (I believe) sounds make the new album so captivating with their darker-feeling kind of hue which adds up not only to the neoclassical beauty but also tons of atmosphere, GY!BE-style. But there's more form to it than it is in the music of the famous Canadians. And it feels very post-rock-like, especially in the quiet ballads as Lovers of Valdaro for example. But the soft, very sensual tones of this track are not the only surprise here. Uninvited brings striking female vocals into the play and counterbalances their softness with the noisiest guitars explosions on the album. It suddenly feels more like what Fuzzy Lights do with the post-rock genres and I can't decide what side of Empress Ephemeral face I like most.

And it may well be the visual one as their music is fantastic but the cover art for this release is even fantasticer.

Empress Ephemeral costs 5 USD.

Check: Siren Eyes

Country: New Jersey, US

Genre: cello-based post-metal

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