PopMatters' 10 Best Ambient Albums of 2022

Brooklyn-based, Asian American musician and composer OHYUNG’s music is continuously shifting, investigating, and deconstructing the possibilities of form. Written and recorded mostly over just a 72-hour period, OHYUNG’s first album on NNA Tapes, the immersive and mesmerizing, imagine naked! focuses on expansion and atmospheric depth. It is a collection of loving ambient expressions of persistence, repetition, and variation. Each song is titled after a line from t. tran le’s poem, “Vegetalscape,” which acts as an artistic companion to the album. The poem works to spotlight little things that le imparts beauty upon despite the challenges of living with mental illness, such as a bedroom garden, or a sibling’s voice singing in the shower. OHYUNG’s engulfing, gentle landscapes take on the context of something more literary than their wordless atmosphere—each line feels as though it informs the timbre of its connected piece—and they reflect le’s poem as these snapshots of small items and instances, and brief melodies are appreciated and made beautiful beyond their size. The music of imagine naked! is full and complex, each track using its time to articulate an entire spectrum of lived emotion with remarkable elegance and simplicity. Some of the songs revel in quiet magnificence: lead single “symphonies sweeping!” is the extension of a breathless instant, the moment between the orchestra’s end and the recognition of applause, as notes linger and hang in the air; “my hands hold flora!” begins as a low tone over a bleak, crackling background, but that gives way to something more bright and shimmering; the joyful and effervescent “i’m remembering!” is a kind memory, like recalling the details of a loved one’s face—an exuberance brought by clarity. Other pieces seem to notice discomfort, like on “tucked in my stomach!,” which plays like a harsh self-reflection, emphasizing sharp, piercing tones. The melancholic piano notes on “yes my weeping frame!” fall over one another like a waterfall or a stream of tears. The title track, “imagine naked!,” is unencumbered by any additions, with somber drones that capture the vulnerability of being bare. The final three songs close the album with a calming, sustained exhale. “philodendrons trail!” feels fresh and clean, and “oxalis unfold!” opens incrementally towards a warm light. The serene grand finale of “releases like gloves!’ (not included on the CD version) is entirely a world of its own—orange and purple sky, soundtracked by far-off refrains and the pressure of worry hissing away like steam. On this album, OHYUNG shifts again, deliberately moving away from the experimental, electronic, hip-hop, and noise influenced work of their previous records, Untitled (Chinese Man with Flame), PROTECTOR, and GODLESS, and expanding on the space found in their work as a composer on films like Bambirak, which won the 2021 Short Film Jury Award for International Fiction at Sundance Film Festival, and the Gotham Award-nominated Test Pattern. By focusing on longer, more drawn-out, and textural compositions as an exercise in patience and as a means to cope with the difficult, oscillating new experience of time brought on by the pandemic, OHYUNG has found yet another new way to consider reality and feeling. imagine naked! is humanist music that seeks to explore the mundane strangeness that defines our everyday and that breathes air, or purpose, or just some kind of color into ourselves and the people and the environment around us.

A lot has happened to SUSS since their last vinyl release, 2020’s Promise on Northern Spy Records. That album ended up on many best-of lists that year, and was cited by PopMatters as an “incredible country/ambient hybrid that is nothing short of peerless.” As the album’s title indicated, the music spoke to a future of promise, with the band looking toward new musical horizons. However, that promise was cut short with the loss of founding member Gary Leib, who passed away in 2021 soon after the completion of the Night Suite EP, a dark, late-night trip through the heart of loss set against the backdrop of Americana soundscapes. After the difficult decision to move ahead as a trio, SUSS began planning a series of connected EPs that would culminate in a double-album release representing the natural evolution of the band as it struck out in a new direction. The next EP release, Heat Haze, was a feverish search for fractured dreams in a hot, shimmering landscape, followed by Winter Was Hard, which finds SUSS moving away from the arid atmospherics of the American Southwest and entering chillier dimensions exploring the challenge of surviving uncertain times. To complete their four-part odyssey, SUSS is now releasing these three EPs, together with the last leg of the trip, Across the Horizon, as a double vinyl set simply titled SUSS. Taken as a whole, this work represents how wide the scope of ambient country music can be while also showing the journey of personal change that the band has undertaken over the last couple of years — the loss, the searching, the challenge, and, finally, the new hope on the horizon.

HAUSMO127 - CS / CD / DIG

Everyone’s Children is the stunning debut album of spiritual avant-garde music from keyboardist, composer Surya Botofasina, out on Spiritmuse Records. The record combines deep jazz excursions with expansive synth passages and intimate piano turns to create a hypnotic, meditative and devotionally expressive suite that soothes, enriches and uplifts the soul. Botofasina’s upbringing at the Sai Anantam Ashram in the Southern Californian hills involved daily bhajans (traditional Hindu devotional songs) led by legendary jazz harpist and pianist Alice Coltrane. Her musical and religious teachings continue to have a profound effect on the keyboardist, whose career has since gone on to take in acting stints in the TV series Vinyl and Boardwalk Empire alongside a diverse range of musical collaborations with the likes of Reggie Workman, Joey Bada$$, Gangstarr’s GURU, Amel Larrieux, N’Dea Davenport, Georgia Anne Muldrow, and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. His work as the Music Director of the Sai Anantam Ashram Singers has seen him tour internationally honouring Swamini Turiyasangitananda Alice Coltrane’s devotional music. “The way I play the piano is not the way my friends play the piano” he says. “It forced me to find the place I truly dwell in - the place between the hip hop and jazz, but based in meditative and long form expressions of my spirit.” Botofasina’s renown has enabled him to enlist a supremely talented, cross generational group of musicians for the project including major LA mainstays such as multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Carlos Niño - who also produced the album - jazz singer Dwight Trible, and indie folk vocalist Mia Doi Todd. Brilliantly gifted guitarist Nate Mercereau, saxophonist Pablo Calogero, and drummer Efa Etoroma Jr., round out the guest collaborators alongside Botofasina’s mother, the harpist Radha Botofasina, a key musical disciple of Alice Coltrane’s during her Ashram years and a hugely formative influence on the keyboardist. Ten years in consideration, the album’s genesis lay in Botofasina and Niño’s long-running creative partnership. The pair first linked up through Niño’s Build An Ark jazz ensemble, by the recommendation of Atwood-Ferguson, in 2011 and - after Niño suggested recording a Surya lead project, the idea began to solidify with a series of collaborative concerts in 2018 (still on-going,) that engendered a deep musical bond. Recorded by Jesse Peterson in 3 joyous sessions last year in Glendale, California, the results are grounded in the ashram music that Botofasina grew up with and present his own unique jazz-influenced take on devotional sounds. That vision achieves heady form in the shape of album opener Surya Meditation, an epic twenty-seven-minute duet with Niño built around Botofasina’s assorted keyboard textures. Synths hum hypnotically, softly patter like raindrops or drift by like clouds on a hazy summer’s day. Niño’s subtle percussive accompaniment offers a gentle sense of otherworldliness throughout a contemplative, meditative and stunningly beautiful piece that offers feelings akin to floating gently across water. “I knew when it was happening that it would be the focal point, the opus, the centre of this project” says Niño of the recording. The solo piano piece I Love Dew, Sophie melds jazz and classical keyboard notes in warm-toned clusters before the ecstatic spiritual jazz excursion Beloved California Temple opens things out into a group setting. Here, Botofasina’s hypnotic piano motifs and Niño’s expressive percussion are joined by Pablo Calogero’s breathy saxophone lines, before Dwight Trible’s dramatic wordless vocals bring things to a rapturous climax to the accompaniment of Efa Etoroma Jr.’s crashing drum crescendos, with the harmonic brilliance of Nate Mercereau’s guitar synth fortifying the whole. The title track Everyone's Children follows. Featuring Mia Doi Todd - whose pregnancy at the time of the recording inspired it’s name - the track blends her dream-like singing with the buzzing swoop and swirl of a synthesizer - a recognizable throwback to the Sai Anantam Ashram devotional sound - alongside gentle piano runs. Begun in reflective mode, Sun Of Keshava’s synthesizer textures build in warmth towards a denouement of radiant keyboard notes that recall the beauty of a summer sunrise. The cascading Waves For Margie features gentle harp textures and vocals from Radha Botofasina. The album ends with a reprise of it’s centerpiece Surya Meditation, in a shortened and powerful edit that comes accompanied by the potent spoken reminiscences of Swamini Satsang. It’s return marks the closing of an extraordinary musical circle whose singular blend of improvisatory and devotional music defies easy categorization. The warmly reflective solo synth piece for Meghan Jahnavi* was added with the intention to promote mental health and wellness initiatives. “That is specifically what Dew Sophie's and Meghan's pieces are composed for,” Surya reflects. “Their imperative nature and importance to me cannot be overstated. I, and we, are in a place where uplifting our spirits to wellness is the most crucial part of many aspects of human existence.” Dedicated to the formative influences in Surya Botofasina’s life; his mother, grandmother and Alice Coltrane, his debut album is imbued with a wide-eyed sense of discovery. He explains: “Each piece feels like an inaugural experience in the most spiritually youthful way. Many musicians have many albums - but there is only one first. The Divine energy of a new life is within every second of the music.” *digital only SPIRITMUSE RECORDS MUSIC FOR THE SPIRIT