PopMatters' 10 Best Ambient / Instrumental Albums of 2018

................................. Sam Wilkes answers a few questions from Leaving Records labelmate Carlos Niño, on his debut full-length WILKES Listening to WILKES numerous times, considering what I might write about it for a Press Release, (which I agreed to do because I'm a fan of his Music and his collaborations with Sam Gendel and Louis Cole / Knower,) I was growing in enthusiasm, looking forward to my next radio show or DJ set including the song "Today" so I could hear it bump in a nice system. I was hyped the more I took in this 6 song offering. I thought to ask Sam about his new record and use his answers as aid to illustrate some of my feelings, but when I read his reply I thought you should too. It's so descriptive and visual, perfect to pull from and quote. ................................. What does your last name Wilkes mean? I actually just found that It means Wolf in Lithuanian. Which is crazy because It was changed from Wolff to Wilkes upon immigration to the U.S. due to fear of a Judaic last name inhibiting my families ability to get work here. My heritage is a mix of Romanian, Russian, Polish, Liuthanian, and Austrian/German I believe. ~ What does your last name Wilkes mean to you? It's vast. It provokes a different sentiment in me in different situations. I.e my dad's side of the family is one, while my immediate family is another, and within my musical community in Los Angeles and elsewhere it's also another. The latter is the sentiment I'm really coming from on this record. Myself within the context of my beautiful community. This record does not exist without that community. My friend and collaborator, Sam Gendel calls me Wilkes and our friendship and musical relationship began to take a new form when I started to record him playing these songs of mine. Sam and my other dearest friends beginning to call me "Wilkes" (especially with humor) more and more coincided with a new era for me, which was the start of this record/chapter. ~ What does your new record WILKES mean to you? It is the first part of a two part chapter. It's the product of realizing that I HAD to make my own art, instead of just working with/for other projects (as I had done up until this point). Upon jumping into that pool and then swimming on my own for the first time, I realized that I could compose and produce the music that I want to hear; which I got VERY excited about. I have a pretty belligerent need to create and once I began, working on my own music became a daily necessity for fulfillment and to deal with what I was going through at the time. I expressed this through composition, production, sonics, and creating and curating an environment for Sam Gendel's, Brian Green's, Louis Cole's, and Christian Euman's genius to be heard and featured (i.e featuring personal cornerstones of that community I was talking about.) this, rather than, say, making music for the sake of making a "bass record", was the outlet I needed; it wasn't really an option, this was just the vehicle for my observations, experience, philosophy, love . . . It's a snapshot, one that I worked so hard on, of who and where I was from 2015-2017. ~ Do you have visions about how this record may affect people? I can't really articulate it. But: I think Sam Gendel is the greatest saxophone player alive. I hope it makes some people feel that way too. This music was made to be played by him. ~ What were your biggest inspirations while making this record? John Coltrane Pharaoh Sanders Miles Davis Joe Zawinul Sam Gendel Louis Cole Daniel Lanois Milton Nascimento Rahsaan Roland Kirk Quincy Jones Brian Eno James "J Dilla" Yancey Pete Rock Rudy Van Gelder Joseph Campbell Genevieve Artadi Alice Coltrane Chanting ~ What are your biggest general inspirations? This is infinite but, a short list: My parents My whole family Herman Hesse Patrice Rushen Ndugu Chancler Alphonso Johnson John Daversa Michael Jordan Daniel Lanois Quincy Jones Ray Brown Stefan Sagmeister Sam Gendel Louis Cole Brian Green Mythology Jackson Pollack Ernst Barlach William Shakespeare Rainer Maria Rilke and From my childhood - Phish The Grateful Dead ~ How would you describe the sound of your Bass, what do you see / envision when you're playing? I would describe the sound of my bass as: Sam Wilkes. For seeing and envisioning, It depends on the feeling I'm trying to express. Sometimes it's just colors or an image, but something I've gone back to a bit for whatever reason in some sessions as of late is the feeling of seeing fireworks and having a hot dog on the fourth of July as a kid, knowing that I didn't have to go to school the next day because it was summer and I was free, and just being happy and excited and full of love for my family and my best friends (kind of like that scene in that movie "The Sandlot"), and the feeling of knowing that I could go home and play or listen to CDs in my room and dance.

Dear friends.. Recently I have been thinking about what 'a change' means. Whether it's a turning corner of keeping on walking straight down the road, or a ship adapting its course to the winds and waves, or a kite dancing in the air one step away from the clouds. I'm thinking about new passages, further destinations, new places to reach.. but I still have a bag full of memories: unique people I've met, smiles, hugs, projects.. Maybe a change is like crossing a bridge, following a kite that finds its meaning in the wind, its motive for searching the horizon and stealing another dream. This collection contains some songs that I've made in the past few years, written to talk about dreams and love while waiting for new colors and new music. It's like looking back at a garden of roses and flowers, hoping the next lawn is just as beautiful and bright. Gigi

Originally self-released on February 2nd of this year, Northern Spy is now proud to present this fantastic album on CD for the first time, with four never-before-heard bonus tracks. This is Ghost Box (Expanded). What would it sound like if ambient pioneer Brian Eno had produced the Western film scores of Ennio Morricone? We’ll never know, but we’re now a step closer thanks to Ghost Box, the debut album by SUSS, a quintet whose members have worked in various capacities with Lydia Lunch, the B-52s, k.d. Lang, David Bowie, John Cale, Ed Sheeran, Wilco, Norah Jones, The War On Drugs, Burt Bacharach, the Nickelodeon network, The New Yorker, and countless others. More than a literal reconstruction of an imagined collaboration between Eno and Morricone, Ghost Box opens a door onto a world where ambient music and country-western make for natural bedfellows. That world, as it turns out, is the one we already live in -- it just took someone to make the connection. For multi-instrumentalist, cowpunk pioneer, and digital media entrepreneur Bob Holmes, that connection has been hiding in plain sight for decades. The catalyst behind SUSS, Holmes views electronic acts like Boards of Canada and shoegaze icons like My Bloody Valentine as more recent avatars of the “high lonesome” vibe that we typically think of strictly in terms of traditional roots music. In that light, you can trace the melancholic sprawl of classic titles by both of those acts back to Hank Williams. And in reverse, what is twang if not a form of ambience? Ghost Box, then, embodies “ambient country music” not as novelty or mashup, but as the organic offspring of forms that, in a sense, were already conjoined. One of the album’s charms, though, is that the rest of SUSS didn’t necessarily see it that way. So it required quite a bit of stabbing in the dark for Holmes on mandolin, guitarists Pat Irwin and William Garrett, pedal steel player Jonathan Gregg, and synth looper Gary Lieb, to arrive at a blend that felt natural. The goal, in a nutshell, was to create ambient music using traditional instruments -- a kind of reverse-engineering of Holmes’ longstanding conviction that electronic music is today’s folk expression. Ostensibly, Ghost Box achieves what Holmes was aiming for, but it also accomplishes much more. As tumbleweeds continue to blow across the screen of modern fashion, musicians have increasingly yearned to connect with the mythical America that reverberates in vintage sounds. Today, we’re practically inundated with music that evokes the hills of Appalachia, the neverending Western sky, the hallowed halls of the Grand Ole Opry, and so on. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between reverence for these cultural artifacts and a fascination with them as kitsch. In both cases, roots music can exude the fragrance of social archeology. Ghost Box echoes from a more genuinely inviting musical landscape where the cowboy-hatted Brooklynite and the native Kentuckyan are no longer pitted into their stereotyped roles as tourist and tourist attraction. Whatever your frame of reference, wherever you stand when it comes to notions of “authenticity,” Ghost Box will transport you, as Irwin says, to “some new places.” But nowhere does SUSS present its marriage of country and other forms as a gag. “In our old band Rubber Rodeo,” says Holmes, “Gary and I were well-known as the guys who mashed-up Dolly Parton and Devo -- but you could see the stiches. This time, we wanted to make music where you couldn’t see the stitches.” -- Saby Reyes-Kulkarni, music journalist

On December 7th Erased Tapes present ‘Fallen Trees’ – the new album by singular talent and literal force of nature Lubomyr Melnyk – known as ‘the prophet of the piano’ due to his lifelong devotion to his instrument. The album release coincides with Melnyk’s 70th birthday, but despite the autumnal hint in its title, there’s little suggestion of him slowing down. Having received critical acclaim and co-headlining the prestigious Royal Festival Hall as part of the ErasedTapes 10th anniversary celebrations, after many years his audience is now both global and growing. The composer is finally gaining a momentum in his career that matches the vibrant, highly active energy of his playing. Cascades of notes, canyons and rivers of sound: there’s something about his music that channels the natural world at its most awe-inspiring. In ‘Fallen Trees’ the connection with the environment continues, taking its cue from a long rail journey Melnyk made through Europe. Glancing out of the window as the train passed through a dark forest, he was struck by the sight of trees that had recently been felled. “They were glorious,”he says. “Even though they’d been killed, they weren’t dead. There was something sorrowful there, but also hopeful.” That sense of sadness touched by optimism infuses the album, too: rarely has Melnyk made music so shot through with melancholy and regret, but which sounds so rapt, even radiant. Drawing comparisons with Steve Reich and the post-rock group Godspeed You, Black Emperor!, Pitchfork praised his 2015 album ‘Rivers And Streams’ for it’s “sustained concentration andecstatic energy”. That energy is present in ‘Fallen Trees’ too, but at points the tone is quieter, the mood darker and more wistful. At points elsewhere on the album, despite being routed in the wonders of the natural world, there’s a kaleidoscopic quality in the fractal flurry of notes and the broad spectrum of colour they summon. The work that gives it its name, the five-part, 20-minute ‘Fallen Trees’, is one of the most ambitious and demanding pieces he has ever created. Though the music is – as ever – Melnyk’s own, ‘Fallen Trees’ once again features a number of Erased Tapes artists. Japanese vocal artist Hatis Noit, whose first EP ‘Illogical Dance’ came out to much acclaim earlier this year, lends ethereal vocals, floating mysteriously above the surface of Melnyk’s eddying piano lines before diving far beneath. Other contributors include Berlin-based cellist Anne Müller, a sometime collaborator with Nils Frahm, and American singer David Allred, the most recent addition to the label family. “More than any of the albums that I’ve done, it’s a real collaboration,”Melnyk insists, emphasising how much he owes to his producer, Erased Tapes founder Robert Raths. Born in the Ukraine in 1948, Melnyk fell for the piano at an early age. Given lessons as a young child after his family emigrated to Canada after the iron curtain came down, he was immediately transfixed by the possibilities of the instrument. “On the piano, you can create whole worlds,”he reflects. “I realised that it could be an orchestra, a choir of sound.” After studying classical piano and graduating with a degree in Latin and Philosophy from St Paul’s College in Winnipeg, in the early1970s Melnyk found himself in Paris. Homeless and in desperate need of money, he supported himself by accompanying dance lessons for a company run by the experimental choreographer Carolyn Carlson. The experience became a kind of epiphany: watching Carlson’s dancers, he began to play a new kind of music, spontaneous and improvisatory – responding not to rigid classical conventions but the dance he saw unfolding. Using the sustain pedal to create echo and reverb, he transformed free-flowing cascades of notes into hypnotic waves of sound. Eventually he found a name for this new style: ‘continuous music’, which he uses to this day. Critics have detected the influence of Ravi Shankar and other Indian styles in Melnyk’s music, along with the insistent, repetitive textures of minimalist pioneers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Melnyk himself cites his debt to the American composer Terry Riley, particularly the legendary 1964 work ‘In C’, which he says “opened the world for me”.But he adds that if you listen carefully, you’ll also be able to hear the lilting contours of traditional Ukrainian folk music. It might be truer to say that there is genuinely nothing quite like Melnyk’s work: a unique musical pioneer, he has defiantly carved his own path. “I don’t say to people I’m a composer,”he declares. “I don’t know what I am. ”Melnyk composes, as he plays, at the piano, feeling out lines and individual rhythmic cells that bubble, undulate and gradually expand into vast, interlinked frameworks. Asked to describe what it’s like to live inside his music, he says “my whole body is transformed as I play, it honestly feels like that. My fingers feel like the winds of the world; it feels like you’re physically transcending dimensions.”

'Parallel' is the third ambient album by Warmth. A tribute to the minimalist ambient of the nineties. Written and Produced by Agustín Mena Mastering by Taylor Deupree Photography Alexander Kopatz www.go70north.com Archives45 // ArchivesCD26 Archives / 2018

"It was the most beautiful summer of my life." Memories — places, vacancies, allusions — are fundamental characters in Mary Lattimore's evocative craft. Inside her music, wordless narratives, indefinite travelogues, and braided events skew into something enchantingly new. The Los Angeles-based harpist recorded her breakout 2016 album, At The Dam, during stops along a road trip across America, letting the serene landscapes of Joshua Tree and Marfa, Texas color her compositions. In 2017, she presented Collected Pieces, a tape compiling sounds from her past life in Philadelphia: odes to the east coast, burning motels, and beach town convenience stores. In 2018, from a restorative station — a redwood barn, nestled in the hills above San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge — emanates Hundreds of Days, her second full-length LP with Ghostly International. The record sojourns between silences and speech, between microcosmic daily scenes and macrocosmic universal understandings, between being alien in promising new places and feeling torn from old native havens. It's an expansive new chapter in Lattimore's story, and an expression of mystified gratitude. A study in how ordinary components helix together to create an extraordinary world. Awarded a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Lattimore spent two summer months living with 15 fellow artists — writers, playwrights, musicians, poets, painters, activists, curators — in a cluster of old Victorian military buildings on the Northern Pacific Coast. Days offered solitude; Lattimore set up in a spacious barn, able to arrange her instruments at will. Nights welcomed new perspectives. "Hanging out with a lot of accomplished artists with poetic ways of looking at the world was really inspiring. My heart was in a bit of a tangle after leaving Philadelphia. I was holding onto things instead of moving forward. My time there was a nostalgia detox, a way to press reset in a healthy way. Also breathing in the freshest air in America, straight off of the ocean, felt good." Throughout the shifting locales there is one consistent companion Lattimore engages: a 47-string Lyon and Healy harp. The instrument wires directly into her psyche. Pitchfork's Marc Masters posits, "she can practically talk through it at this point; she’s created a language." The space and stillness of the Headlands afforded Lattimore freedom to her expand her vocabulary, to stretch out and experiment with layers of keyboard, guitar, theremin, and grand piano. Lattimore's voice sweeps beneath the plucks and washes of opener “It Feels Like Floating,” enraptured by the winding current, and reappearing in the second minute of the immense "Never Saw Him Again." The track elevates towards a shimmering apex of static and percussion before organ drone yields to signature halcyon flutters. As with much of Lattimore's work, the track titles are telling; "Baltic Birch" is a somber windswept march that sways gracefully out of step, a remembrance of a recent trip to Latvia where she was struck by the abandoned resort towns along the Baltic Sea. “Hello From The Edge of The Earth” is an earnest reflection of Lattimore’s love of the natural world, recognizing the thresholds of varying terrains. The album's fifth track borrows its name from Lattimore’s favorite line in Denis Johnson’s short story “Emergency” from Jesus’ Son. A character, lost in a blizzard, reassesses a disjointed universe, a clash between curtains of snow and angels descending out of a brilliant blue summer: it isn’t an apocalypse, it is a drive-in movie, with stars hovering above the lot, off the screen, in the throes of the Midwestern storm. This mix-up is disorienting and existentially tragic; Lattimore's darkly strummed piece is a melancholic parallel, mimicking Johnson’s elegant suture attaching two remarkably discontinuous spaces. Micro-revelations, not quite as bright as torn skies but nonetheless enlightening, were everyday occurrences during Lattimore's residency. Living small days with small tasks — feeling little dramas within the arcadian universe of a national park — rendered her the sense that disjointed spaces can be interconnected no matter the enormity that divides them. It's in this elastic scale of perception that something as simultaneously simple and intricate as Hundreds of Days can flourish.

It’s not often we mention Jimi Hendrix and Trap music in the same sentence. Or Brixton and George Benson. In this case Mansur Brown embodies all of these. An integral part of the groundbreaking Yussef Kamaal album, he now releases his debut album on Black Focus Records. As Thundercat claims the Bass Guitar, Robert Glasper the keys, the 21 year old prodigy from south east London claims the Guitar. Welcome to Shiroi.

A thrilling 9-song set, Murmurations is as perfectly pitched for headphones as it is for clubs, named after giant cloud formations of starlings and themed around the stunning emergent behaviors that appear within them. To mirror these movements in the sonic landscape and visuals of Murmurations, SMD’s James Ford and Jas Shaw collaborated with the celebrated Hackney-based vocal collective The Deep Throat Choir, as well as creative directors Kazim Rashid of ENDLESSLOVESHOW (Aphex Twin, Flying Lotus, Hudson Mohawk) and Carri Munden. Finding time in between Ford’s work as a producer and Jas' club gigging last year, the duo arranged a session in Shaw’s countryside studio. Via an introduction from a friend of Ford’s wife, The Deep Throat Choir’s director Luisa Gerstein and SMD began swapping some production and melodic ideas. They decided to bring the whole East London-based choir into the studio to experiment, and the results were intense. Jas says, “Listening to them moving their voices around a tone, altering the timbre, making chords, was like working with an incredible new synthesiser.” Rashid and Munden explore related ideas centered on kinetic energy and communal movement throughout the visuals of Murmurations. Rashid says of the collaboration, “We were both having discussions around the purity of collective human experience and how transcendental this can be. Techno and the dance-floor is one of the last true expressions of this euphoria.” From the beat-less introduction “Boids” onwards you can hear uncanny patterns and sounds rising up from the sea of voices -- not traditional chords or harmonies, but complex interference patterns that play tricks on the mind and merge perfectly with SMD's distinctive synth tonalities and instinctive dancefloor nous. At times you might hear hints of Bulgarian choral music, or Cocteau Twins, or avant-garde composers like Iannis Xenakis or Pauline Oliveiros – but really, thanks to the creative freedom of SMD's working methods, it is a sound completely of its own, something all too rare in an age of retro and reference. Ford and Shaw still have the same love of pure sound, human harmonies and electronic possibilities that they did when they first met at university, and it's clear that their career path has allowed them to nurture this love and express it as vividly as ever before. Murmurations Tracklist: 1. Boids 2. Caught In A Wave 3. We Go 4. Gliders 5. Hey Sister 6. A Perfect Swarm 7. Defender 8. V Formation 9. Murmuration