#3827 Golden Retriever, Chuck Johnson - Rain Shadow

4/5 the opener's a tough one, endless and dissonant, horns and Johnson's pedal steel running against the grain of the ambient hums. But its a rite of passage, earning you a drink from the album's exploding heart. First, a stop through Lupine, a spacy dispatch worthy of late Sigur Ros -- and then you arrive at Sage Thrasher, as unknowable as they come, gorgeous in every phase of its descent into chaos, with Creosote Ring as a fitting closer, that 13-6-13-6 song length cadence subconsciously tying it all together

#3825 VA - Focus On: Metroline Limited Volume 3

2.5/5 wow this is two hours of very samey music, even as house goes. may you connoisseurs out there derive some subtle note that I cannot

#3823 Moon Diagrams - Lifetime of Love

4.5/5 about as deeply atmospheric as electronic albums come. Lifetime of Love is a blend of styles, but it's ambient at heart, with a transcendent sense of pacing, with vocals early so that their absence is felt for the next half hour, the importance of beats ever-evolving, ending on the only traditional song. Blue Ring // The Ghost and the Host are the centerpiece and the destination, an endless embrace that the whole album approaches and recedes from like breath in repeated listens

#3822 Super Flu - Heimatmelodien

3/5 missing the unexpected momentum and playfulness of their later stuff, everything here's locked in and by the book. Some clever moves but man they come in slow

#3821 Super Flu - Musik 3

3.5/5 a roundly enjoyable hour fourteen, balancing housey patience and simmering momentum, with some real highlights: V13a with its playful knobtwiddling, Gausa with its Moby-via-The-Range emotional shifts, even that red herring opener's a good time

#3816 Erik Hall - Music for 18 Musicians

3.5/5 probably better, as pleasant listening goes, than most performances. So let's be glad it exists. But the thrill was always undeniably in the insidious madness of the physical playing - it's hard to recommend this _too enthusiastically

#3815 Kara-Lis Coverdale - Sirens

2.5/5 clever, all those tones and voices interchangable, stretching infinite landscapes - but man it's a rough listen for listening, often harsh, usually tense, like a soundtrack to a difficult film

#3814 Floating Points - Late Night Tales

4/5 a lovely little ambient opener is a fakeout into a long sidechannel of obscure soul, before drifting back for some extended meandering electronic jams. There's a swoop to the flow, it gets smoothly from one mood to the next, by the end leaving you feeling like, well, like you've made a night of it

#3805 DJ Python - Mas Amable

3/5 I love where this starts, because it's beautiful slow and evocative and all I listen to anymore is ambient. But then the offkilter beats come in and all these tacky noises, and there's still these touches of that original beauty but then oh wow ouch the vocals on that 11 minute centerpiece. Bummer fakeout

#3799 Dan Deacon - Mystic Familiar

4.5/5 Dan Deacon's transformation from batshit noisemaker to transcendental sherpa is finally complete. After a decade or so of making increasingly amazingly trippy videos for harsh-but-gorgeous songs he's finally dropped the harshbut and made a wonderfully soft, busy, colorful swirling armchair//headphone listen without a single ragged sawtooth in sight. A fractal rainbow sweater. Just look at those song titles! A lovely listen, weaving old tricks (those sweeping automated piano lines, those filtered drones) with the new (some lovely sparse saxes, some actual clean vocals!). Fitting that it ends on the names of ghost towns. Let's get the fuck out of here

#3798 Wamth - Life

3/5 at some point Mena lost that balance from Home, stopped going slow, stopped blurring the edges of his 4-speed skills, let overt harmonies come through, fell ass backwards into a Tycho album

#3796 Skatebard and Lauer - Volpe

2.5/5 three criminally boring and idea-light songs, not even especially dancable. feels phoned in

#3795 Bjorn Torske - Byen

4/5 almost every song on Byen has a backbone of deadsimple old-school synths, some foundation of tangible, visible, hard-edged waves. And on top of that familiar, elemental crunch comes disco, rumbling drums, sparkling synth lines, samples of birds, and a million ways to bob your head and move your ass. A wonderful hybrid. The Norwegian scene lives.

#3793 Warmth - Home

4/5 the difference between good and bad ambient is necessarily subtle. Agustín Mena does one thing very well: moves voices into the mix slowly, evolves voices even more slowly, and builds in subtle rhythms, little ghosts of clicks and heartbeats moving at paces more readily expressible in bpms. And every once in a while there's an actual melody, played low and slow and repeatedly and far apart. And he does all these things well, adding the barest scent of some distant place and, there you have it, good ambient from just one stone

#3792 Christina Vantzou - No. 3

3/5 a giant, patient mix of soundtracky, classical-adjacent drones and readymade electronic reverb. There's flashes of something enormous and elemental, with constant instrumentation shifts to keep you off-balance. But I'm not sure more is more when it comes to this kind of music, and it never adds up to more than a numb sense of unease

#3790 Underworld and The Necks - Appleshine Continuum

4.5/5 I haven't gone hard on a song like this in a long time. Each blur of a workday lately's been marked by at least one Appleshine Continuum playthrough.

Straight 4s makes for a straight underworld song for the first five minutes or so, but then little by little the beat compounds, and a bassline sidles in, and long organ drones lurk. And then its just a jazz trio magma jam, with only the barest electronic flourishes, and that strange patient dance goes on and on until the half hour mark (!) where something really remarkable happens: we just take off the yoke and a full on, maximal/minimal Necks groove breaks out, a Reichian raveup, endless texture, all upright bass and rumbling piano, and then just the sweetest outro you can imagine.

Apparently done in one take and it flows so slowly without a seam on it. Every part works and it is not boring and it is goddamn great background music to anything, that insistent beat as everything shifts in such slow motion. Perfect quarantine music, a second heart when yours is tired

#3787 Lindstrom - On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever

4/5 you gotta hand these Norwegians one thing - after they found the peak space disco sound 8 or so years ago, none of the big names are stuck in it. Better to become Liars than the Rapture. Of these four long songs, two are beatless and near-ambient and are the best of the bunch. The title track's all interpretive dance, lurching from motion to motion without overarching structure or form, and its, kind of incredible, in its frustrating way. Swing Low Sweet LFO's the other highlight, endlessly paced, rippling arpeggiated patronuses bounding through negative space. Even the closer's a mysterious anticipation of a moment that never really comes. Each song bordering on boring in some interesting way.

#3786 Skatebard - Vill Stil

3/5 packed with clever little sound design gestures, this guy clears the presets when he gets a new synth. Skatebard gets a lot of mileage out of a small idea and minimal hardware, except when it's a long road to nowhere -- man those 11 minute tracks are slogs

#3785 Skatebard - Skateboarding Was A Crime: In 1989

3.5/5 shamelessly repetitive, retro synths, with that signature Norwegian crunch and a sneakily playful spirit

#3781 Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts V: Together

3.5/5 I wonder how this will sound on the other side of the pandemic. Now, it sounds like a glimmer of hope, a silver string of connection, beauty in the slow endlessness, marbled with thick veins of sympathetic anxiety*. This is a good time for long slow songs.

* I still haven't finished Locusts, which is a solid block of anxiety