Ambient Treats, Acid-Aventures, Smooth Jazz & Wind Powered Electronica

A mostly mellow, occasionally mad selection of great new LPs for you.

Tomotsugu Nakamura - Stay In Solitude / The Green Kingdom - Environs (Teinei)

Japan’s Tomotsugu Nakamura is one of my favourite ambient artists. He’s been making ambient music for the last twelve years and has developed a refined, minimal sonic mosaic style of composition, where he crafts each track from fragments of acoustic, electronic/processed sounds and choice field recordings.

Last April, after gracing some of the world’s best ambient labels, he decided to go it alone and Teinei was born, launched with the release of an album by the maestro himself and fellow Japanese ambient producer Haruhisa Tanaka. Both recordings are great and made it to the blog.

You also need to check out the latest label release which just dropped from The Green Kingdom (disclaimer his last LP was released on TSMM’s label last summer - check it out!). This, rather like the TSMM release, is something of a departure from his trademark sound, and he’s delivered a beautifully crafted tribute to Kankyo Ongaku - Japanese environmental music. It fits the label’s current aesthetic trajectory a treat, and is one of his best albums to date, which is saying something for this respected ambient producer with such a long history.

Back to Nakamura. Last week I was pleasantly surprised to notice that I’d missed a late 2024 transmission from him. The work was initially made for a project entitled, “Music Suitable for Reading Books”, and he’s certainly delivered the perfect soundtrack for a night curled up on the sofa with your latest novel.

The sounds of a minimal piano refrain get the ball rolling and that’s where the energy levels remain, perfectly pitched to hover around the lower limits of your auditory perception and create a soundtrack that heightens rather than distracts from your chosen tome. The keys are intertwined with the subtlest of machine emanating sounds and the unhurried picking of an acoustic guitar that, like the piano, has been carefully recorded to create an enticing intimacy to the recording, and as always there’s plenty of space between the precision placed notes and sounds, allowing you time to contemplate the latest plot twist. It’s another minimal marvel from Nakumura.

Aux Meadows - Draw Near (Eiderdown)

Aux Meadows first came to my attention with their great self entitled debut LP in 2022 in which Americana flirted shamelessly with stoned cosmic country and desert baked ambient. This was closely followed the next year by the equally accomplished Dust Kingdom where the trio kept their string heavy alt-roots blueprint, teasing the purists with the odd familiar tune or refrain before delighting the heads with regular descents into psychedelic and ambient Americana backwaters, well away from the MAGA cap wearing, Bud swilling good ol’ boys.

Draw Near continues their outsider vision of Americana, is released via the ever wayward Eiderdown Records and fittingly only exists in the Bandcamp backwaters, where only committed and adventurous music lovers dare to tread. (* Update. It’s now available to stream.) The LP starts off innocently enough with a couple of lightly stoned campfire scores, although the trio are soon mesmerised by the flames and drift off into deeper ambient reflection, lonesome six string laments, pleasantly distorted ambient guitar, genteel acoustic folk, drum machine powered acid-swampiness, spectral ambience, a siesta soundtrack and finish with a mighty fine slice of contemplative cosmic country. The trio have done it again, so ditch the algorithms and take a trip to Bandcamp.

monde ufo - Flamingo Tower (Fire Records)

I was an early Monde UFO adopter. Looking back at Bandcamp I described their second single as, “Sweetly sung bedroom gloom pop over a jazz drum break, Kenny G sax & bit of microdosed guitar twang.“ They then followed it up with one of the most singular LPs of 2021 and probably the debut LP of that year, a far out fusion of lo-fi psychedelia, jazz, Americana, bossa and pop exotica. Well I’m glad to report that things have gotten weirder since then.

Their new LP has just dropped via one of my favourite indie labels - Fire Records and it’s another hard one to pin down with the only discernible thread being main man, Ray Monde’s distinctive, hushed vocals, that melt into wave after wave of psychedelic whimsy and far out arrangements.

It’s more cohesive chaos and glorious madness, so expect the unexpected, from spooky soundtracks, full pelt acid folk-pop, jazz licked orchestral indie-jangle, free operatic ambient-jazz, freak funk, carnival primed lysergic samba crooning, Americana rock operas, toad licked surf or THC saturated dream jazz. Fly your freak flag for this one.

Grand River - Tuning the Wind (Umor Rex)

Lofty concept albums are generally a bit of red flag to me, the musical reality rarely seems to live up to the creatively underdelivering theory, so I’m glad to report that Grand River aka Aimée Portioli’s new album delivers admirably on all fronts.

Initially created as an installation piece (I know - don’t worry though), Portioli recorded various types of wind and then reworked them through layering and pitch adjustment until the wind itself became a prepared instrument. At times the wind was tuned to 440Hz whilst at other times the instruments were tuned to the sound of the wind.

Technicalities aside the result is a rare symbiosis of woman, nature, machines and instruments, where boundaries are blurred and the idea of creativity as just a human quality challenged; you’ll never not contemplate a gust of wind against your cheeks again.

The recording itself is an epic thirty six minute soundscape that starts as a gentle summer breeze and gradually explores the power, and at the mid-way mark the brutality, of this natural force, before a calmer, kosmische second half takes you safely home. It’s a beautifully realised concept and a genuine sonic journey.

Takuro Okada - The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line (Temporal Drift)

Although I noticed I was following him on Tidal, I wasn’t fully aware of Takuro Okada until this fond retrospective collection was released on Temporal Drift the other week, his first collection to be released outside Japan.

The collection is a diary of the artist’s last ten years of guitar inventiveness, with the recordings either made at home or friends’ houses. Effects pedals are used, abstract electronica added, field recordings meander and drummers and percussionists enter and leave through the revolving collaborative door, pedal steel adds some ambient Americana touches, aquatic vibes are conjured, mysterious sounds leak into the mic from neighbouring dimensions, vintage sci-fi soundtracks are reimagined and there’s even some straight up finger picking and a dash of Tex-Mex twang to highlight his mid-Pacific influences.

It’s a whimsical collection of experimental guitar and a great introduction to this laid back, boundary reshaping guitarist and producer.

Patrick Shiroishi & Piotr Kurek - Greyhound Days (Mondoj)

Patrick Shiroishi is always worth keeping an eye on, a sax playing serial collaborator with an adventurous spirit, although you’ll have to sift through some regularly appearing, harder to digest experimental works to get to the more melodic stuff, which is where my interests lie.

Ironically Greyhound Days is almost too smooth in places, with both Shiroishi and keyboard/electric bass playing Piotr Kurek both in serene mood as they flirt with borderline muzak in places, maintain a suave ambient jazz vibe and touching “simple tenderness” that should ease the minds of even the most stressed souls. It’s a really lovely, gentle listen, and we could all use some of that from time to time.

Don’t Forget TSMM’s Playlists.

From ambient sound baths and wellness imbuing new age vibes to underground house via jazz, neoclassical, folk and dub, the twenty TSMM playlists cover a lot of ground.

They’re available on Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon, Youtube Music, Youtube, Deezer, Soundcloud and Spotify (if you don’t worry about them not paying most of the artists on the playlists). Just hit this smartlink to connect to the various services and TSMM profiles.