On Atmosphere for Dreaming Steve Roach presents a masterfully realized immersive habitat that is instantly transportive, organic and alive. The verdant environment of hovering, sustained earthbound atmospherics comingle with a surreal processed Australian outback ambience resulting in a sonic ecosystem of tranquility and renewal.

This 74 minute longform immersion zone is an evolution of the pre-concert soundworld that quietly permeated the performance venue before the start of the 2018 Return To The Dreamtime shows in Tucson and Santa Fe, as well as experienced on the SomaFM broadcasts of the concerts. This release also shares its intention and spirit with the longform classic The Dream Circle which was also born as a pre-concert atmosphere before evolving to its current state. Atmosphere For Dreaming is designed for infinite looped playback.

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Composer, multi-instrumentalist, and soundscape artist Tom Eaton makes his Spotted Peccary debut with HOW IT HAPPENED, a sensitive, emotional, and introspective new album of reflective ambient impressions which he evokes with tenderness and grace. With its heartfelt blend of piano, ambient guitar, and synth textures, the album offers an escape from the familiarity of daily life, inviting the listener to slow down and explore the spaces and openings in the world that are often ignored.

HOW IT HAPPENED is a love letter of sorts, or more accurately a musical expression about love in which Eaton reflects on his own deeply personal and sentimental experiences, inspired by the various ways in which love has impacted his life. Each track is drawn from reflective moments spent along the rivers and in the woods of New Hampshire, New Orleans, Vermont, and Massachusetts, where Tom discovers new perspectives as he explores unseen paths.

Eaton invites the listener into his world with the slow-moving and mysterious atmosphere of the opening track, “Ice”, which clears space for “An Unexpected Opening” with its delicate piano and synth tones that slowly blossom like a flower cautiously opening itself to the wider world. This is followed by “MK, And How It Happened”, which has the feeling of a melodic yet melancholy memory that lingers, circling through time before giving way to the atmospheric mist of “The Slow River”. The quiet stillness of “Later, At Night, By The Lake” gives rise to a growing uneasy tension, while “Genezen” invokes a feeling of solitude, lost and drifting, yet still surrounded by beauty. The interplay between piano and guitar on “The Fog And The Lifting” offers a welcoming return to a safe and peaceful place before the floating ambience of “Until Her Eyelids Flutter Open” seems to momentarily slow time in an attempt to lengthen those last lingering moments of a wonderful dream.

Having spent the past 25 years as a full time producer and engineer with credits on hundreds of recordings, Tom Eaton is certainly no stranger to crafting delicate musical spaces. His pensive soundscapes stir the emotions and touch the soul as the lush textures and quiet melodies of HOW IT HAPPENED deliver a multi-dimensional immersion into the artist’s vulnerable space, where he investigates the amorphous connections shared by us all.

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“I focused most of 2018 investigating ideas surrounding my new album. I started by asking questions about tactile synesthesia, as I have long used touch and texture as a metaphor when I work with sound. This led me to start painting again, trying to find a visual abstract language that echoed the way I feel sound on my skin. This led to a double CD release. Both discs are quite deep and atmospheric, each with a continuous flow of sound: the first one more naturalistic and gentle, the second more abstract and shadowy. I suspect “Tactile Ground” will find its core audience with those who like my slower, more introverted work.”  -Robert Rich

Can we find a tactile ground, an animal surface upon which to calibrate our humanity?

Skin telegraphs sensation from air,
filtered from distant worlds.
Language constricts our sense of self
to an illusion of separation.
The verb of living, flux and transmutation,
expands outward from the middle,
concentric ripples on a pond.
We drop through the surface,
pebbles tossed from the shore.

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Sverre Knut Johansen turns back the clock, peering into the distant past on his fourth Spotted Peccary release, PRECAMBRIAN. Focusing his conceptual musical lens on the prehistoric development of planet Earth and its inhabitants, Johansen is joined by noted electronic music maestro and soundscape pioneer Robert Rich to create a deeply compelling ambient-electronic odyssey that serves as a virtual soundseeing tour through our planet’s vivid history.

Each track on PRECAMBRIAN takes the listener through significant geological periods and evolutionary events of Earth’s 4.6 billion year history, bringing the epochs and eons to life through musical poetry and recorded natural sounds. The sonic landscapes, both organic and electronic, are always deep and captivating, evolving through abstract amorphous spaces, peaceful harmonious moods, and dramatic eventful moments. 

The music is built on a foundation of swirling synths, pulsing electronics, and occasional rhythmic moments, creating a space where Johansen’s mesmerizing compositions are highlighted by Robert Rich’s piano and spellbinding voicelike gliss guitar. Add to that the recordings of environmental sounds, both natural and mechanical, and the immersive world of PRECAMBRIAN springs to life with depth, energy, and artistic vitality. 

Johansen and Rich transport the listener through the ages as they conjure sonic visions of a planet in constant change. The music evolves in a vivid timelapse that unfolds before the ears, occasionally pausing to experience key events along the way, before the title track ends the album with a sweeping musical epilogue that acts as the closing credits to Johansen’s epic geologic adventure. 

“The epochs on Earth are an exciting topic for me,” Johansen professes, “so I was inspired to create an album around the concept of the Earth’s geological time scale. The music is epoch-based where I try to convey with nature sounds what might have happened on Earth, creating moods around certain events that have taken place, like oxygen, birds, water, and ice.” Deep listeners may notice some of the real world ambience skillfully woven into the tracks throughout the album. 

PRECAMBRIAN is a stirring and enthralling work of art where synthesized and organic sounds mingle to create a beautifully detailed sonic journey. It’s a voyage through time in which Sverre Knut Johansen has elegantly condensed billions of years into a mood-based soundscape charged with emotion and wonder. While it’s certainly true that the entire geologic history of planet Earth is a lot to cover in a single album, Johansen is hopeful that PRECAMBRIAN’s music, artwork, and gorgeous 20 page booklet will combine to tell an intriguing story, and perhaps serve as a thought-provoking reminder of how important it is to be mindful of the world we inhabit. As he puts it, “Of course the album only scratches the surface of Earth’s 4.6 billion year history, but I hope it can help open up our eyes and consider what we are doing with this planet.”

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This special edition of Johan Agebjörn‘s full length debut, Mossebo, includes the original album plus two previously unreleased tracks from the era, all meticulously remastered in 24-bit clarity from the original mixes.

Named after the house in which Agebjorn lived while creating the album, Mossebo is a collection of ambient pieces composed between 2004 and 2007; and one additional track that was created in 1996. The natural feel and unpresuming flow of Mossebo highlight an artist in his element, as Agebjorn evokes human warmth in a wintry landscape, expertly juxtaposing intimacy and isolation.

With the stunning wordless vocals of Lisa Barra skillfully winding their way through Agebjörn’s lush synth textures on many of the tracks, Mossebo is both electronic and organic at its core. Understated electro beats lend the rich ambient atmospheres a subtle sci-fi motion that evoke contemplations of time and transit.

While he is best known as the creative force behind the popular electronica dance project Sally Shapiro, Johan Agebjörn proved for the first time on Mossebo that he is quite at home in the darker and deeper spaces of ambient music, as well.

From Johan:

“In 2004-2005 I took up residence in Sweden, in a 19th century cottage called ‘Mossebo’. There, isolated in the countryside, I started composing, mainly acoustic piano music and electronic ambient music, influenced by the landscape around me and the music by Biosphere, Pete Namlook, early Moby, Erik Satie, Krister Linder, and more.

The album ‘Mossebo’, named after the cottage, saw the light of the day in September 2008. This was the first time my solo music was released on CD by a proper record label, and therefore it’s a release that means much to me.

The Gothenburg-based vocalist Lisa Barra sings on half of the tracks. I met Lisa at an animal rights event where she performed some songs a cappella. She had the voice of an angel, and so I started to sample her recordings for my ambient creations. I sent her the results, and she liked what I did, so we started to record some new songs in a studio. Some of the tracks on Mossebo are based on the earlier vocal samples (such as the opener ‘Dulciter Somni’) whereas others are from the studio recordings (such as ‘The Sound of Snowflakes Touching the Ground’).

‘Siberian Train Part I’ was taken from an earlier musical period, 1996-1997, when I was 18 years old and made music with an Atari computer (as a sequencer) and a Roland DJ-70 sampler with only 4 MB of RAM. The longer samples on that track were recorded by me and my mum 10 years earlier during a 1987 journey on the Trans-Siberian railway.

This remastered version of Mossebo includes a previously unreleased track from that 1996-1997 era called ‘Unhappy Love’. The main melodic sound on this track was actually sampled from a Commodore 64 computer storage tape, played on a tape-recorder and slowed down a few octaves. This same sound was later used on ‘Dulciter Somni’ – and on ‘Kyrie Eleison’, another bonus track exclusive to this edition of ‘Mossebo’. ‘Kyrie Eleison’ was also the first track I made using Lisa’s vocals. Have a listen.”

Lund in May 2019
Johan Agebjörn

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Bloom Ascension is a resplendent expression of elegant futurism.

The rich melodic and rhythmic symmetry of this kaleidoscopic bloom of interlocking electronic music was created specifically for the canvas of time inherent to the vinyl LP format. Bloom Ascension‘s spiraling analog synth/sequencer-driven sound conveys vibrant energy and radiant optimism woven into the core of these living, breathing musical mandalas.

This is Steve’s first release conceptualized for LP since Desert Solitaire(1989). The timing is perfect for a statement like this — a natural expansion and evolution upon the sound of his recent Grammy-nominated Spiral Revelation(2017) and Molecules Of Motion(2018).

Following upon the momentum of those two albums, Steve notes, “Bloom Ascension grew from the inspiration to envision an album that’s the same musical experience across all formats (LP, CD, download, streaming and cassette.) In order to maximize the fidelity of the LP’s dynamic deep bass and crisp detailed high end, I settled upon a 44-minute canvas. This set up a time structure that empowered and focused the creative process.”

Handmade music cultivated on analog tools continues to be a staple of Steve’s sound. He reflects, “This 4-part suite engages the listener in the spontaneous process in which the music evolved; it captures the sense of urgency and the direct transmission of pure emotion I felt at that moment in my Timeroom studio. Working this way, the infinite detail and visceral sonic impact of the large format and eurorack analog modular synthesizer systems feeds the mental states this music activates — hyper-alert, expansive and kinetic, yet suspended and calm at the center. The album title itself draws inspiration from the patterns of symmetry and organic beauty found in nature, while on another level there’s awareness of the unfoldment that modular-based music is seeing worldwide.”

Steve Roach is a leading American pioneer in the evolution of ambient/electronic music, helping shape it into what it is today. His career stretches across four decades and almost 200 releases. Drawing from a vast, unique and deeply personal authenticity, his albums are fueled by a lifetime dedicated to the soundcurrent. Steve is an artist operating at the pinnacle of his artform, driven by his passion and unbroken focus on creating a personal vision of electronic music steeped in emotion and organic subtlety.

A unique petal on this bloom is the track “Synesthete” which relates to the idea of synesthesia: a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, such as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color. Steve recently discussed this concept with Psychology Today: “This new release embraces the fusion of being both a synthesist (one who creates with a synthesizer) and synesthete. This is clearly about the correlation of the sound-color-taste-texture and three-dimensional sound activation and immersion experience I strive for in my work. This is more than just my own relationship with this trait throughout my life, for years listeners have reported their own experience of synesthesia in my work. This release will celebrate this aspect of our perception.”

”Music certainly lives beyond any one physical medium, or ultimately no medium at all except for perhaps the atmosphere we inhabit. On reflection, this rotational music feels absolutely at home playing on the spiraling medium of a physical format, as if being generated directly out of the device as it spins.”

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The Gesture of History draws upon introspective passages where the organic texture and emotions of the viola play out over an atmosphere of engulfing mournful beauty. Delicate strings float upon shimmering, forever changing expressionistic backgrounds of processed viola, synth, and harmonium – profoundly sensitive and deeply moving. The modernist ambient compositions balance on the precipice looking back in moments of reflection and rumination while delicately holding the future in our hands.

The artists

For 33 years, Sam Rosenthal has been the songwriter/primary band member of the gothic/ethereal/ambient act Black Tape For A Blue Girl. Spreading his wings over the last five years, Sam has released 3 instrumental electronic albums including a recent collaboration with Mark Seelig.

Steve Roach is a leading American pioneer in the evolution of ambient/electronic music, helping shape it into what it is today. Grammy-nominated in 2018 and 2019 consecutively, his career spans four decades and nearly 200 releases. Drawing from a vast, unique and deeply personal authenticity, his albums are fueled by the momentum of a lifetime dedicated to the soundcurrent.

Shadow is an enigmatic violist based in Portland, Oregon. They perform in a number of local bands, busk at Powell’s Books during the holidays, and perform on the most recent two Black Tape For A Blue Girl albums.

The story of the album

Sam recalls:
The Gesture of History began with an instrumental I created for the Black Tape For A Blue Girl Blood on the snow EP utilizing processed and sequenced viola. The track features Nick Shadow, a fantastic Portland-based violist who’s been part of the band on our two recent albums. Soon after, I processed and structured “Blood ii” in the same moody, textural vein, and Nick played some live viola over the piece. During the mixing of To touch the milky way, I escaped from the rigors of that highly-focused work by creating the longer “The Gesture of History,” a viola-harmonium-synth track with a compelling, engaging flow. This piece goes to a deep, rich place; I sensed I had the makings of a great album if I could shape the earlier pieces to fit with the new one.

I fully admit that artists are weird, in that a listener might be satisfied with the tracks as they stood. Yet I knew there was something more I wanted to hear; I could sense it, but I wasn’t sure how to get there. To find a new perspective, I sent the tracks to Steve Roach and asked if he had some ideas and if he’d add spacial enhancements (processing, reverb, etc).

I’ve worked with Steve since 1995, releasing over 75 of his electronic/ambient albums on my Projekt Records label. We talk on the phone almost daily about art, experience, his music, my music, and so much more. Steve provided spacial enhancements on the As Lonely As Dave Bowman Pod and Monolith albums, and I played the piano on “In the Eye of Noche” off his 2005 New Life Dreaming. Steve is always creating, and I admire his ability and determination to live in the now of the creative flow.

Steve called the day after receiving the files and said he was instantly compelled to weave in some synth elements to “Blood i + ii,” I took the multi-tracks of Steve’s enhancements and synths and set about restructuring and extending the pieces; his additions provided inspiration to flesh them out, to fulfill the album I had envisioned.

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MEDITATION IN GREEN, the Spotted Peccary label debut of ambient electronic artist Kelly David, is a psychedelic musical journey deep into the heart of Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta. Guided by rich ambient textures, manipulated field recordings, traditional instruments, and a blend of cultural and electronic percussion, the album offers a surreal sonic sojourn into a mysterious land defined by the power of a river and its influence, where nature has always been the dominant force.

An immersive work, built upon deep evolving drones and dreamlike atmospheres, MEDITATION IN GREEN blends environmental field recordings with minimalist ambient textures to underscore nature as a significant component to the work. Subtly nuanced electronic soundforms inhabit the heart of the music as percussion elements ebb and flow, slowly winding through the ethno-atmospheric currents of sound, while thoughtfully placed micro events give depth to the experience, rewarding the discriminating listener with a revealing musical landscape.

Pure, honest, and undeniably introspective, Kelly David’s masterfully crafted soundscapes bring to mind misty visions of a familiar unknown. Tensions build and release as the music moves through moods that are both soothing and challenging. Gongs, bells and the occasional emergence of authentic Vietnamese instruments signify the album’s deep relationship with SE Asian culture. The mesmerizing timbres and imaginative sound dimensions place the music solidly in world-bending ethno-ambient territory where distant dreams of the past collide with futuristic contemplations, creating a memorable experience that remains long after the music is gone.

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Celebrating the fundamental energy currents that are the building blocks of all electronic music, Bart Hawkins’ debut release 21 Pulse Eclipse is a bold and provocative album that takes a deep dive into the distinctive world of modular synthesis and pure electronic sound-shaping.

This album of abstract electronics offers eight meditations that explore the countless possibilities of raw soundforms and the imaginative ways of voicing them. Using only patch cables, oscillators, and a host of modular sound shaping devices, Hawkins guides the myriad machines with skill and purpose, molding the unrestrained sonic energy into mind-bending journeys of creative expression. Sweeping tones and harmonic drones set moods that range from peaceful and dreamlike to edgy and bleak, while occasional chirps, squelches, and pulsing patterns call to mind transmissions from distant alien worlds or the soundtrack to a sci-fi classic.

Other than some tape loop techniques and a few natural recorded sounds, Hawkins created the album entirely on a modular synthesizer system using no keyboards. “Modular synthesis is a unique art form, both from a creative process and a listening experience,” he explains, “and the resulting sounds are just so unique and loaded with personality.” It was Hawkins’ deep passion for the underlying sonic energy that provided inspiration for the album, where he envisioned an almost human-like essence within the core of his inorganic instruments, as if they might have a life of their own. “I wanted to capture the powerful, raw, undulating currents that create the life and breath of electronic music. For me, building these sonic personalities into a moving journey is like sculpting something that is infinite.”

Infinite, timeless, unrestrained, visionary; any number of words could be used to describe the enigmatic soundscapes of 21 Pulse Eclipse, as Bart Hawkins uses the power of sound to break the barriers of the finite experience, simultaneously reaching inward and outward to explore the currents of an ever-expanding electronic dream.

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Woodlands is another inspired chapter in Rudy Adrian’s continuing exploration of atmospheric music. Once again influenced by the stunning natural spaces in his home country of New Zealand, Rudy has created a moving ambient impression of the wild forests and planted parks of Dunedin.

Woodlands offers thirteen deep and enchanting tracks that naturally continue the artistic thread from Rudy’s two previous releases, Atmospheres and Coastlines. Stirring atmospherics, natural ambiences and delicate synthscapes slowly evolve and drift through a forest of mystical moods and sacred spaces, creating a timeless work of textural electronic beauty.

The album is filled with the slowly evolving melodies, harmonically rich textures, subtle ambiences, otherworldly vocal effects, and sublime moments that listeners have come to expect from a Rudy Adrian album, and fans of Rudy’s previous works will also recognize the stunning baroque flute of Nick Prosser on the track “Deep Within Forbidden Mountains.”

Infused with the essence of wind, distant water, and the echoes of life, the mysterious music of Woodlands renders a deep and tranquil soundtrack; a serene reflection of long walks within wooded wonderlands where scattered light filters through the spreading boughs of forest trees.

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