#ambient-electronic

#ambient-electronic

The two-day electronic music event is set to take place September 19-20, 2026, at Randall's Island Park, promising another immersive experience for dance music fans.

The Day Party will feature big-name DJs such as Mark Farina, Shiny Objects, J Boogie, and Collette back to back with DJ Heather, celebrating three decades of future music.

Lachlan Turczan's practice sits in the space between physics, optics, and environmental art, as he works with lasers, water, mist, and custom-built lenses to produce sculptures made entirely from light.

Concrete Waves is the first in a new series by Werkdiscs capturing improvised musical conversations between two avant-garde icons, Actress and Suzanne Ciani.

Butterfly unfolds across four unique versions of the same song, each exploring different genres and emotional depths while maintaining a cohesive melody and lyrics.

End Of Summer features falsetto voices, bowed cello, feedback tones, synth drones and various electronics, blending and melting into each other's timbres. Robert Lowe is involved in "Part 1" and "Part 3", the latter with multi-tracked harmonic lines utilising nasal intonations to accent frequencies in waves of filtered resonance.

Galen Buckwalter, a 69-year-old research psychologist and quadriplegic, participated in a brain implant study to contribute to science that aids those with paralysis. The six chips in his brain decode movement intention, allowing him to operate a computer and feel sensations in his fingers again.

Her slowly shifting synthesizer compositions and quiet, meditative pieces for acoustic instruments continue to inspire a deep immersion in their audiences, and her recordings and writings have influenced multiple generations of musicians worldwide.

Junho Park's graduation concept borrows all the right cues from TE's playbook, that modular control layout, the single bold color, the mix of knobs and buttons that practically beg to be touched, but redirects them toward a gap in the market. Where Teenage Engineering designs for people who already understand synthesis and sampling, the T.M-4 targets people who have ideas but no vocabulary to express them.

Tim Zha is looking for the soul in the machine. While some might hear Auto-Tune as masking a singer's humanity, the London-based artist filters his vocals to highlight technology's inseparability with our notions of self. This is ground well-trodden by Afrofuturist techno pioneers, Atlanta trappers, and PC Music hyperpoppers; for Zha, Auto-Tune represents what he calls the "coincidence of human subjectivity and the networked machine system."

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Laurie Spiegel for the site. As preparation for the interview, I spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks revisiting Spiegel's records, most notably The Expanding Universe, her 1980 masterpiece that blends synth experimentalism with early examples of what would eventually be called ambient music, and algorithmic composition techniques. It's a marvel that sounds both nostalgic and cutting-edge at the same time.

Paradessence draws its title from a portmanteau of "paradoxical" and "essence," coined by author Alex Shakar. Per Visible Cloaks, the word embodies the oppositional-but-coexisting concepts they're trying to explore with the new album. "Instead of creating pieces that function horizontally as environments, we wanted to conceptualize them as living material changing in space, continually in flux," Doran shared in a press statement.

The work behind "Waiting for You" by Monotronic spanned two years and several geographic mindsets. Its songs were built in the contained spaces of an East Village apartment and the open humidity of Tulum, initially seeming like disparate projects with no clear direction. Only in retrospect did their shared disposition come into focus. This is an album about the slow work of self-knowledge, which here looks less like an epiphany and more like the gradual acceptance of a particular signal,

His first albums under his own name, 1995's Earth & Nightfall and 1996's cult classic Ten Days of Blue, were blissful-sounding ambient techno records that took the melodic sensibilities of the local scene to their cosmic extremes. Every beep and blip was in harmony with a lush string line, the rhythms less like breakbeats or programmed drums than trance-inducing hammered dulcimers.

OKO DJ's music is best measured not in decibels but in candle watts. Sunlight, one suspects, would reduce it to ashes. Her debut album, As Above, So Below, is a seance of a record, a journey into the darkest corners of the night. The Athens-based musician, aka Marine Tordjemann, is host of an NTS Radio show called Twisted Dream Diary, and As Above, So Below, is similarly steeped in dream logic and surrealistic visions. In its collision of bleak sounds and cosmic mysticism, it often feels like a gothic take on new-age spirituality. It might be the post-post-punk equivalent of a European art-house film shot in grainy black and white, framing monologues muttered in French and Greek in dramatically austere trappings. It's a mood piece par excellence.

The Phase8 uses a new form of "acoustic synthesis" that combines acoustic sound generation with electronic control. Takahashi says the synthesizer is "beyond analog vs. digital" and "beyond electronics" altogether. It features chromatically tuned steel resonators, which creates an acoustic sound similar to that of a kalimba. These signals can be manipulated via onboard effects and sequenced like a traditional synthesizer. Here's a video of the synth in action.

Green-House will release new album Hinterlands on March 20. The Los Angeles duo of Olive Ardizoni and Michael Flanagan has left their longtime home of Leaving to sign with Ghostly for the follow-up to A Host for All Kinds of Life. Listen to a new song from the record, "Farewell, Little Island," below, and scroll down for the album art.