There are a few reasons why I am so late to the party on Daryl Groetsch's work, but the primary one is that I first heard about him in the early 2000s, when he was appearing on albums with titles like All I Want for Xmas is Bowel Disrupting Noise and Underwater Corpse.  Consequently, his transformation into one the premier purveyors of kosmische-inspired long-form analog synthesizer voyages went entirely unnoticed by me.  Another reason, unfortunately, is that Pulse Emitter has a dangerous tendency to veer into cloyingly saccharine New Age territory, as he sometimes does here.
Utilizing the sound of tuning forks, a method of generating tones that goes back far into history, Nicolas Bernier places them in a motorized, computer controlled installation that belies the simplicity of its core. The single piece moves quickly, evolving from the simple resonating tones to a dense, complex synthesis of the naturally captured resonance and the computerized processing of the pure source material.
Joao Da Silva’s Luciernaga project has been active only a relatively short time thus far, with releases dating back to 2010, and obviously material here going back even further. This disc compiles selections from ultra limited cassettes, split releases, and unreleased work that stands out well in the often crowded field of ambient drone works. Nicely alternating between harshness and soft, gauzy textures, the result is a dynamic and cohesive collection of material.
This trio from Tel Aviv has created driving and airy songs suffused with somewhat doom-laden yet inspiring vocals, hollow rhythms, and gauzey guitar, for an album which could easily masquerade as a release from 1980s Manchester or Glasgow.
The material that makes up Voyeur dates back to 2008, when Celer was at their most prolific as a duo. Intended to be a film score, the sound of this album is in league with the contemporaneous work they were putting out, but there is a distinctly different feel to this album, possibly due to its conceptual framing, or perhaps because of the project’s more conservative release schedule as of late.
The single piece that makes up this album began life three years ago as part of Szczepanik's hand-made, subscription based Ante Algo Azul series. Expanded from its original 18 minute duration to a full 53 minute length, it maintains the identity of the original work while building upon it dramatically. This new version in some ways feels like simply more, and in this case that is a perfectly good way to rework the piece.
This Brooklyn-based composer's debut release for Students of Decay is quite an unusual effort, placing its emphasis most prominently on frequently untreated field recordings of natural spaces (as well as a few unnatural ones).  Even the instrumentation is atypical, as Guthrie uses violoncello and contrabass to weave a creaking, moaning bed beneath French horn playing that frequently sounds like a very large, very sad bird.  There is seemingly not much happening compositionally (overtly, anyway), but Codiaeum Variegatum's languorous, organic, and unfamiliar soundscapes are a lovely place to linger nonetheless.
