New Years Eve, 2009. As always happens around the end of one year/start of another, I begin to sift through the leftover albums that I once loaded on my iPod but never got a chance to thoroughly experience.

Sometimes you need comedown music. Around five thirty, most of us had burned out and were ready to crash, and someone in the house put Level Live Wires on repeat. This was the perfect end to a seemingly endless night of surprising adventures and sleepless social encounters. The music recalls the soft ambiance of early Broken Social Scene (Feel Good Lost era) and warm textural sounds from Kiln. Throw in some slow, monotonous rapping and breakbeat or two for good measure and you’ve got something close to Daedalus on downers. Walking around listening to this on my headphones, I couldn’t help but think that no album has ever made me feel so cool to be listening to music alone in a cold dark city. This dude has worked on the indie hip-hop label anticon and has remixed the likes of Boards of Canada, Notwist, and Nosaj Thing.

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Seefeel is old. I don’t even know if they are still around. They make dreamy ambient IDM, and were signed to Warp before I hit kindergarten. “Plainsong” is one of the most beautiful songs in the world. I forgot how much IDM I have (and like); hit me up with other similar bands - I know a lot of old IDM but has it passed its heyday? Is there any new great IDM scene I’m missing? Let me know in the comments.

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UPDATE: link includes V0 version

Yup, it leaked a while ago. It’s great. I kinda hoped this wasn’t the cover art because I feel like he creates much better (more interesting) stuff, but whatever. The album itself is excellent, though hang onto those old leaked demos and unmastered versions from last year if you have him, cuz there are definitely some cuts and changes. Overall, the record is a delicately refined and polished version of songs you can tell he’s been working on for the past 4+ years or so. An astoundingly beautiful sophomore release. I keep getting more effusive as I write because I started listening when I started writing the post.

Check him out as he tours North America with Broadcast this fall/winter! He’s in Philly October 18th.

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Another awesome release from Ghostly. Lusine, (previously Lusine ICL), or Jeff McIlwain is an ambient/IDM composer from Texas who has put out releases on Hymen and Isophlux in addition to Ghostly. His style typically ranges from anywhere from subtle and textural ambient to minimal, glitch, and softly serrated IDM. Here, he has refined his sound so it is crisper and snappier for a wider musical audience that has become much more accustomed to the addition of brightly popping electronic beats from IDM and hip-hop. I would venture to guess that if he, as Moby did with his first album, agreed to license out all of the songs on this album for commercial purposes, they would probably all be grabbed quickly and he would make a fortune. I don’t really know what that means, but I still really enjoy the album and think you will too. After the first listen to either Operation Costs, Two Dots, or Gravity, you will hear it’s clearly the result of careful, deliberate composition and polish.

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This is the experimental ambient album from Ohad Benchetrit, someone I’ve long thought to be the brains behind the brilliance of Do Make Say Think, Broken Social Scene, and other BSS-related projects. Of course it is always a team effort, but there’s something about his instrumentation (listen to Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn to hear what I mean) which makes me think he is one of the most incredible musical geniuses of our time. And he’s got an awesome name too. You can tell that he has matured into genre-less music with this album, which in parts can be defined as ambient, acoustic guitar, found-sound, experimental, IDM, what have you. The point is that he has explored so many styles that he is now able to sit down and create his own, and he does so beautifully. Every song I hear someone stitching together a sonic blanket, where melodic sound textures are held together by the daily rhythm of his thread. I hope you will enjoy this as much as I have.

Here’s what Arts-Crafts (the label) had to say of the new release:

“Arts & Crafts announces the signing and debut release from Years, a beautiful and inspired self-titled album due for release May 5. A true visionary of compositional soundscaping, Ohad Benchetrit, provides an immense soundtrack and illustration of his accomplished production and guitar proficiencies.”

For fans of: first BSS album Feel Good Lost, DMST (especially the acoustics on You, You’re A History In Rust), BSS, any sunny, hopeful and down-to-earth ambient IDM that inspires you.

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Air France is essential balearic electronic with ambient pop leanings. Also, these guys are apparently anarchists too! and pretty hot, for swedes. They released this album on Sincerely, Yours, which is The Tough Alliance’s label - a great compendium of all the beautiful balearic synthpop that’s been bubbling in that neck of the woods. I’ve put both No Way Down and On Trade Winds in this so you can have both of their EPs in lieu of a proper release, which we should see soon enough.

FYI: this is really good ecstasy music, like, really. wait till it gets warmer outside (depending where you are), but rolling with air france is like summer in a pill.

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K.C. Accidental was a two-person band comprising Kevin Drew and Charles Spearin, and it formed the base for the band now known as Broken Social Scene (up there in my top 10 all-time obligatory favorite bands). To be honest, I wish they’d never broken up. For those familiar with both Drew and Spearin’s work, this will play as a beautiful synthesis of the two’s different approaches to music. Spearin’s instrumental post rock leanings (he’s in Do Make Say Think, again an all-time favorite band for me) combined with Drew’s ambient electronic experiments (you should see him playing with synths live, it’s awesome) create an album so perfect that it has defined more than one period of my life (and that’s saying a lot). Boy do I like parentheses today. Anyways, the first album is Captured, and the second is Anthems, but each have 6 blank tracks, at the end of the first and the beginning of the second. To me, this implies that both comprise one continuous work, with a silent pause between each act. Truly, it is really beautiful, there’s no other word than that. It is very hard to express in words how incredible this album is (it’s my emotional attachment which is making it difficult), but few others who have heard it experience different reactions.

Also, it’s uploaded (both of the albums are zipped together) in 320 kbs, so there’s NO excuse for you to not have it. NO EXCUSE.

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This is going to be one of the top ambient releases of the year, from the same guy who brought you one of the best ambient albums last year, Harmony in Ultraviolet. It’s late and I’m tired, and describing ambient music is generally long, flowery bullshit which I’m just not interested in typing now - suffice it to say that this album is a little more gentle and hypnotic than his last, but at the same time just as hauntingly vague and tenuous as all other Hecker releases. You should buy it cuz kranky’s an incredible album with a lot of great artists and they’ve really popularized ambient music in the indie-mainstream more and helped to bring about an evolution and renaissance of ambient music over the years.

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This is a really great album, flawless, even, and delicate like the gentle lilting curls on its cover. A must-have for fans of similarly chilled-out IDM that verges on ambient pop, a la Marumari, Freescha, Casino vs. Japan, Boards of Canada, Tycho (ok, maybe I’m straying a bit). I’ve been listening to it during the nighttimes for the last few days, it’s a really great way to decompress, like heroin after a night of heavy rollin,’ except less addictive.

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