New-age reflection, Joseph Shabason’s ‘The Fellowship’

From the album The Fellowship, available April 30, 2021.Pre-order / listen here: http://smarturl.it/vo1tgmDirector: Maxwell McCabe-LokosDirector of Photograp...

Shabason reveals the first step into an ambient jazz return to his emotional roots

Albums are often created to become more than a collection of tracks showcasing the talent and recent works of an artist. While there’s certainly a place for LPs which flirt with unconnected themes and ideas, listening to a set of tracks painstakingly woven together to explore the same concept can give rise to something greater than the sum of its parts.

Such is the case in Joseph Shabason’s upcoming album ‘The Fellowship’, which brings to life the Toronto based artist’s upbringing in eight tracks of ambient new-age jazz. The full release is planned for late April, but promises to be a journey coloured by sparkling synth melody, warm drone vibes and carefully measured out amount of rich jazz percussion.

Expressing emotion and complex experience is a challenge for any creator, but Shabason approaches this project with ample experience. In addition to his work as a session musician, Shabason has lent his talents to the the Canadian rock band Destroyer, as well as synth-pop trio DIANA.

In the eponymous title track for ‘The Fellowship’, ambient jazz seeps into an open world; sometimes sharp edged and sometimes soft as a footstep. The artists Saxophone becomes the central character in a calm, curious space with broad horizons.

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Dreams of the unknowable, ‘Cassilda and Carcosa’ present ‘Cloudwaves’

With handmade tracks, the New York artist imbibes minimalism and ambience with strange fiction

The producer behind the experimental IDM project ‘Cassilda and Carcosa’ resides in Brooklyn. They take their namesake from the writings of Robert W. Chambers, a prolific author concerned with the supernatural. The science fiction of Chambers ripples through the work of Cassilda and Carcosa, igniting a desire to experiment, and bringing to life new worlds that flicker through malleable genres like ambient, new age, drone and minimalism.

Parallel to Cassilda and Carcosa is this artist’s career as a software engineer, an inevitably technological environment from which electronica can still provide an escape, if approached with the right perspective.

Circumventing a conventional digital audio workstation (DAW) entirely, Cassilda and Carcosa composed their 2020 album ‘Transformers, Transistors, and Tape’ using a host of analog mixers, hardware synthesizers, sequencers and guitar pedals, directly recorded to tape.

The eight track album released on Ingrown Records, the Virginia based imprint who welcome creators of new age psychedelia. The music contained within the album is tied to minimal but club worthy beats, which generate weird, evasive melodies. The sound is alien at times but consistently enjoyable listening, with acid squelches and electronic pulses falling in a pattern before you. The closing track ‘Cloudwaves’ leaves a more ambient taste however, with synth rolling over sonar blinks.

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Atelier Pink Noise finds solace in quietude with 'Meditation of silence'

Continuing in the rich tradition of Japanese ambient, environmental, and new age music, Atelier Pink Noise releases a brand new full-length, 58-minute long album titled ‘Draw a Sleeps.’ Today, we get to listen to a selection from the album, a track titled ‘Meditation of silence.’ For the uninitiated, pink noise is a mathematical noise function that is perceived very similarly to soundscapes found in nature, such as waterfalls.

Atelier Pink Noise, however, instead of using pink noise in his compositions, goes straight to the source and samples the world around him. The sounds of forests, water, small animals, and more reverberate through his compositions, processed and warped to evoke new aural worlds, excitingly fresh yet still intimately familiar. APN blends these sources beautifully with rich, uplifting synth chords that are nominally abstract, but still manages to provoke a narrative within the mind, if one focuses clearly enough. Indeed, I would invite you to experience this track, as well as the rest of the album, in a peaceful and intimate setting, with the lights low and your eyes closed. Perhaps you’ll even see the natural sources from which these sounds originated from.

Stream ‘Meditation of silence’ above, and listen to the entire album over on Spotify.

— review by autonomy

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