Best New Ambient (July 2025)
These records will take you places
June has been mostly warm, sunny and calm. My days were filled with listening and writing, chores and practice, light physical exercise and watering the plants; a quiet life.
Throughout the month, I’ve discovered some gorgeous new ambient music for your listening diet – six recordings in total, which you will find below in my monthly roundup.
One more time, I’d like to make you aware that I’ve implemented a sliding scale for paid subscriptions. I’m now offering a 20% discount for people whose economic situation feels tense, and a VIP tier for financially well-off readers who want to support my work in a sustainable way.
Gabriel Brady – Day-Blind (Tonal Union, 2025)
During the pandemic, the young composer and musician Gabriel Brady picked up a bouzouki, a traditional Greek string lute. He’d combine its ancient sounds with sparse piano and violin melodies, then route these analogue signals through a minimal modular synth set-up to add loops, effects, filters and textures.
This all happened in his dorm room at Harvard University.
The short album (just 23 minutes) that came out of these sessions was inspired by old French film scores, Brian Eno’s classic Ambient 4: On Land and the music of Debussy, Satie and Ravel. These seven vignettes have a hazy, warped vibe that listeners might have once found in lo-fi beats, before that scene became obsessed with gaming algorithms.
Brady doesn’t seem concerned with such profane matters; his music is rather looking for the transcendent in the mundane.
In the press text, he explains:
“There’s a way in which everyday life can be a source of deep pain and melancholy, intensely disquieting and dull and leaden, and yet it can also be a place of deep peace and conscious attunement to the present moment, and it’s this tension that the album is built around.”
Félicia Atkinson – Promenades (Shelter Press, 2025)
Conceived as a sound meditation on a Nord keyboard, these 26 minutes of minimal music are broken up into six movements, each named after a colour, which hints at Atkinson’s synesthesia.
“While playing synths in the studio, my fingers wandered over the keyboards as I watched the movement of the hands and the air through the window”, Atkinson writes in a short note accompanying the tape. “Each song has a colour, and while I'm playing, I'm following an invisible river.”
As the title suggests, Atkinson created these tunes for listening while strolling around (“se promener” in French; “Promenades” are leisure walks). Her music tends to be quiet and unassuming in general, but without her trademark half-whispered vocals, it feels even more restrained. This slow succession of improvised chords and arpeggios almost automatically dissolves into the background, but if you listen closely, you will find encapsulated within a modest poetry and depth.
By the way, I’ve previously interviewed the French ambient composer at length, and you can still access the piece as a paid subscriber.
Kenji Kihara – Winds of Eternity (Constellation Tatsu, 2025)
This Japanese composer writes tunes that feel as unhurried and scenic as one imagines the coastal town of Hayama, a good hour south of Tokyo, where he lives and works. His newest tape Winds of Eternity recalls the classic 1980s environmental music of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Midori Takada and their peers.
Kihara’s compositions are often built around field recordings of nature and environmental sounds. His music is characterized by slow changes, representing the gradual turn of the seasons, and floating synth chords that evoke the stillness of nature out in the Japanese mountains.
Winds of Eternity was released on Californian quality ambient label Constellation Tatsu. It can be purchased separately or together with two more intriguing new cassette releases – Rhucle’s No Wing and The Harp Players’ Destruction – as a tape pack called Summer Batch 2025.
Susana López – Materia Vibrante (Elevator Bath, 2025)
This elaborate piece by Spanish electroacoustic composer and audiovisual artist Susana López loosely reminds me of the works of Serbian sound artist Manja Ristić which I recommended last month.
Similar to Ristić’s music, these four long-ish tracks are mainly based on field recordings captured with microphones (in the UK and Ireland) and hydrophones (in the rivers of Northwest Spain); these were then combined with electromagnetic wave scans, synthesizers, digital harmonium, effects, percussion and vocal textures.
Designed as “an invitation to hear the world as vibration in perpetual becoming”, this isn’t ambient in the sense of music that can also dissolve into the background – it’s music for active listening that lures the listener into an imaginary dream world resembling a fascinating underwater cave.
Taken in best as a 37-minute whole, Materia Vibrante works like a guided sound meditation that doesn’t need a single word to convey a surreal, immersive sonic landscape.
Hiram – Solarium Songs (Permaculture Media, 2025)
Released on summer solstice, this new work by Minneapolis-based sound artist Matthew Hiram is a welcome addition to the canon of botanical ambient, a subgenre I might have just made up but which can actually be traced back to Mort Garson’s Mother Earth's Plantasia from 1978.
Designed to induce meditative trance states, Solarium Songs was created on analog synthesizers and refined through electroacoustic processes. The textures were apparently shaped through bio-electric impulses from actual plants (the liner notes list Bromeliad, Yucca Elephantipes, and Crassula ‘Springtime' as collaborators). However Hiram might have accomplished that – the press text speaks of a process of “data-sonification” –, the music does feel as if it’s mirroring photosynthesis, essentially transforming light into life.
Inspired by the pioneering synth works of Pauline Anna Strom, the album – which is available on tape and a limited lathe cut edition – consists of two long soundscapes that are well-suited for moments of quiet daytime contemplation. Conveniently enough, each of them runs for the duration of a short Zazen session. I normally don’t meditate to music, but these pieces have recently enhanced my morning practice with an element of deep listening.
Sontag Shogun x Lau Nau – Päiväkahvit (Beacon Sound, 2025)
This is a collaboration by Finnish artist Lau Nau (Laura Naukkarinen) and the experimental trio of Sontag Shogun. It follows 2022’s critically acclaimed Valo Siroutuu, which was based on the same sessions, recorded at Laura’s home on the Finnish Kimitoön Island in 2019. This new album features nine more tracks and four woven-in reworks by like-minded artists.
Päiväkahvit is a peaceful, unhurried and slightly mystical record; what differentiates it from a standard ambient album is the fact that some vocal tunes and the remixes are seamlessly mixed into the sequencing.
The few actual song-like compositions oscillate between classic 4AD dream pop territory and indie folk-ish influences, but they really don’t disturb the flow of the record at all. On the contrary, they seem to add a human, emotional dimension to it.
The remainder of the record is made up of instrumentals and collages of various sound sources, mostly based on field recordings from Kimitoön Island in the South of Finland. I love how varied and eclectic it all sounds, without ever becoming incoherent. There’s acoustic piano, guitar, violin, electronics, vocal textures, sine waves, even gentle beats; some of the acoustic instruments were obviously recorded with distant room mics, absorbing the ambience and giving the music a sense of room and place.
From a Substack essay by Sontag Shogun member Jesse Perstein about the genesis of the record:
“‘Päiväkahvit’ translates to ‘afternoon coffee.’ (…) It’s the perfect way to listen to music — inside, with a fresh cup, watching dust motes dance in the afternoon light, trying to exist outside of linear time.”
