Best New Ambient (August 2025)
These records will take you places
In her 1964 essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag argues against a prevalent form of modern cultural criticism that emphasizes the ‘content’ of art over its emotional qualities and favors intellectual, allegoric readings over sensual reception.
Rather than trying to interpret a piece’s ‘meaning’ or speculate about the artist’s intentions, she is looking for critical writing to describe how the piece does what it does; criticism that captures that spark of awe we feel when experiencing art, the way it makes us feel alive and human like nothing else can.
This is still a valid perspective, especially when writing about instrumental music. While I always enjoy reading about the context and genesis of a piece, I don’t think we should be trying too hard to come up with interpretations. What I tell my students is: Listen deeply, and try to write convincingly about what you are hearing, and if and why it touches you. That’s enough.
People seem to be obsessed with lyrics these days. They like being told stories, or knowing what a piece is ‘about’. With instrumental music, there is no such thing. It makes the act of listening more challenging, almost a niche interest – but that’s what also creates its allure to people like you and me.
Alan Watts once wrote aptly that Bach sonatas or Ali Akhbar Khan tunes aren’t ‘about’ anything but their very ‘suchness’. Trying to describe that ‘suchness’ with the right, simple, original words, without slipping off into clichés and jargon – that I see as one of the critic’s main tasks. I hope I can live up to my own ideal.
Here’s my newest round-up of ambient music released in the last weeks.
Patricia Wolf – Hrafnamynd (Balmat, 2025)
Over the last years, Patricia Wolf has blessed us with three brilliant projects – I’ll Look For You In Others (2022), See-Through (2022) and The Secret Lives of Birds (2024). Now the Portland, Oregon-based composer, synthesist and field recordist has returned with another album for
’s Balmat imprint.The unpronouncable title means ‘raven film’ in Icelandic; Wolf describes the album as a “love letter to Iceland”. It was conceived as a soundtrack to an autobiographical documentary by the experimental filmmaker Edward Pack Davee, a close friend of Wolf’s. Though it’s brilliant in its own right, I don’t even want to talk too much about the film for two reasons: It’s not widely available to watch yet (go see it if you can though!), and the soundtrack works perfectly as a stand-alone album.
To score the movie, Wolf has chosen to make extensive use of the UDO Super 6, a polyphonic synthesizer that generally produces a classic, vintage sound. Aside from the synth, there are just a few splashes of nylon-string acoustic guitar, and field recordings from a trip to Iceland in 2023.
Hrafnamynd is stunning, New Age-inspired ambient music in its most minimalist and timeless form – reminiscent of the nature-inspired soundworlds of Steve Roach or even Robert Rich, who captured the sonic beauty of Wolf’s native Pacific Northwest on his classic 1989 album Rainforest.
What makes Wolf’s compositions stand out from the overpopulated field of synth-based ambient is their deeply emotional core – never one to resort to simple clichés, she is not afraid of striking up a gorgeous melody either. Evoking the image of majestic ravens circling over Iceland’s wild glaciers, geysirs and lava fields, Hrafnamynd is another truly breathtaking entry in her catalogue.
Sofie Birch & Antonina Nowacka – Hiraeth (Unsound, 2025)
I might be stretching the genre definition by including this record here, as many people tend to think of ambient as instrumental music. But to me, ambient is not defined by an absence of vocals, more by an absence of lyrics, and while Hiraeth does feature the voices of Danish composer/synthesist Sofie Birch and Polish singer Antonina Nowacka, their wordless vocalizations feel like instruments.
This is their second collaboration after 2022’s Languoria, this time recorded direct to tape in the small Polish village of Sokołowsko. The origins of the album go back to improvised outdoor sessions with acoustic instruments – Birch on guitar and Nowacka on zither. Vintage synths and organs were overdubbed afterwards, as well as hints of percussion and added field recordings.
Due to the mix of folk elements and free improvisation at its core, Hiraeth sounds exactly like it was made, like two artists inspired by their rich and peaceful natural surroundings. The ebb and flow of the tracks feels like waves crashing against the rocks of some remote, paradisiac island with dense forests and colorful birds. A gorgeously meditative, but also quite unpredictable album which did not bore me for a split second.
Almost An Island – Almost An Island (Past Inside The Present, 2025)
This project was created by a trio comprised of ambient musicians James and Cynthia Bernard – the latter is better known as
– and Kenneth James Gibson, who has in his multi-decade career co-founded the noise pop band Furry Things, worked with the late Brian McBride (of Stars of the Lid) as psych-folk duo Bell Gardens and recorded electronic music and dub under various aliases.Almost An Island is the L.A.-based trio’s mutual foray into the subgenre of ambient country – which makes a lot of sense, as Gibson has previously recorded Americana-leaning music, and the Bernards have created solo ambient records and drone-shoegaze hybrids as husband-and-wife duo Awakened Souls, so the style of this record feels like a logical combination of its creators’ wide-ranging influences.
There’s a base layer of acoustic instruments – guitars, piano, bass, and, of course, pedal steel; more unusual sounds come from rare string instruments like the electric Chapman stick and the analog Japanese Taishōgoto. Synth clouds and heavily reverbed, layered voices are incorporated as well; “In Light Of” even introduces less-processed vocals over gentle percussion and programmed drums, moving this outlier track almost into dreampop territory.
These nine long-ish, melancholic tracks take their time, never rushing to arrive anywhere quickly. In fact, there is no such thing as arrrival, only the sonic journey. The press blurb alludes to “a lingering sense of something left unsaid”, which is an apt way to describe the feeling after listening to the record as a whole – one that made me curious to discover more of the music’s innate secrets and start back at the beginning of the journey.
John Also Bennett – Στoν Eλaιώνa / Ston Elaióna (Shelter Press, 2025)
Flautist, synthesist and composer John Also Bennett started out in the U.S. noise scene, but soon pivoted towards electroacoustic composition. After a few years of heavy touring and drifting between places (New York, Brussels, Athens), he’s recently settled in Greece with his romantic and occasional musical partner, the composer Christina Vantzou (they’ve worked together as CV & JAB).
Ston Elaióna translates from Greek as “in the olive grove”. The album was recorded in Bennett’s new home, mostly in the early morning hours. He’s deliberately limited himself to a small palette of instruments – a bass flute and the classic Yamaha DX7ii synthesizer, triggering some digital oscillators with his flute, and adding some unintrusive field recordings afterwards.
This meditative suite of nine pieces seems to reflect the slowdown process after a period of being uprooted by constant traveling – a process of finding and recalibrating yourself, tuning back in with your surroundings; growing roots, maybe, in a country where ancient history still permeates everyday life.
Athens is not known to be a quiet or a particularly clean city, but Bennett managed to create a calm oasis for himself in the midst of the noise and the dirt. I find this to be a beautiful illustration of a lesson from the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön: To find inner peace, you need to learn to sit still within the chaos and turmoil of life. Surely you can create ideal circumstances for a slow and calm lifestyle, but the most effective change will happen when you adjust your perspective: Accepting impermanence allows you to cherish simple moments of joy and find beauty in basic things, without the need to constantly retreat from the world. It might sound like a cliché until you actually experience it; most of all, it’s easier said than done.
Bennett’s dignified, slow-paced melodies, sustained bass flute tones and the otherworldly, slightly dissonant feel of his justly-tuned synthesizer have become a constant companion to my mornings throughout this unusually rainy summer. Morning hours are sacred hours to me, it’s when I usually focus on researching, listening and writing, not allowing any intrusion or distraction. This elegant, restrained music has supported me in creating that oasis of stillness in my daily routine.
Emil Saiz – Cycles Of Disappearance (Ruby Harvest, 2025)
This is the first full-length work of guitarist and composer Emil Saiz, who is based between Madrid, Spain, and Porto, Portugal, on the relatively new Swedish tape label Ruby Harvest.
These five compositions are based on manipulated electric guitar improvisations; once written, the final tracks were recorded in one single take without any post-production. If you’re into noisy, droney guitar ambient, this one’s for you.
The title and concept immediately bring to mind William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, but where the American composer focused on the decay of tape loops as a linear process, Saiz zeroes in on the cyclic nature of life, where everything grows and then deteriorates but nothing ever completely disappears.
The opening tracks’ lo-fi distortion reminds me of early Stars of the Lid, while the following tracks “Sometimes The Moon” and “Grounding Phases” feature hopeful fingerpicked melodies over distorted drones, illustrating how growth and decay happen simultaneously.
These pieces “never stay still”, as Jon Buckland aptly writes in the liner notes. “The notes tumble and writhe as if they’re coming apart, fluctuating from one form to the next, twisting and looping, even occasionally reversing and almost always deteriorating in a sea of caustic static. Pining sheets of guitar wail out through waves of distortion. Each undulation sizzling into the transient shapes of disintegrating bonfire embers.”
Shelley Burgon – The In Between (The Black Editions/Thin Wrist, 2025)
Shelley Burgon is a household name in the world of avant-garde and New Music; she has studied at Mills College with the late Pauline Oliveros and collaborated with Björk, Anthony Braxton, and Fred Frith. The In Between is her solo debut album.
This is a continuous 56-minute piece, performed live in one take by Burgon on an acoustic concert harp without any effects or amplifications. The performance happened at sunset on a summer day in the mountains overlooking the Ojai Valley in Southern California.
There’s a rich background ambience – birdsong, crickets, frogs, plane noises and the creaking wood of the auditorium’s roof – that conveys a sense of time and place, while Burgon plays a series of repeating motifs and evolving figures informed by classic minimalist techniques.
I’ve regularly put this solo harp recording on in the early evening hours this summer, and it has never failed to create a deep sense of suspense and stillness. A truly special piece.
Loving the bass flute
Thank you, Stephan!