Best New Ambient (June 2025)

These records will take you places

I just returned from this year’s opening ceremonies of Kiezsalon, one of the best event series for experimental music in Berlin. For two nights in a row, Kiezsalon took over an open air stage at Schloss Britz, a historic manor house in the south of Neukölln.

Jumping into a bus on Hermannstrasse, a long strip of kebab places, tea salons and gambling joints, I got out ten minutes later at a crossing south of the city highway. I passed a small lake and entered a courtyard; beneath the actual manor house, which hosts a museum, I walked along open green spaces until I arrived at a grazing area for cattle, horses and goats, right opposite of the stage.

You wouldn’t believe you’d find such a tranquil place in Neukölln, but a wide range of experimental artists would play here over two days:

• On Friday, we saw Scottish smallpiper Brighde Chaimbeul, experimental musicians Paul Wallfisch (on organ) and Dana Schechter (on lap steel guitar), and jazz saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi (with a quartet).

• On Saturday, the bill was shared by ambient keyboardist Ann Annie (with a saxophonist and a trumpeter), electronic composer Alice Hebborn (with a pianist), and Lithuanian folk duo Merope joined by multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily.

Musically, the programming was all over the place, with an emphasis on calm, dreamy and introspective sounds. I truly enjoyed all the shows, and the audience was mostly really attentive.

Personal highlight: The two former Swans members Wallfisch and Schechter brought a healthy dose of noise to the table, their performance loosely based on their recent collaboration album The Heart of a Whale – a live soundtrack from a theatre play at Vienna’s Volkstheater that features titles such as “Wolfram Lotz and Elon Musk Have Heavenly 3 am Discount Sushi and Talk about the Future”.

As usual, the Kiezsalon audience was very diverse and queer, quite art school meets Berghain Biergarten. The common language was English with a strong Southern European accent. Very Berlin, you might say. In any case, it was loads of fun. I mean, mild summery weather, superb music and live animals (who didn’t seem to mind the mostly peaceful music at all) – what’s not to love?

I’m looking forward to the rest of the Kiezsalon season. The concerts are happening throughout summer and fall at various locations all over town.

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Media Diet

Before we get into the best new ambient roundup, here are five unrelated brief recommendations:

• This lovely old school tape recorder with in-built speaker (Sony TCM-939). Since I’ve bought it, I’ve been listening to ambient tapes from my collection every day. Tape hiss still makes me happy.

• Horizon, the new non-ambient album by Resavoir (Will Miller) and Matt Gold on International Anthem. Grown out of their mutual love for 1960s bossa nova and 1970s jazz-funk fusion, this 30-minute suite sounds just like a beatdigger’s hazy afternoon daydream. Mostly instrumental, except for some gorgeous Japanese vocals by Mei Semones on standout tune “Diversey Beach”. File under: Seasonal music.

• Also on heavy rotation at Casa Kunze: The Cure’s fifth album The Top (1984). I’d dismissed this as one of their weaker records for many years, but it has recently started to grow on me. Usually seen as a transitional record between the goth trilogy and their mid-period work, it’s a fascinating amalgam of greyscale and colour, combining some beautifully bleak tunes like “Wailing Wall” or “The Top” with quirky little pop songs such as “Bird Mad Girl” and “The Caterpillar”.

• Ugnė Uma’s stunning piece “Manhattan”, a sound collage of sparse piano chords, half-whispered voice messages, operatic wordless vocals and static. I discovered this intriguing Lithuanian artist in a recent community radio broadcast by Martyna Basta.

• Robert Bresson’s 1971 film Four Nights of a Dreamer. A rather obscure late work by the French master, now available in a restored 4K version on various streaming services. Lovely adaption of a Dostoyevsky short story; beautiful shots of downtown Paris by night.

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Best New Ambient (June 2025)

For this monthly column, I am hand-selecting 3 new ambient releases that stay on heavy rotation in my headphones. Tape releases favoured.

claire rousay & Gretchen Korsmo – quilted lament (mappa, 2025)

“All of my projects, at their core, feel almost like excuses to hang with friends”, Gretchen Korsmo has said in an interview for the 15 questions website. The sound artist and producer apparently looked for an excuse to team up with fellow Texan experimental musician claire rousay; quilted lament was produced remotely though, by sending pieces back and forth, adding on top of each other’s ideas.

As one could expect, the resulting album feels like a patchwork of impressionistic sounds. There are bits of guitar and piano, some hushed and layered vocals, percussive noises and, most of all, field recordings. The press blurb mentions hazy, worn polaroids – an apt metaphor for these six pieces that resemble sound images of specific moments, with loads of memory filters applied.

Opener “find yourself in a hole on the beach” sounds as if the listener was eavesdropping on someone mindlessly strumming their guitar and humming along in solitude, while everyday noises are blurring in from the street through an open window. On other tracks, you will hear piano arpeggios over strange bleeps, dreamy vocals and ghostly whispers over synth drones and pulses. Some feel like Cocteau Twins tunes played backwards.

This half an hour can go by almost unnoticed. This is quiet, unassuming music that doesn’t command attention, but unveils more of itself with each listen. quilted lament doesn’t feel manipulative in the way a lot of ambient music does – this music is not designed to calm you, or to comfort you, or even just to feel any specific way. Though beautifully arranged and composed, drawing emotional conclusions from these sounds remains up to us, the listeners.

Manja Ristić, photo: Matej Grgić

Manja Ristić – Sargassum aeterna (2025)

The newest album from prolific and accomplished Serbo-Croatian composer and field recordist Manja Ristić comes with a fictional narrative set in a dystopian future – and Sargassum aeterna truly sounds like a dispatch from an imaginary waterworld, a transmission from a society shaped by climate change and surveillance capitalism, a hundred years from now.

These four long-ish, slightly uncanny ambient soundscapes were created from field recordings captured by the sea in Portugal, Scotland, Croatia and Serbia, set against the sounds of shells, violin, static and the EMS Synthi 100, a large hybrid synthesizer. (Only 31 of these monstrosities exist.)

As journalist Lujo Parežanin aptly writes in the press text, “there is anxiety, but also tranquility; trepidation, but also melancholia. The sonic palette is deliberately sparse: field recordings that capture both the intensity and desolation of life by the sea, instrumental drones, and the ever-present hydrophones [microphones for underwater use]. The dramaturgy is mostly static, creating a suspended feeling – a sense of ominous stillness.”

Personally, I think the overarching narrative can clearly add to the appeal of the music, but it also works really well without it. The four long pieces, each clocking in at slightly under ten minutes, evoke some inescapable impending doom – as if we’re witnessing a catastrophe unfolding throughout several stages of descent and recovery, but at the same time finding a strange kind of comfort within that uncertain reality.

In addition to the above, Wabi-Sabi Tapes recently released another amazing tape from Manja Ristić: Purpurna vresišta features two 20-minute eco-ambient soundscapes recorded at former industrial sites in Portugal, on the island of Mljet, Croatia, and in the tropical forests of Thailand; areas where decades of pollution, waste, exploitation and neglect have left deep scars in the landscapes. Ristić asks:

“What do these soundscapes have to tell us? Do they speak of the profound resilience? By listening to these landscapes, would we begin to understand the depth of their struggle?"

Jackson Hill – Empty Egg of Purity (Holy Cowow, 2025)

A bassist, composer and producer from North Carolina, Jackson Hill has worked with artists such as Son Lux’s Rafiq Bhatia, Xenia Rubinos and William Brittelle. His tape EP Empty Egg of Purity is released by the design bureau Holy Cowow, and according to the press info, it “draws inspiration from open world video game play, new age spiritualism, ambient music, and medieval drone music.”

These four largely drumless instrumental tracks are built from found sounds, field recordings and acoustic instruments, creating juxtapositions of synthetic electric guitar and woodwinds, bubbling synthesizers and organic percussion. At times the tunes have a 1980s ECM feel, almost like an early Steve Tibbetts record, but it could also be an unjustly forgotten European new age record re-released on Music From Memory. In other words: Right up my alley.