Good morning, folks!
Starting today, I'm hoping to start a weekly series of music recommendations!! There's so much great music in the world, and it sucks that profit-motivated companies (*cough Spotify and YouTube cough*) keep prioritizing New, Trendy Content™ and burying older releases.
Since I've just wrapped up my own ambient-ish album, I want to take this week to highlight a couple of ambient songs/albums I've been enjoying!
Hainbach - A Voice Magnetic
If you like old synthesizers, you might've seen this guy pop up on YouTube before. But if you haven't taken the time to listen to what he makes with those synths, you're missing out!
Hainbach uses a huge variety of analog synths and effects plugins to make uniquely tactile music. His style is both gritty and lush, artificial and organic, each piece constantly evolving as it goes. I could listen to his work for hours on end.
I really appreciate that while many electronic musicians get caught up in buying the latest gear and following Teenage Engineering's latest trend, Hainbach is just a dude who's fascinated with old equipment and judges them solely on how weird and cool the sound is.
Nelward - Ambient 2
Okay, this one is only a couple weeks old as I'm writing this, but any time is a good time to share Nelward.
I've been following Nelward for a long time - I remember finding his old Earthbound remixes in high school and really vibing with them. Several years later, Nelward's carved a niche for himself in various digital fusion and hyperpop spaces, writing bangers like Ghost and Cosmic Relief.
Ambient 2 is a step in a different direction. His usual cheesy synths are drenched in reverb, his synth-pop arrangements replaced with sparser and more varied progressions.
I absolutely love the back-and-forth between his and Monique Osorio's vocals on Sunset, and I can't get over how much Ice and Fire sounds like melting ice looks.
Haruomi Hosono - Mercuric Dance
Oh boy, where do I even start with Haruomi Hosono??
His genre-defining work with Yellow Magic Orchestra? His remarkably evocative soundtrack for Night on the Galactic Railroad? His 1984 music for MUJI stores that briefly took over the YouTube algorithm?
Maybe it's not fair to highlight one of the most well-known Japanese musicians in a post about obscure music, but it seems to me that here in the Global West, the Japanese music niche is mostly taken up by Vocaloid, Plastic Love, and songs written for anime or video games.
So in the spirit of Music Rec Mondays, I decided to at least pick one of his lesser-known albums, Mercuric Dance. The track Fossil of Flame is a particular favourite of mine, scratching an itch that only warbly synth drones can.