Mellow or Mad?

Oooh, I’m liking this less writing lark, and I’m sure you’ve had enough of my personal soap opera for a bit. It also means I can concentrate on what I do best - discovering music.

Just for your interest, the releases aren’t in any order of preference - although Spacious Heart happens to be a gem, so it’s always worth making it to the bottom of the newsletter; but I have created an ambient first half that you should sink into when you’ve got an evening or weekend morning to spare. As for the second half, it’s a more uptempo and a pretty far out selection, but sometimes you’ve just got to get your freak on.

It’s not fashionable, or arguably very “slow” to say it, and I do intend to elaborate sometime, but playlists are one of the best things to happen to music since Herbie Hancock started playing the Rhodes Piano, so don’t forget TSMM’s playlists. There are twenty-one of them organised by genre, each containing four to five hours of recent, unfailingly great music from independent artists.

So if you’re looking for a particular vibe - ambient, dub, folk, jazz, new age, neoclassical, slowtronic, psyche, soul, world music, party bangers, house, grooves, Balearic and ambient pop, rather than random albums, then you’re in luck. You can find TSMM profiles and playlists on Tidal, Apple Music, Spotify (if you really must), Youtube Music, Youtube, Deezer and to a lesser extent Soundcloud - all accessible via this link.

Music From Memory have been a long time label favourite since their auspicious inception back in 2013, and their ensuing journey has wound its way through all sorts of Balearic balminess, lysergic laziness and quietly deviant downtempo, and this new release from Anthony Caloncio is one of their finest releases to date.

So where is that line between cheese and tune? Caloncio flirts with Smooth FM rotation ignominy with the album opener “Ether”, but there’s serious depth to his crooning and the vintage drum machine adds some vintage private press charm to his ambient schmaltz. He then gives the follow-up an impressive jazz infusion - trumpet, percussion and keys in cosmic harmony on the all-too-short “Hillside”. “Whispers” is ambient piano at its most gaseous - minimal improv’ meets heliumtronics; before he digs a bit deeper inside and reinforces his gentle voice with blue-eyed soulful depth on “Gray Glow.” And so the second half continues with no loss of quality or cohesion. Your new favourite ethereal singer pops up on two more cuts, and the instrumentals carry on their rarefied jazz, new age noodling, lightly stoned, unhurried and unworried way. Your new Sunday morning soundtrack awaits.

With his long history of ambient, and ambient-adjacent tinkering - something of an odd evolution from his metal-inspired drumming youth, Alaskan Tapes has serious TSMM blog and Slow Ambient Playlist form. Oddly, Blu Miles seems to have had a similar epiphany, ditching his lo-fi alt-folk/pop singer songwriting from the last few years ago, to hop over the border with his sax and dip his toes in the ambient water too, and I have to say it suits him.

This is another smooth, almost borderline musak affair at times - several tracks saved from hotel lobby playlists, by dint of their attention to sonic detail: the sounds of studio shuffling, creaking piano wood and distant field recordings revealing themselves as the musicians contemplate their next precision placement; not to mention a couple of tracks also have mild electronic sugar rushes, and the album’s second half a fuller-bodied, spiritual jazz vibe. Wisely, Ann Annie and Luke Howard were also invited to the studio to join what sounds like a laid-back session by good-listening friends rather than colleagues, and the result is a reflective and really pleasing ambient jazz listen.

For some reason I thought Anthéne had been in the ambient music game longer, but on checking his Bandcamp page it’s just an illusion created by the seventy-six (!) solo and collaborative releases he’s put out in the last ten years. That’s serious commitment to the horizontal music cause.

His new album is a relatively short thirty minute long, six track affair for the ever-dependable Dronarivm label who, at the risk of doing myself out of a job, you need to keep an eye on. It’s hard to pin down sometimes why some ambient music hits the sweet spot and so much is ignorable - it’s a very fine line at times, especially when, like this one, there’s a relative simplicity to the recording; formed as it is, just by some minimal guitar loops, a couple of trusty guitar pedals and a delay.

Like so much of life, there’s some real-world background hiss to accompany the agreeably distressed swells and nicely reversed swirls, that sound like an oversized, now extinct mammal, drifting through oceanic depths, unhindered by shipping noise, industrial fishing and plastic pollution. Perhaps it’s the simplicity or purity, or maybe because Anthéne has put in the studio hours, but rest assured, this one sits on the right side of the ambient listening fence.

OK, one last ambient release and then I’m going to get soulful and weird - don’t say you weren’t warned. Jogging House is quite possibly Germany’s finest ambient producer - discuss. He’s certainly a force for ambient good, not just through his steady stream of consummately crafted releases, but also via his excellent Seil label, not to mention the large village sized underground ambient community he’s encouraged in the Patreon and Discord underground. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention his sound pack design work for some notable music production companies.

Although a curious explorer of the ambient world, he tends to inhabit gentler regions on the whole - which is where you can usually find me hanging out too, and I’m happy to report that Sender is hitting all sorts of soothing, restorative, possibly even wellness-promoting cerebral centres. The album was made with a minimal set-up of an Elektron Tonverk and kalimba samples, recorded straight to 1/4” tape, which gives the album a cohesive quality, and also means there are no sudden mood changes to jerk you out of your meditative state or slumber, whilst the tape medium gives the album a warm, faint ferric glow. Whatever the technicalities, and let’s face it they’re unimportant to most, it’s a most comforting, calming and mentally restorative listen - something we all need at times.

Aja Monet leapt to prominence by winning the spoken word Grand Slam at NYC’s prodigious Nuyorican Poets Café at the young age of nineteeen; that’s quite a feat in the city’s competitive slam poetry scene. She’s spent the subsequent twenty years honing her “surrealist blues poetry”, whilst her inherent activism, and the Aja Monet Foundation’s arts education, community work and efforts with marginalised youth, make her something of a force of nature, and for all sorts of good.

Whether spoken or spat, talking loud and saying something is par for the course with Monet, and if she’s spitting, you better duck; though mostly there’s a soulful and gentle forcefulness to her vocal delivery, reinforced by a scholarly lyrical depth. The album moves, grooves, rises and falls, but even at her quietest, you don’t dare check your messages for fear of missing something deep or meaningful, often both. It’s also very much a live affair, with a host of the city’s finest players in the studio collectively reflecting on the past and present of black music, whilst quietly mapping its future. If that wasn’t enough, the recording was co-guided by none other than Meshell Ndegeocello, and the result is a soul, jazz and spoken word woven dream made very real.

Considering Birmingham is the UK’s second city, and despite its notable musical history, it doesn’t quite have the modern musical cachet of some of the country’s smaller urban centres like Manchester or Bristol, and I’m pretty sure it was never known for experimental music, which makes discovering Peter Grimshaw aka Zyggurat recently even more exciting. I guess experimental electronic musician best sums him up, although to me he sounds more jazz than Juno.

The sounds of low-cost church bells open proceedings, possibly from that curious, warmly lit place of worship on the cover. Zyggurat, for his part, eases us in with an ambient intro that paves the way nicely for long-time collaborator, drummer Nathan Jones, to skitter alongside Grimshaw’s patiently building synth work as he probes stylistic boundaries for weakness. Despite the easy, bass-anchored start to “Ram Ba’s Shep Hut” he finally finds his opening, and driven by Jones’ genre-fluid percussion, he’s off. The album then weaves its way through cosmic valleys, free-flows through low-lit kosmische glens and explores modular tunnel complexes adorned with wall paintings from alien civilisations who wisely abandoned this doomed planet, until “A Door Opens”, and the duo open their eyes again and, somewhat surprised, take in their studio surroundings once more. It’s a wild, seriously plugged-in and percussive trip, and Birmingham now has a worthy experimental electronic chapter to its reggae and rock history.

Speaking of trips, you better buckle up for this one - I always do when Ak’chamel drops a new release, but you might already have suspected that just from the cover and track titles. Ak’chamel is a shadowy figure(s?) with many aliases, who has every oddball musician south of Portland in his phone to help him melt minds at live shows.

Spiritually Unemployed is a great album title, but even more impressive is that Savage dragged time-worn and distressed recording equipment along America’s southern border to “harvest the psychic weight of migration, abandonment, and geopolitical limbo“. I’m also happy to report that instruments were damaged during the recording, throat nodules bled, tapes were buried, exhumed and finally tortured, and erratic hot-wired power sources embraced for their sound-warping benefits, all whilst local Fourth World resistance groups watched on curiously, occasionally joining in on sun-warped string instruments and beating out rhythms on the rusting remanents of long-abandoned cars.

If you ever wanted to know what late-Anthropocene, post-societal breakdown tribal rituals will sound like, now you do.

Charles Garmendia aka Charlie Chimi is a Dominican-raised Cuban psychonaut, singer-songwriter, producer, and banger of things for hire, with some notable collaborative credits, as well as a lurid image painter. I somehow imagine there are not too many dull moments when he’s about.

He’s also busy fusing his intimate knowledge of Afro-Latin rhythms from the last century with freak funk, not to mention strains of lysergic Latin pop, tropical disco-not-disco, bachata abnormalities, hyper-speed space rock and post-punk; then interspersing these genre-splicing experiments with more innocent, misty-eyed Latin rhythms from decades past, but not forgotten. It’s a fun, freaky, funky slice of party-primed, past nodding Latin music meets modern musical irreverence, on a very promising new label.

From ambient sound baths and wellness imbuing new age vibes to underground house via jazz, neoclassical, folk, dub and more, the twenty one TSMM playlists and podcast cover a lot of ground, and are updated regularly.

They’re available on Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon, Youtube Music, Youtube, Deezer, Soundcloud and Spotify (if you don’t worry about them not paying most of the artists on the playlists).