As we resume our regularly scheduled programming in the heat of the hell that ICE has wrought on self-titled’s adopted hometown — we moved to Minneapolis in 2018 — I find myself pulled in two deeply polarized directions: the stress-reducing sounds that drive our site’s ambient side project (self | centered, which has a new home right here) and the extreme noise exemplified by everything from Converge’s latest single latest single to a Rage Against the Machine reissue I may discuss in more detail soon. (Timeless protest tracks like “Killing in the Name” have taken on new meaning in light of Renee Good’s murder and what’s beginning to feel like a paramilitary-led police state overseen by a petty madman.)

A sterling example of this spectrum’s middle ground — music that’s both calming and chaotic — is Guido Zen’s Abul Mogard project. More of a fully formed alter ego than a swiftly named solo outlet, it was first presented as the work of a Serbian factory worker haunted by the industrial drones heard throughout his life.

Which makes sense; its slow-moving soundtracks often sound like they’re stuck in a sonic limbo between serenity and decay. The three-part record In a Few Places Along the River captured this beautifully in 2022, when its weightless, reverb-laden experiments in “extremely slow, intertwined tones” received a quiet digital-only release on the eve of Mogard’s emergence from anonymity.

“[I] wanted to mark this new period,” explains Zen, “so I decided to release it quickly, by myself.” This step away from the shadows didn’t go unnoticed; In a Few Places Along the River is a favorite among fans and fellow artists, and has been excerpted in everything from an augmented reality installation (Peder Bjurman’s Slow Walker) to a politically-charged animated film (Fleuryfontaine’s Soixante-sept millisecondes).

Given everything that is going on throughout the world — a recalibration of long-held realities, with no clear end in sight — we can’t think of a better time than now for the album’s long-overdue physical release on Zen’s own Soft Echoes imprint. Look out for a limited run of 500 vinyl copies on March 6.

In the following exclusive feature, Zen discusses the first Brian Eno record to leave a lingering impression on his own work: 1983’s Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks…

I first discovered Apollo in the early ‘90s, when two of my best friends brought me the CD, insisting it was a great album I had to listen to. Up until then, I only knew Brian Eno through Nerve Net, which I had purchased when it came out and really liked.

But Apollo was something entirely different. In fact, I believe it was the first ambient album I listened to, alongside Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II, which came out shortly after this first encounter of mine with ambient music.

Apollo has profoundly influenced my own work. I must have listened to it hundreds of times, often falling asleep to it. There is something about the sound: those heavy yet subtle drones beneath layers of delicate, pointed melodies that immediately caught my attention. From the first few seconds of “Under Stars,” I was completely drawn in.

Listening to the album helped me understand a new way of using the space between the notes, the weaving of melodic lines, and the seamless continuity carried by the atmospheres. At the time, I knew little about its background, but listening to it was almost addictive. I love the way your mind can follow different strands of sound and stay with them.

Afterwards, I explored many other works by Brian Eno and came to understand that he is a master of intricate simplicity.

Another work of his that brings this to mind is the sound installation I Dormienti, created in collaboration with sculptor Mimmo Paladino. I saw it at the Roundhouse in Camden, London, in 1999.

I still vividly remember walking through the vast space, with sounds coming from all directions, catching my attention, and those low bass tones resonating through the architecture. It was a beautiful work and an incredibly immersive experience.

Returning to Apollo, I also love its more melodic pieces. “Deep Blue Day” became widely known years later when Trainspotting used it in the memorable toilet scene.

Oddly, the pieces featuring pedal steel guitar didn’t appeal to me at first. But much later, after attending a Q&A with Brian’s brother Roger in London in 2019, I came to understand the idea behind it.

The music on this album was written as the soundtrack for an Al Reinert film made from NASA footage of the Apollo missions (For All Mankind). Brian Eno was aware that astronauts were allowed to bring only one cassette tape with them to space, and he discovered that they nearly all chose country and western music, as many of them came from the southern United States and simply liked that genre.

Both Brian and Roger shared a quiet passion for the genre, which led them to imagine a psychedelic, slowed-down interpretation of country music that could suit the long, meditative sequences in space where almost nothing happens. Daniel Lanois’ pedal steel guitars, which I hadn’t fully appreciated before, now feel absolutely perfect in that context.

This understanding gave me a new way of hearing those parts. They point to something unexpectedly human — a cultural thread carried into space.

To me, Apollo is a soundscape that opened up a new world, shaping how I approach melody, texture and atmosphere. It remains one of the key works I keep returning to, still deeply inspiring.

Explore more of Abul Mogard’s immersive music on Bandcamp.

Share

In honor of his ace new album ‘I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away’, here is Hayden Pedigo breaking his favorite William Basinski album (‘Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive’) down for self-titled’s old ambient outlet self | centered. Like s/t, its new home is here on Substack, with a mix of new and nostalgic content landing in your inbox every week.

I have always joked that the best ambient music in the world comes from Texas. I mean, Stars of the Lid and William Basinski both came from this state.

I always wondered if it was because of how expansive and vast Texas is. I grew up in Amarillo, which is in the center of the Texas panhandle — out in the country where everything was yellow and the sky went on forever.

I remember the first time I heard William Basinski; I was 15, doing school work at my parent’s house (I was homeschooled), and listening to Pandora on some station, maybe Harold Budd or something. “Variation III” from Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive (Durtro / Die Stadt, 2004) came on and I stopped everything I was doing. It was the closest feeling to time actually stopping I have maybe ever experienced.

In that moment, the sound was devastating — like nothing I had heard before. I jokingly say it’s the most accurate audio representation of what depression feels like. The loop of the piano keeps repeating like a memory you can’t let go of and with each mental repeat you start to lose the actual memory until it’s just a blur, a repeatedly xeroxed photo reduced down to washed out pixels.

As sad as the music on the record is, I can’t help but feel hope emitting from it just because of the sheer beauty. William has always been able to tap into something so human with these loops that very few people have been able to recreate. Variations isn’t just music of a landscape or place like a lot of ambient music tends to be; it is the sound of how we feel and think within those places and the memories that come afterwards. Like putting your soul under a microscope.

“Melancholy” is an overused descriptor when it comes to ambient music, but for William and this album, it feels wrong not to acknowledge how the feeling of melancholy is absolutely monolithic — like being hit with a tidal wave that you saw approaching for two hours, but you are in awe of its size and are rendered frozen.

Share

Hayden Pedigo’s new album, ‘I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away’, is now available via Mexican Summer. Stream it in full below, along with the rest of his ‘Motor Trilogy’.

Share

Sean McCann’s Recital imprint first gave this gorgeous collection of gamelan pieces a proper release in 2016. In My Arms, Many Flowers has gone through three blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em vinyl pressings since then, but you can still let the album’s four sublime vibrations reverberate across your living room online.

Pulled from the personal 1978-1982 archive of music teacher/composer Daniel Schmidt, it alternates between minimal studio recordings and live performances without missing a mallet. The first side starts off strongly, melding Schmidt’s metallic progressions with a simple digital sampler — lent by Pauline Oliveros and loaded with a lovely string quartet — and the prickly counterpoints of a bowed rebab.

The rest of the record sticks to a gamelan setup, emphasizing the strengths and signatures of an instrument that’s been an integral part of Indonesian culture for centuries and a driving force in Schmidt’s own career.

Here’s how author/fellow musician David Toop described one of the most impactful gamelan performances he’d ever seen in the seminal ambient book Ocean of Sound:

Toop also shares this apropos gamelan nod from the Colin McPhee book A House in Bali: “Forever changing, brilliant and sombre by turn, the moody music seemed to express a new spiritual restlessness, an impatience and lack of direction, for it was as unpredictable as the intermittent play of sunlight from a clouded sky.”

Check out more gamelan music below, and more from self | centered here.

It doesn’t take long for Steve Roach to lull most listeners to sleep (or at the very least, a semi-comatose state) on Structures From Silence. Originally released in 1984, expanded into an essential three-disc edition 30 years later, and remastered once again recently, this is as good as the ambient icon gets — three lush, synth-led pieces that sound like they would go on forever if given the chance.

Repetition never becomes redundant here. It’s part of the plan, as if Roach’s Oberheim OB8 started finishing his sentences in the middle of a marathon session, and the California-based composer let it lead us all towards the light.

“With synthesizers emerging in the ’80s,” Roach explained in an old interview, “it was clear that you could almost stop breathing, lose the body connection, sit disconnected in a chair, and still manage to make sounds. This realization was a big piece of my entire waking and sleeping focus.

He continued, “I worked to deepen and nourish the connection to the essence of sound, body, mind and breath awareness when creating with synths. This was directly translated into Structures From Silence — conscious breathing, the sigh and the expansion of this place in-between.”

Like a lucid dream burned into your memory banks, the final product is as potent now as it’s ever been. That’s why Projekt’s two reissues work so well: because they tack on four new songs drawn from a similar “place of stillness.” No demoes; no alternate tracks; no remixes — just a widescreen masterwork of pure weightlessness.