Every week, I typically process up to three or four dozen press releases and direct music submissions from musicians and labels — mostly in the ambient, atmospheric, and neoclassical genres. Though it’s not uncommon to also get new age, noise, avant garde, and other various styles and sub-genres of sub-genres submitted to me from record labels, promoters, and the artists themselves. But every now and then an album really stops me in my tracks — and this new forthcoming album from Canadian ambient artist Anthéne really hits a sweet spot for me — one part drone, one part minimalist electronics, one part ornamental embellishments, and a generous helping of lush ambient guitar.
There are layer upon layer of varying textures, mystique-filled sounds and instrumentation, and mesmerizing swells coaxing you into an absolute state of bliss. I could describe the music with more words and in exhausting detail, but that’s far less interesting than just hearing the album for yourself. If you head over to Home Normal’s Bandcamp profile, you’ll find the pre-order for Anthéne’s album “Frailty” with two tracks that you can listen to now. “Frailty” is available March 7, 2025.
But I’ve heard the entire album… and it has unmistakenly secured a slot in my Featured Album segments for The Relay Station. I want to write so much more about the other tracks and the vivid impressions they leave me, but you’ll just have to wait until the March 2nd broadcast of The Relay Station to hear more on the matter.
I listen to everything… almost…
There have been quite a few transcendent ambient albums that have crossed my desk and left an indelible imprint. Invariably when I’m rifling through dozens of submissions, efficiency is paramount — I simply cannot listen to everything in its entirety, otherwise I’d forever be underwater, drowning in music. It’s more common for radio stations to simply discard a submission even if it doesn’t look right.
There is one small caveat, and even that caveat has its own condition. If something’s just blatantly not in the right postal code for The Relay Station, I’ll listen to a song or three — maybe even more if the music piques my curiosity. But if it’s a heavy submission week, non-relevant music may only get one track out of me, or maybe 15-20 seconds on each track, breezing through them to get a better sense of the album as a whole.
But every once in a while, Ed from Dense Promotions or some other avant garde record label or artist will send me something out of the blue — completely inappropriate for the programming — but will totally open my eyes to new possibilities, or be a new artist or style that I discover for myself and further broaden my horizons of what I’ll listen to.
Did I say one caveat? Make it two.
Looooooooooooooooooooooong-form ambient performances.
You know, the hour-long jam you had with your partner and immediately uploaded to Bandcamp, or the four-hour drone you made from generative synthesis and let the computer make it evolve and develop its own sentient state. I’ll give it about 10-15 minutes, skipping through various sections to get an idea of how it evolves (musically, not in its level of consciousness). But you can bet that while I’m at my daytime gig, or in the car, or on the go picking up groceries, I am slapping on that 3-hour drone you sent me, and am loving it. However, when I’m doing the initial intake — you’ll be fortunate to get ten minutes if it at all resembles Taylor Deupree’s album Stil. with its absolute minimalist changes over the course of the whole composition.
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I appreciate it all, truthfully
That doesn’t mean I like everything I hear, but one philosophy that I’ve adopted a few years back was to embrace as much of life as I can with a curious mind — seeking as much as I humanly can to understand before I pass too much judgment. It’s an extremely difficult task sometimes, but I put in the effort.
I know I brought up Taylor’s beautiful minimalist drone album Sti.ll — but not to make light of or to call out. It’s sheer genius work and requires an attentive, curious listener — looking for patterns, listening to the relationship between the various instruments or frequencies, hearing the sympathetic rhythms and harmonies that occur naturally in the musician’s choices, and on the deeper end tapping into how the composition makes you feel emotionally, mentally, and physically.
But when it’s music that doesn’t quite jive with my tastes, I can still ask myself questions about it to foster a bit more curiosity and openness, a broader willingness to try something different — not just in listening, but also in doing.
It challenges me in good ways, often with fruitful results
I had participated in “Jamuary 2025” this year, performing and recording an ambient composition every day of the month of January. One of the goals was to stretch myself, to try new things, and explore broader territories — which as one example, the above track emerged out of attempting to create a piece using no inputs and only an internal feedback loop.
Using a few different effected loops generated from feedback loops, I live-recorded a drone making microtonal adjustments to each sampling layer on the Boss RC-505 MKII loop station and running it through additional effects to produce something that sounds extremely mysterious and intriguing to me.
This exercise encouraged me to look at noise as a musical source, a valid instrument. Now, can you create ordinary music entirely with feedback loops? Probably not, at least not without some granular synthesis shenanigans afoot. But you can create some pretty intense liminal spaces and atmospheric listening experiences — ones that have their own unique key signature, their own independent scale and rhythm — it’s a completely different language.
When we think about music that is vastly different from our tastes, it helps to think of it as learning a new language, a new culture, and a new way of living or thinking. This forces you to look at the music from within the context of that artist, from the viewpoints of those who typically frequently consume that style of music, and from observing and speculating on the raw, honest emotions conveyed in the music itself. And sometimes it’s completely not about emotions all, but some extreme mathematic formula plugged into a generative synthesis unit and further expressed and manipulated through dozens of other devices all for the sake of making something that just sounds cool to them.
The point is, it is extremely helpful to get on the inside of the music, and look outward from their vantage point to appreciate a style that just isn’t your jam.
Anything can be interesting if you are able to land the right frequency in your perspective. That doesn’t mean that the music is technically good — it could be downright rotten-sounding. But when empathy is one of the primary ingredients in your listening session, you’re apt to hear it in a different way that helps you appreciate where the artist is in their journey and where they might be coming from — remembering that this is an expression unique to that individual or group, and is generally a very personal expression.
One more track, and I gotta run.
Another artist to watch, Rotating Tapes
This is my friend Frasier, who is the brainchild behind the ambient project Rotating Tapes. He just released a new album entitled “2” and it’s super dreamy — a luscious blend of felt upright piano, blurry-eyed pads and synths, soft washes of gentle noise to massage your mind, and packaged together in a hypnotic blend of neoclassical and ambient music.
You should follow him at Bandcamp.
His first full-length release, aptly entitled “1” is this seamless gem of an album — damn near indescribable, but because I’m verbose and have a respectable vocabulary this shouldn’t be too difficult. ….especially since I had featured “1” on The Relay Station nearly a year ago on February 18th in episode 5.07. That feature read…
Have you ever been hypnotized by sounds produced from electronics — and I mean deeply hypnotized — where time slows to the pace of a pine tree bleeding its sap, or the slow meandering of the moon caressing the night sky with its radiance? When I sit with the new album “1” from Rotating Tapes, my thoughts take a back seat to my imagination, giving way to warmth, color, and a feeling of ease that blooms with each generative note and phrase. This six-song release is rich with placid borders inviting you to cross over into a seamless ruminative sensory experience for the mind, to come and just be.
It’s that good.
It’s the reason why I listen to everything that crosses my desk, I sift through the vast sums, widths, and breadths of music that comes to me on a weekly basis hoping to hear that one track, or that whole album that resonates with me so deeply, that I experience a new kind of serenity wrapped up in someone else’s privately recorded musical session — experimenting with their DAW, or toying around with different settings on their analog synths — it’s all an adventure for me. I’m on the safari of a lifetime — hearing, experiencing, and feeling the vast diversity there is in this beautiful genre we call ambient.
Peace. Be kind to yourself and to others.
