Three shades of autumn ambient

Here are three recommendations for you, all of which wander through and around ambient tones and textures; a genre I tend to lean into more and more at this time of year. I hope you enjoy listening.

Cyano by Emily A. Sprague

I'm lucky to live near a big body of open water. It wasn't luck that brought me here, though, it was a choice I made eighteen months or so ago. In that time, I've spent hours walking along the edge of it, occasionally climbing into it. Watching it move in all of its strange ways, seeing how it holds and shifts the light.

Last night, I sat and watched the last of the day's light set across the hills and behind the clouds, over on the far side of it. It looked different again, the orange-glow shimmer of the sky hitting the water in a way that showed two flows of water at the same time. Towards the near shore the water moved slowly upstream, the surface calm, dancing a little as it all swayed together. Then a distinct line showed a different channel, deeper and further out, the textures changed once more, this flow heading west, out towards the mouth of the river where it meets the open sea. Two flows at once, each holding their own space.

While I sat and watched the movement, saw the last light of the day fade, I listened to the beautiful new album from Emily A. Sprague, itself a moving body holding two separate flows. Here, on Cyano, a sprawling fifteen-song collection, Sprague weaves together, for the first time, the two distinct projects that she's crafted over the past decade or so: the folk-edged, voice-led work of her Florist project, and the bubbling, ambient synth-led sounds she's shared under her own name.

And so, like the small body of work that's preceded it, there are passages of gorgeous ambient unwinding, long stretches of playful soundscapes that glimmer and flicker, but now they hold space for her voice too, itself a somewhat hazy instrument that drifts in among the scattered instrumentals. Together, they seem to form something new once more; a gentle, enchanting shape that belongs to neither of the outputs that have come before, but instead seems to grow, naturally, into something familiar but new.

It's a beautiful record that deserves more exploration, and one that's "conjured around the idea of an imagined planet whose inhabitants are rebuilding forbidden capacities for expressivity and emotional connection."

It's available now via Bandcamp / everywhere else.

hidden hour by marine eyes

There's plenty of water weaving its way through hidden hour too; the new album from Cynthia Bernard's marine eyes project. It's her fourth full-length collection, and, more significantly, the first to be released via her own label, cloud collecting.

"hidden hour was written during moments i might have otherwise missed," Cynthia outlines in the albums written introduction. "Many of these songs were born in the quiet hours of sunrise and sunset, often while visiting places i had never been before within an hour drive from home. this provided a space outside of routine, and i found that time seemed to move differently in these carved hours of stillness."

Formed of eighteen songs and a whole hour of music, the work here is tender and exquisitely produced, but never elusive. Each song may have come from a specific place or object or movement that Cynthia herself found in front of her, but they attach themselves to our own world, our own sense of place, thanks to the beautiful nature of their sounds.

Formed from a gathering of instruments that includes electric guitar, acoustic guitar, piccolo guitar, bass vi, bass guitar, mandolin, lap steel, 3rd wave synth, omnisphere, take 5 synth, scapeshift, harmony bloom, and Cynthia's own voice, it's a gently immersive collection that drifts, that lingers, that catches the light, that falls into the spaces of a quiet day.

These songs were born from 'magical places', as Cynthia herself describes, and like all the most endearing ambient work, they conjure their own magical places too; lending a glow to what we see in front of us, or simply creating a space to disappear into as her crafted sounds roll on and on.

You can stream/buy hidden hour now, via Bandcamp

Routine by Jason Dungan & Johan Carøe

This captivating new collection from Copenhagen instrumentalists Johan Carøe and Jason Dungan, whose Blue Lake project we've covered here previously, mostly relocates us from the outside world and into the home, but is no less compelling for it.

Formed from playful but dedicated routines, the pair hadn't initially set out to make a record together but, instead, spent years sending each other scraps of ideas and sounds, building a 'sonic palette' that over time led to them "developing an intuitive musical language to reflect the dreamlike meanderings and creative play of life's quiet moments."

It's less ambient than the two records above, more spirited and lively in the way it moves through various domestic settings, but it's no less compelling in its charming blend of both intriguing craft and gentle colour.

Across the record – which houses songs simply titled 'Mornings With Rita', 'Clouds', 'Silence' etc – acoustic instruments such as the clarinet, cello, and saxophone, are woven together with drum machines and tape hiss to create something that feels uniquely bound to the world of its two creators but also loose and whimsical enough to resonate to us listeners, as outsiders peering in through the gaps.

Indeed, there's something almost melancholy about these musical responses to short snapshots of life, something about the capturing of small moments over a long space of time that feels deeply moving; a reminder of how quickly and significantly life changes, while all we can really do it just wander through it and respond in-kind: morning to morning, cloud to cloud.