Villages - Sun Control

I'm going to keep posting these tapes by Villages until they start selling out as quickly as they should. Sun Control, the latest on Sacred Phrases, is an exceptional piece of uplifting ambient bliss. Massive sonic expanses that just go for miles. The whole thing feels like traveling at the speed of light, and watching the world become a singular stretched out, vivid, beautiful blur. Actually the warm, inviting atmosphere here is an enjoyable juxtaposition against the icy minimalism of last year's Music For Savage Flowers on Headway. Each element feels soft and distant, floating out of reach, but still perfectly accessible. For me, ambient music is about proper selection of mix and timbre, and from there, everything else either works or doesn't. Everything here works.

Pro dubbed and printed edition of 100 with liner note insert card. Dial up the physical copy direct from Sacred Phrases.

Villages - Music For Savage Flowers

A journey through grey, ghostly tones from Villages, with Music For Savage Flowers on Headway Recordings. Lots of wobbly raw piano floating on top of cold, windswept ambience. Distant and indiscernible field recordings. Ross Gentry's Villages project always does a wonderful job of transporting me, giving me the feeling I'm exploring, and that's exactly what he continues to do here. Through the eight tracks, simply enough titled one through eight, you don't just listen, or hear, but travel through each movement. Much cooler, and more icy feeling than the preceding works on Bathetic and Harvest. This one feels as much to me like a storybook as it does a tape. Exactly what I'm looking for from modern ambient minimalist composition.

Limited to a scant fifty copies, how is this not already sold out. Stream in full at Bandcamp, purchase at Headway.

Villages - Theories of Ageing

Beautiful, nostalgic, cinematic tracks from Villages with Theories of Ageing on Bathetic Records. Things take a no rules approach to composition where everything seems free, and at ease to come and go as it pleases. Long sustained rusty drones that just hang in the soundspace, swell, and give way to reverberating ghostly noise. Sparingly composed piano echoing backwards into the vastness of your consciousness. An incredibly open, accessible, enjoyable composition full of slightly cloudy organic instrumentation. When a recording can sound so comfortable in it's own skin, and still so tremendously emotional, thats just magic. And it's on this record in spades.

I don't suggest things very often (maybe more like describe), because of course to each their own, but I really do highly suggest this record. Grab directly from Bathetic.