Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases of ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and similar styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

This installment takes us nearly to the end of our August list and we’re ready to move in to September 2026.

FEATURED ALBUM

from the liner notes:

Ipsum - iu takahashi

Born and raised in Kanagawa (Japan) Iu Takahashi is a sound artist based in Tokyo.

She produces her own musical worldview mainly using synthesizers, ambient sounds, and voices.

Previously, Iu Takahashi pursued a career as a singer and since 2018, she has focused primarily on creating ambient music and provides her tracks to serve as background music for exhibitions or promotional videos.

Inspired by Japanese ambient music such as Hiroshi Yoshimura and Satoshi Ashikawa, Iu Takahashi creates some sounds works based on Japanese ambient music. As part of the “soundscape” concept, she always takes care to offer music that takes the listener’s thoughts and feelings into account, as well as music that resonates with the subconscious.

This is her second release on LAAPS and LP.

Dial / Head Stroll - Alexander Holm

Music to be heard with ears. Through and through. Over and over. No coherence or meaning. A slow rotating dial of information. In and out of focus between benches, beams, buffs, busses, butter, bars, bees, bumps, beens and boons. Luminous eyes around a small fire. Waiting for something to happen. These two movements. With 10 eyes divided onto 6 faces. Making small sounds as they roll clockwise. Then over the table... stumbling into everyday ghosts.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Fives And Sixes - Stephen Holliger

Fives and Sixes drifts between memory and presence, weaving guitar textures, metallic resonance, and fragments of my grandmother’s voice with recordings from my childhood — a 1995 Christmas, moments with our family dog, a quiet church service, an acoustic bookstore performance, and a final game of Yahtzee.

These pieces come from unreleased work spanning years, each fragment holds a sense of nostalgia and impermanence, tracing the way dementia slowly reshapes memory. This record is an intimate homage to what remains when someone we love begins to fade — a meditation on time, memory, and the quiet beauty of what slips away.

I think of it as a reflection on memory, faith, and impermanence — where childhood echoes and sacred spaces blur into something softer, more diffuse. A way of holding onto what I can, even as it changes.

🎧[Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

complete jazz box set - landtitles

We’re thrilled to welcome landtitles, the recording project of Grant Gard, to the label with ‘complete jazz box set’, a deeply beautiful collection of fragmented ambient music, delicate digital textures and finely drawn melodic micro-detail.

landtitles’ debut, ‘Your Voice in Pieces’, was my personal favourite album of 2021 and was released by our dear friend James Murray through his stupendous Slowcraft label. Following a short hiatus, the follow-up, ‘geographic beings, phosphorus mountains’, was released this past June on the ever-excellent Whitelabrecs. Both labels are closely connected to Home Normal, making it especially meaningful to now welcome landtitles to the label with an altogether different kind of work.

Recorded at home across a collection of ageing computers, outdated hardware and obsolete software, the album carries the warmth and unpredictability of technology being gently pushed beyond its intended life to remarkable effect. Small glitches, blurred tones, softened rhythms and half-hidden melodies appear and disappear across its twenty pieces, creating a world that feels intricate without ever becoming crowded.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Between Frost and Promise - Nobuhiro Okahashi

Between Frost and Promise unfolds as a quiet passage through stillness, light, and renewal.

Across seven delicate pieces, Nobuhiro Okahashi shapes a world where sound drifts between cold atmospheres and subtle warmth, echoing a sense of grace, distance, and inner reflection.

From the frozen calm of “Frost” to the contemplative depth of “Solemn,” and into the soft glow of “Promise,” each piece reveals a fragment of a fragile, evolving landscape.

A work suspended between silence and becoming.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

B - Seigen Tokuzawa & Masaki Hayashi

Six years after Drift, cellist Seigen Tokuzawa and pianist Masaki Hayashi return with a second album recorded entirely in a single hall on Lake Sagami, quieter, more private, and more inward-looking than their 2020 debut.

Hayashi’s score for Miwa Nishikawa’s Under the Open Sky (winner of the Audience Award at the Chicago International Film Festival) brought him one of Japan’s top film-music honors, and he works in parallel across chamber and improv projects. Tokuzawa is just as versatile: a familiar voice on Japanese children’s TV, the string orchestrator behind Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name., and composer for the anime Mobile Suit Gundam: GQuuuuuuX. Together they bring a decade of shared playing into 13 pieces: eight originals, two room-toned improvisations, plus a classical rarity, a Thelonious Monk standard, and a Claus Ogerman piece with Tokuzawa on vocals. The result is hushed and cinematic, sitting somewhere between contemporary jazz and modern classical chamber music.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Evocation - Mikkel Rev

Mikkel Rev returns to A Strangely Isolated Place with Evocation, his third full-length album shaped deep within the forests of Norway.

Since Mikkel’s debut, The Art of Levitation first arrived on ASIP in 2023, Mikkel has been quietly building his own corner of the label’s catalog. Last year’s Journey Beyond expanded that vision further, revealing an artist increasingly comfortable balancing the emotional pull of early trance with a more reflective, ambient-leaning approach. While his work elsewhere naturally gravitates towards the dance floor through his own collective, Ute Recordings and other club-focused outlets, his ASIP releases have always evolved differently. Beginning with a larger body of material that’s gradually shaped together, each album seeks to find a narrative without a dancefloor in place; one that moves naturally between momentum and stillness, carrying something of the spirit found in those early-’90s records that drifted effortlessly between peak-time energy and the quiet hours in room two.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases of ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and similar styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

We’ve wrapped our July 2026 listings and have moved into August.

FEATURED ALBUM

time and space - anthéne

from the liner notes:

Home Normal is delighted to welcome anthéne back to the label with ‘time and space’, a beautifully still and quietly luminous album from one of our most celebrated artists.

Having released widely across Home Normal since 2019, anthéne has created a deeply personal body of work rooted in patience, restraint and emotional clarity. His music has always held a rare ability to make the smallest gestures feel expansive, allowing tone, texture and silence to gather slowly into something quietly profound and powerful.

While ‘time and space’ feels like a natural continuation of that world, it opens into one of his most beautiful and gently affecting albums to date. Across its six expansive suites, delicate layers unfold, drifting between presence and absence, wonder and stillness, memory and atmosphere, and, as Brad Deschamps is so deft at expressing closeness and distance. The music moves outside time, inviting the listener into a space where detail, stillness and feeling become inseparable.

The album’s sense of suspended beauty is perfectly reflected in the cover photograph by Benoît Pioulard, whose visual sensibility carries the same quiet sensitivity as his revered musical worlds. Both the music and cover feel immediate yet dreamlike, intimate yet open, holding a moment that appears both fleeting and permanent in spirit.

There is a quiet warmth running throughout ‘time and space’, offering a place of calm reflection and slow discovery, as Brad so often does in his music. Each piece feels shaped by light, air and memory, with sounds emerging and fading like clouds slowly changing shape in the wind. It is music for still rooms, open windows, late summer afternoons and the soft spaces between thought and the slow movements of calm reflection.

Released on CD and digital formats, ‘time and space’ is a beautiful return from anthéne, and another deeply considered chapter in an ambient oeuvre that has become one of the most singular and quietly affecting in modern ambient music.

Thank you for listening.

I Wander - Djrum

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Before we lost our minds // EP - Bleeptwig

Before We Lost our Minds is a focused little ambient collection including three-and-a-half pieces created outside on a summer afternoon.

For these pieces I built a focused modular case designed specifically to make immersive and absorbing ambient experiences from a simple source - one single piano interval from Eric Satie.

Following an extended afternoon live session, this set of pieces emerged that were developed further to push them further down their own unique path - from the intense opener, to the melancholic On a Wednesday, to the more mind-expanding closer.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Stochastic Parrot - mike cooper

In the past some reviewers and critics of my series of Ambient / Electronic / Exotic releases mentioned Jon Hassell and even suggested that we should make an album together.

That never happened of course and probably never would have. An influence of his music on my exotica music is in some ways true but initially to be honest it was the cover art by Mati Klarwein for Aka/ Darbari/ Java and Dream Theory in Malaya that I would sometimes turn to look at for inspiration. They reminded me of places that I loved to be and why I was making the music. They were non-existent or imaginary places that i might have visited in dreams or half remembered from real places.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

untitled - leon todd johnson

leon todd johnson makes his Past Inside the Present debut with untitled, a three track collection of ambient adjacent instrumental pieces shaped by gentle guitar work, analog textures, and tactile instrumentation. Formerly recording as Airport People, the Indianapolis-based artist has spent years refining a patient, understated approach that feels both immediate and nostalgic.

Each composition balances warmth, restraint, and subtle detail. The music evokes memories that feel both forgotten and newly remembered without leaning on sentimentality, allowing its painterly arrangements and soulful depth to emerge naturally. untitled is a confident introduction to johnson’s work on Past Inside the Present and another welcome addition to the growing community of Indiana artists represented by the label, itself proudly based in Indiana.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Everything you give away - Pablo’s Eye

“And so they sat, watching the waves break.

He picked up green pebbles and threw them into the sea,

she played with her jade earrings.

That night in bed, she felt one missing.

She pictured it lying in the sea,

she felt relief:

the best place to hide a leaf is in a tree.”

“a remoteness from the centre” from “the light user scheme”

poems by Richard Skinner, Smokestack Books 2013.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Splayed Werks

by Tyondai Braxton

Even at first blush, Splayed Werks, Tyondai Braxton’s new album, his first full-length release since the recording of his 2022 symphonic work, Telekinesis, reveals itself as unlike what came before and marks the beginning of a new chapter with UK label Erased Tapes. First off, there’s a lot more music here, 70+ minutes of pure electronics and sound design. Plus, it’s divided in a way that’s out-of-step with the longer forms the 47 year-old composer/producer has previously imagined into being. Of the album’s 15 tracks, more than two-thirds are sub-five minutes.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases of ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and similar styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

This time around we’re finishing up our July 2026 list of releases and moving on to August.

FEATURED ALBUM

Few Words Are Enough EP - Almost An Island

from the liner notes:

Following last year’s debut LP, Almost An Island, released on Past Inside the Present, the trio of James Bernard, Cynthia Bernard, and Kenneth James Gibson return with the three-song EP Few Words Are Enough. The collection includes the title track, previously available only on Bandcamp as part of PITP’s year-end compilation, along with an extended ambient version and a brand-new piece, “Gift of Place,” featuring the enveloping textures of taishogoto harp and lap steel. Picking up where Almost An Island left off, the EP continues the trio’s exploration of ambient Americana, dream pop and cinematic textures, calling forth vast landscapes and the beauty of the open road. The group is currently at work on their second full-length album, slated for release on Past Inside the Present in 2027.

The Rest Is My Ghost - Lawrence English

A Note From Lawrence English

Nostalgia is not an ideology, though in this moment, we could be mistaken for thinking it might be just that. Over the past years, the idea of nostalgia has been filtered through various political and technological lenses and has become a tool used for forgetting, rather than remembering. Instead of embracing histories’ complexities and inconsistencies, this version of nostalgia seeks only singular recollection. This contemporary phenomenon of nostalgia has become a methodology at best, and a weapon at worst, used to erode the past and project forward a collapsed and unimaginably sanitised version of things, places, and ways of being from former times. It’s this projection that sees it playing a mounting role in a social pathology associated with reducing the imagined possibilities of future.

The Rest Is My Ghost is a record that interrogates the manifestations of this reductive futuring and celebrates those that have tried (and failed), and those who continue to push back against decayed and revisionist positions. It’s a record that considers the weaponisation of nostalgia for the purposes of cloaking possible futures.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

cortex vs. linea - jo jena/imm

“kubernētikḗ” is an electroacoustic composition for four haken synthesizers (sine wave, two cellos, synth pad) and three acoustic guitars. it was recorded using the overdub method on a multitrack recorder.

“bios pros geometrian” I-V are five electroacoustic improvisations involving the use of extended techniques on guitar and a looping pedal, the haken synthesizer, tweaking an experimental reverb creating physically impossible spaces and experimenting with various body sounds. however, the linchpin of the work was a handcrafted swiss mixing desk featuring exceptional electronic circuits with fast transients and providing the ux akin to another instrument.

“finse” is a modal solo improvisation for guitar, linnstrument and haken synthesizer.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Somewhere in the Wind - Loren Connors and David Grubbs

Somewhere in the Wind is the third record that Loren Connors and I have made together. Of the three, it’s the first that consists exclusively of electric guitar duos and it’s the first that was recorded live. To me it feels very much like a live record; this music happened in crowded rooms in Brooklyn on two dates in 2025 and there’s an urgency to connect with others and a pleasure in doing so that can be heard on both of these tracks. On the first of our duo records (Arborvitae, 2003) I primarily play piano, and on the second (Evening Air, 2024) we switch off on piano and guitar. Both of those albums bespeak the privacy of the recording studio, where time is suspended and one can explore the quietest of sounds. By contrast, Somewhere in the Wind is the noisiest, most raucous and most free of our duo records. It’s the sound of us taking it to the stage.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

pylonesque ep (remastered) - christ

Beautiful analogue remaster of christ.’s 2002 debut release on benbecula records.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

the places we carry - Various Artists

‘the places we carry'“ brings together 24 released and forthcoming works from Home Normal in 2026, unfolding across almost two hours of music. Mixed and edited by Home Normal curator Ian Hawgood, the pieces have been arranged as a continuous sequence rather than presented as a conventional collection of separate tracks. Recordings overlap, recede and gently transform one another, with edits and transitions allowing the music to move as a single unfolding whole. Familiar works appear alongside new versions and unreleased material, forming a reflection on the year and on the spaces that open between sounds.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

II Reworked - Kiasmos

In July 2024 Kiasmos returned with their second album, II, to critical and fan acclaim. The album took Ólafur Arnalds and Janus Rasmussen across four continents over the next 18 months, playing to sold-out audiences. Now the duo have entrusted five artists to completely reimagine it.

Arnalds and Rasmussen, together with executive producer Robert Raths, invited long-time friend and composer Alex Somers, producers/multi-instrumentalists duo Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith (aka Disiniblud), and fellow Icelandic composer duo Kjartan Holm and Sin Fang to rework the entire album. The result is a sprawling and shimmering trip back through the record’s melodies, with a dream-like daze more suited for after the dancefloor and when the lights have faded.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases of ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and similar styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

This time around, we’re continuing to work our way through our list of July 2026 releases.

FEATURED REVIEW

Islands Alight - James Murray

from the liner notes:

Very happy to say that next in the quiet details series, with his second solo album, is an artist with a uniquely special talent - UK-based James Murray, with Islands Alight

Undoubtedly familiar to followers of the label - James first appeared in collaboration with our good friend Ian Hawgood on qd15 Slowreels - Everyday Exotic, a gorgeous example of what can happen when two wonderful musicians come together. Then again on his first individual album, qd23 Weeds - another spellbinding album.

Along with all his many other releases on the likes of Home Normal, Ultimae, Eilean Rec, Fluid Audio, Morr Music, his own Slowcraft and more - James is an artist dearly loved across the community.

Islands Alight is James combining his peerless ability to craft deeply touching synthetic vistas, now sent through a prism of rhythmic forms. Four years in the making, and much inspired by the history of dub in electronic music, James has made a singular and mesmerising work of art.

The introductory lush chordal waves and modulating melodic shapes are soon joined by the first indication of the true direction of this album - textural percussive patterns give us an initial glimpse into James’ vision.

Huge spaces open up and the drums morph into new forms; psychedelic echoes disintegrate into the distance; the emotions of the listener are brought to the forefront by radiant synth contours that reach into your consciousness.

The album evolves from here - countless textures and beautifully subtle percussive programming meshes perfectly with James’ melodic refinement - hypnotic, all- compassing, and one of a kind.

As James says:

“Islands Alight making landfall amidst these relentless heatwaves and impending drought feels about right; environmental anxiety courses through the album like wildfire, consciously balanced only by the rising of pale, elemental waters.

Developed over four years, the origins go back further still. Drawing together wide- screen melodic, rhythmic and electroacoustic concerns, Islands Alight stands as a deliberate, defining work at the confluence of ambient dub roots and the artist I am now.”

Country/The Country - by J.WLSN & Liam Keenan

A note from J.WLSN.

In late 2024 my good friend Liam Keenan and I recorded a short session with our friend David Akerman at his studio Lost Sound in Marrickville. We had been working as art and music curators at a major art museum in Sydney, Australia. We both make music separately but had neglected making a record together for too long.

Country/ The County is the first of our combined love of all things longform, expansive, distorted and it is filled with reverberations. Built on subtle guitars, modular synth pads and sample-based loops, the record is us exploring our experience growing up in similar regional and rural settings.

The music represents parts of the country in Western Sydney and further west in regional NSW in Australia where we both grew up across different periods of time. These places are drifting plains, scowling mountains and at times, simply, rolling suburbia. The music is a score of sorts for these meshing places, a way of us decoding these shared geographies, outside of time. You could almost say, it’s a music of place, out of time.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

The Meadow & The Bridge - Benjamin Fulwood

For close to a decade, I have lived in Tokyo, a city so immense that it unsettles familiar ideas of narrative. We tend to understand life through beginnings, climaxes, and conclusions. We expect arrivals to matter and departures to be marked. Tokyo often resists that grammar. Here, movement is constant, density is ordinary, and human presence appears less as individual story than as flow. Faces emerge and disappear into stations, crossings, elevators, side streets, convenience stores, office towers. Someone is always leaving as someone else arrives and much of it goes on without anyone ever noticing.

To live inside that scale is, at first, disorienting. The mind craves resolution it cannot find. One looks for the central drama and instead encounters simultaneity: private joys, unnoticed griefs, routines repeated with devotional precision. Yet, over time, what first felt alien can become strangely seductive.

This record was made from within that condition. It consists of two long-form pieces shaped less by linear composition than by recurrence, drift, interruption, and return. Themes surface, dissolve, and reappear altered by what has passed around (and through) them. Motifs are not resolved so much as absorbed back into the swell. The music does not seek to tell a story with a clear ending; it tries instead to remain faithful to the experience of being carried through stories that never declare themselves complete.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Night’s End - David Cordero & Aiko Takahashi

Home Normal is delighted to present Night’s End, a beautiful new collaborative album by David Cordero and Aiko Takahashi.

Centred around gentle piano and modular electronics, Night’s End is a tranquil, deeply atmospheric work that hovers between the darkness of night and the first light of a new day. Across ten delicate pieces, the album unfolds with quiet melodic fragments, soft harmonic movements and subtle electronic textures that drift together, weaving in stillness and reflection.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Word Passed the Time - Charlotte Jacobs

Charlotte Jacobs is a world-builder of the highest order, a vocalist, composer, and producer whose work exists in the porous space where literature, movement, and visual art collide. Born in Belgium and currently based in Brooklyn, Jacobs has spent years refining a sound that is as restless as it is refined—a singular mix of jazz-flecked avant-pop that feels less like a series of songs and more like a curated, sonic architecture. Jacobs now joins Geographic North with ‘Word Passed the Time,’ a singular, immersive, text-forward compositional experiment that acts as a profound meditation on language, structure, and the quiet alchemy of the present moment.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Human Music: Live Improvisations I - Jessica Roch

Speaking about her debut album on Past Inside the Present, Human Music: Live Improvisations I, Jessica explains: “This album is an unambiguous protest and rejection of AI-generated “music”. It is imperfect, it is raw and it is unpredictable. That is the beauty of live improvisation. It is innately human.”

Drawn from performances captured between 2022 and 2025 in concert halls, intimate venues, and assembly rooms across England, Human Music: Live Improvisations I is a document of spontaneity, vulnerability, and presence. Each piece unfolds in real time, free from predetermined outcomes, embracing the subtle imperfections, fleeting decisions, and emotional responses that define genuine human expression.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Sea of Thought - Motohiro Nakashima

Following the luminous textures of Gathering The Light, which explored the traces of light gathered within landscapes and memory through acoustic instrumentation, Japanese guitarist and composer Motohiro Nakashima returns with Sea of Thought, an album that turns inward to confront the fragility of the human condition.

At the centre of the record lies a meditation on environmental destruction and the limits of capitalism. Across ten interconnected pieces, Sea of Thought considers the contradictions and quiet helplessness embedded in contemporary life, drawing the listener into an increasingly introspective state where thought itself begins to dissolve.

Built around Nakashima’s distinctive fingerpicked guitar, the album expands its sonic vocabulary with the worn, unstable character of cassette based tape looping inspired by Robert Fripp’s Frippertronics, alongside a collection of self built instruments that further extend his experimental approach. Performances by ARAKI Shin, Kumi Takahara and marucoporoporo introduce additional layers of restraint and subtle tension, revealing moments of fragile beauty within the album’s otherwise sombre atmosphere.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases of ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and similar styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

This time around we’re looking at new releases from July 2026.

FEATURED ALBUM

Wilderness Channel - Poppy H.

from the liner notes:

Poppy H. is not new to “smartphone production,” but on this latest release, Wilderness Channel, that label is taken to its logical extreme. There’s no studio gear or live recording setup in sight—just GarageBand, a phone, and a stubborn commitment to see how far that limitation could be pushed.

What began as a strict creative constraint evolved into something more consuming: part experiment, part obsession, and eventually a process that clicked into place. By stripping everything back to the essentials, Poppy H. found freedom inside the limitations, building a world from stock sounds, digital instruments, and the strange emotional weight of “generic” samples.

The results are anything but clinical. Across the album, dubby bass trips collide with funky rhythms, twitchy hi-hats, warped vocal clips, and free swinging undefinable percussion. At times the tracks stagger forward with an industrial lurch before dissolving into something softer and more transcendent; music that feels simultaneously mechanical and natural.

Beneath the electronics sits a quiet thematic tension: how to make something human out of tools designed for convenience and repetition. The process became less about resisting artificiality and more about animating it, like injecting blood into the veins of the robots.

The project also marks a shift in tone. Known for emotionally direct material, Poppy H. intentionally steps back from overt confession here, aiming instead for something more open-ended and immersive. But while the album avoids wearing its heart too obviously on its sleeve, intimacy and feeling remain woven throughout. Moments of reflection surface unexpectedly; not as heavy introspection, but more like the hazy warmth of replaying a perfect night out with friends in your head.

The result is a collection of tracks that feels tightly constrained yet oddly expansive. Music that drifts between club energy, abstract experimentation, and unfolding transcendence without settling comfortably into any one category.

It’s messy, conflicted, playful, intimate, and difficult to pin down. Which is arguably the point.

chair (a subscape of resonance) - Steve Roden

a series of 3″ cds, each created using only the sound of a single modernist design object – a leg splint designed by charles and ray eames, a lamp designed by george nelson, and a metal chair designed by harry bertoia. i suppose the initial ideas came from “strumming” these things as i passed them in our apartment on a daily basis as well as the notion of wondering weather bertoia even played one of his chairs.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Fictions - Lamasz & Grandbruit

Lamasz and Grandbruit return to Past Inside the Present for the first time in more than five years with Fictions, the first collaborative recording from brothers Pier-Luc and Francis Tremblay. Following four acclaimed solo releases across the label, Fictions brings together the defining elements of both artists into a single body of work.

Drawing from the tape loop driven structures of Nature Morte (PITP-C016, 2020) and Broderie (PITP-C021, 2021), alongside the layered guitar compositions and environmental recordings that shaped Ruptures (PITP-C017, 2020) and Ville inerte (PITP-C019, 2021), the album finds common ground between repetition, decay, and atmosphere. Loops evolve gradually, guitars blur into dense harmonic fields, and tape hiss becomes an active part of the compositions rather than background texture.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Country/The Country - J.WLSN & Liam Keenan

In late 2024 my good friend Liam Keenan and I recorded a short session with our friend David Akerman at his studio Lost Sound in Marrickville. We had been working as art and music curators at a major art museum in Sydney, Australia. We both make music separately but had neglected making a record together for too long.

Country/ The County is the first of our combined love of all things longform, expansive, distorted and it is filled with reverberations. Built on subtle guitars, modular synth pads and sample-based loops, the record is us exploring our experience growing up in similar regional and rural settings.

The music represents parts of the country in Western Sydney and further west in regional NSW in Australia where we both grew up across different periods of time. These places are drifting plains, scowling mountains and at times, simply, rolling suburbia. The music is a score of sorts for these meshing places, a way of us decoding these shared geographies, outside of time. You could almost say, it’s a music of place, out of time.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Bivabippabualukka - Sofie Birch

This album is created over the past years with my brother Alfred. This period has been spiritually transformative for me. It reflects the playfulness and authenticity that comes out of releasing deep traumas and healing wounds. This music comes from a deep place of joy and connection with my brother and with the essense of being a child. being filter free and in contact with the most uncomplicated and loving parts of ourselves, still emphasizing magic and mystery, like childhood does without asking for permission or confirmation.

it took me a while to actually see the music as an interconnected piece. I have been taking in and out material, re mixing, removing, rearranging, re producing and regretting all along the way. but suddenly when we mastered this selection on a cassette tape recorder, the meaning started to reveal itself and drawing threads back in time.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

The Meadow & The Bridge - Benjamin Fulwood

For close to a decade, I have lived in Tokyo, a city so immense that it unsettles familiar ideas of narrative. We tend to understand life through beginnings, climaxes, and conclusions. We expect arrivals to matter and departures to be marked. Tokyo often resists that grammar. Here, movement is constant, density is ordinary, and human presence appears less as individual story than as flow. Faces emerge and disappear into stations, crossings, elevators, side streets, convenience stores, office towers. Someone is always leaving as someone else arrives and much of it goes on without anyone ever noticing.

To live inside that scale is, at first, disorienting. The mind craves resolution it cannot find. One looks for the central drama and instead encounters simultaneity: private joys, unnoticed griefs, routines repeated with devotional precision. Yet, over time, what first felt alien can become strangely seductive.

This record was made from within that condition. It consists of two long-form pieces shaped less by linear composition than by recurrence, drift, interruption, and return. Themes surface, dissolve, and reappear altered by what has passed around (and through) them. Motifs are not resolved so much as absorbed back into the swell. The music does not seek to tell a story with a clear ending; it tries instead to remain faithful to the experience of being carried through stories that never declare themselves complete.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

LILA - Mohamed Bourouissa

Critically acclaimed photographer, Paris-based Algeria-born artist Mohamed Bourouissa has long fostered a deep, enveloping interest in sound. ‘LILA’ is his solo debut, a self-styled “musical object” that inventories the important relationships in his life; each of the album’s tracks is dedicated to (and named after) a person he was thinking about as he composed the record. Featuring appearances from Franco Senegalese artist Le Diouck and Italian avant-garde figure Valentina Fanigliulo (aka Mushy and Phantom Love), the album plays like a diary of hypnagogic reflections that uses weightless synths, heartbroken Autotuned vocals and dissociated beat sequences to sketch a likeness of Bourouissa’s inner reality. Emotionally charged and rooted in the aesthetics Bourouissa pegs to his bonds with sound, people and art, it’s as complex and multi-layered as any of his celebrated installations or exhibitions.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases of ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and similar styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

This time around we’ve closed out June and have moved into new releases for July 2026.

FEATURED ALBUM

Eraserhead Xiu Xiu - Xiu Xiu

from the liner notes:

In 2016, with the blessing of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, Xiu Xiu released and toured the surprisingly successful album and concert, Plays the Music of Twin Peaks. Out of respect and deference to the beloved series, the band decided to put the concert to rest in 2018. After the recent and untimely passing of David Lynch, Xiu Xiu began to receive several high-profile requests to revive their interpretation of this iconic music. However, in wanting to always try to follow, honor, and continue to be inspired by the incredibly high bar of artistic challenge set by David Lynch, Xiu Xiu is instead going deeper.

Eraserhead Xiu Xiu is a new live concert with accompanying film & full-length album that uses field recordings, concert specific homemade instruments, organ, modular synths, vocals, flashlights, electrical interference, and elements of musique concrete to express the bizarre emotionality, conflicted sexuality, relentless darkness, and singularly unsettled moonscape of this most incredible of midnight masterpieces. The album itself is a masterpiece in sound collage and experimentation, with tracks like “Tetra” and “Sleep Synth” shifting from minimal auditory sensations to a clobbering, grotesque cacophony. The album’s closing track, “In Heaven,” is a beautiful rendition of Peter Ivers’ original composition, with Stewart’s delicate and soft vocals showcasing the elegance and wonder found on Lynch’s directorial-debut.

Eraserhead’s original sound design and score by Alan Splet and Lynch guide Xiu Xiu’s expanded interpretation, reflecting their influence as fans and musicians. The original film gives birth to Xiu Xiu’s visual lens through which to be baffled and pummeled by the band’s imaginary unused auxiliary footage.

Is it a short term art installation, an exploded tribute to a cinematic triumph, epitaph to an idol, via an entirely new work? YES. Is it intense, odd, curious, and shrouded in the gloomiest of nights? OF COURSE. After all, it is Eraserhead.

The Consolation Engine - Grant Beasley

Inspired by Philip K Dick’s ‘A Maze of Death’ this album tows the line between drifting endlessly through the vast expanse of space and the paranoia and distorted reality of Delmak-O.

The album is a mix of pulsating sequences, ambient textures and the the slightly more abstract leanings of a modular synth system.

Played entirely on hardware synthesizers including Arturia Polybrute and Minifreak, ASM Hydrasynth, UDO Super 6 and DMNO, Beetlecrab Vector and Tempera, Waldorf Iridium, M and Pulse, Torso S4 and the Make Noise New Universal Synthesizer System.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

you and me - emer feat. Ugnė Uma

It began somewhere between sleep and memory.

After first meeting in dreams, in Brussels and Berlin, on landscapes that felt strangely close to Vilnius, Marija Rasa aka emer and Ugnė Uma leisurely rewrote those visions into songs.

What followed became a collection of moments suspended in idle summers, familiar faces, gentle motions, skin touched by golden sun. These songs wander through closeness and distance, tracing the delicate emotional shifts between us, who almost understand each other completely.

‘you and me’ lives in the space where magical realism meets everyday intimacy: honey-colored evenings, recurring thoughts, and the slow surrender to things unfolding on their own.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Infinite Velocity - Ken Lusk

Infinite Velocity is a new album of Berlin School inspired Space Ambient music emphasizing engaging sequences, ethereal pads, hypnotic leads, stirring basses, and a sweeping range of percussive elements in sometimes driving, rhythmic grooves.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Tatemono - Tomoyoshi Date + Stijn Hüwels

Tatemono (建物) is the third collaboration by Tomoyoshi Date and Stijn Hüwels.

Tomoyoshi Date and Stijn Hüwels met for the first time in 2015 in Tokyo, being introduced to each other by Chihei Hatakeyama. That same evening, they recorded what would later become Hochu-Ekki-Tou, their first album, released on Home Normal in 2019, followed by 遠き火、遠き雲 (A Distant Fire, A Distant Cloud) in 2021 on LAAPS.

Tatemono (建物) means building in Japanese. Each piece explores a different architectural element, gradually moving from the exterior to the upper structure of an imagined space.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Sub Re - Kassel Jaeger

Kassel Jaeger (aka François J. Bonnet) returns to Shelter Press after Swamps / Things, Shifted in Dreams, and the recent reissue of the classic Zauberberg, co-composed with Akira Rabelais and Stephan Mathieu.

With this major new album, entitled Sub Re, Bonnet continues his long exploration of the musical possibilities of sound, extending the concrete approach developed at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the historic and essential Parisian studio that Bonnet has been directing since 2018.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Moor to Sea - Tomosla

Home Normal is delighted to welcome Tomosla to the label with ‘Moor to Sea’, a quietly expansive collaboration between James Osland and Thomas Hoey.

‘Moor to Sea’ traces the slow movement between land, water and light. The journey from open moorland down towards the coast becomes one of gradual change, not only in landscape and atmosphere, but in the organic spirit of the music itself. Tones drift in and out like weather over exposed ground, with small details rising through the haze before dissolving into a wider field of sound.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases of ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and similar styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

This time around we wrap up our list of June releases and move into July.

FEATURED ALBUM

Lava - Andreas Tilliander

from the liner notes:

Extremely pleased to say that next in the quiet details series, with an interpretation of immense breadth, is the eminent Swedish producer, Andreas Tilliander, with Lava.

Andreas has been established in the highest echelons of electronica since the late nineties - amassing a vast discography across many leading labels and multiple aliases. Wide-ranging productions under his own name, Morika, TM404, Rechord and many more - on the likes of Kontra Musik, Mille Plateaux, Raster-Noton, Acid Test and his own Repeatle - has proven him time and again to be one of the most important and influential artists of recent years. Essential live performances have served to enforce this legacy.

Lava is Andreas Tilliander at his finest - endlessly experimental and wildly creative expressions, shaped into a sonic excursion of mind-expanding distinction.

As he says, this is “An exploration of southern Sweden - light, memory, and open landscapes.” And we can feel this from the very first second.

Deeply atmospheric from the start, submerged locational recordings intertwine with gradually evolving synths - creating an introduction that lays out the beginning of the path into this beautifully constructed album.

Trademark acidic pulses emerge through the clouds as the music continues on unabated, and from there we’re led by the hand through the emotions Andreas elicits from his surroundings.

His mastery of his machines is total - analogue richness, digital grunge - recordings from many sources manipulated into fascinating collages - all meld into a cohesive whole by the immense creative vision he possesses.

At times vivid and luminescent, and others dark and meditative - always profoundly reflective - this is an album of vast contemplation, perfectly executed by a master of his form.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

The Prophet - Scanner

What began as a little studio playtime with a new software synth from GForce developed into this neat little EP.

I made a little demo online for social media and had a number of requests to make this track available, so you not only get that track, but also three additional tracks, all of which I made on the same day.

A little context - Few instruments have left such an indelible mark on modern music as the Sequential Prophet-5. You’ve heard it on countless recordings, from Michael Jackson’s Thriller album to Phil Collins, from Radiohead to Vangelis, Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, oh the list goes on and on.

It was first introduced in 1978, and its seductively rich analogue warmth and unmistakable character helped define generations of sound. And now, decades later, it remains a benchmark of electronic instrument design, but the price unfortunately inhibits many of us having an opportunity to play with one.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Where the Echoes Bloom - ALIA

Los Angeles theremin player and composer ALIA announces her debut album Where Echoes Bloom, following 2025’s Harold Budd cover in collaboration with Nailah Hunter. It is an exploration of atmosphere through cultural influences paired with a performance prowess over audio technology and novel instrumentation.

“I wanted to showcase the hauntingly beautiful voice of the theremin as well as the intimate, melancholic sound of the kacapi, a Javanese zither,” writes Alia. “I set them to a backdrop of lush pads I created on my Arturia Microfreak and Korg Minilogue along with lots of shimmering reverb to create ethereal, otherworldly soundscapes that are, at times, hypnotic.”

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Field Notes - Noodle Therapy

Noodle Therapy is the ambient-focused alias of Brighton-based producer Dan Porter, a musician active since the late 1990s whose previous work has appeared on labels including 4bit and Thirteen[rec]. While his history and aliases (Gods of Ruin, Cosmic Acid) span a variety of electronic styles, Field Notes marks a deliberate shift toward slower, more reflective forms, drawing inspiration from the coastal, rural, and woodland environments surrounding England’s south coast.

Built from a combination of field recordings, modular synthesis, and hardware-based experimentation, Field Notes explores the relationship between memory and place. Fragments of found sound drift through evolving compositions, where analog circuitry, digital instruments, and Eurorack systems are used less as tools of precision and more as instruments of discovery.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Instant Light - Federica Deiana

We’re delighted to announce the debut full-length album from Federica Deiana, out this June. Her fifth release overall on Home Normal, Instant Light is a radiant and deeply affecting work, balancing evocative piano compositions with immersive ambient swells and cathartic synth textures.

A graduate of the University of Cagliari and mentored by acclaimed Sardinian composer Stefano Guzzetti, Deiana delivers a work that feels like a defining moment within the ambient neo-classical landscape. As her debut physical release, Instant Light is remarkably complete in both vision and execution — organic, immersive, and quietly breathtaking. Aurora Zandara’s blurred, dreamlike imagery further enriches the release, evoking memory and atmosphere in a way that beautifully reflects the music’s tenderness and purity.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

The Hermit - Netherworld

Glacial Movements, an ambient and electronic music label founded in Rome in 2006 by Alessandro Tedeschi (Netherworld), celebrates its 20th anniversary with the release of “The Hermit,” a collection of restored archival recordings from the early 2000s. These recordings, originally stored on deteriorated CD-r and Minidisc formats, were recovered and restored to reveal early experimental sounds full of mystery and emotional depth. These earliest sound experiments emerged while the Netherworld project was still evolving, years before Glacial Movements came into existence.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Petals and Marbles - Miko

I was curious about what kind of music would emerge from who I had become—just an ordinary person living in the countryside. After self-releasing my work “Across the Water Mirror,” which was inspired by the nature I love—mountains, lakes, flowers, and the changing seasons—I felt my creativity—instinctive and eccentric—begin to move again. And so, this work “Petals and Marbles” came together naturally.

At the sketch stage of songwriting, the keywords that came to mind were electric, sync, dance music, sampling, lightness. I felt that I might be able to create something again with the same kind of energy I had when making my first album. By chance, my former bandmate provided me with some vintage drum machines, sequencers, and sample materials. These elements played a major role in shaping the lo-fi and somehow futuristic beats I had envisioned. I also used many of my favorite synthesizers from long ago, and I think the result is a sound that feels very much like me.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases spanning ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and adjacent styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

This time around, we’re still working our way through our June 2026 list of releases.

FEATURED ALBUM

The Black Sea - Bot1500

from the liner notes:

Shinichi Kobayashi’s music as Bot1500 has such a beautiful signature to it. Using the layers and language of ambient IDM, artfully arranged pads & chords and crisp vectored breaks, he’s been creating a beautiful and highly individual sound.

The Black Sea, His first album since 2022’s Surreal on AD93’s sister label Lith Dolina, spaces things out more and focuses inward with a palette of minimalism and increased emotional resonance. It’s been a focus for Shinichi across his self-published studio work in the last few years.

The album’s tracks feel increasingly rooted in the principles and logic of dub. Utilising more space, more silence, and more focus on the simplicity and elegance of the composition folded into radiant arrangements of melody, snare, shade and echo.

The sea is both an inner landscape and a geographic image that hangs over the record’s mood. A dark humid summer night, like that on Japanese coasts. A small boat sails aimlessly. An eerie tone, but with a glimpse of beauty. The water is melancholic, enveloping, and endless.

Each track is written at 140bpm save for last track White Flocks at 120, for the image of heading south to close out.

Tell Me About the Outside - David Vélez + Bruno Duplant

The title ‘Tell Me About the Outside’ is taken from the dystopian sci-fi fiction novel ‘Parable of the Sower’ by Octavia E. Butler.

‘Tell Me About the Outside’ is not a description, it is a question repeating itself in the material. An attempt to listen to what presses from elsewhere, what holds, what resists without appearing. Sound emerges in fragments, as if found rather than composed. It carries weight, density, a sense of tension.

Alongside electronic processes, non-electronic sounds persist: physical gestures, contacts, residual noises whose origins remain partially opaque. They do not oppose the electronic layer, but complicate it, introducing friction and instability. Surfaces vibrate, retract, remain suspended. The music moves by slow displacement rather than development. Each gesture is measured, each texture maintained in a fragile equilibrium.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Seasons - ai yamamoto

Seasons are like human emotions and they are something that defines life. Seasons pass time with us and colours things from birth to death. The circle of life feels close for me and it seems to be the pattern of everything.

From cherry blossom petals falling, we see fragility and transience, which is life. I found this moment so precious and beautiful. Seasons give me a strong sense of the presence of life. I can visualise this with my music and I would love to capture and make this sound diary in all my life and work.

A book, One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, inspired the way I feel about the world and the universe. This record is also a tribute to that text.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Sacred House (Versions) - John Also Bennett

Sacred House (Versions) is a 26 minute EP by American composer John Also Bennett. Consisting of four variations on “Sacred House”, a minimal, haunting composition first released on his 2025 album Ston Elaióna, Sacred House (Versions) continues Bennett’s engagement with resonance, empty space, and the small details hidden just below, using piano, bass flute, and synthesizers to create remarkably different yet entirely coherent new versions of the same piece of music.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

In A Small Room, Decades Ago - James Bernard

“Hanging in the chill out rooms of the 1990’s rave scene inspired me to create my first ambient album, Atmospherics over 30 years ago.

For this album I wanted to journey back and create a love letter to those magical times, and the energy that was felt in those small rooms decades ago.”

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Headwater - Helen Svoboda

Headwater was originally composed as part of a larger interdisciplinary performance at the Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne, 2024, with the generous support of the Musica Viva Australia FutureMakers program and the Berg Family Foundation.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Cate Kennan - Shadows

Los Angeles musician Cate Kennan’s self-produced second full-length unfolds with the poetry and immateriality of its title: Shadows. 10 vignettes of keys, strings, reverb, and voice, the songs sway and lope between dream and lullaby, rose-colored but remote. The album was inspired by the dislocation Kennan felt upon returning, after several years away, to the rustic neighborhood northwest of L.A. where she’d grown up: “Wandering through a place where my life once existed but where everything had quietly shifted with time.”

The music conjures a mood of distance, dust, and dazed emotion, alternately lulling and unraveling. From shuffling tumbleweed vignettes (“The Lone West,” “Romantic Strings”) to sepia-tone torch songs (“Shadows,” “Reverie”) to oblique keyboard meditations (“Moonlight,” “Rain”), Kennan’s soundworld moves with a muted, murky beauty, like alluring shapes seen through smudged glass. In her hands, haze is a transformative property, liberating melody and memory into landscapes still untraveled: “What began as a period of nostalgia for me turned into a longing, not for the past, for a place that might exist somewhere beyond the horizon.”

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases spanning ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and adjacent styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

This installment contains a half dozen and one more releases from June, 2026. Enjoy!

FEATURED REVIEW

while the universe sleeps - variant

from the album notes:

For the fiftieth release in the series, I’m thrilled to share an extended-length interpretation from a foundational figure in the electronic music world, the

Detroit-based Stephen Hitchell, here as variant.

Describing the importance of Stephen’s contribution to electronic music is a huge task - born out of the visionary axis between Detroit, Chicago and Berlin, he built on structures laid by those before him to create a universe of vast depth and sonic beauty. Along with many collaborators, his label echospace [detroit] became a home for forward-thinking dub-spirited music.

This, and numerous releases on other labels, including the seminal The Coldest Season on Modern Love with regular partner Rod Modell, and ground-breaking live performances everywhere from Berghain to Movement, made Stephen indivisible from any conversation of the most important artists of our time.

Under the guise of variant, we might find Stephen at his deepest, as he puts it:

“to score the constellation of mystical events occurring in the depths of space”

With while the universe sleeps, he has achieved something remarkable. As with all the variant music, Stephen takes influence from the vast recesses of the cosmos, both imaginatively and sonically.

Drawing on NASA’s sound archive, “the vast echoes of space have been manipulated and resynthesized throughout the duration of this sonic experience.”

Through decades of dedication to his craft, Stephen has become a producer of almost unparalleled skill - all seen through the lens of formative years immersed in the inception and evolution of techno, house, ambient and countless detours.

All this is brought to bear on while the universe sleeps - a truly masterful deep-space voyage, eighty minutes submerged in cathartic waves of interstellar bliss.

Infinitely spacious - echoing chords and endlessly sustaining pads establish an emotional core, surrounded by highly-processed astral transmissions and organic analogue noise. Always underpinned by sub-bass reminiscent of the lowest frequencies emanating from the studios of Jamiaca, that are also of massive significance to Stephen’s work.

The Water - Rhucle

We are delighted to welcome Japanese ambient artist Rhucle back to Home Normal with ‘The Water’, a gentle, deeply melodic album of luminosity in sound.

Based in Tokyo, Rhucle has spent more than a decade creating quiet, intimate sound worlds from soft synths, piano, field recordings and delicate environmental detail. His music unfolds through slowly evolving structures, with small tones drifting into focus, textures gathering like light on a surface, and melodies appearing and disappearing with natural ease.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

After Hours II - Western Grey

In January 2006, Sean Baxter, David Brown, and I had the opportunity to record inside West Space—a Melbourne artist-run initiative—during its summer shutdown. With the gallery empty and silent, we spent two evenings exploring its acoustic and spatial dimensions through a series of improvised performances. Using percussion, electro-acoustic guitar, electronics, field recordings, and found objects, we responded directly to the material qualities of the space—its concrete floors and walls, reverberant surfaces, and the presence of an elevator shaft that acted like a resonant chamber.

The recordings were archived soon after and left untouched until the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, when the stillness of that period prompted a return to the material. As with After Hours I, the recordings position West Space as an active acoustic system rather than a neutral setting. The gallery’s acoustic properties shape the structure and behaviour of the sound, with performance and environment operating in close relation.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Después de llover - Eli Wewentxu & Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė

“Después de llover” is about musical conversations between two people who have only recently met; they come from very different places, do not speak the same languages, and perhaps have little in common other than the resonance of their instruments. This encounter leads them to explore an imaginary world where they share sounds to build a place where they can go and play with the moisture of the plants growing in the water, listen to the pudus playing with the herons, rest on the floripondios, and perhaps stay there waiting for the rain to return.

These pieces were recorded on a summer day in 2025 in Indrė’s home with kanklės, txompe, and violin.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Seasons - by ai yamamoto

From cherry blossom petals falling, we see fragility and transience, which is life. I found this moment so precious and beautiful. Seasons give me a strong sense of the presence of life. I can visualise this with my music and I would love to capture and make this sound diary in all my life and work.

A book, One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, inspired the way I feel about the world and the universe. This record is also a tribute to that text.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

The Red Book - by Penguin Cafe

Erased Tapes are proud to re-issue The Red Book by Penguin Cafe, with an expanded vinyl track list which now includes the CD and digital-only “And Yet…” plus two tracks from the limited-edition Umbrella EP. This new edition will be available on limited double translucent vinyl and CD, both with updated art from Studio Torsten Posselt utilising the original drawing from renowned British sculptor and Simon Jeffes’ partner Emily Young. Both formats also include liner notes from Arthur Jeffes.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Position - by Spyros Polychronopoulos + Nikos Veliotis

Spyros Polychronopoulos and Nikos Veliotis first crossed paths almost twenty-five years ago. Since then, their trajectories have unfolded in parallel: shared festivals, overlapping scenes, and a long-standing mutual attention to each other’s work.

A collaboration was often discussed but never materialised. Now, with time, context, and intent finally aligned, Position marks the convergence of two practices that have matured independently, meeting at a point of quiet precision and shared focus.

The album explores resonance as a living condition rather than a fixed property. Sustained tones expose the body of the cello as an acoustic field in constant negotiation. As time unfolds, minute fluctuations bring certain frequencies forward while others recede.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases spanning ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and adjacent styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

This installment contains a half dozen and one releases from June, 2026. Enjoy!

FEATURED REVIEW

Vestiges - by Olivier Alary

from the album notes:

French composer Olivier Alary returns to LINE with his stunning elegant new album ‘Vestiges,’ a 43-minute composition for twelve amplified lap steel guitars and electronics, conceived as an instrumental choir. ‘Vestiges’ emerges from an exploration of memory, disappearance, and the persistence of sonic traces over time.

--

The approach for this work is rooted in my interest in the spectrality of memory. Rather than evoking memory as a fixed image, ‘Vestiges’ treats it as a dynamic process that appears, dissolves, and reconfigures itself. In dialogue with hauntological music, the piece reflects on how the past continues to inhabit the present in fragmented and altered forms.

More broadly, the work responds to a contemporary condition marked by the loss of stable structures and reference points. Rather than addressing this directly, ‘Vestiges’ embodies it through its form. A continuous, evolving field in which nothing remains fixed, and meaning emerges through instability.

At its core lies a simple, sustained gesture. Through continuous, oscillatory slide movements on the strings, the performers set the instruments into resonance, activating a field of subtle interferences and harmonic fluctuations. From this unstable material, voice-like textures emerge, as if each guitar were channeling the ghost of a sung presence. The ensemble functions as a single, shifting body of sound, where timbral proximity allows psychoacoustic phenomena to unfold at the threshold of perception.

The sonic language is shaped by techniques that introduce material instability. Noise, saturation, micro-variations in pitch, and the friction of the slide contribute to a sense of erosion and transformation. These elements evoke artifacts of recording technologies such as hiss, wear, and distortion, not as references, but as intrinsic qualities of the sound, which is never entirely pure and carries the marks of its own alteration...

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Still Beauty - by zakè & marine eyes

With Still Beauty, PITP label head zakè (Zach Frizzell) and California-based marine eyes (Cynthia Bernard) present a suite of lovingly constructed pieces that combine organic, tape-saturated drones with angelic, spacious vocals and a host of other texturally nuanced instrumentation. Building on the hushed promises of their collaborative debut, Unfailing Love (2021), the two artists immerse us in the processes of loss, grief, and renewal, spiriting us through overlapping shadows into newfound light.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

A Distracted God - Beatriz Ferreyra

Ferreyra’s life in sound has transcended from the analogue to the digital and back again. She is equally at home with tape manipulation as she is with digital transformations and it is this sense of material agnosticism which has lent her work such a personal quality. She pursues sound in the absolute, and allows it to guide her curiosity.

A Distracted God collects three works from Ferreyra, each one a microcosm of listenership that speaks to her wholly consuming practice in sound. The edition takes in both tape and computer based works, which reveal the very particular ways within which Ferreyra has explored and shaped sound. She remains one of the true pioneers of her generation, a fearless and relentless maker for whom the totality of sound’s affect is forever front of mind.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Open the windows and let the spirits in and out - Ángeles Rojas

Warm Winters Ltd. welcomes Argentinian, Berlin-based composer Ángeles Rojas with her new piece ‘Open the windows and let the spirits in and out’. Originally commissioned by the Buenos Aires festival RUIDO, the work documents Rojas’s closing performance of its 2023 edition.

Performed on a Klais Opus 1912 organ with an ensemble of violin, cello, soprano flute, piccolo, baritone saxophone, trombone and bass clarinet distributed throughout the space, the piece unfolds over 30 minutes. Sustained tones remain in the air while subtle variations in timbre, intonation and beating patterns slowly emerge, shaping a continuous and immersive acoustic field.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

After Hours II - Western Grey

In January 2006, Sean Baxter, David Brown, and I had the opportunity to record inside West Space—a Melbourne artist-run initiative—during its summer shutdown. With the gallery empty and silent, we spent two evenings exploring its acoustic and spatial dimensions through a series of improvised performances. Using percussion, electro-acoustic guitar, electronics, field recordings, and found objects, we responded directly to the material qualities of the space—its concrete floors and walls, reverberant surfaces, and the presence of an elevator shaft that acted like a resonant chamber.

The recordings were archived soon after and left untouched until the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, when the stillness of that period prompted a return to the material. As with After Hours I, the recordings position West Space as an active acoustic system rather than a neutral setting. The gallery’s acoustic properties shape the structure and behaviour of the sound, with performance and environment operating in close relation.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Maps - Driftwood

Following our 2024 self-titled release, Nick and I were compelled to make another record, expanding on the distinctive sound world we have found as the duo Driftwood.

Grounded in the unique instrumentation of two microtonally re-tuned pump organs, alongside clarinets and guitars, the sonic landscape of Driftwood has become a welcoming place for us to inhabit together. The distinctive characteristics of these instruments, as well as the challenge of playing multiple instruments simultaneously, have become a frame we’ve leaned into more and more, trusting the vitality of their combined resonance to lead us further into uncharted paths of improvisation.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Pon - Tujiko Noriko

Pon is Tujiko Noriko’s sixth album for Editions Mego and a further extension of her already significant body of work as both a solo and collaborative artist. Dedicated to her cat who she adopted as an infant and passed away due an accident having been born deaf, Pon is imbued with abstraction, tenderness and a deep emotional resonance.

Noriko’s palette of electronics, romantic melodies and surprising sonic details are all fully present here, and like her last full length, 2023’s Crépuscule this is an epic work, released as a 2LP by Editions Mego alongside a Japanese CD release.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases spanning ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and adjacent styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

In this installment, we’re wrapping up our list of May releases and moving on to June, including a recent release by Michael Stearns & Robert Rich.

FEATURED REVIEW

Reunion Of Breath And Waves - Michael Stearns & Robert Rich

from the album notes:

Robert & Michael met in 1986, introduced by Stephen Hill of Hearts of Space. Labelmates, their friendship came naturally… explorers of the sonic mystery. In 2024 fellow composer Steve Roach organized a series of performances for the three in Tucson. Although both Robert and Michael had released albums with Steve, the two realized the time had arrived for their own collaboration.

During two 10-day sessions in Robert’s studio in June and December 2025 they created a range of compositions. During intervening months, they sent iterations back and forth, and formed them into vignets, short melodic stories. Several themes connect these stories, deep in their origins, touching on love of nature, shared experience and the passion of feeling truly alive.

flightbox - Infloresce Records

“flightbox” is the start of a new album series from Infloresce Records, where five composers are asked to write a piece of music based on one word. The word for this album was “flight”.

From magnificent flocks of birds to satellites orbiting the earth, we hope you enjoy the tunes in this gift box.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Take Me, I’m Yours - Alan & Jan

“Take me, I’m yours” is the first collaboration album between Alan Abrahams and Jan Jelinek. Released through the latter’s faitiche, it builds upon multi-layered vocal sketches by the former. The Paris-based artist, primarily known for his work as Portable and Bodycode, supplied Jelinek with multi-layered song sketches that the German artist subjected to a rigorous process of manipulation, excavating the ambiguities of the original material and transforming its rhythms into subtle pulses. “Take me, I’m yours” is neither a typical Abrahams record nor a classic Jelinek album—it is something third, mediating between the physicality of the voice and the abstraction of electronic sound design.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Aware 哀れ - Tomotsugu Nakamura & David Cordero

We’re delighted to welcome Tomotsugu Nakamura to Home Normal for the first time in collaboration with David Cordero, one of the label’s most cherished returning artists. ‘Aware 哀れ’ is a beautifully organic meeting point for two truly remarkable artists in the field of understated melodic ambient minimalism.

‘Aware 哀れ’ is an album of great delicacy and stillness, touched by the atmosphere of early ambient music in its patient, spacious, quietly electronic nature, filled with small human gestures. Gentle guitar and piano elements drift like reflections on water, giving its serene, otherworldly textures a sense of warmth, breath, and memory.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

AGON (OST) - Tom Wheatley

Tom Wheatley’s score began as a conceptual mirror to this. He took three musicians, each with a singular approach to their instrument, each instrument having a language of articulation that relates to each sport: percussion for judo, cello for fencing, saxophone for rifle shooting. Added to this were claustrophobic analogue electronics, and bagpipes, to represent a state beyond competition: war. The rich, detailed signals from these players underwent extreme processing live in the studio, at times moving the music into a grey area between score, sound design and foley.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

1731 - Eva-Maria Houben

a trilogy for organ, composed by Eva-Maria Houben

Eva-Maria Houben, organ

The organ:

Ev. Kirche zu Hoerstgen, Kamp-Lintfort

Thomas Weidtmann, Ratingen, 1731 (rest. Ahrend & Brunzema 1971)

soundboard/windchest: slider chest

actions (keys and stops): mechanical

stops: 11

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Making Friends - Or Sobre Blau

Andreu G. Serra and Kiran Leonard are guitarists and good friends. They met nine years ago, having moved to Lisbon within a couple of weeks of each other by pure chance. While living together in a large, horrible warehouse in Alto São João, they recorded a set of improvisations later released as “The Piri Piri Samplers” (Memorials of Distinction, 2019), which captured the duo’s distinct yet complementary approaches to their instrument: Serra’s rasping, wildly idiosyncratic lead lines spilling over looping beds of tape manipulation and ebow, and Leonard’s contrastingly traditional, no-pedals counterpoint. They played one show at an art gallery, both left Lisbon before the end of the summer, and did not live in the same country again for almost a decade.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases spanning ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and adjacent styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

In our latest installment, we’re still working our way through May 2026 releases. With the exception of the Steve Roach album, which was released in June.

FEATURED ALBUM

Steve Roach - LA ROSA - Live in Tucson

from the album notes:

Pioneering electronic artist Steve Roach’s LA ROSA is a zenith in the fourth decade of his legendary live career. Blending new pieces born from the living moment with essential classics, the 2-disc / 2-hour odyssey captures a riveting point in time on December 6, 2025 at Tucson, Arizona’s state-of-the-art La Rosa performance venue. Originally built as a monastery and cathedral in the 1930’s, La Rosa was converted to a concert destination in 2025. Its setting empowers the music in ways that can’t compare to a conventional hall. Steve taps into the collective memory of the sacred space itself, a space used for devotion and transcendence, the same intentions found in his music.

An equal mix of classics and new material, this astounding show brought together fans from near and afar. This gathering of the tribes inspired all that is captured on this immaculate recording presented with no post-production overdubs or edits just as it was performed, created and mixed by Steve from the stage. LA ROSA transcends what a solo artist’s concert can be; it is the culmination of the last seven years of shows in large cathedrals across the USA.

Natural sounds dissolve the boundaries between the performance space and the surrounding landscape. Coyote howls and nocturnal ambience recorded at Steve’s Timehouse studio desert habitat and the sounds of the Australian outback from his past adventures transform the venue into a transcendent environment. On the new track “Born of Darkness,” Steve plays the fujara – a six-foot overtone flute – producing serpentine forms of sonic lightning. We also hear ocarinas, Tibetan bowls, hybrid trance and shamanic percussion, and on “Songlines” (originally from 1988’s seminal Dreamtime Return), Steve delivers an ecstatic didgeridoo engagement demonstrating that the soundcurrent can passionately flow just as easily through primordial – as well as electron driven – circuity.

LA ROSA’s final threshold brings us to an emotional rendition of 1984’s “Structures From Silence.” When we hear the final burst of applause from the sold-out crowd, it’s like waking from a collective dream with a sense of alignment, expansion and inspiration. Often referring to Joseph Campbell, famous for his work in comparative mythology, Steve references his concerts (and this one in particular) as a representation of the hero’s journey. We can encounter this deeply in settings such as La Rosa with this stellar documentation of a peak moment in Steve’s career.

The Echoing Green - Zachary Paul & Celia Eydeland

‘The Echoing Green’ is a poem by William Blake published in ‘Songs of Innocence’ in 1789. The poem talks about merry sounds and images which accompany the children playing outdoors. Then, an old man happily remembers when he enjoyed playing with his friends during his own childhood. The last stanza depicts the little ones being weary when the sun has descended and going to their mother to rest after playing many games.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Air Signs - anthéne

The pieces on air signs are based on fairly minimal guitar loops with overlapping swells and melodies. Inspired by the hawk on the cover, which landed right outside the window at my workplace in a hectic area of downtown Toronto, the pieces are light and airy, reflecting the stillness of our natural surroundings in the midst of human made chaos.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Lagoon - FLOCKS (W. Durand / U. Hohmann)

New album by FLOCKS, the duo of drone specialist WERNER DURAND and percussionist ULI HOHMANN. Musical landscapes that move between traditional as well as experimental sounds with influences from Krautrock and JON HASSELL’s “fourth world” aesthetics.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Softening - Ancient Astronaut

Some sounds don’t ask for attention.

They slowly dissolve the edges of the day.

Softening unfolds across six tracks, moving through quiet ambient spaces and gentle melodic fragments.

Warm pads, drifting textures, and patient atmospheres that invite the listener to slow down.

There is no rush here.

Only a gradual release.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Paradessence - Visible Cloaks

Paradessence, Visible Cloaks’ third full length, is a work of emergence and illusion. The album’s fourteen songs shift, heave, and shimmer against a faintly luminous backdrop of night, a cavernous space shaped by sparse hyperreal representations of the natural world. The arrangements are simultaneously grandiose and fragile, both an inversion and culmination of what came before and as adventurous as anything they’ve produced so far.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Sense of Time, A Sense of Place: The Driftless Suite - Piscean Daydreams

A Sense of Time, A Sense of Place: The Driftless Suite is anchored in the living voice of a landscape. In August of 2025, I set out to capture the sounds of the Driftless Region of northwest Illinois — a land left unglaciated during the last ice age, shaped instead by deep time into steep hills, winding valleys, limestone bluffs, and the quiet persistence of cold-water streams and springs.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases spanning ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and adjacent styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

FEATURED REVIEW

Window Forms - Oskar Tomala

Dense, shimmering masses of sound, slowly and gradually shifting. That pretty much sums up Tomala’s third Bandcamp release, at least by my reckoning. If it’s not apparent from the foregoing, I consider that sort of thing to be a good sort of thing. The first and longest track, at 12:37, was the standout for me.

The music stands on its own just fine. But here’s some background.

From the album notes:

Let’s imagine ourselves sitting in a comfortable position,

gazing into the distance through a window.

The perspective is limited, yet still in proportion between the interior and exterior of the room.

A rather ordinary moment.

Unless we switch off all processes of evaluating the situation.

And now you stand up and slowly approach the window.

The entire landscape framed by it enlarges and fills your field of vision.

More details from outside emerge.

The room disappears.

Then you head back.

You reverse this brief scene from a moment ago.

You sit back comfortably at the beginning.

The described situation literally represents the moment when I subconsciously understood the hidden formal concept of the compositions that make up this album. This took place in Copenhagen in 2024 during my master studies on Rytmisk Musikkonservatorium. During the period, I had the opportunity to work with the acoustics of the abandoned Vridsløselille Prison building, where I conducted spatial impulse measurements. In the creative process, I tried to recreate the character of the unique reverberation resonating in the main hall of the building called the “panopticon”. We are therefore able to experience this place to a similar degree throughout the entire album. It was an exceptionally haunting experience, being alone in this place and listening to re-amplified fragments of the compositions being created at the time.

From Tomala’s bio:

...sound artist, composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Copenhagen and Gdańsk. Working in the field of electro-acoustic composition, site specific sound installations and music for motion pictures. Their work focuses on the phenomenology of intensity, ambiguity and possibility as it manifests in the perception of tones, sounds, harmony and other forms of harmonicity.

Oskar is interested in how our ways of listening expending our perceptual experience. His current explorations are oriented towards the research for interaction of harmonic sound with architecture space, by performing with site specific multichannel systems, capturing acoustic resonance and measuring space impulses then by merging with the search in timbres of acoustic instruments, sine waves, white noises and sound processing. As a composer, Oskar works extensively with just intonation harmony and composes for both acoustic instruments and sound synthesis.

Immersion - Aspetuck

Aspetuck has been steadily carving out a name for himself through releases on Never Late and Oslated, garnering a respected following for his DJ mixes and festival performances. Aspetuck’s latest record, Immersion, was sequenced and curated from dozens of ideas spanning a transformative few years in Griff’s life. The album is less a snapshot in time and more of a memory bank - flashes of fatherhood, loss, modular rabbit holes, late-night studio sessions, and long walks by the Hudson River with his daughter.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

broadcast colours - michael scott dawson & anthéne

We’re delighted to welcome Michael Scott Dawson to the label for the first time in collaboration with anthéne. For Brad Deschamps (anthéne), this marks an eighth consecutive year of work with Home Normal in a relationship that has grown organically across solo records, collaborations, mixtapes, and now both ‘broadcast colours’ and a new solo album out later this year. In that time, Brad has become one of ambient music’s most revered voices; a presence of patience, tenderness, and quiet emotional light guiding us all home.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

The Lost Catalogue - Spheruleus

Harry Towell, the Lincolnshire-based artist behind Spheruleus, has spent nearly two decades exploring the boundaries between field recording, collage, and ambient composition. Best known also as the founder of the Whitelabrecs label and for his work under the name Glåsbird, Towell has released music through respected imprints including Hibernate, Time Released Sound, Home Normal, Lost Tribe Sound, Eilean and Rusted Tone. Since first discovering ambient music in the late 2000s, Spheruleus became the outlet through which he documented both his surroundings and his own artistic development, using found sounds, inexpensive acoustic instruments, home recordings and layered electronic textures, to create intimate, narrative-driven sound environments.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Acceptance - HERE

His latest album and physical debut for Whitelabrecs ‘Acceptance’, is his most personal statement to date and follows previous digital-only eRecord editions ‘Hues of Amber & Rose’ and ‘The Colour of Snow’. Created in the aftermath of profound personal loss, the record emerged during a period in which he lost both of his parents and experienced the breakdown of a relationship he believed would define his future. Rather than setting out to make a concept album, these ten pieces gradually took shape through the act of sitting with grief rather than trying to outrun it. The result is a spacious and emotionally charged body of work where soft melodic guitars drift through slow-moving Ambient drones, analogue tones flicker against distant silence and acoustic fragments are woven into enveloping electronic surrounds.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Enth - by Arovane & Taylor Deupree

Acquainted through their shared love of music technology, and now a friendship, this is the second-time pairing between two well-known musicians from the ambient and electronic scene since some decades: the German artist Arovane and the American artist Taylor Deupree.

After their first release together in November 2022, “Skal_Ghost” on 12K, this new release explore once more an organic journey built around loops and layers or processed and re-processed sounds giving this particular color to a new must-have album.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

La Manzana Mágica - Federico Durand

One of his most gentle, open and fragile albums to date, La Manzana Mágica is for sure an exercise in restraint, in letting the listener’s imagination wander around the space in between his sounds. His pure synthesizer tones and tape machine maniuplations take on an ethereal, almost haunting quality, perhaps feeling a bit darker than some of his other work. The inspiration and relation to the often-mysterious nature of the Cinderella stamps is apt.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases spanning ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and adjacent styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

FEATURED REVIEW

Travelogue [Thailand] - by CM von Hausswolff & Chandra Shukla

If I had to pick one word to describe this album, I guess I’d go with murky. For two words, maybe quietly noisy. Or subtly disturbing?

Describe it however you will, Travelogue [Thailand] is an album that definitely made my ears perk up. It’s four tracks fall in the 10-15 minute range and I’ve listened to a bunch of times now. Von Hausswolff and Chandra Shukla have released two similar collaborations prior to this one - Bali, in 2023 and Nepal, in 2021. This latest album was recorded over the course of about a week and a half in February, 2024, in Northern Thailand. Here are snips from the liner notes regarding the project and the location:

The third in an ongoing series of collected international audio diaries; the premise is quite simple: the two meet at a mutually agreed upon destination along with the facilitation of something to record audio of these experiences on. The intent is to capture and augment these sonic documentaries of their travels which then are sculpted into soundtracks. This is done by sourcing the culture, environment, persons or events that make their voices available. The result might be pleasantly kind and floating or unpleasantly rough and jarring unveiling a light or dark world.

von Hausswolff and Shukla rounding off another whirlwind 9 days in Southeast Asia in the unusual setting of the Lanna Kingdom (Kingdom of a million rice fields) of Northern Thailand. A multifaceted location where Thailand shares borders with Myanmar, Laos and China in what is known as The Golden Triangle, a commercial trade zone between the nations. This frontier region is home to hill tribes, countless Buddhist monasteries, stupas, The Mekong River, mountains and forests.

Duori - Heith & Tarawangsawelas

Heith and Tarawangsawelas met in Bandung in 2017, since then their collaboration has been evolving, both in person and remotely. The result is ‘Duori’ an album of 5th world music in low data mode that travelled inside lost and found portable recorders, on defunct hard drives and expired e-sim cards.

Recording and arranging songs over a long period of time and across a vast geographical distance has lent their practice a distinct character. This distance allows the possibility to see things from different perspectives and creates music that hovers both inside the Sundanese Land, and outside of it, both on the European continent and not. This record carries compositions from one side of the globe to the other, catching spirits and energies from different places, societies and rituals.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Songs of Soil - Sulk Rooms

His quiet details interpretation, Songs of Soil, is a reflection on his life living in rural Yorkshire and his connection to nature - in his own words this “is an album dedicated to the majesty of worms”.

Making extensive use of field recordings of these essential parts of the ecosystem in his allotment, Thomas imprints the organic chaos of their hidden world - sounds rarely heard by humans, amplified and shaped into captivating and mesmerising soundscapes.

These worlds are both delicate and evocative of unknown space and are the perfect compliment to the ethereal and powerful sonic atmospherics Sulk Rooms does so well. Using a range of synthesisers, guitars and effects, the album winds its way though a huge range of emotions. Vast dynamics - from time-stopping euphoria to soft introspection - Thomas’s command of his instruments is absolute.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Kreng - Wormhole

What does a trip towards another world sound like? We’re about to find out. The master of tension, melancholy, and the deranged is back after a long period working in the worlds of theatre and cinema. Last seen on Miasmah with the grief stricken The Summoner, Kreng now returns with Wormhole, following closer in the footsteps of the cult classics L’Autopsie Phénoménale de Dieu and Grimoire.

Starting with “You Are Here”, the listener travels through a vacuum of spacious minimalism and edge-of-your-seat tension. Within the journey, we are pulled and lured towards a mystic inner core and beyond, encountering drifting fragments of old-world nostalgia on the way: echoes of empty jazz bars sit alongside hellish, Hieronymus Bosch-like scenarios.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Soundsphere - Akio Suzuki

Soundsphere, recorded in 1990 at Hut Apollphuis in Eindhoven, captures Suzuki at the height of his powers. It is a document of his music shaped by patience and dynamism, in equal measure. Few other recordings capture both the tenderness and the presence of Suzuki’s ways of discovering sound in his instruments.

On pieces such as Analapos A: Voice, he creates a wavering oceanic vocal drone that echoes up and down, tracing the coils of the Analapos’ springs. The results are simultaneously minimal and expansive, reminding us that sound exists in the vertical and well as horizontal planes. Similarly his performance on De Koolmees: Suzuki Type - Glass Harmonica shares this intensity of focus. Suzuki’s strikes and strokes on the glass tubes, creating an endlessly evolving array of tonal inflections and pulses.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Álbum de Viaje - Verónica Cerrotta

LINE welcomes sound artist, composer, and field recordist Verónica Cerrotta, originally from Argentina and based in the countryside of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her first work for LINE, ‘Álbum de Viaje’ continues her explorations of environmental listening and everyday soundscapes to create imaginary spaces and sonic fictions.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Immersion - Aspetuck

The emotional undertow of the album is immediate. Opener, Hit Me With Your Pet Shark, is one of the earliest compositions in the collection, created just months after the loss of Griff’s brother and during the sleepless swirl of new parenthood. Built around a single sound from Spectrasonics Omnisphere, found while rediscovering his brother’s studio gear, the track sets the tone: restrained yet searching, personal without becoming precious.

From there, The Printing Press captures the raw energy of a live jam in Griff’s upstate New York basement, running through a 1980s Tascam mixer like a lo-fi assembly line of synths, pads, and drum machines. REI, named after a spontaneous family mission to find a pink water bottle, encapsulates his knack for imprinting daily minutiae into sound. And title track Immersion- once known simply as “Tuesday 303 Jam”- emerges from a dinner break and a blender, distilling modular sketches and distorted drums into a powerful, slow-motion march.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Hiss & Float is a weekly listing of Bandcamp releases spanning ambient, avant-garde, experimental, and adjacent styles that lean more toward the quiet side. It’s a human-curated look at new sounds that might otherwise slip through the cracks. We navigate this corner of the vast Bandcamp landscape so you don’t have to. Note that while we like Bandcamp, we are not affiliated with them.

Welcome to the first edition of Hiss & Float. Weekly updates will go out on Friday, with the exception of this first one, which is going out early.

FEATURED REVIEW

Ben Vida - Oblivion Seekers

It’s a bit of a generalization, but I tend to be drawn more to music without words than music with. So as I skimmed the notes for Oblivion Seekers, I noticed that it was all about words and I almost passed on it. And the album cover are is made up of...words.

I gave it a spin anyway. Then another and a few more after that. Which is to say that it caught my ear. But when it comes to finding the...words to describe what’s going on here, I was initially at a loss for...words.

This is not verse and chorus stuff, mind you. At times I couldn’t help but be reminded of Laurie Anderson and her way of dispassionately and matter of factly declaiming her lyrics. For a few more thoughts on what’s going on here, I’ll defer to a few snips from the liner notes:

Oblivion Seekers is Vida’s newest album in this mode of composition, following 2023’s collaboration with new music ensemble Yarn/Wire The Beat My Head Hit. Like its predecessor, the music’s focus is on coordinated duets of spoken word in a neutral tone, the variable cadences of the words in motion creating complex internal rhythmic structures.

The instrumentation on each of the album’s four pieces varies; “Be Yr Own Abyss” is defined by the wave-like counterpoint of saxophones, while the ambiguous chime of vibraphone floats over “Oblivion Seekers” and Fraser’s swelling bass provides the album’s sole dramatic entrance. The music shifts in the ear as the text constantly redefines and recontextualizes the composition’s form and movement, even as it remains consistent in its otherworldly glow.

These elements form lattice-like structures that the text darts in and around, often adhering to downbeats but otherwise moving freely within each lilting phrase. A tranquil, focused temperament persists, enhanced by the reserved cadence of the voices that makes it feel as if the music is one long mantra that never quite reaches back to its genesis point. The effect is entrancing, equally soporific and gripping, implying repetition without ever moving exactly the same way twice.

Petr Kotík – Many Many Women

Many Many Women by Petr Kotík is a large-scale composition for voices and instruments from 1975-78 on the text of Gertrude Stein's novella of the same name. It was published in Paris in 1910 as part of the book G.M.P. - Gertrude, Matisse, Picasso.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Jolanda Moletta – Oceanine

Oceanine, Jolanda Moletta’s third album and her first for Beacon Sound, is a powerful and ethereal statement of artistic community. Expanding on her previous work, each track represents a collaboration with a different female vocalist (see list below), with the foundational elements being generated entirely by her own voice.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Ana Roxanne – Poem 1

"I wanted to travel / Home into somewhere," Ana Roxanne breathes across an eerie suspended drone on 'The Age of Innocence'. "I wanted to try / And go very far." These are the first words we hear on 'Poem 1' and reintroduce an artist who's in a conspicuously different phase of her life than she was when her debut album, 'Because of a Flower', sprouted nearly six years ago.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Russell Haswell – Let It Go

In the face of this darkening reality, LET IT GO arrives as both acknowledgment and antidote. This new full length on Editions Mego extends an olive branch through defiant sonic diversity—an unpredictable mosaic that embraces everything from propulsive rhythms to radical abstraction and enveloping ambience. True to Haswell's core practice, the material draws from the same tactile, free-improvised electroacoustic framework that powers his live sets: immediate, powerful and unscripted.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Maps and Diagrams – Tone Isolation

It is hard to believe that, in the more than seventeen-year history of Home Normal, this marks the first release by my dear old friend Tim Martin, under his maps and diagrams moniker. As Tim mentions later in this press release, our little sister label, Nomadic Kids Republic, released two seminal works by him — 'Lights Will Call On You' and 'The Town Beneath The Sea' — back in 2011. I had already been a fan of Tim’s music for some years before that, and what began as an invitation to release on NKR grew into one of the most natural and rewarding creative relationships I’ve ever had.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Deaf Center - Through Time

Since their last full-length LP, “Low Distance” (2019), the duo has gradually shifted towards a more long-form electroacoustic sound which perhaps makes for their most immersive listening experience so far. Otto A Totland’s piano travels in less frequent rhythms than before, yet is felt even more as a relief in the quieter moments that contrast with Erik K Skodvin’s deep atmospheric worlds. There’s a searching quality within the record which feels like slow movements on the way towards something meaningful, capturing a sense of both peace and awe.

🎧 [Stream or buy the album on Bandcamp]

Kansas City-based composer and performer Paul Berlinsky crafts music that is inspired by folklore, dreams, the natural world, and our sense of time. His music explores the intangible space between tone and noise, as well as the emotional impact of layering these elements. Praised as both “dark and satisfying to listen to” (Sound Currents, KCUR) and “beautiful, mysterious and eerie,” his compositions span solo, chamber, and large ensemble works.

From a series of meditative improvisations on my piano, this collection explores how ideas, sounds, and emotions originate in us and move out into the world. Taking these improvisations and manipulating them with electronic processes, they become stretched, echoed, and abstracted, in the hopes that their emotional resonances can be felt far beyond their place of origin.