Richard Skelton ‘Landings’ [Type Recordings]

Ambient Music as a category can be misleading. Often dismissed as background music; unobtrusive, atmospheric sounds. However, it may just be the perfect description of Richard Skelton’s new album.

Emeralds ‘What Happenened’ [No Fun Productions]

“In the beginning there was feedback: the machines speaking on their own, answering their supposed masters with shrieks of misalliance. Gradually the humans learned to control the feedback, or thought they did, and the next step was the introduction of more highly refined forms of distortion and artificial sound, in the form of the synthesizer, which the human beings sought also to control. In the music of Kraftwerk, and bands like them present and to come, we see at last the fitting culmination of this revolution, as the machines not merely overpower and play the human beings but absorb them, until the scientist and his technology, having developed a higher consciousness of its own, are one and the same.”

David Sylvian ‘Manafon’ [Samadhisound]

As expected I’m way too skint to afford any new music with the backlog of albums on my wishlist, so I’m going to review a few that came to my attention at the end of last year.