Ex Confusion - something to remember (2010, U-cover)

If you read only the titles and consider the cover, you might imagine a very dark, cold an depressive ambient record. While not a totally inaccurate presumption it fails to grasp what's really going on.

Ex Confusion is the solo project of Japanese musician Atsuhito Omori, recording ambient music with synthesizer and processed guitar sounds. His music seems mostly improvised and with open structures devoid or melodies or plan, but without falling into an experimental or senseless direction.

Steiner - untitled (2011)

Sometimes, records come out of nowhere, a first release from a new musician, from a relatively unexpected place, and please you without even trying to hard.

Stijn Huwels lives and works in Brussels, has been playing music for years but never felt he could pass the border and actually release something. Everything changed during a summer night, suffering of insomnia, he decided to play music instead and started to experiment with electric guitar, e-bow and laptop, and rapidly achieved the draft of "Untitled". Pleased with it, he decided to release it by himself as a CDR.

Debutant - we stand alone together (2011)

Debutant has been one of my discoveries of last year, through two nice songs, "Thirst" and "Definition", on a split EP with Conquering Animal Sound.

Finally Phillip Quirie is back with a debut full length, self released and offered for free, a pure solo album, written and recorded alone, the conclusion of three years of intensely personal songwriting.

Josh Varnedore - 186,000 Endings per Second (2011, Dynamophone)

Half of the Amman/Josh duo, whose  last year "Places" EP was a real jewel but whose future seems apparently in indefinite hiatus, Josh Varnedore is back with an EP under his own name, preceding a full length.

Four tracks of instrumental ethereal ambient dreampop music with the same usual suspected influences, Hammock, RF, Sigur Ros, Insides, Album Leaf, Cocteau Twins, Harold Budd...

The Apartments - black ribbons (2011, Chapter Music)

A new single, with two versions of the same song, one autumnal and the other spring-like,"Black Ribbons", Peter Milton Walsh is back behind The Apartments, with soft and sensitive guitars, a gorgeous melancholic, romantic and desperate melody, and sharing vocals with Natasha Penot on one of the two versions.