#55: Society In Ruins, Buy Music
Five Picks for Bandcamp Friday
Welcome back to Ambient Audiophile, a place where it can sound like shit and amazing at the same time.
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Working on a potential live Ambient Audiophile/Trailhead event for this summer in the Hudson Valley. It’s gonna be cool and I hope a lot of you ae able to join us. More on that soon.
Things got back to somewhat normal on the Trailhead this week, with episode #173 featuring a full hour of new music in the front. We heard from the great new Quiet Details release from Home Normal label operator Ian Hawgood as well as great cello + electronics from Heather Stebbins on Outside Time. Also featured in the set was the title track from the new Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas collaborative LP from Drag City and something from the universally hailed new longplayer from England’s Djrum. Seriously, Under Tangled Silence (Houndstooth) is a major work and essential listening for new sound searchers.
The show’s second set featured some favorite 70s Canterbury proggers. We heard the centerpiece of Hatfield and the North’s second LP, The Rotters’ Club (Virgin, 1975) as well as the standout off Caravan’s 1971 odyssey In the Land of Grey and Pink (Deram) before finishing the trip with some wild live Steve Hillage.
Check the full tracklist below and LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE
The Trailhead 173:
1. Ian Hawgood - I Was Never Really Here - Well, Here We Are (Quiet Details, 2025) 00:00
2. City of Dawn & Rhucle - Thoughts Mingle in Rain - Threads (Aural Canyon, 2025) 08:46
3. Heather Stebbins - Cardinal - On Separation (Outside Time, 2025) 11:43
4. Loscil - Bell Flame - Lake Fire (Kranky, 2025) 18:35
5. Gregory Uhlmann, Josh Johnson, Sam Wilkes - Unsure - Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes (International Anthem, 2025) 24:33
6. Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas - Totality - Totality (Drag City, 2025) 29:38
7. Djrum - Three Foxes Chasing Each Other - Under Tangled Silence (Houndstooth, 2025) 46:20
8. Hatfield and the North - Mumps - The Rotter's Club (Virgin, 1975) 1:01:15
9. Caravan - Nine Feet Underground - In the Land of Grey and Pink (Deram, 1971) 1:21:39
10. Steve Hillage - Radiom / Lunar Musick Suite / Meditation Of The Dragon - Live Herald (Virgin, 1979) 1:44:00
Bandcamp is far from perfect but as long as they do Bandcamp Fridays (where they take no cut from music sales), I’ll sing to the hills and rooftops about the importance of buying and supporting art and artists.
So here are some things on the platform well worth your hard earned money. And, remember, you don’t need to own everything on vinyl (or CD). Digital downloads have the lowest overhead and can really help out smaller labels and musicians who are working their way to fanbases.
One of the leading lights of the modern psychedelic underground, Stefan Beck’s Golden Brown project has a new full length on the horizon. Whisker Fatigue is out 6/13 via Seattle’s Eiderdown Records and it promises to be more zoned in/out guitar-centered jams that we’ve come to know and need from this Colorado roamer.
New Mexican Stargazers came into my view via their 2021 Not Not Fun release Highway Dreamscape. Since then, I’ve followed this project from Nashville-based producer Carter Eggert closely but nothing prepared me for the knockout beauty that was waiting in their latest, Thermal Narrative Report. Opener “Exemplary Panorama Nap” is pure joy beamed from some far off forgotten land that never was and a perfect table setting for the impossible-to-desrcibe journey that follows. This project’s heavy use of samples defies logic and understanding and yet it remains infinitely listenable.
Florry is a Philly-based band/project that I’ve never really been able to get into before. My patience/yearning for modern rock and roll is pretty much non-existent. So I don’t really know what possessed me to check in with Florry was doing this week, but I’m really glad I did as the two released tracks from the forthcoming new album are fucking incredible. Album opener “first it was a movie and then it was a book” is a Stonesy rager with a fuck yeah strut and guitars that make me giggle. What Florry is doing here is what lying ass music writers in the 90s made me think Royal Trux was doing before I heard them. Also it makes me unreasonably stoked to see bandleader Francie Medosch rocking an NRBQ shirt in one of their videos.
Shoutout to Saapato’s Brendan Principato for posting about this Loamer project recently. Other than being based in Philadelphia I don’t know much about it. But this new self-released joint, Travelogue, has breeze and beauty in spades—there’s twinkling evening morning/ambient sounds as well as bouncy and jazzy acoustic guitar excursions and interludes. There’s even a touch of slowcore here! It’s a fresh and lively mix that sounds really nice when played moderately loud. Loamer is a project I’ll be paying close attention to going forward.
Extremely stoked to see that BIll Orcutt is releasing a new Cyrus Pireh record on his Palilalia label. I discovered Pireh’s "transcendental shred electric guitar music" via his 2022 LP VISITOR. The music contained on that album was so unlike all other guitar music I’d ever heard and I sort of believed it was a once-in-a-lifetime feat that couldn’t be repeated. Thankfully Pireh returns with more extraordinary explorations for speed, strings and distortion on a label operated by someone who knows a thing or two about expanding the guitar’s vocabulary.
The Djrum record is absolutely phenomenal and I’ll echo the genius of New Mexican Stargazers