[ Hypnos Forum ]

For immersive Grassow releases: his recent collab with Tomas Weiss, Quiet Calling II, is amazing. I believe the drones were made from cellos. A lot of his older CDR releases are great, deep, drone works as well: Space, the Empty Sky, The Soil of Awareness, The Dreamquest Sessions. This used to be sold through Klaus Wiese's site, but I don't know if they're available anywhere now.

Lots of good stuff this year. I enjoyed a lot of releases already mentioned ("Phantoms," "Rigning," any of the many Roach albums), but to keep things interesting, here are 10 others that've also impressed me:

Arktau Eos - Ai Ma Ra
Ben Frost - By the Throat
Mathias Grassow - Transpersonal
Mathias Grassow & Tomas Weiss - Quiet Calling II
Igneous Flame & Disturbed Earth - Harmonium
Lustmord - [ The Dark Places of the Earth ]
Raison d'etre - The Stains of the Embodied Sacrifice
Robert Rich - Live Archive (hell yes!)
Bruno Sanfilippo - Piano Textures II
Troum - Eald-Ge-Stréon / Abhijñâ

I've got a huge soft spot for Kenji Kawai's scores for the Ghost in the Shell films.  Bizarre and beautiful; wonderfully atmospheric.

I'm eagerly trying to complete my Seren Ffordd discography.  Is there any chance recordings like Vajra Storm, Calling, and MooN will ever be made available (whatever the format)?

And wow, the audio samples for Gigi's new one are glitchy, indeed.

Hmmmm...where are you finding these samples, good sir?

Very stoked for this.

So, I purchased the mp3 versions of Due Acque, Lumin, and Mycosphere.  Great performances, but the ripping job was terrible.  Typically, for gapless albums like these, I'll drop the tracks into Goldwave, delete the small silence between them, and basically "stitch" them together into one unbroken mp3.  When trying this with these tracks, however, I noticed that the ends are "frayed," so to speak; that is, the waveform becomes distorted/jagged around the track transition points.  So, even after removing the tiny gap, I still get an annoying little pop/click when transitioning to the next track.  It's a thing I've noticed in damn near every track of each of the 3 concerts I purchased.  You can see some of the problem spots circled here.  On listening to the concert in its entirety, I've also noticed several pops/clicks in the middle of tracks. 

I'm getting really damn sick of paying for mp3s that haven't even been ripped/encoded properly (CD Baby has been a particularly egregious offender in this regard, but even Amazon has given me some bad apples).  To anyone else who's ordered the mp3 versions of any of these concerts, have you experienced similar issues?  To those who ordered the FLAC versions, do those seem to be problem free?  Anyone ordered FLAC and then converted to mp3?

I've managed to collect just about all of them by now.

Some favs:

The Sun is Falling in a Sea of Blood
Vertigo
Aludra (with L.E.M.)
Leteph (with L.E.M.)
The Light Sweeps All the Mist Away
As We Slip Away to Dream
Lifting the Veil (with Tau Ceti)
Borealis (with Tau Ceti)
Where the Green Ants Dream (with Perceptual Defence)
Suddenly the Birds Fell to Silence (with Tau Ceti & Netherworld)

I'm also quite fond of Tau Ceti's and Seren Ffordd's penumbra releases.

Good thread and good calls.  The piece that came immediately to my mind was:

Mathias Grassow - "The Empty Sky"

His 2-disc "Space" also achieves this effect nicely.

Most of Oöphoi's albums and EPs do this too, particularly "Athlit," "Nocturnes," (collab with Paradin) and, of course, "Celestial Geometries" with Tau Ceti.

The newest Lustmord, "[ The Dark Places of the Earth ]" (A retooling of material from "[ O T H E R ]" without the lame guitars) is a nice black slab of cosmic indifference.

I also really dig the new Igneous Flame/Achromus collab "Halo."

For the being-swept-away-in-a-cosmic-storm effect in particular, I like Phaenon - "Submerged," and I.Corax - "The Cadaver Pulse I: Sealed in a Radiant Larval Maelstrom" (if you can get over the title, the music's quite captivating, in a grab-you-by-throat-with-its-teeth-and-shake-you-around kind of way).

Oöphoi - "The Last Farewell"

One of the most achingly beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard.