Ambient Sunday returns sweltering slightly in the heat with three tunes from Choongum, Bonobo, and Ross Harper.
Choongum is from New York and offers, “Utopian rhythms for dystopian times.” And we all need a bit of that. The track is the delightfully hooky Eternal. Starts off with weird spaced rhythms and echoes. Beats come along in their hissy way. But the one note riff has got you by then. This is lucid psychedelic dreaming. An imagining of possibilities. A tummy tickle of a track. Skips the light fantastic without a care in the world. Annoyingly not on Spotify.
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Next, the massively influential Bonobo. TBH I can’t say I’d have picked him as the one who would have thrived and grown in stature from the early noughties downtempo boom. His stuff was good but not standout. Or so I thought. When you listen to this previously unreleased track from around the period of his debut Animal Magic album you wonder if your lazy, casual assessment of 20 years ago still holds water. Brighton Tapes 01 has beautifully clattering almost hip hop beats and a melange of other sounds from tin pan drums to sitars and the kitchen sink. This is very, very good.
And so to Ross Harper. A 90s rave veteran making downtempo music with elements of Jon Hopkins and Orbital. He shares a certain spaciness with Orbital and there’s a smidge of One Perfect Sunrise on Low (Edit) but this is no slavish pastiche. This is its own thing. A lovely downtempo / ambient track that ploughs its own furrow.
Of the track Ross says, “LOW is the single from my forthcoming downtempo album, all inspired by a poem I wrote that begins: “I see machinery, I see a man of light holding a key of light, surrounded by the huge machinery…”” This is a three minute downtempo psychedelic trip. It’s full of hazy sounds and dappled sunlight. A symphony of leaves waving in trees. Walk with me in the downtempo woodland.
