Etheric Currents: Recent Episodes
Equinox Deschanel
The Etheric Currents podcast archives Equinox Deschanel's weekly Etheric Currents show from RadioSpiral.net. Catch up on anything you missed, or relisten to anything you'd like to hear again – or hear it the first time at your convenience.
Tonight's show features two new albums: a short EP from 4T Thieves (whose retirement from music seems greatly exaggerated) and a unique album from Konejo, The Moodygoer -- filled with ambience from many, many movies -- each excerpt about a minute of ambience from a movie, accompanied by an improvised soundtrack, plus a live Equinoctal, Stranger Around These Parts.
This episode's theme is equinoxes, a thing near and dear to Equinox's heart.
The feature for this episode is Max Corbacho's new release, Equinox, which is the first full hour and a quarter of the episode. The latter part of the episode includes a new five-part Equinoctal, Manhattanhenge, and Lucette Bourdin's Crossing the Equinox to round out the episode.
This episode features three new albums:
- In Utera, a new – and first! – album from AntiMonos. "His music is built from emotions, stories and experiments. Its objective is to take us to different worlds and to offer the listener to be at the center of this journey, to appropriate it to shape their own story."
- Obscure Matrix [Cyberwave Edition], a collaboration between Humanfobia, a "dark electronic, experimental, ghost computer music project from Rancagua, Chile", and α Ori, a "glitch, noise, experimental project created by Julien A. Lacroix from France". It's a fantastic ambient techno album.
- Ambient Box, by Rog (Roger Guerrero), which bills itself as ambient, but is a lot more, with great beats and a lot of complexity. "The concept for this material was conceived on the idea of mantras and prayers. Every sound was recorded through my daily experience in the environment I live, specially in these circumstances worldwide bringing a different layers of what I usually go for dance beats. I wanted to preserve a lot of techno elements in each track without losing what I wanted to bring to the table - meditation in a noisy city where sound pollution is real. I questioned myself how I can organize all these sounds and make them intimate and beautiful."
Tonight's episode premieres Shepherd Drift, a new album from the Kahvi Collective. Shepherd Drift is the 2019 artists compilation, and is almost three hours of great music. We excerpted about two hours worth for this episode, with everything from drifty ambience to serious beats. As always, Kahvi comes through with another exceptional album!
You know those days when you come home and look in the fridge and realize you forgot to go shopping, and still have to make dinner? That's today's show, except our library is full of tasty things; we've got a random selection of whatever sounds good tonight, with Loren Nerell, Shalmaneser, grum-pé, those Thom Brennan tracks we didn't play from last week, and a lot more.
This episode features a new album from Thom Brennan, "Typhoon", a very deep and complex ambient album from Oberlin, "The Dymaxion Variations" (so good our listeners insisted on staying late to have me play the track I'd left out for time!), and Faex Optim's space-age "Mercury".
This episode brings together a number of short releases from the Monotonik netlabel, from izmar, sleepy town manufacture, jiva, Akira Kosemura, bliss, planet boelex, lackluster, and Ollie Cram. More beats than usual tonight!
This episode, we feature multiple artists from the Monotonik netlabel, and feature two full albums from Troupe (It's Really Pretty Simple After All) and Tatsu (August). We'll also have the albums Sound of Subnatura, Hexual Ceiling, Emotions in a Box, and several other unnamed albums.
This episode centers around π , circles, and irrationality -- whether loving thing irrationally, or irrational motives; circular motion, or music that feels circular. There were technical issues during the broadcast, apparently occurring somewhere between the broadcast machine and the streaming server -- Gypsy Witch had to literally kill the connection before the show could be restarted – so the sections that were interrupted, restarted, or skipped were dropped from this recording.
Nothing like a little weirdness to go with an irrational number!
This episode, we feature two new albums: one from Kahvi, a theme and variations via remix of the title track, Heimferd, by HRYM, with remixes by 4T Thieves, Keiss, Mitoma, Murya, and Abdicant.
The second has an unusual and happy story attached to it: it's a new release from Thom Brennan, Eventide, which was recorded in the early 00's and lost in Thom's archives. He found it while cleaning up earlier this year, and has released it for us, almost 20 years later; it's still a fresh and lovely recording.
We round out our slightly-short second hour with a track from Thought Guild's Archiphonic release, to match the old but new tracks from Thom.
Tonight's show is a little different; rather than featuring a number of tracks by the same artist, I've instead chosen to select tracks that vaguely follow my own history of people I've met over they years in electronic music, from the earliest days of email lists and Usenet newsgroups right up to the current day: RadioSpiral, Discord, and Second Life.
We'll hear music from Team Metlay, CASSIEL, Thom Brennan, Loren Nerrell, Tantroniq, Cousin Silas, Mercaptan, Ozone Player, our own Gypsy Witch and ʞu¡0ɹʞS, and many more.
Tonight we have a new album from Kahvi, Flagstaff Mountains by Escher Adams, and two by Wolfgang Nachahmer – Tryptychon and Nachtwache. We'll also hear a pre-recorded (because I couldn't get my hardware to cooperate) Equinoctal, Converted to Light. I hope to be performing more Equinoctals as time goes on.
This episode features three artists from the Mahorka netlabel: Encased in Amber, Virtually J, and V.
Encased in Amber’s album, Parallel Worlds, is a real treat! Beautiful timbres, excellent performances, and a great melodic sense.
Encased in Amber says about themselves:
The music of Encased in Amber tells it’s stories
through an intricate mesh of melodies and texture.
Described as downtempo, ambient, and dreamy, Encased
in Amber puts forth the concept that each time a piece
of music is written it crystallizes what was felt and
processed in that moment of time, like a fossil caught
in amber.
What I can say is that it’s a great premiere album, and the artist assures me that there’ll be another release later this year.
It’s only a half-hour long, so we’ve got some unapologetic techno from Virtually J’s Autocracy Mage and some cool-down tracks from V’s 23.56.04 to fill out the rest of the podcast.
As always, I’ve linked to the Bandcamp pages for these albums; they’re pay-what-you-like, so support the artists to whatever extent you can.
Enjoy!
This episode features a new-to-me artist, The Pencil-Case, who combine spoken word, electronica, and a whole lot of other influences into a unique sound of their own on their album, Euclidean Fractales, described as “a blend between electronica, breakbeat, ambient, [and] abstract-hip-hop, with a post-rock sensibility”.
Since this gave us only one hour of music, I’ve paired it with an album by Chromadrift, The Story So Far, to fill us out to the second hour.
Lots of beats, and a nice wind-down in the second half. Enjoy!
Podcast listeners, we’d love to have you join us, either in Orlov in Second Life, or on our Discord server at radiospiral.chat. Etheric Currents broadcasts Mondays, 6-8 Pacfic time, on radiospiral.net.
This episode features the music of 4T Thieves — a great blend of electro beats and ambience.
4T Thieves (Nik Racine) is the founder of the Kavhvi Collective netlabel, one of the best places to find great electronica, and has been around since back in the Amiga demoscene in the ’90’s, with releases on Kavhi, Zenopolæ, Mahorka, Monotonic, among many. Racine has “semi-retired” from music making, concentrating on photography at the moment, but has produced a great catalog of releases; we’ll be listening to a selection from a number of different albums on this episode.
Kick back and let the beats wash over you. As always, support the artists by picking up albums from Bandcamp if you can, or from archive.org if you can’t — and pass it on!
Details – Circles – Halcyon Days – Glass – Electronic Tonalities – Electro Cool – Is Anybody There? – The Journeyman Project – The Singles – The Beginning – The Digital Lagoon – Winter – The Abyss – Fulcrum
This week’s episode features three albums from the Bumpfoot netlabel.
Abandoned mixes sampling, electronics, and ethnic percussion into music that is reminiscent of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Based on a set of photographs taken in Vanatau in 2014, this EP (one wishes it were longer!) “…explores abandoned places and their broken dreams. The fractured beauty of abandoned places can tell wonderful narratives.” The artist is Timeofhex (Cissi Tang), and this is (so far) her only available release.
- Abandoned
- The Spirits Are Restless
- Persistence of the Sea
- Light and Shadow
- The Spaces Beyond
Second up is Kevin Bryce’s Disremembrance, a more traditional electronica album covering a wide range of styles, from Boards-of-Canada-like dreaminess to Berlin School sequencer pulse. It’s a concept album, tracing the life of a young boy, from walking at night in a field, to grown up to be an astronaut, and launching into space.
- Rye in BC evening suns
- A walk in the forest
- Venus Plus Y
- The Decaying and the Painted
- AM/FM
- Disremembrance
- Spas N Junk
- I Make You a Spaceman
- The Road to Mars
Last is Tracy Chow’s Music for Monorails, an intriguing shoegaze/electronica mix; its ambient roots are a nod to Eno’s Music for Aitports.
- Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Skies
- Myakka
- Linlithgow
- Honour With a U
- FC Start
- Nil
- We Are Groot
- Voyage to Vinland
This episode is a bit shorter, but the three albums fit together so well that I didn’t feel that shoving in another unrelated fifteen minutes would really make things better. Enjoy!
A short episode this week, only one hour, as Equinox had an early-morning appointment and had to stop early.
This episode features the new Kahvi compilation, Ringworld. It’s an eclectic mix of tracks, and the episode is a selection from the two hours plus of music. We’ve chosen mostly beat-oriented tracks, but there’s a little abstract electronica mixed in.
- Pridefool – Dystopian
- Ideall – Faex Optim
- Avatar – Astrobotanist
- South West – Andrew Gatenby
- Unklar – Notstandkomitee
- Endorphin – O.donm
- Doppler Shift – Stellaterra
- Mofo (Full Monty Mix) – Bassoniq
- Mowk – 3 Mint
- High Up in the Sky – Kunds
- M.u.d – Tony and Eileen’s Wedding
- Crying Dream – The Oracle Model
On this episode of Etheric Currents, we’ll be hearing tracks from Forrest Fang, featuring his new album, Forever Cascades.
He says,
“Though my walks near the San Francisco Bay were initially a way for me to clear my head, I also found myself drawn to the cycles and cadences of tides and aquatic life that shifted gradually from season to season. I was seeking a similar underlying cadence or pulse in these pieces that would evolve over time.”
He has also been publishing (on Facebook) a series of photos taken during his walks; if you’re on Facebook, I recommend checking them out.
We’ll hear a selection of tracks from this album as well as a number of others from his discography. If you’re not familiar with his style, Fang combines Frippertronics, Asian instruments, gamelan, and heavy studio processing to build lovely headfuls of sonic sculpture. His titles reflect his interests in mathematics and his love of the natural world.
Tonight’s show will have fewer beats than usual, but plenty of rhythms. It’s a more lean-back-and-close-your-eyes episode this time –take a deep breath, let it out, and let’s listen.
This week’s episode is featuring music that combines many genres: jazz, electronica, latin, Bollywood, drum and bass, and whatever else the artists felt like into a nicely chilled mix that, for lack of a better word, I’m calling electro-cool.
In the first half we’ll be hearing from Nameless Dancers, Damare, Nienvox & 813, and Duis. Nameless Dancers features afro-beat percussion, tasty keyboards, a full-up brass section, and an outstanding drummer and bassist. Damare tilts more toward electronica, with excellent keyboard work, both electric and acoustic, and heavily manipulated samples. Nienvox and B13 conbines jazz and trip-hop into a dance-oriented mix, and, last, Duis mixes heavier electronics, jazz, and funk into a fascinating and unpredictable mix.
Due to unforseen circumstances, I had to push my break to a little later in the show, so I played a couple of unannounced tracks from Lavoura, a great band from Brazil, with their updated take on bossa nova and Latin jazz.
A minor emergency caused me to cut the second set a bit short, but the podcast episode will have the tracks we missed live: more Lavoura, a few fusion tracks from Martin Lowack’s SlowDrive, and then a last couple tracks from Lavoura and Nameless Dancers to round us out the the full two hours.
- Nameless Dancers: Morning Touches
- Damare: Hologram Summer
- Nienvox & 813: From the Bottom of Nowhere
- Duis: Duis
- Lavoura
- Ayizan
- Deep Safe/Alyeda
- Mirã
- Nu Steps
- Photosynthesis
- Martin Lowack: SlowDrive
This week’s episode features a new-to-me artist, Massimo Discepoli. Massimo wears a lot of hats: incredibly accomplished drummer, teacher, multi-instrumentalist. Nheap is the monickker under which he has released several CC-licensed albums, which allows us to play them here.
We’ll hear from the albums Skymotion, Clouds Under the Table, The Ambient Sides, Flying and the Silence, and Realight. All are available via Bandcamp, and can all be picked up for less than $5 US — a real bargain.
Nheap combines electronica and sophisticated jazz into a delicious package, with plenty of beats and a large helping of cool. I was stoked to have found these releases, and I hope you’ll find them as much fun as I.
Tonight’s episode features tracks that evoke space, space travel, or spaceflight, from several different netlabels, some more obscure than others.
Since this was a themed episode rather than a “selected tracks” one, we have a lot more links for you this week:
- Geolm’s Waves of Tomorrow, on Wavelike
- Fodor Balazs’s Astronaut Farmer, on Dusted Wax
- Point’s Human Music II, on Digital Diamonds
- Nøi2er’s Beyønd Reality (Vacuum) (LP), on Dusted Wax
- Liminal Space – The Remixes, on Kahvi
- Merlune’s Yellowstoned, on Dusted Wax
- Shortforms, on Kahvi
- Cosmic Lullabies, on Musictrade
- Niteffect’s Nip in the Bud (self-released)
- Hurley/Vnuk/Good, The Moss Garden Sessions (self-released)
- Abyssal Plains’s Chimera, on Kahvi
- Violent Public Disorderaz’s Sadness in Square, on Dusted Wax
- Geolm’s intriguing bits of life, on Wavelike
- split phase’s compendium, on Noisy Vagabond
Many hours of great music on those releases — enjoy!
This week’s episode has music from the Kahvi Collective’s One Synth and One Synth II releases, plus a few tracks from their Tangents release to make up the full two hours.
The One Synth releases have a gimmick: each track is done with a single synth, multiracked as necessary, and because we have a fair number of musicians (and a synth expert in the form of Mr. Spiral himself), we played a bit of Guess the Synth in chat and in Second Life, which you’ll hear a bit of in the voiceovers.
Gimmick aside, these are great tracks by excellent performers, and I think you’ll really enjoy this episode.
Etheric Currents Juta Takahashi’s “Miyabi” and Dusted Wax Chill
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Etheric Currents Camomille: Cycles
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This week’s episode features music from the Camomille netlabel. Camomille was founded in 2002 by Vincent Fugère “out of the love of ambient music, camomille tea and as a representation of what inspires him to do music”.
Camomille has (or perhaps had — there have been no releases for a while!) a very specific sound: “naive, idm electronics mixed with new age and emotional hip-hop”, which fits very well with RadioSpiral’s combination of ambience, beats, interest, and beauty.
The episode features a sampling of tracks from a number of releases:
- “Sanctity”, from Benefit of the Boomerang’s Legend of the Final Thread
- “Lilt” from the album of the same name by Shiftless
- “And Now My Love IS When We Say” from …Goodbye by Brainwash
- “Despite All Resolutions”, “van der Rohe”, and “Off the Eastern Shore”, from Cheju’s Despite All Resolutions
- “Yellow Leaf Fell from the Tree” and “The Window’s Open and My Hands Are Cold” from Echion
- “Amoureux” from Amoureux, by Mistrial
- “myopic” from myopic, by Melissa Welch (an outstanding long-form piece that flies through many genres)
- “The Mailbox” and “Space Dominates” from Shiftless (Ryan McKenney)’s Cloudburst
- “blessed”, “the day we met”, and “presets” from Xerxes’s Presets, and “Scar Tissue” from his Scar Tissue
- Line Noise’s Soul Clouds EP, with “Lexei londer”, “Pegasus”, and “Venutian [sic] girl passage”
- And finally, from the Featherfoil compilation, “Dubchant” by Plosive and “Philosophy of Time Travel” by Alex Young
All of these release are available on archive.org. Enjoy this upbeat and unpredictable set of tracks from Camomille!