The original sleeve of Ernest Hood's 1975 album Neighborhoods describes the material within as a series of "musical pictures." Listen to the opening track, "Saturday Morning Doze," and you can hear why. Field recordings of chirruping birds and children playing, sourced by the late Portland artist, start quietly before fluttering synthesiser and gently strummed zither gather in their midst. In the original liner notes, Hood wrote of wanting to honour loved ones who played an important role in shaping the "comfortable memories" he was inspired by—"Saturday Morning Doze" evokes a long summer's day from Hood's own past. But for music so tied to personal history, it's remarkable how universal Neighborhoods, reissued by the New York label Freedom To Spend, still feels.
Hood remains an enigmatic and largely unknown figure—Neighborhoods was his only album, and he pressed it himself in limited quantities. He had played in jazz groups with his brother Bill and the renowned band leader and saxophonist Charlie Barnet. But in the early '50s he contracted polio, which resulted in a year-long stint in an iron lung; he relied on a wheelchair to get around. Confined to Portland, Hood started experimenting with field recordings, slowly gathering the material that would imbue Neighborhoods with such indelible sepia tones.
The album depicts a series of American suburban idylls. The majority of "At The Store" is a conversation between two boys at a shop, then on a porch, as cars pass on the street, all of which is bookended by a lilting keyboard melody. "After School" begins with pitch-bent synth notes, which fade as children mockingly sing to the tune of "Ring A Ring O' Roses." "August Haze," a languid track of crickets, shimmering strings and yet more scrawling electronics, reminds us that Hood was living through the twinkling cosmic jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. But Hood's perspective is less celestial; it has the cosiness of fading sunlight in a backyard.
What's striking about Neighborhoods is not only its fusion of proto-ambient, jazz, and musique concrète, but Hood's own steadfast commitment to exploring "memories of time past." Each recording appears carefully chosen for its emotional resonance, like the funfair sounds and fireworks found on "Night Games." Often, you sense that the environmental sounds came first, with the music scored around them.
"The games we played, the mocks, the terminology and the feelings we experienced as youngsters are tantalizingly familiar," wrote Hood. "If I didn't exactly capture your territorial terms forgive me and just let the mood suffice." Hood does himself a disservice, because the album is more than just a collection of moods, however lovely and life-affirming. Listening to Neighborhoods feels like thinking of a memory for the first time.

Work, eat, meet, repeat. A record of its own kind, hovering between dystopian reflections and confessional lullabies. Driven by strong lyrics and disrupted by rough heavy distortions and gentle sweeps, Afar dismantles every idea of genre and style. Always present, never in doubt, completed by two fantastic remixes from Caleesi and Michael Mayer. »Rational Ecstasy« is an exceptional journey of unforeseen turning points.

Songs composed in 2020 for an art installation in San Francisco
Chromatherapy
Light and color inspired artwork by Erik Otto

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Split Exhibition with Liz Tran
December 12, 2020 – February 27 2021
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Heron Arts
7 Heron Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
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Soundscape & live musical performance by: Connor O’Sullivan
youtu.be.com/watch?v=beT6ZmupLb0

In 2017 Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer traveled together to the Åland Islands (an archipelago that is host to around 6,500 islands) in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland. They headed to the islands with the intention of helping two friends (mother/daughter duo Jannika/Sage Reed) barn raise a small inn named Hotel Svala in Kumlinge (a municipality consisting of a small group of islands and a population of about 320). The idea was that, once completed, Svala would host artist residencies and workshop programs, creating a direct link between the islands and the USA.
The concept of recording music there came about as Honer & Chiu learned more and more about the islands. They were taken by the serene and strange quality of the place. The sun doesn’t set in the summer (and barely rises in the winter). The network of miniature islands is traversed by ferry which, according to Chiu, “casts a surreal horizontal movement through space and time, with islands shifting into and out of periphery, totally still and calm, yet always in motion.”
In 2019 they were awarded a grant from the Department of Culture to return and perform a concert at the Kumlinge Kyrka, a 14th century medieval church adorned with incredible frescos. The concert was recorded and became source material – along with... improvisations on viola and electronics, pipe organ, pump organ, piano, synthesizers, field recordings and voice memos, all captured across both their trips at various locations on the archipelago – from which they meticulously crafted a post-script in the form of 'Recordings from the Åland Islands'.
Easing listeners into the feeling of the place, the album’s opening track “In Åland Air” is a dream-like haze that slows time, invoking the feeling of descending by plane onto the archipelago, a place Chiu recalls as “lush with a gentle, brackish breeze...” On “Snåcko,” a track named for the island next to Kumlinge, the music becomes a transportive portrait, painting in sound “the romantic and gentle atmosphere of the forests in Åland — a place where your eyes slowly adjust to the rainbow-colored moss covering granite boulders. Walking around, you find the forest floor blossoming with blueberries, currants, and flowers...”
The longest and darkest movement in the collection, “Archipelago,” encapsulates “the experience of being surrounded in the vast network of islands” with a dense cloud of slowly modulating string layers, improvised by Honer in an empty swimming pool at Svala. “The heaviness of the track,” says Honer, “is a reference to the deep darkness experienced during the Nordic winter days.” But the plaintive atmosphere of that penultimate piece is succeeded with the triumphant final movement of the album, “Under the Midnight Sun,” which bellows forth like a vibrant chorus of melodious sighs, echoing classic sounds from Jon Hassell’s 'Vernal Equinox', or Franco Battiato’s 'Clic', or Brian Eno’s 'Another Green World'.
Just as two eyes, two ears, and two halves of a brain work together to create a memory, on their duo debut, Honer and Chiu’s collective pallet produces a vivid three-dimensional hyperreality of painterly tones and textures – bright and kaleidoscopic, but with a deeply warm, earthen resonance. The music evokes a powerful sense of place, transporting and immersing listeners in the other-world of the Åland Islands. And though they achieve this in beautifully natural, organic manner, Chiu & Honer agree this album is quite unlike anything they’ve made before, and likely unlike anything they’ll make in the future.
...about Chiu & Honer...
The combination of modular synthesizer and viola is an uncommon one, but Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer manage to create a distinctive dyad that comes together with grace and truth. They’ve accomplished this by bringing much more than their respective axes to the table. Years of collaboration, cohabitation, shared experience, and separate but equally inspired commitments to utilitarian cultural work bind their disparate timbres together into a singular aesthetic reality.
The two artists met, appropriately, as members of a large ensemble performing Terry Riley’s “In C,” for an annual concert organized by Bitchin Bajas at Chicago modern music hub Constellation. Honer & Chiu had been living and working in Chicago for a long time, both active members of the notoriously interconnected improvisational and experimental music scenes, but they were somehow previously unintroduced. Chiu’s musical CV to that point included work with bands like Icy Demons and Chandeliers, but he was mostly known for his visual and graphic design work as Some All None. Honer had primarily worked as an instructor in Chicago, as well as a member of the ensemble Quartet Datura. In 2014, a year after their first collaboration, together, they decided to migrate to Los Angeles to continue developing their respective careers and crafts in sunnier climes.
Relocation to Los Angeles has proven to be fruitful for both artists. Honer has since become a first-call session player for the likes of Adrian Younge and Beyoncé. She’s also played on recordings by Chloe x Halle, Angel Olsen, Fleet Foxes, and Stanley Clarke, among others, including five recordings with Grammy nominations. Along with her session work, Honer is on the music faculty at California State University. Chiu has expanded his visual work in numerous capacities, in addition to becoming an active intersectional community organizer, and refocusing his musical practice to electronic music composition and sound art. He’s also become an Assistant Professor at Otis College of Art & Design; has exhibited/performed at The Getty Center, LACMA, and other distinguished locales; has become a resident programmer for Dublab; and has generated a strong unit of regular musical collaborators that includes Celia Hollander, Booker Stardrum, Ben Babbitt, Dustin Wong, Takako Minekawa, and Sam Prekop.

some unreleased tunes that will not only warm you up on these cold winter nights, but potentially see the light of day in a future release or two in 2023.
enjoy and have a merry christmas and happy new year!

Spacetalk reissue this privately-pressed album from 1985.
Jake Hottell's 'Break The Chains' is suitably cosmic and emotive, with Hottell cannily fusing gentle drum machine rhythms and dreamy synthesizer motifs; influenced, he says, by "a love of the contemporaneous new age output of former jazz label, Windham Hill Records."
Re-mastered from the original master tapes, while extensive new liner notes shed light on the remarkable musical and personal experiences that inspired Hottell to create an obscure, overlooked classic.

黄山气候独特，天气预报难以做到非常准确。

Reserve your CD (+immediate download) here:
ultimae.bandcamp.com/merch
“Terrene” stands as the first musical encounter between Danish and French composers Henrik Laugesen and Vincent Villuis respectively known as Lauge and AES Dana.
A cornucopia of evanescent pads and elaborate rhythms with a distinctive downtempo vibe; a daedal story taking one on a magnetic peregrination through dense and contrasted sonic geographies, picturing the notion of temporality and space.
This mighty 10 track album elicits emotions and feelings and will leave you full of moxie!
released December 7, 2022
Written & Produced by Henrik Laugesen & Vincent Villuis
Audio Mastering by Vincent Villuis at Ultimae Studios (studios@ultimae.com)
C&P 2022 Ultimae
© all rights reserved

Moby has announced that he will release a new two-and-a-half-hour ambient album on New Year’s Day.
The producer will start 2023 by sharing the lengthy new record, titled ‘ambient23’, which was, he revealed, made “almost exclusively made with weird old drum machines and old synths.”
Over the last few months, Moby has shared a number of posts detailing his process in creating the album and sharing updates on its progress with fans.