April showers bring forth perfect days for warm blankets of ambient music to accentuate the tap-tap-tapping of raindrops on your windows.  Although never really that exciting, or pleasant weather-wise, I like April as a month of transformation.  Clearly marking the end of winter and the beginning of spring, life reborn anew.  Taxes are out the door, the house needs to be cleaned, and beautiful girls come out of hibernation wearing miniskirts.  These following relaxing downtempo/ambient/house tracks encapsulate various qualities of spring.

This first track is from Mount Kimbie, a somewhat folksy ambient outfit based in London, from their debut EP Maybes, out on Hotflush recordings.  I first heard this track on DJ Koze’s , it was a great opening for his set, and then when Jakub posted it on ISO50 along with my Shigeto video, I had to pick it up.  It begins with a rainy, as Jakub put it “foggy PBS sound” and leads into a wam, rolling baseline with almost bluesey-sounding vocals.  Beautiful track.

This track from Marsen Jules is actually intended to musically express summer, but this can definitely speak to those spring days where when it suddenly stops raining, the sun comes out and everything seems to reflect the sunlight in a misty haze.  The album is aptly titled Red, Green, Blue & Other Summer Feelings, and this track can be picked up for free over on .  Marsen Jules is an alias of German producer Martin Juhls, an attempt to capture emotion or atmosphere in abstract forms of ambient music.  He makes frequent appearances on Kompakt‘s Pop Ambient series, of which I am a big fan.

This track by sounds like watching some sort of nature documentary about micro-organisms, has a very organic quality to it, kind of reminds me of the way things sort of pick up during the springtime.  ISAN stands for Integrated Services Analogue Network, they’ve been around since 1996, and have a long history of releases on many notable labels like Mute and Warp.

Finally, this track was recommended by my friend Ryan while we did a duo mix session yesterday, I’ll post up a bunch of his excellent deep house and tech house recommendations later in the week.  This track by Move D hit me like a train…a Magnetically Levitated Train.  It sounds like you’re actually taking a ride in a futuristic train, but the sounds could certainly also be associated with movement, progression or growth, making it a good pick for those rainy spring days.  The 17-minute long track is from Let’s Call It a Day, a collaborative effort between Move D and Benjamin Brunn.  Ryan described it interestingly, as sort of a hybrid of deep house and ambient, sort of pushing the envelope as to what constitutes each as a genre.

Mount Kimbie – William

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ISAN – Cinnabar

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Move D – Magnetically Levitated Train (click inside progress bar if it wont start)

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Posted in Music Posted by Alex on Apr 15 2009 11:00 am

Tags: Ambient, Hotflush, ISAN, Kompakt, Marsen Jules, Mount Kimbie, Move D, Mute, Spring, Warp