At close to eight minutes in length, “Tenuto” by Benjamin Dauer both seems to change and stay the same during its somewhat extended droning. The piece drones, but it isn’t a drone, at least to the extent that most drones aren’t drones, which is to say the extent to which, after just a small bit of observation, it becomes evident that there is an enormous amount of activity happening inside the drone.
The term “drone” is like a sausage wrapper, lending a sense of uniformity to what is, in fact, often a chaotic mix of constituent parts. Here that chaos includes a seeming orchestra, high notes like a flute solo, fluttering activity like a string section, a deep probing noise like nothing so much as an organ.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/benjamindauer. More on Dauer, who is based in Washington, DC, at benjamindauer.net.
Chords hover, downcast and remote, the space between them of equal weight with the notes, a creaky silence, a silence that bears the slightest fading whiff of a previous key, one that lingers in the air, a waveform protesting its own mortality. They have the clustering hunched introspection of a Morton Feldman piece, and the spectral aura of, more recently, a Kenneth Kirschner. They are the nearly three dozen miniatures that comprise Erich Steiger‘s Avant Forte, recently released for free download by the 
What does the title of Outra-G‘s Light Drops refer to? Is the “drops” a verb, and the title intended to suggest a just-pre-evening mode? Does the phrase have poetic aspirations, implying a kind of visual precipitation? Even money should be placed on “drops” coming from its lounge/hip-hop meaning: the audio loop as mood-inducer; the “light” thus qualifies it by actively pushing that mood to the background. There’s much to recommend this collection, the slow-pulse beat of “Rayleigh Scattering,” the plucked-wire accents on the rhythm-box-driven “Diving Bells.” 
If ambient music were a Renaissance tradition, it might sound like the work of Spheruleus, aka Harry Towell. Towell, who resides in Lincolnshire, England, makes a kind of British parallel to the hazy Americana of the Boxhead Ensemble — that would be a fine comparison, or at least a more useful one, if Boxhead’s music was as widely heard as it deserves to be. Suffice to say that Boxhead make country music minus anything that resembles a riff or a melody — theirs is the froth, the aroma of country music, the rustle of used instruments left in a shed, touched gently by passing ghosts. 
There’s “Mikale,” in which a jackboot rhythm gives way to a jangle of sliding notes and elastic dubby effects (