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 pandafuzz.com netlabel. They are improvised, but, as with many a great recorded improvisation, they bear the hallmarks of composition, of a considered structure, when listened to a second and third time. Take, for example, number 9 (they are named simply by number), one of the least percussive in the batch. It’s chaotic at times, but it’s a chaos as seen from a distance, not close up, all form, the turmoil below the surface.
More details at pandafuzz.com and archive.org.
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 (