Kelpe and Klimek: from the faded to the filmic

Cambio Wechsel is the third album from Kelpe (pictured), who, as you can see from that link, needs to update his website.

There's plenty of head-noddingness to the ambience, especially with the thin Woodstockian groove of After Gold and the Prefuse-infused buzz bass of Eye Candy Bath.

The seaside cheefulness of The Blankout Agreement is a little underwhelming, but spiralling from psychedelia and radiophonic samples to post-rock hip hop in the course of one album is pleasing - in fact, it's frequently scrumptious.

The whole effect is like listening to a postcard from a long forgotten era, and you can just make out the words Music Has The Right To Children on the postcode. I just wonder if it's sometimes a little too slight and faded.

Klimek also throws an album at us this week, in the expansive shape of Movies Is Magic.

It's filmic. Crikes, I've called Klimek 'filmic' before, but that's the whole point of this album. The idea of producing an album of cinematic audio vistas is not new - just ask David Holmes - but this is epic stuff. It's pretty much what I imagine it's like to hear the whole universe at once.

Tracks like Pathetic And Dangerous and the fabulously-titled Exposed To Life In It's Brutal Meaninglessness sway and wash against the surround-sound speakers.

Others, such as opener Abyss Of Anxiety (Unfolding The Magic), are darker, danker, and much less multiplex, giving this album much more crunch than ambient music often offers.

Syntheme's winsome shit, Kompakt's ambient 'shosts' and Circlesquare's dullness

I'm not sure if Lasers N Shit is the best name ever, or a lukewarm sigh of a title. Either way, it's the debut LP from Syntheme (pictured).

The acid overlord, who has been squelching her trousers off on a series of 12"s, doesn't pull any rabbits from any hats. Instead she sticks to familiar ground: 4/4 drum sequences, a Roland 303 going ninety-to-the-dozen and, er, apart from a couple of downbeat diversions, that's it.

But that's the trick with Syntheme. It sounds simple, like the spirit of Phuture channelled through Squarepusher's cheerier side. Don't be fooled. It's well-programmed, gurning, glitterball techno that's as much for the bonce as for the tootsies. It's magic.

Other releases now... This year's slab of smashingness from Kompact Records hit recently. Pop Ambient is a blissed-out electronica series ideally suited for curious music lovers unsure of where to start in ambient's sweeping, sprawling, snoring pantheon.

It's both uncompromising and accessible, from the opening fanfare of Klimek's swooning True Enemies And False Friends, through the insistent underwater iciness of popnoname's Nightliner, to Tim Hecker's shimmering epic Shosts in Silver. Yes, "shosts". This album is recommended for late nights snuggled up to your headphones, your pet goldfish and a bucket of benzodiazepine.

Finally, and I'm really late writing about this, I wanted to mention Circlesquare's Songs About Dancing And Drugs. This collection of melancholic electropop took five years to arrive, and some of it (but not all) is worth a listen - especially single Dancers' hesitant funk and pining guitar.

"I'm not sure why you should listen to it. But I think it would be a good idea if you did." Not my words, but that of Circlesquare on this slightly dull YouTube interview.

Snoring pantheons? Benzodiazepine? Slightly dull? I've ended this piece on a downer. Bring back Syntheme, with her jolly lasers and her, um, winsome shit.

Merzbow makes crap an art form (that's meant to be a compliment, by the way)

Merzbow used to construct art from rubbish before he pioneered Japanese noise music.

If you don't know, Japanese Noise Music is Japanese, it just sounds like noise, and some people think it's music. I'm not sure where the name comes from.

Anyhoo, now Merzbow makes art from the unwanted noises we often cast away: static, radio fuzz, analogue glitches and machine hums. Still art from rubbish, then.

It's a sound that has served him well: he has a discography that's as long as your arm, but only if you're some long-armed freak who's spent too much time on the rack in your Uncle Cranford's secret torture chamber.

The latest ambient addition to that discography is an album called Higanbana, which literally translated means "you told me this was like Sigur Ros, I want my money back." If you're the sort of oddbod who hears music in the urgent clatter of a train or enjoys scratched muzak CDs stuttering over the speakers in Poundland, then you need this album. If, on the other hand, that sort of thing sounds like an audio atrocity, I'll never be able to persuade you that this extreme, experimental, harsh landscape is actually quite a nice place to visit.

Onto other things. Brighton's Square Records is the new home for iTAL tEK, and thank bigbeat for that because the eponymous title track from his new Deep Pools EP is my track of the week. If I did a track of the week. Which I don't.

A slow moving, spacious take on dub techno, with wheezing synths and heroin-flattened echoes of William Orbit's Water From A Vine Leaf, this record drips with the sort of hope lacking from his darker material previously offered on parent label Planet µ.

Like spacious? Klimek's Dedications is brooding and filmic, which make sense with titles like For Stephen Speilberg And Azza El Hassan. This mile-wide ambience is more suited to the plains of America than its home in Germany, and will appeal to fans of Deaf Center. (You can download a Klimek video by clicking here.)

And finally, a bit less minimal and slightly the worse for it is Vessel's Pictureland 01. It's lovely to have a chill-out album that doesn't have a picture of bloody Ibiza on the cover, but I don't think this release will change the fact that Vessel will eventually kick the bucket and his epitaph will be "'im off the Pet Shop Boys' Back To Mine complilation".

It's a fine way to remembered, but not as fine as making art out of a binful of crap.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: ENO GUITAR, REVIEWS MASSONIX