The musical branches have begun to bloom.  With over 100 spring titles already announced, 2015 continues on pace to be one of the best years in recent memory.  From fascinating frontrunners to left-field surprises, we’ve got your guide to what’s next.  As usual, if you just want the sounds, head straight to our News page; but for a more in-depth look, stay right here.  We’ve made top picks in each category and provided links to every release; this article is your one-stop shop for spring music!

Ambient

Rich’s Pick:  Strië ~ Struktura (Serein, 6 April)
Iden Reinhart’s third winning album takes up where 2012’s Õhtul left off, but is even more abstract than its predecessor.  Given its inspiration – the paintings that lend the tracks their titles – this comes as no surprise.  The joy is in the matching of art and sound.  Hints of lost violin passages, stray…

A few years ago I picked up Bestiardio, a unique recording from Angélica Castelló that to this day remains thoroughly unclassifiable.  Sonic Blue may be easier to classify, but is no less fascinating; it’s a (mostly) underwater soundscape enhanced by the sub-contra bass, colloquially known as the supergreatbass recorder.  Originally commissioned for a festival network, Sonic Blue is now poised to reach a larger audience, thanks to this vinyl release.

The field recordings come from Castelló and a small group of friends, who were led around Norway’s Lofoten Islands by a seasoned guide.  When it comes to making hydroponic recordings, it helps to have someone aware of the local sonic sources, in the same way as it helps to have a guide in the Amazon.  Some spots are simply richer than others, and Heike Vester is particularly interested in whales.  While this is not a whale-woodwind recording like David Rothenberg’s…

Women and Sweet Choices
This week’s guest host is Nesa Azadikhah a sound artist, music producer and Dj living In Tehran. Azadikhah has shown work both in Dubai and Iran and brings her sounds to Resonance104.4FM.

Broadcasts today March 10th at 21hrs-21.:30, repeats Thurs 4pm on 104.4FM in London – Listen online via the RadioPlayer

Tackling William Blake, Madeline L’Engle, Mayan culture, solar winds, WWII, 9/11 and more on a single set is a daunting challenge, but somehow Elizabeth Anderson manages to pull it off.  It helps that the majority of the album is instrumental, as lyrics would threaten to undo the entire endeavor.  Instead, the listener may be led either by the liner notes or by impression, the latter choice a reflection of Anderson’s own mode of composition.  Her swaths of color operate as tone paintings, conveying mood and eschewing the didactic.

The earliest of these compositions was written twenty years ago, the latest only last year, but the album flows well as a whole.  There’s no clear line of demarcation; even the track order follows a non-linear path.  When one delves into abstraction, one manages to avoid the pitfalls of time-stamped composition.  To paraphrase, three of 1994’s top songs were by Ace of Base…

Editor’s Note: Our forum on gender and voice comes to a close today—and what a forum it has been! Last week AO Roberts talked about speech synthesis and why the robotic voices are so often female. That post followed Art Blake’s, where he talked about how his experience shifting his voice from feminine to masculine as a transgender man intersects with his work on John Cage. Before that, Regina Bradley put the soundtrack of Scandal in conversation with race and gender. The week before I talked about what it meant to have people call me, a woman of color, “loud.” The post that started it all?  Christine Ehrick‘s selections from her forthcoming book, on the gendered soundscape.

This week Robin James returns to SO! to round out our forum with an analysis of how ideas of what women should sound like have roots in Greek philosophy. So, lean…

A new record store (Rough Trade) just opened in NYC, and this is exactly the sort of new record one might hope to discover in the front racks: intricate, creative, pleasing to the eye and ear.  The Coke bottle vinyl is an appealing factor: hard plastic backed by a hard plastic sleeve containing the cover art.  An additional tiny touch is a thin, clear postcard containing the track listing; one almost misses it until one removes the record from the sleeve.

Bertucci has been honing her skills for many years in multiple arenas, including photography, video and sound installation.  The latter discipline comes to mind when listening to Resonance Shapes. The sounds seem to have been assembled in vertical layers rather than in horizontal layers, providing the impression of walking through a room even when sitting still.  Sounds move into the foreground and fade into the background, untethered by…