Originally released around the turn of the millennium, Musick to Play in the Dark featured a restarted Coil at bay, with original members John (later Jhonn) Balance (R.I.P.) and Peter Christopherson joined by synthesist/bassist Thighpaulsandra, and Drew McDowall (replaced by Rose McDowall on the second volume). These are long-form works, collections of mood pieces in several modes, and what’s interesting (and somewhat predictable) is that the patience displayed while shifting in between these modes creates a tension and space that feels… almost removed from music by a step, as if the performance decided to slowly back away from Coil at a respectful, totality-fearing distance (or maybe it was the psychic force of their music that pushed it all back)…

Limited CD and Blu-ray edition. 2021 release of Jean-Michel Jarre's ground-breaking New Year's Eve live performance Welcome To The Otherside which combined life-like concert visuals in VR with a real live studio performance, introduced a mixed-media approach which was the first of it's kind. The performance includes tracks from his recent Grammy-nominated opus Electronica, as well as new reworked versions of his classics, Oxygène and Equinoxe.

Silent Hill Sounds Box is a collection of the Silent Hill game soundtracks.
Strings played at the bridge in streaking glissandi. Atonal clusters, filled in down to quarter-tones. Thundering piano chords. And what horror score is complete without the standard tool of surprise, the orchestra hit? These elements, in part derived from the early work of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, which was itself featured prominently by Stanley Kubrick in The Shining, have become staples of horror scoring. While some of these elements appear in Akira Yamaoka's scores for the Silent Hill series, he focuses more on slowly building and maintaining an unsettling atmosphere than on startling the audience, much like the games themselves. The music is not only atypical as game music, but also atypical as horror music, and while it manifests elements of various genres such as trip-hop, industrial, and hard rock from time to time…

In September 2009, Lisa Gerrard and Klaus Schulze performed another tour in six European cities - Warsaw, Berlin, Amsterdam, Essen, Paris, and Brussels. This tour coincided with the release of Come Quietly, a joint project between Gerrard and Schulze that was released during the tour.

The latest suite by composer (and Stars Of The Lid co-founder) Adam Wiltzie took shape following a move north from Brussels into the Flemish countryside, although it was initially inspired by a recurring dream wherein “if someone listened to the music I created, then they would die.” The album uniquely evokes and evades the allure of oblivion, keening between beauty and ruin, forever unresolved.
Recorded at Wilzie’s home studio, with strings added in Budapest at the old Hungarian National radio facility (Magyar Radio), the tracks feel simultaneously intimate and infinite, unfolding vistas glimpsed in an inner space. Robert Hampson of English drone rock icons Loop mixed the album, further lending the music a sense of cinematic expanse and oblique hypnosis…

Outer Dark displays Bill Laswell's penchant for working out compositional ideas at great length, breaking the 20-minute barrier on both of the album's instrumental pieces. Entirely a studio creation, the music is the result of Laswell's (sounds) collaboration with Robert Musso (engineering, treatments) at Brooklyn, NY's Greenpoint Studios. The duo attempts to shape a composition out of the dark ether on the opening "Chakra." It begins with a buzzing sitar drone (providing the Eastern flavor common in Laswell's music) and strummed guitar emerging from the murk. Disappearing and returning throughout, the elements take on a sort of dizzying paranoia at song's end through their repetition. As for the ether itself, the musical backdrop is a drift of throbbing, amorphous ambience comprised of mildly chilling keyboard washes and tube-like breezes…

Klaus Schulze and Australian singer Lisa Gerrard (formerly of Dead Can Dance) proved to be an appealing combination on their studio recording Farscape, and they also work well together on Rheingold: Live at the Loreley. This was recorded at the Night Of Prog Festival at Loreley in July of 2008. We get over 131 minutes of music.

From MEDIUM, an electronic music label run by Masanori Nozawa, a writer/producer based in Utsunomiya City, Tochigi Prefecture, who has produced outstanding works centered on dance music/ambient chillout, a masterpiece dedicated to Japan's ambient scene has been released. Long-awaited appearance!

Prolific ambient innovator Steve Roach teams with Ph.D. shamanic practitioner / musician Mark Seelig to create a long-form piece of space-opening sound magic. Like the many fragrant and beautiful night-blooming plants which are host to mind-altering qualities, this 70-minute experience slowly blooms outwards with Mark’s vocal harmonic and Tuva-style overtoning intertwining within Steve’s zones and “terra” grooves. A slow motion magical blend is created in this nocturnal mist-filled realm. The power of the human voice is drawn forth in a primordial understanding and finds a perfect fusion with subterranean heartbeats, drones and zones swelling from the harmonic soil, gently urging the Nightblooming to increase its potency and allure…

This enigmatic multi-instrumentalist draws from the diverse culture and history of his Mexican homeland, as well as his early experiences playing in progressive-rock bands south of the border. Reyes combines flute, pre-Columbian instruments, and percussion with synthesizers and voice to cast a spell of ritualistic intensity. Like shadows from Mexico's sultry and savage past, his music has a dark quality to it that sometimes scares off the unprepared, but adventurous listeners will find plenty to admire in his evocation of jungles, jaguars, and Aztec rites. Though his albums are often difficult to find, most of his imported releases are well worth the extra effort and expense involved.
Reyes died Saturday, February 7, 2009, of a heart attack at his recording studio in Mexico City, he was 57.