Month: January 2021

John McCaffrey has been creating blissful music under a variety of guises over the years. He started in a duo, Clickits while in the UK, moved to Melbourne and has been creating incredible sounds that weave modern classical, folk and electronic stylings under the name Part Timer, Upward Arrows and Scissors & Sellotape. He recently got in touch with a series of works created/compiled during lockdown last year, so I thought it time to focus on his amazing work. I’d forgotten about some of his releases as I put this together and it’s been a real pleasure to reacquaint myself with his work. I hope you love it as well.

An excellent new release to start 2021. Wil Bolton returns with ‘Cumulus Sketches’ , an album of fragile, drifting ambient structures for daydreaming and cloud-watching. Pastoral analogue synthesizer melodies and effects pedal textures are intertwined with rural and urban environmental sounds recorded in South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka. As well, the excellent Hibernate label with a series of releases available online for a charitable cause.

In our annual look at the best ambient works of 2020, we reveal our Top 100 releases. We conclude with Part 5 – counting down 20 to Number 1.