René van der Wouden’s Universal Quiet is a collection of retro synth music that is a treat for fans of 70’s Berlin School music.van der Wouden is a Dutch composer and synthesist who describes his style as retro, Berliner Schule and progressive. van der Wouden builds on Klaus Schulze’s pioneering mid-seventies sound, modernizing it and [...]

 

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Homegrown Sounds, best known for producing unique pads/textures through its range of sample CDs, has released Astralis, a VSTi designed for making complex sounds easy to produce.
Description:
If interplanetary excursions are your thing, you will love Astralis, a synth to loose yourself in. Astralis is packed with soundscaping features, and is an intuitive. hands-on sound design [...]

Eastwest has announced the debut of Zero-G and Xfonic’s SoundSense Series. The series features four sample libraries: Ambiosis, Trance Inducer, Technomatik, and Chilled Grooves.
Descriptions:

Ambiosis is a great resource for producers who need to apply texture, mood, and ambience across a wide variety of genres. Ambiosis was created by highly acclaimed electronic musician and samplist Ian [...]

H.G. Fortune has released the upgraded ProtoPlasm 21, which has been completely reworked. New features include Super Modulation Morphing (SMM), key-control on Delay (LKO), LFO modulation matrix and a dedicated Attack Oscillator it enhances it’s main purpose as synthesizer for vivid textures, soundscapes and pads.
384 patches are included.
Here’s a video preview that features the sounds [...]

Podcaster Jim Nye sent me some info recently about his Idyllic Music Podcast:
Idyllic Music Podcast features songs by independent artists working outside the mainstream. Music you are unlikely to hear anywhere else. Idyllic Music can be Trip Hop or Ambient, Chillout, Dub or Downtempo. In short, headphone electronica.
What is the new “alternative” music? A strong [...]

 

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Obsessive Surrealism, the latest CD by Parallel Worlds, is a synth lover’s dream.
The release is the fourth CD by Parallel Worlds, the first on the DIN label. We’ve been impressed by previous DIN releases, and Obsessive Surrealism is no exception. The CD is a dense blend of very electronic-sounding elements with very organic-sounding [...]

Monkey Straddle, the debut CD of Nnnj (”inch”) on The Agriculture records, is an interesting downtempo blend of influences ranging from ambient to jazz to IDM to world music.
Nnnj’s music falls into the broad downtempo category - but the tracks on Monkey Straddle are some of the most interesting examples of the genre that we’ve [...]

Paul Avgerinos is a prolific composer and performer. He’s released a series of ambient/new age CDs, played on other artist’s releases, and composed for film and TV. Avgerinos’ latest release, Gnosis, falls into the world of ambient and new age music, but has also has a strong Greek influence.
The title Gnosis [...]

The latest sample library from Bitword, Wavefront for Reason, is a massive, overwhelming ReFill.
It’s produced by Marc Van Bork, the producer/programmer behind Sonic Data Volume One and Prosamples Platininum Vapor Virtual Synthesizer. Van Bork’s clearly got an ear for creating cutting-edge electronic sounds.
We called Wavefront massive and overwhelming, and it is - both in scope, [...]

Lush is a Windows VST pad synth designed for creating ambient or spacey atmospheres in any kind of music. It is designed for creating slow, evolving, interweaving soundscapes, but it’s capable of turning its hand to bass and lead sounds as well.

Features
Four oscillators, three with sine, saw, triangle pulse (pwm) white and pink noise waveforms [...]

em:t records has created a name for itself by releasing a steady flow of quirky, interesting ambient/downtempo disks. They’ve managed to maintain a high level of quality with their releases, by taking interesting music and packaging it with great photography and design.
em:t’s recent gaudi:test 1105 Continuum is no exception. The cd brings together Gaudi’s electronic [...]

Moby’s latest, Hotel, is a two cd set that delivers some of the most intimate work that he’s ever done.
For Moby, the idea of a hotel room is a metaphor for life. Everything happens in a hotel room - business, family life, all types of intimate relations - yet as soon as we leave, all [...]

Martin Ayres‘ Cellosphere is unlike any other cello music we’ve heard. Ayres creates electro-acoustic music, using ‘distortion, feedback, surges and mixes’ to create sonic environments from his cello and violin playing. Ayres music is modern electro-acoustic music that explores ambient soundscapes.
The tracks on Cellosphere are serene dronescapes, falling somewhere between the tape-loop canons of Fripp [...]

Cycling ‘74, a software company based in San Francisco, today announced the release of Momentary Incursions, the fourth volume in the Cycles series of audio source libraries.
Produced and edited by sound designer Ron MacLeod, Momentary Incursions consists of hits, events, effects and transitions for use when a more finite punctuation is needed. This collection of [...]

Spectrasonics has released new updates of their award-winning virtual instrument plug-ins Trilogy and Atmosphere that now include syncable LFOs The plug-ins are available for registered owners as a free download from the Spectrasonics website.
“We’re very pleased to be able to offer our customers’ number one requested feature to these instruments as a free update,” said [...]