Listening diary: weeks 3-4, 2026

RIP Ralph Towner. The only album of his I actually own is the quasi-new age Blue Sun from 1983, but the playing is gorgeous and the deluxe production hits the spot in the way that only 80s ECM can.

I bought Sherriff Lindo & The Hammer’s Ten Dubs That Shook The World after hearing a couple of tracks on Dublab. It’s fantastic, but also serves as a proof of concept for digi-dub in how bone-dry drum machine tones are transformed into swirling psychedelic clouds.

The aforementioned launch of New York Television took me back to Time Wharp’s 2022 album playful yet vulnerable Spiro World, and I fell in love with it all over again. There are whole worlds to explore here; I hear Steve Reich making jazz on a laptop but you may encounter something completely different.

My favourite media art project right now is Daniel Chamberlin’s Inter Dimensional Music, a mix series of deep drone, dub and black metal accompanied by a newsletter with Daniel’s idiosyncratic writings about Zen. This is the kind of work I’d never be able to find without the internet and yet paradoxically the economics of the internet make it hard to sustain, so you should chuck him a few quid if it adds as much value to your life as it does mine.