Music makers

A project of Tom McCone, who also records ambient music as Solipsist, Asleep. Expect a varied combo of hazy drones, strummed guitar and different synthy bits.

Jimmy Solórzano is an electronic musician and sound artist from Guadalajara, México, based in Auckland. His album of soft synth work, Tonos (2021), was mastered by contemporary ambient titan Taylor Deupree.

This Dunedin duo made two collections of ambient music. One says all sounds are piano and field recordings, and the other sounds like it could well be the same. Giles Thacker is another alias of the musician you may know as Fuckault.

A pretty much anonymous producer with three albums on Bandcamp assembled from field recordings. Perhaps more traditionally musical than you might expect, with rhythms and tuned passages among the more psychedelic sections.

A multi-disciplinary artist (as in arts world) whose musical output has often been quite pop-like, Hamilton has one album of instrumentals that is diverse but a decent candidate for ambient listening.

K-Group is the solo project of Paul Toohey, formerly a member of “geological drone ensemble” Surface of the Earth as well as Omit collaborator. While arguably un-easy listening, K-Group surely appeals to certain ambient listeners.

In the early 2000s Christchurch’s Chris Andrews made guitar-based ambience with some occasional turns to motorik beats.

Jess Chambers is a singer-songwriter who has made more ambient songs in recent years under this fitting alias, using layers of synths and her own voice as sound sources.

Textural keyboard music ex-Auckland, now in Melbourne. Tim also ran the CLaudia and Fictitious Sighs labels, both of which documented interesting instrumental and improvised music, mostly in the first decade of the century.

Antony Milton, label head of PseudoArcana, uses the alias Paintings of Windows for “site-specific” releases that are unsurprisingly often heavy on the field recordings, but equally often include quiet instrumentation. The field recordings are generally recorded to tape on a Walkman.