Music makers

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.

A Dunedin solo project of Tom McCone, sometimes involving guitars but I’m really not sure how often. Quiet, abraded ambience.

Contemporary compositions for theatre are the main thing Arbor (previously I.Ryoko) is up to, with two collections of theatre soundtrack work available via his Bandcamp.