Mats Gustafsson

Zelienople is a Chicago trio that takes their favorite bits of atmospheric sound from the last four decades and places them in one big pot of simmering ambience. Their music glides elegantly through cinematic dreamscapes, urban fog, stretched-out tone clusters, free-flowing improvisations, corrosive string ceremonies and detailed mantras of fragmentized noise. Given their sonic focus, most of their output is surprisingly moody and melancholic; never letting things to slip away too far from the organic base they refer to as home.

What they do is to construct stunningly delicate and convincingly toned down sound sculptures, slow building, trance inducing improv and texturally challenging drone music that is packed with so much emotion and darkly seducing beauty that it sucks the listener in time after time. We got in touch with Mike Weis and Matt Christensen to learn how they're capable of turning blurry shots of empty city streets or natural landscapes into immortal music.

One-man folk/psych/drone ensemble The Goner AKA Daniel Westerlund is unquestionably one of my favorite sonic discoveries of 2008. He delivers spiritual music that accompanies dreams, as it organically flows across the sky when you're walking to work and creeps up on you when you least expect it to. It's tempting to place his work along the lines of Hush Arbors and Six Organs of Admittance and although that's true you can also hear his background in the lo-fi scene. We got in touch with Westerlund to learn more about where he's coming from and what's next.

Round 2, Lee Jackson takes the lead

2008? Still haven't caught up; in fact I probably fell even further behind. 2007 was definitely a good year, with vets like San Francisco's Holy Mountain and North Carolinas's Three Lobed Recordings unleashing some of their most varied and unique slabs to date. And there were dozens of fine records on Not Not Fun, Important, Kranky, Digitalis, Soft Abuse, Locust, Drag City, Sublime Frequencies and on down the line that helped make '07 a little brighter. Speaking of Sublime Frequencies, must acknowledge the untimely passing of Charles Gocher due to complications from cancer in late February. Gocher played drums and sung some pretty messed up lounge songs for Sun City Girls, whose bassist Al Bishop co-owns and operates Sublime Frequencies. Needless to say, Sun City

I have to admit that it's pretty much impossible to keep up with everything great that is popping out of the CD-R underground these days. Given the amount of discs that come this way I am sure there's a whole bunch of great stuff passing by without me paying attention. Luckily, I didn't miss Elektronavn's Songs of Impermanence on the consistently great Ikuisuus label out of the land of lakes (Finland), as it's easily one of last year's most impressive discoveries. Elektronavn, AKA Magnus Olsen Majmon, is a Danish sound sculptor that shapes a claustrophobic, almost physical experience with haunting drones constructed from an arsenal of instruments such as clarinet, voice, guitar, organ, flute, gong, harp, field recordings and percussion. The music is pretty much impossible to lump into any particular genre but there is a strong folk vibe that runs through a lot of the music,

There are probably only a handful of bands and artists that I've been truly obsessed with, and one of them is unquestionably Lyttleton, New Zealand folk/noise/drone guitarist Roy Montgomery. I've ranked him as cult guitar hero number one ever since I first got acquainted with his music through the masterpiece Scenes From the South Island (Drunken Fish, 1995). As a matter of fact, I think bored everyone silly with rambling descriptions of how great that album is for a very long time. I occasionally forget why I like it so much, maybe because its textures are so deeply ingrained into my mind. Montgomery runs his meditative guitar explorations through a squadron of effect boxes, and on the other side we find a ghostly precise sonic equivalent to the striking landscape of this musically fertile country. Scenes From the South Island is the pastoral elegance of a hidden valley, the abandoned settlements of the harsh

KM up first

The practice of looking back on a previous year's cultural output seems to be almost a necessary ritual among those who pay attention to such things, but 2006 highlighted a whole range of developments that make such attempts harder and harder to countenance and conceptualize. In music especially, most of my serious-listening friends and acquaintances seem to agree that this past year was one real damn doozy, and even kind of dizzying in some regards. The sheer abundance of music (available via microlabels, self-releases, downloads in addition to the usual channels) made it nearly impossible for any individual to keep up with new developments in any but the smallest corner of the world of sound. Plus, I mean, the whole concept of time as a linear count-up and count-down thing is starting to get pretty fuzzy in our