Chanel Beads make lo-fi indie pop that is imaginatively produced with an abundance of strings and samples inspiring some critics to call it ‘ambient pop’. Their second album Your Day Will Come, which was also the title of their first album, is a delight. It’s full of androgynous and inventive pop songs to cheer your heart. The songs tend to be short and then end suddenly, as if chief Bead Shane Lavers has just exhausted all his ideas for that song – a lot goes into each song.
Guitarists Tomo Katsurada and Jonny Nash have created a beautiful album, At the Emerald Pool, of ambient shoegaze that continues the form both have enjoyed with a string of top albums in recent years.
Nash is a Chill Out Tent favourite known for his pastoral folk epics, while Katsurada is best known as the guitarist in psychedelic rockers Kikagaku Moyo, whose last LP Kumoyo Island is highly-recommended. Together, their gentle fingerpicking is offset by delicate vocals and guitar FX to create a psychedelic ambient wash of swirling sound.
London jazz ensemble Your Brother’s Keeper team up with legendary saxophonist Gary Bartz for a very en vogue ambient jazz odyssey. Bartz has played with greats such as Charles Mingus and Miles Davis and you feel the latter would approve of his latest joint venture. It is Your Brother’s Keeper’s first outing on vinyl and together they have created a timeless jazz that merges beautiful ambience with some free jazz skronk.
Our final choice this month is Universal Love: 10 Years of Love Injection, a fantastically-curated compilation that celebrates the New York club of the same name. It’s a collection of Balearic bangers of the very highest quality – an object lesson in the creation of a club-focused compilation. Brilliant.
The Chill Out Tent 
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