Audiopile Review: New age legend Ariel Kalma is clearly unable to rest on his laurels and be JUST a new age legend. While his music has always been as spiritually blissed as you could hope for, it has a rigour that Kalma clearly learned when studying electro-acoustic music at France’s legendary GRM institute. Furthermore, Kalma is an enthusiastic cross-generational collaborator. Check his excellent albums with Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe and Sarah Davachi. His latest cross-gen collab, ‘◯’, comes via Australia’s Good Morning Tapes, and it’s with New York-based Leaving Records trio Asa Tone. An organic amalgam of classical, electronic, and unabashedly exotic instrumentation, ‘◯’ is a soul-enriching must-have for fans of This Kind of Thing. Put it this way, dude: the title of the album is, like, a circle. Just, like, the shape, dude. Now, sceptics can scoff at This Kind of Thing, but the rigorous commitment to spiritually questing ambient music on display here is so impressive that surely even the most sceptical scoffer will spontaneously issue forth an unironic “duuuuude”. Fans of Jon Hassell’s fourth world excursions, Visible Cloaks’ kankyo ongaku pastiches, and ECM’s most ambient excursions will find it particularly pleasing. But really, this album is a slam-dunk that will scratch a new age/ambient itch you may not even know you had. ‘◯’ hits the spot.

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“Heavenly new age ambient synthesis and 4th world navigations by two leading lights of their field, flocking to a mutual spirit at the behest of Australia’s eternally reliable Good Morning Tapes. RIYL Asa-Chang & Junray, Jon Hassell, Nueen, Enya, David Toop.

Meeting for the first time on record – although it sounds like they’ve been making music together forever – GRM alum Ariel Kalma brings some half a century of experience accrued deep in synth music’s most esoteric realms, to Leaving Records’ Indo-NYC trio Asa Tone, on a gorgeous album spun from the legendary Electronic Wind Instrument woven with modular synth, xaphoon, sax, and rainforest sounds.

Their debut communion represents an ideal of intergenerational dialogue, with both sides sublimating their energies at the service of the lush whole, where bioluminescent arps sparkle on slow shifting beds of swaying bass amid swirls of lilting woodwind within a self-contained imaginary physics that makes the body feel lighter, and most elegantly plays out on the back of the eyelids.

It’s testament to the natural porousness of approach and timeless vision of both Kalma and his younger spars that they work so well together, cleanly transcending cloying cliches and simply cutting direct to more meaningful planes of existence that need little explanation – you know the feeling when you’re left floating and blissed to the fingertips.

Everything is wrapped up in an opening statement ‘Interlace’, where the elements knit and dematerialise with a sense of deferred suspense that could last forever. The twin winds of tradition and imagination continue to push them to beatific heights in ‘28°35’S 153°22’E’, and pastoral lull on ‘Art of Memory’, while they braid the air like Enya on her noumenal loom with ‘Two Winds’, crafting a raft for supine bodies to drift away into on ‘An Expanse II.’” -Boomkat