Company type | Independent Record Label |
---|---|
Industry | Music |
Founded | Sedona, AZ (1994) |
Headquarters | Maui, HI, USA |
Key people | F.J. Forest, Managing Director |
Products | Exotic Electronica |
Website | https://www.waveformrecords.com/ |
Waveform Records is an American record label founded in 1994 in Sedona, Arizona with subsequent relocations in the San Francisco Bay Area in Mill Valley, Austin, San Diego and is currently now based in Maui. Waveform specializes in a "sensual and stimulating genre of chill and ambient music" that the label calls "exotic electronica". [1]
They are perhaps best known for a widely influential series of ambient dub compilations in the mid-1990s: One A.D., [2] Two A.D., [3] Three A.D., [4] and Four A.D. [5]
Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. It is often "peaceful" sounding and lacks composition, beat, and/or structured melody. It uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation. The genre is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. Nature soundscapes may be included, and the sounds of acoustic instruments such as the piano, strings and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer.
Sarath "Skiz" Fernando is a former music critic, who has written for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Source, Spin, and Vibe. Later, under the alias Spectre, he became a record producer, rapper, and electronica artist. He is the founder and the head of his own label WordSound, as well as the author of several books about hip hop music.
Ambient techno is a subgenre of techno that incorporates the atmospheric textures of ambient music with the rhythmic elements and production of techno. It was pioneered by 1990s electronic artists such as Aphex Twin, Carl Craig, The Orb, The Future Sound of London, the Black Dog, Pete Namlook and Biosphere.
Martin Glover, better known by his stage name Youth, is a British record producer and musician, best known as a founding member and bassist of the rock band Killing Joke. He is also a member of the Fireman, along with Paul McCartney.
Cluster were a German musical duo consisting of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, formed in 1971 and associated with West Germany's krautrock and kosmische music scenes. Born from the earlier Berlin-based group Kluster, they relocated in 1971 into the countryside village of Forst, Lower Saxony, where they built a studio and collaborated with musicians such as Conny Plank, Brian Eno, and Michael Rother; with the latter, they formed the influential side-project Harmonia. After first disbanding in 1981, Cluster reunited several times: from 1989 to 1997, and from 2007 to 2010.
Harmonia was a West German musical "supergroup" formed in 1973 as a collaboration between members of two prominent krautrock bands: Cluster's Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius joined by Neu! guitarist Michael Rother. Living and recording in the rural village of Forst, the trio released two albums—Musik von Harmonia (1974) and Deluxe (1975)—to limited sales before dissolving in 1976. AllMusic described the group as "one of the most legendary in the entire krautrock/kosmische scene."
No-Man are an English art pop duo, formed in 1987 as No Man Is an Island (Except the Isle of Man) by singer Tim Bowness and multi-instrumentalist Steven Wilson. The band has so far produced seven studio albums and a number of singles/outtakes collections (including 2006's career retrospective All the Blue Changes). The band was once lauded as "conceivably the most important English group since The Smiths" by Melody Maker music newspaper, and a 2017 article of Drowned in Sound described them as "probably the most underrated band of the last 25 years".
Higher Intelligence Agency (HIA) is the main electronic music project of Birmingham, UK-based Robert (Bobby) Bird. The project was featured on Warp's Artificial Intelligence II compilation and went on to release the critically acclaimed albums Colourform (1993) and Freefloater (1995).
Em:t Records was a British record label, based in Nottingham, which specialized in ambient electronic music. They were active from 1994 to 1998, and after a period of bankruptcy, re-established themselves in 2003 under new ownership and management. In summer 2006, the label officially ceased operations again.
Low on Ice (The Iceland Sessions) (commonly known as just Low on Ice) is the second solo studio album by German electronic artist Alec Empire, the third of five of his to be released on the Mille Plateaux label. Issued in 1995, Empire recorded the album over three days in August that same year during a tour of Iceland with his band Atari Teenage Riot. Primarily written outdoors in tents and recorded onto analog tapes, the record is noted for its ambient overtone, something not commonly associated with Empire's music.
Transmutation (Mutatis Mutandis) is the first album by Bill Laswell's ever-changing "supergroup" Praxis. The album was released in 1992 and features Buckethead on guitar, Bootsy Collins on bass and vocals, Brain on drums, Bernie Worrell on keyboards and DJ AF Next Man Flip on turntables.
Novus Magnificat: Through the Stargate is the fourth studio album by American musician and composer Constance Demby, with additional contributions by Michael Stearns. It was co-produced by Demby and Anna Turner and released in 1986 on Hearts of Space Records. In its original form, the album features a single 54-minute piece divided into two parts.
Woob is the stage name of Paul Frankland, an English ambient musician who started recording in the early 1990s. Woob's albums combine elements of ambient, downtempo and space music, with samples from field recordings, movies and television. Frankland has also recorded under the names of Journeyman and Max & Harvey. After a period working in the advertising industry, he started releasing new material as Woob in 2010: after that time, Woob's works have gradually shifted towards a more synthwave-oriented sound and adopted a cyberpunk/futuristic imagery.
Bureau B is an independent record label, music publisher and booking agency from Hamburg, Germany, founded in 2005 by Gunther Buskies as a sister label to Tapete Records. The label releases varieties of electronic, free-spirited music, with the spectrum ranging from pop to avant-garde. The label has amassed an extensive catalogue of reissues and new productions, including classics from the genre of electronic music in the 1970s and early 1980s popularly classified as Krautrock, alongside new recordings by such formative artists as Faust, Kreidler, Roedelius, Tietchens, Moebius.
Ocean of Sound is a 1996 compilation album compiled and produced by English musician and author David Toop. The two-disc, cross-licensed "various artists" compilation contains 32 tracks culled from a variety of musical sources, including dub, exotica, free jazz, and field recordings. Toop compiled the recordings to serve as both a historical survey of ambient music and an aural companion to his 1995 book Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds.
Kenneth James Gibson is a musician, record producer, composer, singer, songwriter and a founding member of Bell Gardens, Furry Things, Eight Frozen Modules, and [a]pendics.shuffle.
Deep & Chilled Euphoria is a DJ mix album digitally mixed by British DJ Red Jerry as part of the Telstar TV's Euphoria series of DJ mixed dance music compilations. Released as a sequel to Jerry's previous installment in the series, Chilled Euphoria (2000), Deep & Chilled Euphoria features more of a "chill" sound than its predecessor, and features an array of ambient music from different artists. The album was described in its liner notes as "an attempt to enhance the experiences that exist in meditative states" where "rapidly produced states of deep relaxation increase suggestibility, receptivity to new information and enhance access to subconscious material," as was discovered in a 1950s study by neurologist William Grey Walter referred to in the liner notes.
Chilled Euphoria is a DJ mix album digitally mixed by British DJ Red Jerry as part of the Telstar TV's Euphoria series of DJ mixed dance music compilations. Chilled Euphoria features chill-out music, in the form of genres such as ambient music and trip hop, cross-licensed from different artists. The album was intended to be played in "post club sessions", where people chill-out in their homes listening to the album after returning home from a dance nightclub at 8 am. Some of the remixes on the album were exclusive to the album and previously unreleased, and five of them were compiled onto a double EP used to promote the album.
The Positiva Ambient Collection is a compilation album of various artists released by British dance music label Positiva Records in 1993, documenting ambient house and ambient techno music, both of which were popular underground electronic genres in the United Kingdom at the time. The compilation, the first album released on the label, features an exclusive live recording of The Orb and is said to prove ambient house's variety and worldwide emergence. Upon its release, The Positiva Ambient Collection received critical acclaim, and has continued to receive acclaim in the ensuing years. It has also been credited for bringing Beaumont Hannant to prominence via the inclusion of his track "Awakening the Soul".
Give 'Em Enough Dope Volume One is a compilation album of music by various artists released in 1994 by British electronic label Wall of Sound as their first release. The idea for the album came when Wall of Sound's founder, Mark Jones, wanted to release a compilation of hard-to-find music by unsigned artists, with whom he had worked with via his distribution and pressing deals, so that the music could be heard by a wider audience. He picked his favourite such tracks which there was already an audience for and this became the compilation.