GUNNAR JÓNSSON COLLIDER – S.W.I.M. 
Gunnar Jónsson Collider is a music producer from Reykjavik, Iceland, who has released a few albums on local labels. I don’t know much about him beyond what you can easily find out yourself. What makes him different from most other ambient (/techno) artists is that he usually accompanies his music with programmed or AI-generated visuals.
His latest album, S.W.I.M., is his first release on the ASIP label (A Strangely Isolated Place), and his ‘most horizontal album to date’. The entire album is visualized by video artist Arna Beth.
You can watch the 49-minute video of Environment 1-6 below:
S.W.I.M. seems to be an acronym that stands for Sounds Without Image Music, which implies that you can imagine your own images with the music. But you can of course also let Arna Beth’s beautiful video guide your imagination.
If you prefer to enjoy the music without the visuals, ASIP offers a digital download or a (very limited) blue smoke 12″ vinyl.
MOUNT SHRINE – LOST LOOPS COLLECTION
Mount Shrine was one of the many aliases of César Alexandre from Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Starting out creating breakcore and dub techno around 2012, he took up the Mount Shrine alias to create dark ambient music in 2017. Apart from the titles he released himself, most of his work was released on the Cryo Chamber label. This label now also releases this collection – a massive posthumous tribute, as Alexandre died in April 2021 from Covid-19.
The Lost Loops Collection is a compilation presenting all (‘currently known’) underground albums, singles and EPs that César Alexandre produced as Mount Shrine. ‘Underground’ means all the music that was previously self-released and thus hard to find until now.
No less than 4 hours (and 4 minutes to be exact) of deep, dark, swirling drones in 23 tracks of various length, available on a 5-CD set or as a digital download. The dark ambient soundscapes can be experienced as ‘warm’ or ‘cold’, this may depend on the listener or on the moment.
But whatever landscape visions this music may conjure up: there’s a lot of rain either way.