EKHO Sonic Chill #14

Smoke City. London trio, Nina Miranda on vocals with Marc Brown and Chris Franck, active from 1994 to 2002. Acid jazz and trip-hop mixed with Brazilian samba and bossa nova, and Miranda sings partly in Portuguese. 'Underwater Love' was written by Miranda and Brown and first came out in 1995 on Ritas Records. Under the rainforest sounds it samples Luiz Bonfa's 'Bahia Soul' and James Brown's 'Mother Popcorn'. It broke big in 1997 when Levi's put it in their 'Mermaids' commercial, directed by Michel Gondry, and it went to No. 4 in the UK. It opens their debut album, Flying Away (1997), which Slant later ranked among the greatest trip-hop albums. A second album, Heroes of Nature, followed in 2001, and the band split in 2002.

Chad Valley is Hugo Manuel's solo project. He's from Oxford, he also fronts the Oxford band Jonquil, and he started this in 2010. Warm, hazy synth-pop that got filed under chillwave, with lush atmospherics softening his vocal. 'Shell Suite' is off Equatorial Ultravox (Cascine, 20 June 2011), the record that brought him wider attention. Drowned in Sound called it 'a consistently blissful and thrilling EP'. The song ended up on the soundtrack of Warm Bodies, the 2013 zombie romance. Then came Young Hunger (2012, with guests including Twin Shadow and El Perro del Mar), Entirely New Blue (2015) and Imaginary Music (2018), and in 2020 he put out The Starlight Night under his own name.

DJ Day is Damien Beebe. DJ, producer and multi-instrumentalist out of Palm Springs, California, and he co-founded the Innernational Crew in 1995. Instrumental hip-hop that blends jazz, funk, soul and electronics, through sampling, turntablism and live playing. Land of 1000 Chances (2013) is his second album, after The Day Before (2007). Thes One of People Under the Stairs tracked and mixed it, and it was mastered at Bernie Grundman. Life After You (2022) reached the top 10 of KCRW's Top 30 albums chart. For six years he ran Reunion, a weekly Thursday party at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs, and surprise guests showed up, Flying Lotus included. In 2024 he toured as scratch DJ on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Live in Concert, with a full orchestra, in 56 cities.

Hird was the alias of Christoffer Berg, a multi-instrumentalist out of Gothenburg. Warm, jazz-flavoured downtempo on Stockholm's Dealers of Nordic Music (DNM), with Yukimi Nagano of Little Dragon on vocals. His track 'Burn 2' (4:50) showed up in August 2003 as the B1 on the I Love You My Friends 12-inch EP (DNM, DNMEP004), next to 'Fading Blues' with Nagano singing. Berg went on to be a sought-after producer and sound designer, working with The Knife, Fever Ray and Depeche Mode. And get this: his Gothenburg studio houses one of the very first synthesizers made in Europe.

Flunk. Out of Oslo, Norway. Producer Ulf Nygaard and guitarist Jo Bakke started them around 2000, singer Anja Øyen Vister came in, and they signed to Beatservice Records in 2001. Warm, folk-tinged trip-hop. Their second album, Morning Star, was recorded in a Paris hotel room in autumn 2003 and finished back home in Oslo in early 2004. 'Morning Star' is its title track, and this Parliavox remix closes Play America (Beatservice, 2005), which gathers the bonus tracks and remixes from the album's US edition.

Tor. Vancouver producer, spent over a decade quietly honing his craft before his debut album, Drum Therapy, came out on 11 December 2012. Downtempo built on dusty samples, organic instrumentation and driving percussion. He drew on 1960s Italian film scores, Turkish psych records, Celtic folk hymns, Eastern instruments and gospel, and played a lot of the parts himself. Drum Therapy was the debut release on Loci Records, the label Emancipator launched in 2012, and 'Glass & Stone' is the opening track. Since then he's toured with Emancipator and Bluetech, played Shambhala, Bass Coast and Burning Man, remixed ODESZA, and followed up with Blue Book (Loci, 2016).

Love Spirals Downwards. Ryan Lum started it in Los Angeles in 1989, recording ethereal dream pop on an 8-track tape machine, then signed to Projekt Records. Idylls, Ardor, Ever and Flux (1998) came out there with Suzanne Perry on vocals. Flux pushed their shimmering guitars into a gentle drum and bass undertow. In 1999 Lum carried on as Lovespirals with singer Anji Bee, now Anji Lum, and in 2024 they went back to the full original name, releasing on their own Chillcuts imprint. 'Misunderstood' is one of the bonus tracks on the Flux Deluxe Edition (11 August 2023), built around reversed vocal samples from their song 'Sideways Forest'. Through 2026 it's been a new single every month, including 'Dissociate' in May and 'So High' in September.

AtticOmatic. Brighton five-piece, twin vocalists Kamran Kaur and Lorcán Forder, plus Oliver White, Marie Freiss and Kai Raghunath. They fold jazz, hip-hop, R&B and electronica into post-punk and indie. One Brighton reviewer summed it up as 'shoegaze dream pop jazz, you can dance to'. 'Two Alarms' came out as a single on 15 April 2025 and closes their EP Fold the World (9 May 2025), with guest Declan Haughian on clarinet in among the synths and guitars. Earlier singles got BBC Radio 6 Music support, and they've played The Great Escape and Victorious Festival. Their second EP, Between Two, followed in March 2026.

Vök. Out of Iceland, formed in January 2013 when singer Margrét Rán Magnúsdóttir and saxophonist Andri Már Enoksson teamed up for the Músíktilraunir battle of the bands. They won it that March. Dreamy electronics, distant saxophone, clean reverb-washed guitars. 'Við Vökum' opens Tension, their bilingual debut EP, which came out on Icelandic indie Record Records in 2013 and was later picked up internationally by Nettwerk. Their songs have been used in TV shows from Teen Wolf to How to Get Away with Murder, and their third album, the self-titled Vök, came out in 2022.

Airiel. Chicago shoegaze/dream-pop band led by guitarist-vocalist Jeremy Wrenn, who started it as Airiel Project One in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1997. Loud, layered guitars with danceable rhythm and melody, across The Battle of Sealand (2007) and Molten Young Lovers (2017). 'Shirley Temple Tidal Wave' closes Winks & Kisses: Crackled (June 2004), the last of the four Winks & Kisses EPs. Feeltrip Records reissued the series as a 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition in November 2023. They played Sway Fest in Los Angeles on 6 September 2026 and Thalia Hall in Chicago with REZN on 19 September 2026.

petal redd. Independent artist who writes, sings and helps engineer the recordings, and puts them out on redd records. 'bend' came out as a standalone single on 13 October 2025. It's part of a steady run of singles that started with 'can u hear me..?' in August 2025 and runs through 'highs + lows', 'scars', 'crusade', 'paranoid', 'love language' and 'maybe' (June 2026).

Chastity Belt. They formed in 2010 in Walla Walla, Washington, while all four of them, Julia Shapiro, Lydia Lund, Hunter Truscott and Gretchen Grimm, were students at Whitman College. They became a Seattle indie rock band, same lineup the whole way, and these days they're spread across Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago. That's intertwining guitars, meticulous rhythms and a double exposure of melancholy and optimism, on records like Time to Go Home (2015) and Live Laugh Love (2024), which Stereogum named Album of the Week. 'Pavement' came out with 'I Could Say Less' on 9 September 2026 via Suicide Squeeze. It turns melancholy into something buoyant: sunny melodies, weightless hooks, call-and-response vocals. It's track 7 on their sixth album, All My Friends, out on Friday, November 6th, 2026.

The Smashing Pumpkins. Formed in Chicago in 1988: Billy Corgan, James Iha, D'arcy Wretzky and Jimmy Chamberlin. They've won two Grammys for Best Hard Rock Performance and sold over 30 million albums worldwide. 'This Time' is off Machina/The Machines of God (2000), a concept record about a rock star called Zero who renames himself Glass. Corgan and Flood produced it, Alan Moulder mixed it, and it debuted at number 3 on the Billboard 200. Machina got a 25th-anniversary remaster in August 2025 and the Aranea Alba Editio box set that October. The Rats in a Cage Tour (September to November 2026) plays a full set celebrating the 30th anniversary of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

Blackmill is Robert Card, a producer from Carrbridge in the Scottish Highlands, and one of the best-loved names in melodic dubstep and chillstep. He picked up guitar at eight and was producing trance at fifteen. He switched to dubstep in 2010, and his remix of Ellie Goulding's 'Your Song' hit number one on the Hype Machine. 'Let It Be' is off his second album, Miracle (2011). It's built around the vocals of singer-songwriter Veela, six minutes of emotional, melodic bass music. After a ten-year gap he came back with the album Home on Christmas Day 2021.

16 Underground. A trip-hop band out of Los Angeles, formed in 2022, with Hannah Campbell singing over breakbeat loops, real scratches and a warm, dreamy haze. And get this: several of them came up in punk and hardcore bands before they made music like this. 'Without a Trace' is the title track of their Without a Trace EP on Sunday Drive (August 14th, 2026), produced by Max Epstein. Stereogum called it 'a pillow that's somehow also a kaleidoscope.'

Tamaryn. Tamaryn Sitha Brown, born in New Zealand in 1982 and based in Los Angeles. Her first two albums were dense guitar shoegaze. 'Sandstone' is off the first one, The Waves (Mexican Summer, 2010), written with her collaborator Rex John Shelverton. He co-wrote every track and worked with her through Tender New Signs (2012). Cranekiss (2015) was the pivot to synth-driven dream pop, with Jorge Elbrecht, and in 2016 she opened for Lush on their North American reunion tour. Her fourth album, Dreaming the Dark, came out in 2019.

Night Swimming. Five-piece dream pop out of Bath and Bristol, in the west of England: singer Meg Jones, guitarists Sam Allen and Jesse Roache, bassist Josh Nottle and drummer Torin Moore. 'Five-Year Plan' closes their debut EP, No Place To Land, out on Friday, September 27th, 2024, with Peter Miles producing. BBC 6 Music got behind them, and they went back to Peter Miles for their second EP, Melting, Sometimes Bleeding, out on Venn Records in May 2026. Five summer days, live to tape in Devon, and Simon Scott of Slowdive mastered it.

Cocteau Twins. Formed in Grangemouth, Scotland in 1979 around Robin Guthrie's effects-drenched guitar, with Elizabeth Fraser's soprano from 1981 and Simon Raymonde on bass from 1983. They largely defined the 4AD sound. 'Aikea-Guinea' was the title track of a March 1985 single/EP that followed Treasure. It went to number 1 on the UK Indie chart and number 41 on the UK Singles chart, and then landed on the compilation The Pink Opaque (1986). The band split in 1997.

sweet93 is the shoegaze project of Chloe Kohanski, winner of The Voice Season 13. She fronts the New York-based band and writes and produces with Evan Boutte. 'Wonder' is off their 2021 album All the Same All Ok, ten tracks credited to 'chloe mk' and Boutte, produced by Boutte with sweet93. It came out as a single on 22 October 2021, a month ahead of the album. Soft, dreamy guitar haze over a gentle pulse. sweet93 played 'Wonder' in Nashville in December 2025, and they've also put out singles like 'i wanna' and 'what's true?'.

Portishead. Out of Bristol, England. Geoff Barrow was working at Coach House studios when Massive Attack made Blue Lines there, and they let him use the spare studio time. He and Ben Salisbury went on to score Alex Garland’s films, Ex Machina, Annihilation and Civil War among others. And get this: ‘Strangers’ turned up in Nadja, a 1994 vampire film set in New York.

Tummyache is Soren Bryce, an American songwriter and producer originally from Amarillo, Texas, who's worked across DIY scenes in the US and the UK. It started in 2018, and Bandcamp puts it neatly: a project that blurs the line between band and personal confession. After she moved to the UK, it grew into a full band. 'Level Ground' is on Repeat in Reverse, the fourth Tummyache album, out October 16th, 2026, which Bryce produced with Peter Miles.

Kyson is Jian Liew, a producer born in Adelaide, Australia, and based in Berlin. He first got noticed in 2012 for his remix of Bon Iver's 'Holocene'. 'No Such Thing As Me' is track three on The Water's Way, his debut album, out in 2013 on Friends of Friends. He also co-produced Alice Phoebe Lou's debut album, Orbit, in 2016, the same year as his own second album, A Book of Flying.

Buttechno is Pavel Milyakov. He came up in Moscow's experimental techno scene and is now based in Berlin, where he runs the psy x label. His debut album, SPORT, was made for designer Gosha Rubchinskiy's AW15 show. Since then he's played Berghain and Tresor and festivals including CTM, Berlin Atonal, Terraforma and Primavera Sound, working across dub techno, ambient and leftfield electronics. '20 flutes' is off the spirit, a 12-track collaborative album with Triš, a Berlin-based Ukrainian artist, out on psy x on 7 August 2026, with Milyakov credited as composer and producer. He also hosts a monthly NTS show, and Triš guested on the September 2026 episode.

'retire (final)' closes Alvedon's hurry up mixtape, a four-track ambient set released on 1 August 2021 (label AVR, licensed to Dreamscape, a division of Kurate Music). It's a hushed, mostly acoustic instrumental. Since then Alvedon has moved into hip-hop-leaning territory, producing and playing guitar on 'So, You Loved Me?' with daniel.mp3 (Dreamscape Records, 22 April 2025), and showing up on $PADE's 'before the war' (August 2025).

SYML. That's Brian Fennell, a songwriter and classically trained pianist out of Seattle, who used to front the indie band Barcelona. SYML is the Welsh word for 'simple', a nod to Welsh roots he found as an adult. Spacious, piano-led songs with strings and a hushed, soaring voice, on SYML (2019), The Day My Father Died (2023) and Nobody Lives Here (2025). And get this: Lana Del Rey built her 2023 song 'Paris, Texas' on his piano piece 'I Wanted to Leave', and he's the featured artist on it. 'I Was Stone' came out as a studio single on September 18th, 2026.

Song of the show on Episode 14 · pick 14 of the EKHO Sonic 25

Francisco the Man. They named themselves after Francisco the Man, the wandering singer in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a name bassist Néstor Romero suggested. Los Angeles band that formed in Riverside, California, where singer-guitarist Scotty Cantino, bassist Néstor Romero and drummer Abdeel Ortega met at a punk show in high school. Guitarist Brock Woolsey joined in 2011. After two 7-inch singles on Small Plates, their debut LP, Loose Ends, came out on 27 October 2014 as a co-release between Fat Possum and Small Plates. They tracked it mostly live, in about three days. How about that? 'In My Dreams' is track 5, eight minutes of dreamy, shoegaze-leaning guitar rock with long bass lines and the vocals woven in like another instrument. A second album, Bodies in the Sun, followed in 2017.