Sunday, you know the drill, time for some ambient. I was highly biased when selecting the track for today, as we recently discussed Aleks and Terekke and they both have amazing ambient works. As I already briefly mentioned Astral by Aleks, I thought today would be a nice day to introduce you to Terekke.

I first came across Terekke through his releases on Long Island Electrical Systems (L.I.E.S.) Records, and in particular a release I consider to be the pinnacle of confused / lofi house: YYYYYYYYYY. L.I.E.S. was (and is) releasing a lot of so-called “leftfield”, which from what I can gather is a pot-pourri term to say anything kind of experimental and unconventional. I now associate the term with Terekke or Patricia, but I think it is much broader than that. As you may have realized, the part of house music I really dig is not really the one with crazy vocals and funky riffs, but more the subterranean, smoke filled, endorphin-inducing, spatially unresolved kind. The track Amaze on this EP could not describe it better.

Terekke - Amaze (2013)

I have to admit every track released by Terekke sits in one of my playlists, so it is but a euphemism to state that I like his work. However, back in 2017 I was not yet good at really digging through the discography of artists I liked, as I was basically just searching on YouTube for an artist name and adding to my “Watch Later” playlist to listen to a big batch of tracks from the artist. I skipped the much more important step which is to check the artist’s discogs entry (or better bandcamp). And because of that, I had missed the release which is my ambient pick of today: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). Yes; the lenny face is the name of the album.

Terekke - ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (2015)

I remember Camille, my girlfriend at the time, made me discover it. I came back to her place after work one day, and I found her sitting on her bed, dazed in front of her laptop; listening to these heavenly layers of synth. If I recall correctly, we were in the middle of a hot summer in Amsterdam, and the sun was shining in the tree close to her bedroom window, with dust flying in the sunlight. Even if that’s not the same moment, I still associate this sight to this track. I cannot count the number of times I have listened to this album since then, it’s a true blackhole as time will seemingly stop for 35 minutes and leave you uncertain of what time of the day it even is by the end of it.

While this album is self-released, I think it’s easy to see how his next ambient work would be on Music From Memory (which even includes the intro track of this one; wav1). If you do not know about Music From Memory yet, you are lucky as you will get to experience for the first time some of the best ambient albums to ever exist. My friend Indira, or Rnkic from Sorok Pervyï, reveres the label like some transcendental entity. If you want to know what they are about, listen to one of their most appraised releases: Gaussian Curve - Clouds.

Hope you enjoy Terekke’s compositions and Music From Memory in general. I will probably talk more about them in the future, until then; peace out.