| Ambient, Contemporary music |
Thomas Ciufo, The Rising Moon: A Luminous, Essential Ambient Journey.
My house burned down
Now I can better see
The rising moon
Mizuta Masahide’s seventeenth-century haiku, printed inside the sleeve of Thomas Ciufo’s new album, is as good a key as any to what follows: ten tracks built almost entirely from the art of finding light inside loss. The Rising Moon, out on Neuma Records, is a sublime, deeply absorbing ambient record, one of the finest of its kind in years, and an absolute must-have for anyone who loves music that rewards patience with real transcendence.
Thomas Ciufo is a composer, improviser and sound technologist whose work sits at the intersection of experimental electronic music, sonic art and acoustic ecology. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Music and New Media from Brown University, currently serves as Professor of Music at Mount Holyoke College, where he directs the Arts and Technology Labs, and has performed and presented at experimental music festivals and conferences worldwide. For years, his work leaned heavily toward collaboration, including ElectroResonance, his 2022 Neuma release with Jane Rigler and Curtis Bahn.
The Rising Moon marks a deliberate return to solo studio practice, a shift set in motion partly by the stillness and disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it clearly gave Ciufo the space to rethink his tools from the ground up. That rethinking took him in some wonderfully unexpected directions. An artist residency at the EMS studios in Stockholm reignited his love of analog tape looping, sending him down the road of rebuilding a stable of old tape machines, including a tube-based Akai reel-to-reel from the 1960s. The result is a studio practice that deliberately mixes the cutting-edge with the antiquated: modern synthesis and newly built computer-music tools sit alongside analog modular gear, half-working vintage tape decks, and processed acoustic instruments and voices. Nothing here sounds like nostalgia for its own sake, every “regressive” or glitch-prone tool is put to deliberately expressive use, giving the album a texture that feels simultaneously futuristic and worn, like a transmission picked up from somewhere both ancient and not-yet-arrived.
Ciufo studied under the late Pauline Oliveros, the pioneer of “Deep Listening,” and her influence runs through every minute of this record. The Rising Moon isn’t background music, it asks for the kind of patient, immersive attention Oliveros spent her life advocating for, and it rewards that attention generously. Thematically, the album sits with impermanence and loss without ever collapsing into despair – instead, true to its title and its opening haiku, it keeps circling back toward clarity, gratitude and grace. Ciufo has said the record is offered with compassion to anyone navigating hardship, suffering or personal loss in an increasingly chaotic world, and that generosity of spirit is audible in every slowly unfolding drone and shimmer.
Listening to The Rising Moon in full, it’s hard not to hear it as a direct descendant of the great German ambient lineage of the 1970s, the Krautrock, Berlin School and Kosmische Musik movements that essentially invented the vocabulary of ambient synthesizer music as we now know it. There’s something of Tangerine Dream’s monolithic, rhythm-abandoning Zeit (1972) in the way Ciufo lets his pieces drift in long, weightless layers, something of Klaus Schulze’s Irrlicht and Cyborg in the hypnotic, slowly mutating drones, something of Manuel Göttsching’s New Age of Earth in the album’s bright, patient atmospheres, and something of Popol Vuh’s Hosianna Mantra in its underlying spiritual stillness, even though Ciufo’s palette is electronic rather than acoustic. The Rising Moon doesn’t imitate any of these records — Ciufo’s own voice, shaped by decades in electroacoustic composition and improvisation rather than ’70s synth-rock, is unmistakably his own — but it belongs unmistakably in that lineage, carrying the torch of Kosmische Musik’s search for the cosmic within the intimate.
The title track opens the album on warm, richly layered terrain, letting waves of synthesizer unfurl with real patience and mystery, before “Still Arriving” follows with a chillier, more cinematic sense of meticulous atmosphere. “Motion/Stasis” is one of the record’s most striking pieces, its organic, droplet-like textures slowly accreting into something almost geological, stalactites of sound forming in real time. “The Day After The Day Before” radiates a kind of lingering heat, an afterglow of something unspoken, while “Out of Silence” lets a genuinely haunting quality creep into the exploration. “Light and Shadows” is a particular highlight: a moody, dreamlike piece where hints of piano drift in and out against a backdrop that carries real science-fiction atmosphere. “Bardo (The Space Between)” takes its title from the Buddhist concept of transitional states between life and death, and the music lives up to that weight, suspended and liminal in exactly the way its title promises. “The Quiet Sun” radiates an almost majestic stillness, using processed vocals as pure instrumental texture to deepen its introspective pull, before the album closes with “Loss and Acceptance (Still Listening)”, an eight-minute meditation that carries a genuinely spiritual charge, bringing the whole emotional arc of the record to rest exactly where its title promises: in acceptance.
This is a rare ambient record that manages to be both cerebral and genuinely moving – headphones-on listening that rewards total surrender.
A word, too, for the album’s visual presentation, because it’s not often for packaging to match the music this well. Jody Day’s cover artwork, a glowing yellow moon rising against a deep red sky, and Philip Blackburn’s design give the record an identity as striking as its sound: warm, cosmic, and quietly dramatic, exactly the visual equivalent of what’s happening in the speakers. It’s a genuinely beautiful physical object as much as a listening experience.
The Rising Moon is a major work from an artist who clearly knows exactly what he’s doing with every analog crackle and digital shimmer he deploys. It’s patient, generous, emotionally substantial music, rooted in a real lineage of ambient and electroacoustic composition stretching back to the Kosmische Musik pioneers of the 1970s, and brought fully into the present by Ciufo’s own distinctive sensibility and technical mastery. This is a genuinely essential ambient release, not a 100% but a 1000% must-have!
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, October 3rd, 2026
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To order the album on Ciufo’s Bandcamp
To order the album on Neuma Records” website
Tracklisting:
- The Rising Moon 6:01
- Still Arriving 5:18
- Motion/Stasis 7:10
- The Day After The Day Before 3:24
- Out of Silence 5:09
- Light and Shadows 3:53
- Bardo (The Space Between) 7:15
- Turning the Wheel 6:26
- The Quiet Sun 4:55
- Loss and Acceptance (Still Listening) 8:11
Total running time: 57:45
Musician:
Thomas Ciufo – composition, production, mix, all instruments and sound sources
Credits:
Mastered by Taylor Deupree
Artwork by Jody Day
Design by Philip Blackburn
Recorded 2021–2025
Neuma Records (Neuma 231)
