i listen to normal music

The album-reviewing side of @juggalocollege

[jugreviews]

Hello! I’m Jug, and welcome to my album reviewing blog! Music is my main thing, and this is going to be the spot where I talk about and review various music projects that I'm interested in!

Here’s a couple of details/rules before we start.Please read before you interact!

1: While I like to listen to pretty much every genre, this blog is going to be primarily dedicated to reviewing Ambient/Vaporwave albums. I make ambient music in my spare time, and when it comes to albums, ambient/vaporwave releases are the ones I listen to most often. Don’t be surprised if I branch out, though! This blog is not going to be limited to one specific (ambient) genre!

2: This is not a place to discuss music drama. Do not ask me to roast some problematic artist you just discovered. Go to youtube channels like theneedledrop if that’s something you want to see. My main blog @juggalocollege is most likely where I’ll talk about stuff in real life. This is a blog for music, and if I'm not talking about music, then don’t expect it to stay like that.

3: Review suggestions are always encouraged! Please only submit them through the askbox, however. If my askbox is closed, that means I don’t care to take any review suggestions. If I don’t get around to listening to a suggestion or my askbox is closed, please don’t take that personally! You can also use it as a normal askbox, but it’d recommend you do so on my main.

4: Please feel free to post your own reviews of an album I listened to in the comments!

I’m sure more will be added on later, this is just what i can think of right now. Enjoy!

[jugreviews]

Witan - Beneath Hollow Hills

This album is going to be my gateway into dungeon synth, i just know it.

Witan is an English ambient/generate dungeon synth producer known for their album Alchemy, released in 2022. Beneath Hollow Hills is their latest release, having been put out December 16, 2025, and it's awesome.

Witan Markets their music as "English Drone Synth," and while their most famous releases, Hibernal and Alchemy definitely fit that bill, Beneath Hollow Hills encompasses it. Hollow Hills drops you right smack dab in the middle of the English Fens (or at your Hobbit Campground, where everyone's asleep but you) in the dead of night and expects you to fend for yourself, tooth and nail. Each longform composition is dark, its scale unconventional, and the atmospheres and field recordings behind it industrial and unnerving. Not to mention, the album cover just looks awesome.

My favorite aspect of the album has to be the soft clipping on each track. Something about the way each piece distorts is just so fun and crunchy. This album is a real treat with good headphones or speakers. hearing each track bump up against the headroom of the speakers is truly exceptional.

All in all, this is a great, complete genre-bending record, and I can't wait for Witan's next project!

My rating: 8/10

You can listen to it here: [Youtube] [Bandcamp]

[jugreviews]

Kaoru Inoue - Dedicated to the Island

Dedicated to the Island is, well, dedicated to the island. Specifically, the UNESCO World Heritage Site Yakushima island. About 40 miles off the coast of Japan’s Kagoshima Prefecture, Yakushima Island is a little, granite based island known for its large biodiversity, numerous hot springs, and old evergreen forests. It looks like a beautiful place, and this album, made for the 30th anniversary of the island’s designation as a heritage site, and for the Japanese travel magazine SAUNTER, serves it justice.

Immediately upon starting the album, Dedicated to the Island lets you know exactly what it’s about. The album is very clearly inspired by famous Japanese new-age ambient projects like Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Wet Land and other albums from the Music for Your Mind series from the 1990’s. However, there’s also a lot more going on here as well. Tracks like Tobitatsu and Hoshifuru lean into an almost kosmiche-like sound, while tracks like Mizukumi and Tengaku have a more traditional ambient palette, not unlike one you’d find in the Music for Your Mind anthology.

To me, this album brings up memories of a nature documentary. Its new-age retro-futuristic sound palette feels like it’s soundtracking a DK Eyewitness documentary or an old edutainment website, especially the last track Kodama, which is pretty much seven minutes of a nature expedition in audio form. It’s awesome stuff.

This album is awesome. It’s “a blast from the past,” so to speak. If you liked the Music for your Mind album series and want more where that came from, or you want to listen to something that’s “Frutiger Aero,” if you’re vying for “thank you for the gold kind stranger wholesome 100 internet points,” then Dedicated to the Island is absolutely an album for you!

My rating: 8.5/10

You can listen to it here: [Bandcamp] [Youtube]

[jugreviews]

Hiemal - Astray

Let’s start here!

Hiemal is a relatively unknown French ambient drone artist who’s been making music since 2017. I discovered Hiemal around 2022 or so with his album Leaving The Stars Behind, and he quickly became one of my go-to ambient artists, releasing the exact kind of slow moving, atmospheric drones which I was starting to get into at the time. Astray is one of his most recent albums, being released on December 2, 2022, and it fits that exact ambient bill that Hiemal is known for. To me? It sounds (and looks) exactly like winter.

To me, each track in this album feels like a snapshot of a story. The first song, for instance, feels like waking up in the album cover. You're in a clearing, located in a vast northern wood. You can see short mountain ridges dotting the horizon, small and tall clusters of trees, tiny blades of grass poking out from under the thick sheet of snow, and you can feel the warmth of the sun almost able to melt the powder, but not quite. the album continues on from there, each song a small snapshot of your journey in these woods. Track two is when the clouds slowly come in, before leaving as quickly as they appeared. Track four is the sunlight hitting the pine needles at golden hour, these little snapshots continue so on and so forth until you reach track six, where the northern lights surround the sky, and your hometown slowly comes into view along the horizon.

Astray is a darn good album. It is pretty standard in terms of Hiemal albums, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! If you’re looking to get into longform, dark, yet melodic ambient music, Astray is a great place to start!

My rating: 8/10

You can listen to it here: [Bandcamp] [YouTube]