Steve Bates - An Infinite Antenna (2026)

Montréal mainstay Steve Bates approaches modern ambient sounds with a punk ethos on his second Constellation set, cutting source material from his travels around Europe and Canda into beatless, distorted synthscapes, instrumental improvisations and electroacoustic rumbles.

If you first checked into Bates' music back in 2022 when he released the Andrew Chalk-inspired 'All The Things That Happen', you could have easily missed the memo that he shaped his outlook in Winnipeg's anarcho-punk scene, playing in various hardcore outfits. And it's that tenure that directly inspires 'An Infinite Antenna'; the album isn't punk aesthetically, but it's been assembled with the genre's brevity in mind - not something you usually associate with ambient music. This time around, he had an archive of material at his disposal, too. Between 2023 and 2025, Bates tracked through Bosnia, Austria, Greece and Canada on artist residencies and site-specific sound installation visits, collecting sounds as he went.

So how might you cut down this material to just a few short minutes at a time? Bates realizes the record as if he's scanning transmissions on shortwave radio (that's the title explained, then), separating his lush, noisy or just simply evocative sketches with stretches of interference that thread them into a coherent thought. It's surprisingly effective; at two minutes, opener 'Pink pink pink pink... pink pink' is over in a blink, before its '80s synth flutters have a chance to lodge themselves in your memorybanks, but 'Green as a ghost' sounds like warming tubes at first, its grotty static neatly accenting Bates' atmospheric drones and instrumental interjections. 'Easier sad than done', meanwhile, reminds us more of Fennesz as Bates' plaintive harmonies fight through waves of cracked noise, while 'Decades of river widths' is a nocturnal answer to Basinski's ferric corrosions, fading away as the campfire's embers flicker.