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JOSHUA MUETZEL
Electronic Music
Here you can find information about the albums I have released that contain the music I have created, not meant for the concert stage, but rather other arenas of listening. These albums have been commercially released and can be found wherever music is streamed.
Semblances (2025) - reinterpretations of my compositions
Semblances came about as something like a cathartic exercise for me to deal with disappointment. Sometimes, after I have written a piece of music (often for a summer festival or something similar), I end up dissatisfied with the result for some reason or another, and will wonder about what I could have done differently to improve the outcome. For this project, I wanted to take the bits that I really enjoyed and make something more positive out of them. I eventually expanded the project to include audio from any of my compositions, even those I was pleased with. I took the recordings, manipulated the sounds in various ways, and augmented the pieces with additional material to create something new and fresh; something that is a semblance of the original music but has become its own unique sonic experience.
Semblances releases December 2025
Sounds for the End of Time (2023) - original ambient music
Sounds for the End of Time is kind of like a concept album. Each piece is loosely based around an imagined dystopian future, like some mid-century sci-fi novels and films, like Dune, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and Alien. This was an exercise for me in aural storytelling, an attempt to evoke some kind of narrative through the pieces themselves, a short evocative title, and the order in which the music is heard. It's like a film score for a non-existent film.
Listen to Sounds for the End of Time
Well-Tempered (2023) - ambient (re)interpretations of Bach
For this project, I wanted to take some familiar music to me and make it unfamiliar, playing with audio effects and manipulation to create something new out of something old. I took the first two preludes and fugues from J. S. Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier, arranged them for small steel pan ensembles, and then used a great deal of effects, like delay, reverb, time-stretching, and other time-based alterations to create these ambient pieces.
Listen to Well-Tempered
Jungle (2021) - minimalist percussion-based ambient music
Jungle was my first attempt at creating ambient music. I used percussion instruments, guitar, and samples to create harmonic and rhythmic patterns, and then, depending on the piece, these patterns were shifted and transformed in different ways, including transposition and temporal augmentation or diminution. This album features the piece Surface of the Water, which has proven to be very popular among caring owners of anxious dogs.
Listen to Jungle
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