wo new albums from Zürich-based Christof Steinmann and Glasgow-based Ruaridh Law up the ambient electronic ante with different, yet equally fascinating results. Respectively eerie and lush, both offer up a spine-tinglingly original sound.

Once upon a time you could throw a music geek through a record shop and not hit a single ambient electronic album. These days they’re everywhere, the geeks and the records. Lo-fi indie electronic records that might’ve been limited to demos or murky mail order swaps years ago now get proper releases through niche labels and the power of the world wide web.

And there are huge numbers of these specially packaged delights, on homemade seven-inch singles and stencilled CD-Rs. The very nature of these sketches means many are ill-conceived, poorly-followed-through musical brushstrokes inspired more by the ease of production and distribution rather than the thrill of creation and self-expression.

The two records on offer here, on the other hand, are the latter. Brief, elegant vignettes that offer a reflection of something greater. If there’s a criticism to be levelled, it is that both are sketches, mere memories of a moment or place. Somehow I’m glad both kept a record.

Steinmann’s wittily typo-ed second album as Softland represents eight years worth of audio diary entries. That’s not to say it all works in the abstract; “Huch”’s deep groove wouldn’t be out of place in Ricardo Villalobos’s record collection, though squealing flutes, reversed vocals, acoustic bass and alarm clock bleeps shift the emphasis to a weirder place. “All The Nows We’ve Had” is similarly upturned techno, its skipping repetitions pointing towards a stark melancholy.

Acoustic instruments and vocals reminiscent of Tarwater’s deadpan stamp Steinmann’s work, its dark ambience belying the natural providence of much of his source material. A sense of time and place weighs heavily as he interlaces lo-fi pop, jazz techno and sharply dissonant rhythms with nine short field recordings (cows, crickets, car doors, and ringing phones to name a few) titled using UTM coordinates for the recording location. Whether that’s simple pragmatis—fattening the shorter vinyl release up for CD sale—is beside the point. Instead of a simple selection of tracks, it develops into a broader composition across the album’s length; the field recordings and musical collage meting out the years.

Ruaridh Law’s unusual grounding in dancehall, dub, IDM electronics, and drone shines through his debut full-length album as the Village Orchestra. He has previously contributed to compilations under the moniker, as well as under aliases such as Accrual and the Marcia Blane School for Girls.

Bleeps, arpeggiated synth lines, and deep tonal bass underlie wandering melodies, ethereal whispers of processed vocals and hazy guitar. Equally important is the bed of stuttering glitch and throbbing bass. Like Steinmann, Law experiments with ambience, but while he also builds on a montage of sounds, the resulting music is far more optimistic.

Equally Phillip Glass and Carl Craig, midway through the album “All The Lights Going Out” is actually the glorious dawn soundtracked by Orbital more than ten years ago. Cascading showers of feathery hi-hats play, then get sharply rewound, the heavy repetition, again, a legacy of Law’s dancehall fixation.

Down-tempo, but not lethargic, “Bryan’s Tricky ‘Do You Like the Drummer?’ Question” touches on similar territory. However, instead of simply reprising the Hartnoll brothers’ work, Law turns his reflective ambience, sharply scissored percussion and throbbing bass into a psychedelic rush of euphoria.