Is your white noise app not cutting it? Fuzzzel is here to help. Conceived by music writer Christopher R Weingarten, Fuzzzel features unique soundscapes created by acclaimed experimental musicians that play on an infinite loop. It’s available now via the Apple App Store.
Like austere and delicate? Try Owen Pallett. More into fragile and gentle sounds? Mary Lattimore has you covered. Want to chill out to something cosmic and synthy? Press play on Kelly Moran. Feeling more dark and abyssal? clipping.‘s soundscape might do the trick. Need sounds that are thunderous and enveloping? Eluvium are here for you. Like more natural sounds, specifically wind? Try the one by wildlife field recorder Chris Watson.
“One of my core beliefs about experimental music is that there’s no ‘correct’ way to listen to it,” Weingarten says in the app’s press release. “I’ve intentionally left Fuzzzel abstract. Play these pieces quietly or loudly. Use them for daydreaming or for focusing. Use them as ambient noise or as your favorite jams. These are open spaces for the user’s own wants and needs. When I started approaching these artists, many of them would tell me that they had already concocted bespoke white noise solutions for their own lives. I’m psyched to bring these personal pieces to the world, and allow people to connect with them in their own ways.”
Try out Fuzzzel via the Apple App Store, and get a preview of the sounds, and read descriptions of the initial Fuzzzel soundscapes via their creators below.
OWEN PALLETT:
I started doing yoga in earnest in 2012, going three times a week to the studio by my house. Their choice of music was always distracting. I remember, going into a pigeon pose sequence, that a Fleet Foxes track cued up. I was sweating on my yoga mat, thinking, This is probably the worst context in which one could listen to Fleet Foxes. I like Fleet Foxes in the car or when I’m cooking. I don’t like Fleet Foxes when I’m trying to do pigeon pose.It got me thinking about my ideal musical accompaniment for an exercise such as yoga — not just yoga, but any type of exercise wherein there is a mindful element. Ambient music has a tendency toward repetition, which I didn’t want. New age music makes me feel alienated. Classical music just makes me think of my day job. I ruminated on this problem for years.
Then, in 2024, Christopher Weingarten emailed me out of the blue, asking me if I’d like to be paid to make some white noise for him. I immediately said yes, without knowing what the specifics were. When he described the Fuzzzel app, and what the noise was to be used for, I immediately felt like my “yoga music” problem was solved by his suggestion.
I thought about it and built a synth patch in my head, which I called a “noise organ” — white noise being kissed by resonant filters to allow for improvisation. I built the patch and recorded a series of tracks; among them was “Wake (i).” I hope you find it clarifying and useful.
MARY LATTIMORE:
I wrote this after taking my friend to the hospital in an emergency. I used copper handbells, Lyon & Healy Style 30 concert grand harp and Moog Mother-32.
KELLY MORAN:
“Solina” is a drone meditation I composed with my Prophet 12 synthesizer. Throughout the piece there are several timbral shifts occurring over one major harmonic shift. It is my sonic representation of a glacier melting. This video was taken on a cross-country road trip in Ireland where our final destination was the massive, awe-inspiring Cliffs of Moher.
CHRIS WATSON:
Recorded on Cap de Creus, Spain in March 2024. The Cap de Creus is a peninsula and a headland located at the far northeast of Catalonia, some 25 kilometers (16 miles) south from the French border. It is the easternmost point of Catalonia and therefore of mainland Spain and the Iberian Peninsula. It was very, very windy indeed.On Cap de Creus the savage honeycomb patterns of the exposed rock are battered by an unseen force and an aeolian howl is torn from the landscape, conjuring madness. The voice of an Iberian wolf or lost human soul?
CLIPPING.’S WILLIAM HUTSON:
Twenty-three minutes and 31 seconds of abandoned space freighter engine noise. Off-course, presumed wrecked, carried forward by directives written generations ago, light-years ago. Forgotten. Howling emptiness, the tranquility of autopilot, an absence of consciousness, the unimaginable scale of the universe — I don’t know, it helps me sleep.The audio for “A Place to Be Still” was constructed from the many “outer space” backgrounds we made for our album Splendor & Misery. Each ambience represents a different room inside the interstellar vessel on which the album’s story takes place. Some of the sounds originated as recordings of Graham Stephenson playing trumpet. The associated image is a photograph of the Horsehead Nebula by Paul Edmondson.
ELUVIUM:
it is difficult to translate
an ocean of feelings
ripping you apart
and all your insides blooming
in an endless cycle
of destruction and rebirth