Across the Horizon Begins Assembling Its Second Expanding Ambient Volume

Bob Holmes and the Northern Spy label are currently assembling the second volume of Across the Horizon, a project that treats the album as a continuously arriving collection rather than a finished object. The series doubles as a label, and each release expands over time through a subscription model: buyers gain access to a pool of tracks that grows across multiple digital drops until it reaches 24 pieces total. The first volume, completed last year, unfolded in three batches before it was pressed to vinyl in full.

Holmes, a member of the ambient country group SUSS and host of the Ambient Country podcast, designed a curation process that avoids standard compilation logic. Eight artists are invited to contribute an initial track. Those eight then each choose two more from their own networks, building a web of musical conversations that shape the record. The method brings a loose, sympathetic coherence to the music, with tracks emerging less from a central plan than from a series of introductions.

Volume 2 will follow the same format. No release timeline has been announced, but the series continues to explore the blurred line between ambient texture and country phrasing, a space Holmes has been mapping through SUSS and his podcast for years. The name Across the Horizon describes the project’s logic as much as its sound: a point that stays visible but never arrives, even as the music keeps appearing.