Experimental Electronic Music
Sacred Drift is an enjoyable listen, and the clicks, reminiscent of the click-hop movement that emerged in the early 2000s from artists like Microstoria, Pimmon, and early Matmos, bring back those familiar click sounds that add curiosity to glitch textures of an ambient piece.
Ouroboros emerges as a fully realized assembly of extraterrestrial circuitry, endlessly bent, folded, and reconfigured into excitingly unique forms.
This sprawling, sandblasted opus brings together a stellar constellation of avant-garde visionaries—Meat Beat Manifesto, Proswell, Cathode Ray Tube, AZ-Rotator, Rontronik, ΠΕΡΑ ΣΤΑ ΟΡΗ, Scape One, Roel Funcken, Deru, Kindohm, Vytear, and Robert Logan—each sculpting sound into surreal, shimmering form.
Across five neat pieces evoking introductions, mountains, flow, waves and threads of home, Kyo Na conjures conceptual atmospheres that remain suggestive rather than literal.
Explorer is a richly detailed journey through melodic ambient electronics and progressive textures, where Parallel Worlds transforms the mystery, beauty, and endless motion of deep space into nine immersive sonic voyages.
Romantic, Visceral is highly recommended for those who enjoy challenging music with semi-classical overtones and chilling stylistic pathways dominated by energetic electronic textures. Without neglecting its own originality and trippy, chameleon-like strength, this album stands as the missing link between Brendan Moeller, Burial, and Michel Portal.
With The Hexadecimal Era, Sleep Underwriter delivers an album that celebrates electronic music’s past with joy and aplomb while sounding completely alive to the present moment. Here, then, is another superb release from Dublin’s Aduaine, a label whose catalog continues to set an impressively high bar through both consistency and relentless quality.
If hope is absent, there remains at least the desire for hope, and in that uneasy space Iron Lung and FRKSE offer an erstwhile companion as the trade winds of failing systems continue to buffet the human experiment.
Coniglio has made an album that honors the craft of earlier soundscape practice while carrying it into a private, contemporary meditation on cause, chance and presence. It is beautiful, grave, lucid, quietly overwhelming.
29526 is a return under another name and, at the same time, a departure. LoMo delivers to Neo Ouija an album capable of conversing with the ambient techno tradition and with the more introspective sensibility of IDM, sustained by writing that is lucid, visionary and deeply musical.
Rotostyles is a vertiginous and exhilarating demonstration of sonic craftsmanship, draped in colossal, almost Dantean orchestration. Highly recommended—uneasy and captivating in equal measure.
There is a sense of parring back with The Night Album. Electronic elements are present, but they are employed subtly and without over elaboration. Instead, it is Dobson’s own interaction with string and wind that is returned to with a renewed impetus and vigor. Captivatingly understated, Digitonal captures the glory of stopping and considering those forgotten sounds. An audio salve in an all too loud world.
Some records ask to be heard; Philippe Petit’s Lightning Field 01. Constraint asks to be observed, documenting the unpredictable conversation between composer, electricity, and machine at the heart of modular synthesis.
The finest quality of Ladybug 1 comes from its ability to treat dub as an art of emotional memory. Each return of the theme seems to erase something and make it more vivid at the same time. In the leaner versions, rhythm becomes a heavy step through smoke, reverbs widen like liquid metal, silences speak with the same intensity as the impacts.
