Experimental Electronic Music
Streaming-era production tends to scrub everything clean, loud and bright so it survives a phone speaker. Send Death goes the other way. The snares are dulled, the pads carry dust, the vocal chops are worn down to syllables. It’s a record that sounds like it was handled before it reached you, and that handling is the whole appeal.
1: When the Reflection Passes’ recordings were assembled from extended improvisations, with subsequent editing emphasizing repetition, erosion and negative space. Individual performances were continually reworked, layered and reduced until each piece reached its final form.
Twenty-five years after its release, Markus Guentner revisits IN MOLL, reflecting on youthful intuition, creative freedom, the limitations that shaped his sound, and the enduring importance of making music without expectations.
Jordan Schmelzer’s debut as Dead Edit, Signal Loss, plunges deep into the industrial undercurrents of IDM, where fractured rhythms, mechanical weight, and ambient collage converge in a dense assemblage of broken beats and digital decay.
The Cardboard Falcon is a profoundly vibrant, impressionistic, cinematic, slow-moving, and melodically oriented neoclassical album that will lead the listener to a state of serenity and contemplation.
Disheveled may not fully encapsulate Miller’s trajectory here; it’s in the blurred and shattered rhythms, often melancholic but always brimming with energy, where the Pacific Northwest-based musician finds comfort.
Undertow finds subtle variations and shifting emotional temperatures within tightly wound rhythmic frameworks; elsewhere, the grooves occasionally coast on their own momentum, mistaking persistence for progression.
This squamous assortment of pinged and panged filters drips with blips as the frequencies throb and slip. This little EP of five songs is perfect for a subwoofer session, i.e., when you need to do a bass test or just feel the explosion of low-end sounds in a swarm of voltaic murmuration.
Plone/None provides two expanded, long-form ambient-drone pieces, featuring massive walls of static, followed by slowly evolving clusters of convoluted, bleak noises and meandering motifs. This is not exactly power noise or a brutilist sound manifesto, as the two soundscapes give space to emotions and evocative, intimate feelings, pointing to a real sentient movement.
A live improvisation and sonic experiment, featuring warm, hazy and frayed guitar-based ambient textures and loops that evolve in space and time. The feeling suggests imaginary perceptions, perceptual distortions and fantasy-like perceptions of the universe we traverse, an incomplete journey through time that sets one forever adrift, through places that will remain after us, and where we are not.
Rudy Adrian’s Southern Isles Sketchbook is a deeply atmospheric and meditative journey through cinematic piano textures, haunting flutes, shimmering electronics, and spontaneous improvisations, evoking the stillness, mystery, and natural beauty of imagined landscapes.
Clark newly drops Steep Stims II, a second wave of electronic mastery and tuffist expressionism in mature machine funk. The deftness of touch is immediately apparent, but the album’s real achievement lies in the precision with which Clark marshals his unruly musical imagination.
IDM has a long history of artists who hide behind machines, faceless names and cryptic titles, letting the equipment do the talking. Trickjumps turns that tradition inside out. Calella tells you plainly who she is and how she moves through the world, then lets the machines say everything her face won’t.
Our world is moving faster today. Deuter wants to go the opposite way, and people love it. They want to slow down, sit on a silent island, and reflect. Deuter creates music by hearing one tone and by listening to it, which tells him where the second tone is coming from or where it’s going.
Rather than imposing a conventional compositional order upon these fragments, Coil seem content to let them retain something of their original instability. The result is an uneasy, sometimes beautiful collision of the intentional and the incidental, music found at the crossroads of the cult, the celt, the conundrum, and the coil.
Part vintage sci-fi soundtrack, part floating ambient propulsion, The Atlas Sector is immersive, emotionally resonant, and quietly transportive.
