Experimental Electronic Music
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.
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.
Solythode maintains an unrelenting presence, often opening with uneasy ambient-noise structures before expanding toward the outer edges of mechanical rhythms and threaded bass lines that seem to operate just outside our galaxy.
This is electro with its lineage intact and its eyes firmly ahead: studied, physical, detailed and properly funky. The lesson is simple. Know the form. Then push the production until the form starts pushing back.
Philippe Blache has constructed a detailed sonic environment where piano, electronics, repetition, and shifting textures create a sustained feeling of uncertainty, contemplation, and spectral loss.
DiN has built an extensive catalog through precisely these kinds of creative connections, and Juxtapositions stands as a particularly strong example of what can emerge when experienced artists remain genuinely open to one another. There is considerable craft here. Its sophistication lies in the natural way its many elements coexist and transform.
Across Another World, Artificial Island keep things measured and textural, allowing minute sounds, gentle rhythms and shifting layers to carry much of the album’s character.
The depth and breadth of Documents of Different Reality is truly amazing. Cold Blow have done their homework and their research. This is a compilation of archaeological detail that brings to life the momentous machine music of the 1990s. In Spara’s own words, the collection connects “dots that people might have not connected before.”
Primal Forms is quite a propulsive and beautifully elaborated electronic synthedelica effort that will ravish listeners of adventurous music with dancing, then hallucinogenic qualities. The synergy between the two musicians works like magic and with a clear easiness.
For fans of CPU, Carl Finlow and electro’s wider continuum, IXRQ’s command of the language will be immediately apparent. But this isn’t simply reverence for what has been. These are familiar components arranged with enough curiosity to remind us that electro’s future has never been about inventing the machine. It’s about continuing to find new things for it to say.
Concept Record not only works as a creative tool; it demonstrates what can be created when Professor Ben’s instruction is heeded. The concept is to use this record alongside other records to make new records, while providing a legitimate D.H.S. album of its own right—one that embraces the features that help make physical records so fun and appealing.
There’s something particularly satisfying about hearing forgotten tracks recovered, revisited and finally released for others to discover. Off-Cuts (2014–2021) doesn’t feel like a scattered collection of archival material; instead, it comes across as a carefully gathered snapshot of a creative period, proving that these pieces still have plenty to say.
Most ingredients are well known, but it’s the ingenuity with which they are married into one homogenous alloy that makes Anemoia not simply a standout IDM piece in terms of production proficiency and storytelling, but an important milestone in the history of modern electronic music in general and, for me, a present and future classic.
