Experimental Electronic Music
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.
Pentagrams Of Discordia seem to vaporize sound itself, blending traces of past, present, and future until their downtempo worlds begin to intertwine. Beats become memories, melodies become distant signals, and atmosphere takes over as the guiding force.
Tricky turns the difficult stuff into sound rather than sermon, and the result is an album that feels less like an elegy than a deeply lived affirmation of being here. No, not a return to form. The form was never abandoned. Instead, a deeply resonant expression of a singular experience eventually known finally by all. Alpha to Omega.
From noise to nice. Harsh to honed. Squelch to sculpture. Ectospasm is a 10/10 top-tier proposition for anyone still prepared to leave the comfort of the known and go poking around in whatever is moving about underneath it.
Potato.exe executes precision-built, acrobatic sound structures that, despite their mechanical framework, still exude warmth through rhythmic foundations of remarkable control.
Rather than simply calling out for someone to remain, Geyzel uses these five tracks to explore what happens when you finally stop holding everything in. Its hidden strength is found in that openness: a willingness to wander through uncertainty, sit with absence, and ultimately let it all out.
Luca Young crafts a hypnagogic birthing enclosure in the space created by this music, a space open for manifesting further gifts of reflective imagination.
Overflowing delivers an oceanic body of shifting harmonies, melodious vibes, and cool, soft-rock resonances. Sparse textural ambient motifs punctuate the ensemble, as in the granular and free-flowing “Sunbird.” Emotionally, the music is entirely connected with hope and gentle bitterness.
Each Monolake release is, of course, sui generis with a context and sound never to recur, but Interstate is unique in its way—document of a vital musical and cultural moment capturing paradigm shifts in (pre-)millennial music production; its deep textured electronics and ever-morphing cyber-rhythms a snapshot of two phonauts boundary-surfing with then cutting edge tech, causing ripples that became waves that would break over the ’00s and beyond.
This music tells of the passage of time, with sparse humorous and facetious tones punctuating the moodier ensemble. Each track is elaborated and designed as a subtle, sentient vignette in the mind of a daydreaming smoker and ordinary thinker who opens his soul and invites the listener to witness his hope, fear, despair, and intricate yet playful reflections.
Olùsìn [Worshippers] moves with the gravity of a procession seen from a great distance: slow synth masses, vocal apparitions, soft percussive grammar, low harmonic pressure, field material absorbed into the body of the music.
Empire of Sand provides impeccably built darkened droning soundscapes with an emotional and nihilistic apex. The whole sonic architecture is centered on assaultive, multi-layered harsh electric guitar patterns; micro-noisy, grainy ambient electronics; and a grandiose, spellbinding dystopian cinematic component.
