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.
I can assure you there is no greater telling of a chapter of electronic history, set in a modern context, than this collection. A brand-new decade in retro colours, still vibrating with the naïve possibility that perhaps this time the future really would be different. Whether it was the intention to set out to communicate these themes, Acid Punx 3 did that to me. For me. Great job.
There’s an understated optimism running through Less Invasive, placing Cognition Delay comfortably alongside the more atmospheric work of artists such as Secede, Arovane, Biosphere, and Rod Modell. Yet rather than imitate those sounds, Alexander and Rice create something more patient: music that works best when allowed to sit quietly in the room, gradually revealing its details while everything else falls away.
Morning Glories is strongest when it allows this material to breathe without forcing it towards the sublime. bvdub knows his own vocabulary extremely well and at times exposes it to its limits. The more accessible melodic openings give the album a different kind of light, occasionally close to a pop sensibility, always absorbed within durations and structures that belong to another logic.
Together, the two tracks form a small refuge built from sound: sparse voices, lingering tones, and an unhurried sense of calm. Fortresses finds its strength in restraint, creating music that asks little of the listener beyond simply staying awhile, drifting, and letting go.
Interbeings unfolds as a living trace of coexistence: a permeable sonic ecosystem where listening becomes an experience of connection, crossing perceptual, physical and inner layers. These intertwine with interactions with the artworks through contact microphones, and with the flugelhorn as a center of presence and listening.
Black Shapes’ ZEROFOUR delivers four uncompromising transmissions of Millsian techno, smoked-out acid and analogue futurism, where relentless pressure, machine-driven psychedelia and late-night propulsion do all the talking.
A full-circle encounter with Steb Sly’s The Galaxy Projector, a gloriously funky, retro-futurist transmission that bridges house, breaks and cosmic soul while reminding us that the deepest purpose of music is not simply to move bodies, but to bring us together.
Rather than resolving its strange machinery, Noxi Melank leaves it in motion—a collection of damaged systems, unstable rhythms, and modular forms continually finding new ways to become something else.
With Economy of Movement, Antipodean breakbeat pioneer Social Sport delivers five restless, shape-shifting cuts where fractured rhythms, heavyweight bass and psychedelic atmospheres turn the breakbeat tradition into something fiercely alive and forward-moving.
Trippin’ is timely, the London (Ontario) label cementing the Newfoundland-based producer’s growing profile with a more substantial presence.
Mathias Villard is a very promising sound artist and Past Radiance can easily figure among my top favorite albums for this year. Exquisite, wistful, cinematic, alluring and emotionally transportive. For fans of Alessandro Cortini, Bvdub, Loscil, Markus Fjellström and Terence Hannum. Once more, Affin proves to be in the first league concerning modern-day ambient-lush drone music.
