Experimental Electronic Music
What Answers pulls off, mostly, is conjuring a nostalgic feeling attached to nothing specific. Tape hiss, degraded loops, half-remembered melodic phrases, none of it points at an actual memory. It just borrows the texture of one and hands it to you empty, letting you fill in whatever it’s supposed to be about. That’s a strange trick for two artists to pull off together, especially two who built this thing without ever being in the same room.
Trudi Veremu turns the vintage EMS VCS4 into a voice of her own, blending freeform vocals, experimental electronics, and diasporic memory into an intimate exploration of sound, identity, and the unpredictable relationship between artist and instrument.
Two decades removed from the clockwork IDM of Polytuft-Tech, Tim Martin’s returning light (Home Normal) and beneath still stars (handstitched*) find him stripping everything back to drift, texture, and quietly resonant melody, resulting in two companion albums that feel less like separate releases than different sides of the same long, unhurried thought.
God Is Everything You Are Not is built from voice, MicroKORG synthesis, a microphonic soundbox from LeafAudio, and field recordings. Seven pieces, just under 36 minutes. The release notes describe grief approached as passage rather than narrative, and that framing holds, this record puts you inside the duration of something rather than telling you it happened.
The Consumers Research and Development Label is clearly not trying to be one thing, and that’s the most encouraging part of this reintroduction. A techno veteran finally putting out his own record after twenty years of platforming everyone else, sitting right next to a hip-hop travelogue built out of literal years of instability and constant movement, that’s a genuinely odd pairing on paper, and it works precisely because neither release is compromising to fit next to the other. They just happen to share a home.
Natural recordings, soft rhythms, distortion, metallic noises, melody, and digital artifacts continually lean against one another without settling. By the end it feels less like eight compositions and more like half an hour spent inside a system that was continuously adjusting itself while you were listening, and never quite finished.
Distort Everything Forever opens in ambience, spends most of its middle throwing rhythmic and low frequency chaos at you, then returns toward atmosphere at the end.
MEGAFAUNA creates a dark atmosphere using nature sounds and electro-acoustic manipulation to take the mind somewhere it didn’t expect to go. Listening to this at early morning hours, at normal volume, lying down, not fully awake, is a specific and disorienting experience. It’s quite amazing for what it is: a live improvisation built from birds that manages to sound like a horror score composed by the landscape itself.
This is what it sounds like when a producer has a large collection of morning keyboard improvisations, a practice the artist calls “Chaos Works,” recorded daily as a meditative exercise, and decides to present them honestly rather than sculpting them into something more conventionally structured.
Taimela isn’t trying to recreate the 90s IDM and drum and bass golden era so much as he’s drawing a line from it to the present, letting those influences inform his melodic instincts without being consumed by them. There’s a lightness to how he carries all of that reference—it never feels like homework, never feels like pastiche. It just sounds like a producer who grew up on the right records and internalized them so completely that they became his own vocabulary.
That Porous Line follows as a deliberate shift—letting in just enough light to see differently without abandoning the dark corners they prefer to inhabit.
