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.
Author: J. Batista
MEGAFAUNA :: Birdsong (Self Released)
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.
You Us We Them :: memoryleaks (([||])) (CONDU||T)
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.
Otto Taimela :: Cheap Ingredients (Cudighi)
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.
Push For Night :: That Porous Line (Room40)
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.
omni causa :: aux4444 pt.1 (mindcolormusic)
A label that kept going, kept releasing, kept refining a shared aesthetic without compromise or concession to trends. aux4444 pt.1 carries all of that history in its drum patterns and melodic builds, and it sounds better for it. This is what underground electronic music looks like when it’s done with genuine conviction over a sustained period of time.
Mount Shrine :: The Yasu Ether Project (Cryo Chamber)
Simon Heath closes the release notes with “May you rest in peace.” There’s nothing to add to that. The Yasu Ether Project is an overall haunting and pleasant experience, a final document of an artist who understood that darkness and stillness aren’t opposites of beauty but conditions under which a particular kind of beauty becomes possible. César Alexandre knew that instinctively, and this album proves it one last time.
Latest Fad :: Radio Free Money (Durable Oxide)
Durable Oxide announces itself with DOX-001—the debut release from a new Portland, Oregon-based label intent on delivering decisive electronic atmospheres. It’s a strong opening statement for a label to make, and Radio Free Money earns it.
Heogen :: The Precipice (Touched Music)
The Precipice is the clearest proof yet that the trust between Boulton and Bax runs deep enough to produce something genuinely singular. It’s the sound of two producers who stopped negotiating with each other and started finishing each other’s sentences.
Lusine :: Melting Days (Ghostly International)
Melting Days is constantly in motion—loops building, layers arriving and dissolving, rhythms surfacing and retreating, and that restlessness is what keeps it from becoming background music. It demands a kind of attention that most ambient records politely decline to ask for. Ten albums in, that quality hasn’t dulled. If anything it’s sharper.
Somatic Responses :: Operational Ambivalence (Self Released)
Somatic Responses and John Healy, specifically on this release, have spent over three decades refining the specific space between force and sweetness that their catalog occupies. Operational Ambivalence doesn’t reinvent that space. It just inhabits it with the kind of confidence that comes from thirty years of knowing exactly where you live.
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stanleycypress :: Ephemeral EP (Self Released)
Chris Meyer’s Alias Zone featuring Robert Rich :: Passage (Self Released)
Fallen :: Stars are Crashing, Homes are Burning… (Touched Music)
SUAHN :: Distort Everything Forever (Self Released)
Ervin Omsk :: Der Saal tobt (Orange Milk)
Strugatsky Brothers :: Window To Askoy (Zoku – Zoku)
Lost Myths :: Lost Myths vol. VII (Lotophagus)
The Bug / Friday Night Plans :: Ladybug 2 (Pressure)
