Experimental Electronic Music
Pequeño clima doméstico is radically atmospheric: it blends equally well with the sounds of traffic or chirping birds, with a slow Sunday morning with a book or with the Monday after sending emails while working from home, and is sure to improve any of these moments in a humble but powerful way.
Not a simple translation of light into sound, nor an allegory, SB4 makes and transcends its own rules (as well as minimalist and drone music’s, for that matter), resulting in a rare natural wonder, deceptive in its simplicity but cosmic just under the surface.
DISPLACES is an album that I’ll find myself drawn back to, or haunted by over and over, providing sometimes an intimate, intuitive understanding of something bigger than me, and others giving energy from some obscure source, or else… The thrill of not knowing exactly what will only keep expanding.
With everything speaks of itself, joão ms decisively steps out of the dream logic of his earlier work, presenting an album grounded in direction, structure, and presence, where sound no longer signifies sleep but asserts itself as waking reality.
Ludovico Franco’s Open Field (Rohs! Record) is a seven-part ambient work blending field recordings, improvisation, and electronics. Inspired by James Tenney, it was recorded outdoors with musicians and audience sharing the space. The result is a series of immersive soundscapes that feel more like living environments than compositions.
Hello Spiral’s Detached Objects (Moonside Tapes) blends noise, dark ambient, computer music, and musique concrète to defy easy categorization. By severing sounds from familiar meanings, it creates an unsettling atmosphere of estrangement, embodying Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of “making the stone stony” and challenging passive listening.
The strength of D-R is that, like much of the best ambient music, it can be approached as the perfectly balanced backdrop which will subliminally change your state of mind, or as a full immersion, disclosing one more detail at each listen. In both cases, the album rewards the listener, and inspires them in its tranquillity.
Bursts of chaos pop up all over the album, taking the shape of anything from an explosion to white noise to shouts, reminders of extreme levels of energy threatening to explode at any moment.
Throughout El So de los Muertos, this sense of awe at the geological scale of something larger and more ancient is present both in sound and aesthetics, as shown by the album name itself (“The Sun of the Dead”) as well as track titles with translations like “The Earth and its subterranean powers.”
Unlike the usual live record, Under Certain Light and Atmospheric Conditions refuses to offer the listener a concert experience by proxy, to be had in the comfort of one’s own headphones. The inclusion of these field recordings, and the fact that over half of the tracks are soundcheck improvisations and unreleased compositions, distances the album from a simple celebration of his past catalog.
Like Nazar himself in the lyrics, Demilitarize appears inaccessible at first, using its abstraction and deconstruction as a shield. But a strong light still shines through this shell and sinks in a bit at a time, first with circumspection, then with warmth, until opening itself to repeated listens and blooming in all its beauty and intention.
