Experimental Electronic Music
After 13 years of silence, Boards of Canada returned not simply with new music, but with a surreal, memory-soaked communion at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre where every fading ray of sunset, whispering pine, analog pulse, and hushed breath among 300 devoted listeners made Inferno feel less like an album preview and more like a long-lost transmission finally reaching home.
Two of my favorite sonic sculptors converge as F~M, alias of Roel Funcken and Jeroen Bax (aka exm), shaping Fose into four extended chapters that warp and reassemble rhythmic glitch fragments, threaded with fluid collisions of bass pressure, flickering bleeps, and meticulous sound design.
The resulting experience of Sorry I Didn’t Realize feels untethered from trends or nostalgia bait, instead standing defiantly above contemporaries as both tribute and evolution — easily deserving placement near summit of any Best of 2026 conversation.
OS ZA CR AA NC stands as an immense body of experimental electronic excavation — a sprawling surge of shattered atmospheres, industrial IDM pressure, broken-beat deconstruction, and invasive sound design that engulfs senses without pause.
What begins as mechanical sound manipulation gradually transforms into drum-heavy recollections from another era entirely. A surreal passage through decades of IDM evolution, overflowing with restless imagination and stylistic bliss.
Shadow Tactics maintains a focus on structure and texture—beats splinter, surfaces scrape, and each element is placed with intent. It’s a concise study in mechanical detail and broken rhythm, placing WONKS in conversation with artists like Richard Devine, Funckarma, Hecq, and Funkstörung.
Together, these tracks form a succinct pairing, orbiting just beyond cerebral breakbeat fragments and electronic flickers—an intense sonic link that stretches rhythm toward its outer limits.
Ritual Machines fulfills its promise: a hypnotic, otherworldly passage through exploratory electronics, guided by ceremonial rhythm, subterranean resonance, and a persistent sense of sonic invocation.
What lingers is a sense of disorientation paired with reflection—a portrait of a fractured present, hinting at eventual calm while acknowledging the long aftermath ahead. In that sense, Cartography of Expression stands as both document and inquiry, tracing intersections of sound, voice, and politics while asking how everything arrived at this point.
There’s something quietly affecting on Shatter Marbles. It doesn’t demand attention so much as it lingers, inviting reflection. What emerges is less a revival and more a reimagining of ambient IDM’s early foundations—something that doesn’t stay fixed, but moves just out of reach, leaving behind a hazy sense of familiarity that’s likely to return long after the final notes fade.
Inspired by William Gibson’s 2014 novel The Periphery, Weldroid (aka Tamas Zsiros) settles into shadowed corridors of industrial IDM on The Peripheral (2026), where soundtrack fragments hum with minimal light, yet rhythms grind, shift, scrape, and collide.
