Experimental Electronic Music
This is not merely an album about pessimism, collapse, paranoia, or sepia memories. It is an expertly crafted and beautifully sustained paean to the enduring presence of the motion of Goodness—often obscured, often wounded, not-for-profit, but somehow still capable of outliving every system designed to extinguish it. A balm for balmy days and long dark nights of the soul.
Empusae and Maris Anguis have crafted a fantastic album that rewards repeated listening and offers a welcome step toward a more spiritual and cultural focus for their label Cryo Chamber.
Originally published in Melody Maker on May 11, 1996, Mark Roland’s review of Meat Beat Manifesto’s Subliminal Sandwich captured the arrival of a record that would go on to become one of electronic music’s most influential and genre-defining releases; republished here with permission, 30 years on.
Air Signs rests at its distinct sound. Everything is pieced together very well, and all the noises, melodies, and synths are family—they all align track after track. Deschamps has a gift for cohesion. Even when he’s working with degraded loops, reversed recordings, and heavily processed guitar, nothing feels fragmented. Everything belongs.
Broken rhythmic structures, exquisite sub-bass stutters, and destabilized funk mechanics colliding into something gloriously unhinged. It’s machine music with bloodstream heat—tactile, sensual, and absolutely devastating at volume.
The waters here are torrid. But the result of swimming in them is to emerge somehow richer than before. The sound of subtraction through propulsion: the old and archaic riotously stripped away to leave space for the new. A violent recalibration disguised as transcendence.
Analogical Force remains a powerhouse label capable of balancing both forward-facing experimentation and deep respect for established electro and breaks traditions. Both approaches carry immense value, and perhaps the real excitement comes from hearing artists navigate the space between the two.
I trust BoC to make something interesting and emotionally effective, but when it comes to their music’s meaning, they’re slippery and mysterious. Inferno is a collection of pieces that grapple with scary feelings, scary beliefs, and the inescapable feeling that you can only trust your senses so far.
This succinct observation offers a glimpse into a language in which Mayer seems uniquely at ease. Through gathering otherworldly effects and artifacts that might otherwise be dismissed as errors, Matters animates unfamiliar forms and hidden possibilities.
What really gives Lost Data its sonic force is not all the included excess, but an apparent refusal to settle into the predictable symmetry of four, eight, sixteen bar logic as the expected routine resting place. The DNA of that architecture still exists, but it is constantly being bent, misaligned, mangled or re-angled until it stops feeling like a weak safe-house and guarantee.
Drawing inspiration from Gene Wolfe’s monumental The Book of the New Sun, Flint Glass and Ah Cama-Sotz craft a dark and immersive soundscape via The Shadow of the Torturer that evokes the decay, mystery, and uneasy beauty of a far-future Earth where ancient machines, lost civilizations, and the long shadow of Severian’s fate still echo beneath a fading sun.
