Experimental Electronic Music
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.
Much music is steeped in the history of the place where it was made, and here Jonathan Sharp, the musician behind this project, trawls the borderlands of fiction, imagination, and the real places written about in the Plague Dogs where he went to collect sounds for the album.
In Bernhard Living’s works, there’s almost always a straightforward title to express the context behind each one, and there is always a description paired with the record to fully elaborate on its concept. That ends up making music as minimalistic as this far more interesting to me.
A really enjoyable eerie, isolationist and wistful electronic ambient release with enough ideas and well-designed textures to enthrall the listener.
Albumin is limited to 500 copies on vinyl through Moving Furniture Records, and it’s exactly the kind of release that rewards deep, focused listening. Put it on, turn it up, and let the textures do the work.
Portal for his own finely tuned musical frequency, Laurie Osborne returns with the latest Appleblim set, Neolithic Neon, released through hot house Sneaker Social Club. Here Osborne delivers a collection of tracks fused with depth, weight and emotional intelligence, reflecting not simply the mechanics of club music but the deeper pulse of human creativity itself.
Frisson is proof that Collingburn’s years in the club scene weren’t wasted. He knows how to build tension, how to pace a track, how to let moments breathe. But he also knows when to pull back, when to let the ambient drift take over. For an artist who’s spent nearly two decades navigating the underground dance world and another stretch exploring pure ambient, Frisson feels like the convergence of both.
