Experimental Electronic Music
A slow moving, contemplative, dark and sustained, thrilling and colossal poetical/musical drama of overwhelming expressive intensity with hints of hidden cathedral organs holding each listener up to the sky above their wearisome moments and extending the illustrative emotional mood.
Tomoyoshi Date is a musician who knows how to make warm music from a cold laptop. To that end, he uses recordings from a Diapason upright piano in the house of his maternal grandmother’s sister.
Hawkins elicits increasing clearly defined tones from his modular synth, with bright ambience and traces of an improvisatory concert of lofty circles in the air, like entangled particles dancing in their contemplative and transcendent harmonic existence.
The tracks assembled for this annual aural treasury are all highly crafted ambient electronic instrumentals, each illuminated and uplifting, with an evident deep moral seriousness and an artistry which expresses a very conscious and deliberate assumption of spiritual ecstasy in which our mind is suspended.
Neau records tranquil surroundings, filled with birds and a bit of water, which he combines into soundscapes. He superimposes the material, and along with that, he adds some electronics.
After covering several hundred releases in 2022, many notables—including links to their respective Igloo reviews or release pages—are cataloged here. As usual, there are no winners or runners-up as the lists are alphabetized by artist and selected tracks are featured on our Soundcloud playlist.
