Experimental Electronic Music
As always with New Risen Throne, this album is massive, cathedralic, orchestral, sonically transportive, with hints of doom-laden epicness. Recommended for fans of deep ambient music with a cinematic, moody-esque, dystopian edge. Fans of Lustmord, Svartsinn, Phaenon, Dodmaskin, Psychonaut, Aeoga… won’t be disconcerted.
Otero Vargas has created an album that rewards attentive listening without demanding a prescribed interpretation. It is dark, textural, challenging, and surprisingly inviting. Beneath its fractured rhythms and unstable surfaces is an unusually thoughtful piece of electronic composition. Dissonance is a compelling listen from beginning to end and another strong statement from both Otero Vargas and Facade Electronics.
Across its ten tracks, vocals function as much as part of the instrumentation as they do a traditional lead, with Hammerbell and John Winston Phillips giving each song its own shifting character.
Hana Stretton’s album tiarn is filled with the kind of hazy lo-fi arrangements that pull on the heart strings of sepia toned memories, fading Polaroid snapshots in sound of private moments and community life alike. It’s not crazy to learn that some old family camera footage is part of the inspiration behind these songs.
MEGAFAUNA creates a dark atmosphere using nature sounds and electro-acoustic manipulation to take the mind somewhere it didn’t expect to go. Listening to this at early morning hours, at normal volume, lying down, not fully awake, is a specific and disorienting experience. It’s quite amazing for what it is: a live improvisation built from birds that manages to sound like a horror score composed by the landscape itself.
Kid Bucle, either knowing or unknowingly, takes a lineage built from futurism, tek-funk, broken machinery and the pleasure of the unexpected, then subjects it to contemporary pressure until something new and now begins to emerge.
This is what it sounds like when a producer has a large collection of morning keyboard improvisations, a practice the artist calls “Chaos Works,” recorded daily as a meditative exercise, and decides to present them honestly rather than sculpting them into something more conventionally structured.
Taimela isn’t trying to recreate the 90s IDM and drum and bass golden era so much as he’s drawing a line from it to the present, letting those influences inform his melodic instincts without being consumed by them. There’s a lightness to how he carries all of that reference—it never feels like homework, never feels like pastiche. It just sounds like a producer who grew up on the right records and internalized them so completely that they became his own vocabulary.
Solythode maintains an unrelenting presence, often opening with uneasy ambient-noise structures before expanding toward the outer edges of mechanical rhythms and threaded bass lines that seem to operate just outside our galaxy.
DiN has built an extensive catalog through precisely these kinds of creative connections, and Juxtapositions stands as a particularly strong example of what can emerge when experienced artists remain genuinely open to one another. There is considerable craft here. Its sophistication lies in the natural way its many elements coexist and transform.
For fans of CPU, Carl Finlow and electro’s wider continuum, IXRQ’s command of the language will be immediately apparent. But this isn’t simply reverence for what has been. These are familiar components arranged with enough curiosity to remind us that electro’s future has never been about inventing the machine. It’s about continuing to find new things for it to say.
