Experimental Electronic Music
Tschernobyl serves as an immersive depiction of such a wasteland and as a medium to cement the band’s feelings regarding the catastrophe. Both the music and the various vocal samples scattered throughout feel incredibly apt for painting images in the listener’s head; a sense of melancholy is sometimes present, while at other times the tracks become rougher and much more industrially influenced.
Beyond the Clones then does a fantastic job of morphing proto-EBM rhythms, contemporary glitch textures, and those delightful toybox electronics into this next release. And in so doing, moving between space-like abstraction and grounded abrasions with a physical intensity throughout.
Across eleven diverse movements, SICK STREET displays rhythmic elasticity, aural sculpting assembled from found sound, cellular technology, environmental residue, postcode mosaics, and a restless multiplicity of influence.
Across its duration, A Wave Of Alarm navigates the long architecture of inner turbulence, invoking something akin to a dark night of the soul: a descent into fertile voids where collapse and liberation begin to mirror one another.
For listeners expecting linear progression or clear melodic arc, Tracker Mini Works will feel incomplete. For those who understand that fragmentation and glitchy manipulation can be more emotionally resonant than perfect production, this will feel exactly right.
A decade and a half hiatus since his last (Awash, 2012) brings new skin for the old ceremony with True Bypass on familiar ground yet with a sense of refresh.
Like Manual, Billow Observatory purveys work of delicacy and poise, and Resina is never less than engaging, frequently compelling.
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.
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.
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.
A really enjoyable eerie, isolationist and wistful electronic ambient release with enough ideas and well-designed textures to enthrall the listener.
