Experimental Electronic Music
rust/wave, his latest, takes a different approach. The Hamilton, Ontario-based artist has compiled a beautiful piece of ambient work, and rather than introducing itself as some ambient drone or sounding like that, it’s actually really melodic and beautiful. A peaceful listen.
The sounds here are not just the contemporary musique concrète we’ve all come to know and love from Everyday Dust, but musique métaphysique. It’s earthy, its rooted, its physical powerful when blaring through the headphones or speakers and subwoofer, but it contains the ever necessary particles of dust that transport me to the otherworld every time I listen to music from this artist.
Operating as Simon Pyke (aka Freeform) and various collaborative ventures, unveils Drift Works—twelve fractured post-ambient sketches unfolding in slow, seamless disintegration.
Within that tension between structure and collapse, Sven Piayda uncovers a strange sense of ease. Intercelestial thrives inside instability, shaping corroded electronics and broken rhythmic patterns into something fluid, tactile, and strangely alive.
DaFou’s new release on Buenos Aeros’ Cyclical Dreams arrives under the title Berlin Transit, and the Berlin nod is more than cosmetic—it signals a clear pull toward a Schulzian mode of expression. What unfolds across more than 100 minutes is a sustained act of musical articulation, rooted in a tightly wound compression of intention from the outset.
After 13 years of silence, Boards of Canada returned not simply with new music, but with a surreal, memory-soaked communion at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre where every fading ray of sunset, whispering pine, analog pulse, and hushed breath among 300 devoted listeners made Inferno feel less like an album preview and more like a long-lost transmission finally reaching home.
Gridlock’s Trace returns, and this is a classic industrial IDM release. As a reissue, there’s nothing here that’s reinventing the wheel in regards to production, it was released at a time where this type of sound was innovative and thriving.
Lost Hope Society doesn’t deal in easy optimism. Instead, it locates hope as a kind of underlying signal—constant, even when masked by noise. Like Midsommar, it uses brightness to reveal shadow, and in doing so, turns discomfort into clarity.
Two of my favorite sonic sculptors converge as F~M, alias of Roel Funcken and Jeroen Bax (aka exm), shaping Fose into four extended chapters that warp and reassemble rhythmic glitch fragments, threaded with fluid collisions of bass pressure, flickering bleeps, and meticulous sound design.
Taken together, Fading Bright and Litchfield reveal the emotional and conceptual breadth possible within contemporary ambient music when approached with sincerity and imagination. Both artists resist easy categorization or formulaic structures, choosing instead to create deeply immersive worlds shaped by texture, emotion, and atmosphere.
Hollan Holmes delivers a conceptual ambient-electronic album that energizes beauty, while considering decay, aging, and the passage of time. This could act in a sonic parallel to Holmes’ visual art, celebrating the unconventional elegance of oxidation and endurance.
