Experimental Electronic Music
Some albums get your brain working. You’ll plant some conceptual seed in your mind, and you start thinking or even philosophizing. It depends on the planted seed, how your brain works, mental (dis)abilities, and, oh yeah, the amount of coffee you had that day.
Through multiple evolutions along decades, with a refined combination of harmonies, a deep sense of space, a phenomenology of time and bright sonic manipulations based on acoustic timbres, Japanese artists invite the listener to enlightened and intuitive inner promenades.
In July 2024 the seminal Schematic label released the Brooklyn-based artist’s 12-track album called Density of Traction, a complex piece of art, rich in detail and far from following any common music patterns, which Autechre and Gescom lovers should listen to.
Establishing a benchmark for high-definition electronic experimentation, US-based Point Source Electronic Arts explores expansive landscapes steeped in post-industrial terrain, striking a balance between explosive glitch mechanisms and delicate atmospheric textures.
Breath shines both as an ambient record and as a blend of both ambient and classical, not solely because of the instrumentation utilized, but also because of these really big powerful climaxes that make up for the record’s most engaging moments.
So even though Kilometer Club is doing something new by making electronic ambience the length of something you would hear by the Minutemen or The Germs, it is still long enough at the album level to be considered long form. That’s the paradox: an epic odyssey taken in brief snapshots. There is something very earnest about this approach.
A quarter of a century on from optimal.lp’s release, then, its timelessness is still palpable, even enhanced, with the reissue’s addition of three tracks made while working on it, plus a new take on the closing “Tank” (digital only): in prepping the reissue, running one of the masters through a customized reverb unit, he began recording the outcome of this haptic past-inside-the-present dialog.
Blurred Cities presents an engaging and brilliant sound excursion, crafting poignant pieces with a slight departure from his usual sorrowful dusty neoclassical ambient in favor of more hypnotic and discreetly beat-laden ambient chills.
