Experimental Electronic Music
In Rotation across the past several weeks and months, this multi-view column surveys a shifting electronic landscape shaped by bold and forward-thinking artists. Expect fractured rhythms, glitch aesthetics, abstract experimentation, mechanical precision, industrial pressure, melodic detours, and bass-heavy electro transmissions from Alavux, Annie Hall, Delta Division, Koloah, Low Battery Orchestra, Modul, neuroboy, Nocto, R.I.O.T, Trofusin, and Voltaire.
Sacred Drift is an enjoyable listen, and the clicks, reminiscent of the click-hop movement that emerged in the early 2000s from artists like Microstoria, Pimmon, and early Matmos, bring back those familiar click sounds that add curiosity to glitch textures of an ambient piece.
Within the latest Speaker Music transmission, Brown returns to the bastion of seriously adult musical content that is Planet Mu Records for the frankly exquisite Synoptic Audio. With its theme-first offering to the experience, De Forrest proposes sound itself as a system of critical inquiry.
Mutual Motion gathers 25 artists across 24 tracks into a release animated by movement, bodily response, and stylistic multiplicity—an expansive survey of modern club mechanics operating at full physiological intensity.
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.
Graham Dunning emerges with Quern (Jollies Records) from a period of academic research into sound and self-built instrumentation with a collection that feels both tactile and purposeful.
Changing shape for their third outing, ZEROTHREE from Rome’s Black Shapes shifts away from the straight four-to-the-floor techno of the previous release m into something way deeper and more essentially elastic.
Shadow Tactics maintains a focus on structure and texture—beats splinter, surfaces scrape, and each element is placed with intent. It’s a concise study in mechanical detail and broken rhythm, placing WONKS in conversation with artists like Richard Devine, Funckarma, Hecq, and Funkstörung.
The downtempo chug is still there, but it’s been processed through decades of IDM evolution, filtered through the same sensibility that informed Beans’ abstract hip-hop work and Schematic’s experimental roster. DL Poisons’ unsettling in the way that the best experimental electronic music should be, familiar enough to feel grounded, strange enough to keep you off balance.
UK live performance stalwart Si Brown as MQSA returns with the Enmity Voidance EP, a sleek five-tracker that feels both finely engineered, energetically sharp, and instinctively loose and juiced.
Synonym carves a sharp path through bruising low-end sound design, relentless electro fragments, and pixelated bleep modulations, never easing its grip across five kaleidoscopic cuts.
