Experimental Electronic Music
Aura leans more toward the hip-hop beat era than straight IDM, experimental in spirit, with enough left-field nuance that it resists being filed simply as instrumental hip-hop. It’s a document of a producer figuring out his own DNA in real time, two decades before anyone thought to look back and call it influential.
The 23 tracks that make up IDM Collection 21-25 / The Structure of Silence create a sonic fortress of shadow and light, featuring many rooms with complex infrastructure and sharp angles. There are geometric rhythms throughout, like gears that wind up, dismantle and reconfigure themselves, warmed by vapors of tone that slip through the cracks. As a sound designer and producer, Miyashita displays a masterful understanding of space.
This release is excellent on its own, but with so little material, it almost feels like something you’d listen to in anticipation of the next Vijunns release. Given how great the music on 1991 is, I certainly hope there’s more to come soon.
Ara is a three-track 8-minute mini-EP that spans a wide emotional and sonic range across three compositions, illustrating S. Salter’s evolving language of composition, which is detailed, emotive, and increasingly expansive in scope.
Marconi Union seems to have removed weight from everything, allowing only the emotional core of the materials to filter through: soft drones, slowly shifting harmonies, reverbs opening like irises, barely hinted pulses, melodic glimmers that surface and dissolve within the same breath.
From bubbling synths to irresistible basslines, Teleportations makes every stop on its cosmic journey worth visiting.
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.
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.
This is not merely an album about pessimism, collapse, paranoia, or sepia memories. It is an expertly crafted and beautifully sustained paean to the enduring presence of the motion of Goodness—often obscured, often wounded, not-for-profit, but somehow still capable of outliving every system designed to extinguish it. A balm for balmy days and long dark nights of the soul.
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.
