Kid Bucle, either knowing or unknowingly, takes a lineage built from futurism, tek-funk, broken machinery and the pleasure of the unexpected, then subjects it to contemporary pressure until something new and now begins to emerge.
Tag: Best of 2026
Otto Taimela :: Cheap Ingredients (Cudighi)
Taimela isn’t trying to recreate the 90s IDM and drum and bass golden era so much as he’s drawing a line from it to the present, letting those influences inform his melodic instincts without being consumed by them. There’s a lightness to how he carries all of that reference—it never feels like homework, never feels like pastiche. It just sounds like a producer who grew up on the right records and internalized them so completely that they became his own vocabulary.
Fleck E.S.C. :: Interior Reset (Pyramid Transmissions)
This is electro with its lineage intact and its eyes firmly ahead: studied, physical, detailed and properly funky. The lesson is simple. Know the form. Then push the production until the form starts pushing back.
Philippe Blache :: Embodied Shadow Of Thy Secret Mind (Mahorka)
Philippe Blache has constructed a detailed sonic environment where piano, electronics, repetition, and shifting textures create a sustained feeling of uncertainty, contemplation, and spectral loss.
Boddy | Scanner :: Juxtapositions (DiN)
DiN has built an extensive catalog through precisely these kinds of creative connections, and Juxtapositions stands as a particularly strong example of what can emerge when experienced artists remain genuinely open to one another. There is considerable craft here. Its sophistication lies in the natural way its many elements coexist and transform.
Phantom Horse :: Primal Forms (Umor Rex)
Primal Forms is quite a propulsive and beautifully elaborated electronic synthedelica effort that will ravish listeners of adventurous music with dancing, then hallucinogenic qualities. The synergy between the two musicians works like magic and with a clear easiness.
Dimensional Holofonic Sound :: Concept Record (Self Released)
Concept Record not only works as a creative tool; it demonstrates what can be created when Professor Ben’s instruction is heeded. The concept is to use this record alongside other records to make new records, while providing a legitimate D.H.S. album of its own right—one that embraces the features that help make physical records so fun and appealing.
Ruxpin :: Anemoia (Touched Music)
Most ingredients are well known, but it’s the ingenuity with which they are married into one homogenous alloy that makes Anemoia not simply a standout IDM piece in terms of production proficiency and storytelling, but an important milestone in the history of modern electronic music in general and, for me, a present and future classic.
omni causa :: aux4444 pt.1 (mindcolormusic)
A label that kept going, kept releasing, kept refining a shared aesthetic without compromise or concession to trends. aux4444 pt.1 carries all of that history in its drum patterns and melodic builds, and it sounds better for it. This is what underground electronic music looks like when it’s done with genuine conviction over a sustained period of time.
Mount Shrine :: The Yasu Ether Project (Cryo Chamber)
Simon Heath closes the release notes with “May you rest in peace.” There’s nothing to add to that. The Yasu Ether Project is an overall haunting and pleasant experience, a final document of an artist who understood that darkness and stillness aren’t opposites of beauty but conditions under which a particular kind of beauty becomes possible. César Alexandre knew that instinctively, and this album proves it one last time.
Arca :: XXXXX (XL)
Arca’s latest record pushes her glitch-heavy, genre-defying sound further than ever, turning chaos, vulnerability, and radical experimentation into one of her most fearless works yet.
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