Tag: Best of 2026

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.

Dean De Benedictis :: Salvaging The Future (Spotted Peccary Music)

With the completion of this trilogy, we acknowledge our part as a remote viewer of Dean’s life over three decades. Salvaging The Future—perhaps more than the prior two albums—is a restless collage, yet it is so well mixed that it lends itself to uninterrupted full-album listening. This listener is tuning in about 2x per day at the moment. Despite the challenges these decades have wrought, the trilogy’s close with “Our Story Survives Collectively” leaves us with a sense of hope. This is music for visioning.

Orange Crush :: Eidolons (SUNSEΛSKY)

Norway-based producer/musician Karl Endreson’s downtempo electronic project has been active since 2006, purveying nature-inspired soundscapes mixing ambient textures and trip-hop beats with guitar and field recordings, steeped in atmosphere infused with a deep sense of melody and nostalgia.