Knowing what Foel built this record out of—a difficult mental health stretch, a fascination with landscapes that are beautiful and hostile in equal measure, a process built on chaos eventually resolving into order, Gwasgaru earns its title honestly.
Tag: Best of 2026
Tujiko Noriko :: PON (Editions Mego)
PON moves effortlessly between the childlike and the obscure, the intimate and the epic, grief and wonder. It’s an extraordinary piece of work that reveals something new each time. This is an artist fully at the height of her powers and it shows in every single track.
Mana ERG :: Concealed Under A Strange Tongue (XBDA)
Concealed Under A Strange Tongue suggests an elegant, diversified, and pleasant listening experience where meandering emotional chords meet spacious ambient electronica, processed field recordings, occasional sampled voice elements with a near new-age tone, and a neo-psychedelic/cosmic Americana feeling (for the sunlit psych-country-esque guitar sequences), along with near Steve Tibbetts-influenced mystic grooves.
Building Music :: A conversation with Yu Miyashita (Yaporigami); architect of the inner world
Yu Miyashita (aka Yaporigami) approaches music as a lifelong search for structure, authenticity, and philosophical expression, balancing uncompromising artistic vision with an openness to reinvention that has defined every stage of his creative journey.
ENV(itre) :: Prysmaen Tales (Detroit Underground)
Prysmaen Tales bridges eras without straddling them awkwardly. It honors the introspective depth of classic IDM while moving forward on its own terms. For anyone who’s been following Majewski since the early DETUND years, this is exactly the kind of return worth waiting for.
Josh Mason :: Kicking A Dark Horse (greyfade)
These releases are not merely containers for music. They are thoughtfully conceived artistic objects that extend, deepen, and enrich the listening experience. They are works meant to be lived with, revisited, displayed, and cherished. Josh Mason’s Kicking A Dark Horse, the third installment in the label’s FOLIO format, may be the clearest realization yet of that philosophy.
Caural :: Aura (Prism92)
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.
Yu Miyashita / Yaporigami :: IDM Collection 21-25 / The Structure of Silence (The Collection Artaud)
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.
Vijunns :: 1991 (Hyperreal Projects)
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.
S. Salter :: Ara EP (Plusha)
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 :: Multiforms: Ambient Transmissions, Volume 3 (Just Music)
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.
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