Experimental Electronic 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.
On Islands Alight, percussion takes on a structural role, the bass gains weight, echo intervenes in the form, and the pulse alters the relationship between the different parts. The British composer points to the history of dub within electronic music as one of the project’s sources.
The Precipice is the clearest proof yet that the trust between Boulton and Bax runs deep enough to produce something genuinely singular. It’s the sound of two producers who stopped negotiating with each other and started finishing each other’s sentences.
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.
Pentagrams Of Discordia seem to vaporize sound itself, blending traces of past, present, and future until their downtempo worlds begin to intertwine. Beats become memories, melodies become distant signals, and atmosphere takes over as the guiding force.
Tricky turns the difficult stuff into sound rather than sermon, and the result is an album that feels less like an elegy than a deeply lived affirmation of being here. No, not a return to form. The form was never abandoned. Instead, a deeply resonant expression of a singular experience eventually known finally by all. Alpha to Omega.
Rather than simply calling out for someone to remain, Geyzel uses these five tracks to explore what happens when you finally stop holding everything in. Its hidden strength is found in that openness: a willingness to wander through uncertainty, sit with absence, and ultimately let it all out.
Mind Maps 7 stands as another richly rewarding chapter in an extraordinary body of electronic music—one that continues to push gently at the boundaries of ambient, downtempo and sample-based composition without ever losing its sense of warmth or wonder. Long may these maps continue to unfold, pointing listeners towards the kind of electronic music that still feels capable of surprising, transporting and quietly reshaping the landscape around it.
There is a sense of parring back with The Night Album. Electronic elements are present, but they are employed subtly and without over elaboration. Instead, it is Dobson’s own interaction with string and wind that is returned to with a renewed impetus and vigor. Captivatingly understated, Digitonal captures the glory of stopping and considering those forgotten sounds. An audio salve in an all too loud world.
The finest quality of Ladybug 1 comes from its ability to treat dub as an art of emotional memory. Each return of the theme seems to erase something and make it more vivid at the same time. In the leaner versions, rhythm becomes a heavy step through smoke, reverbs widen like liquid metal, silences speak with the same intensity as the impacts.
Isness, the label’s sister imprint focused on more atmospheric and introspective electronics, arrives at its third release with Memorabilia EP, introducing Kid Bucle—the new alias of Ibrah PM, previously known as Malsum within the drum and bass scene. It marks both his debut on the label and the start of a new chapter, working out of Valencia, Spain.
