Experimental Electronic Music
UPIC Diffusion Session #23 begins with a cascade of glitchy static tones, each descending in pitch and rising in volume. They converge briefly around a central point, only to spiral down further as we begin to hear the distinct click of switches being flipped.
With a seamless blend of structured instrumentation and drifting passages, this ten-track suite unfolds as a collection of evolving, serene, and blurred shoegaze elements that hover just above the realm of organic surrealism.
Throughout the compilation, Transmission 010 embraces a range of ambient sub-genres, from weightless hazy pads to richly dense sound design, ensuring that each listener finds moments that resonate. The interplay between light and shadow, movement and stillness, results in an experience that feels vast yet intimate.
With Lifeless Ground, Sjellos plunges listeners back into the dark, mechanical abyss introduced on his last album Transmission Lost (2013), intensifying the grim sense of desolation and uncertainty. Each attempt to move brings flashes of forgotten memories, or fractured images of a past life.
Attached to the singular process of degradation—evoking memory, loss, and the inevitable corruption of time—and looped patterns but brightly coupled to soothing ambient lines and oceanic shimmering sequences which attenuate the ominous purpose and turns it in something dreamlike.
Within Silent Observers, Substak examines humanity’s need for mental escapism from reality’s harshness, seeking self-reliance, connection with nature, and alignment with the inner spiritual cosmos.
Listening, I want the big fat flakes to fall from these dense ambient envelopes and rippling contours. Yet like the snow, these flakes of sound don’t fall, they just hover over the listener with a sense of unknowing dread. Moody isn’t even the half of it.
A Trial of Distances is modern ambient music that sets a reflective mood. It combines subtle, functional, and therapeutic elements with a poetic human touch, making it perfect for moments of daily introspection.
The huge scope that Speaker Rotations depicts is well served by its compositions as well, as it sometimes starts to build to these big big walls of chaos; truth be told, loudness is never this album’s main goal, but it feels so huge that it almost tricks you into thinking you’re submerged by sound, slowly sinking in quicksand.
Fragile Peaks is a deeply engaging (in the sense of the quality of engagement being ‘deep’) slow burner, though that descriptor might misrepresent the intensity of a piece that, fire-wise, is more of a smoulder—a low-lit one at that.
