Experimental Electronic Music
Mathias Villard is a very promising sound artist and Past Radiance can easily figure among my top favorite albums for this year. Exquisite, wistful, cinematic, alluring and emotionally transportive. For fans of Alessandro Cortini, Bvdub, Loscil, Markus Fjellström and Terence Hannum. Once more, Affin proves to be in the first league concerning modern-day ambient-lush drone music.
Two decades removed from the clockwork IDM of Polytuft-Tech, Tim Martin’s returning light (Home Normal) and beneath still stars (handstitched*) find him stripping everything back to drift, texture, and quietly resonant melody, resulting in two companion albums that feel less like separate releases than different sides of the same long, unhurried thought.
Landscape 07 unfolds in breaths: slow waves advance, overlap, recede and return in subtly altered forms. The movement is continuous, yet it can escape a distracted listener. You need to stop, allow the piece to find its own pace and follow its changes as you might follow shadows moving across a field.
A mesmerizing collision of ambient, jazz, electronics and ritualistic textures, this album unfolds like a deep-space journey that never loses its human pulse.
Irezumi returns with a deeply immersive ambient journey where granular textures, subtle electronic details, and melancholic atmospheres unfold into a beautifully restrained world of sound.
What began as an ordinary box of records arriving at work quickly turns into a strange trip down the rabbit hole of Synaptic Cliffs—a label where extraterrestrials, electronic music legends, immaculate vinyl and one very elusive artist called pdqb somehow all make perfect sense.
Los Angeles-based ambient explorer stanleycypress finds comfort in smaller spaces with Ephemeral, a two-track slice of life where atmospheric modulations weave through melodic drone tones and cascading Detroit-inflected textures.
All in all, an emotionally intoxicating, bizarre yet alluring ghostly-ambient trip, augmented by dark clouds of noisy elements.
The Bug’s Ladybug 2 pairs his heavy, hypnotic bass pressure with Friday Night Plans’ hushed vocals, turning six versions of “Miss U” into a dark, immersive journey where dub, shoegaze, and electronic melancholy slowly dissolve into one hypnotic flow.
Magic Hour is both accessible and deeply experimental with its mutant ambient approach. The sonic palette employs clicks and clacks, echoes, mechanical whirs, lost terrestrial train whistles, melodic forms, shattering forms, and human murmurs, sometimes slowing or speeding up local fields to gain an emotional edge.
From its roots as a music blog to a fiercely independent label built around physical releases, Somewherecold Records has grown from Jason Lamoreaux’s love of experimental music into a deeply personal effort to give artists and their work something lasting to hold onto.
