Tag: Electronica

Charlie May :: Trusted Farms (A Strangely Isolated Place)

Trusted Farms retains something of that freedom. It carries it into music that feels more physical, driven by rhythm, repetition and synthesizers with weight, friction and substance. Many parts were played live and barely edited. Lines are doubled, distorted, recorded again, sent through other machines. They remain recognizable. They keep some of their roughness. They breathe. Perhaps this is where the most beautiful part of the album lies.

Bibio & Dorian Concept :: Answers (Warp)

What Answers pulls off, mostly, is conjuring a nostalgic feeling attached to nothing specific. Tape hiss, degraded loops, half-remembered melodic phrases, none of it points at an actual memory. It just borrows the texture of one and hands it to you empty, letting you fill in whatever it’s supposed to be about. That’s a strange trick for two artists to pull off together, especially two who built this thing without ever being in the same room.

Acid For The Grandma :: What?

In many respects, the 12”s from Acid For The Grandma sound more like compilations. Each EP has a sense of being distinct and unique rather than a progression from one to the next. The real surprise is that it is one artist behind these releases, one musician exploring acid, ambient, house and techno and doing so from incredibly varied perspectives.

Cognition Delay :: Less Invasive (Neo Ouija)

There’s an understated optimism running through Less Invasive, placing Cognition Delay comfortably alongside the more atmospheric work of artists such as Secede, Arovane, Biosphere, and Rod Modell. Yet rather than imitate those sounds, Alexander and Rice create something more patient: music that works best when allowed to sit quietly in the room, gradually revealing its details while everything else falls away.

[2View] Drift :: Manic EP / Radius Etc :: Alive & Thriving EP (The Consumers Research and Development Label)

The Consumers Research and Development Label is clearly not trying to be one thing, and that’s the most encouraging part of this reintroduction. A techno veteran finally putting out his own record after twenty years of platforming everyone else, sitting right next to a hip-hop travelogue built out of literal years of instability and constant movement, that’s a genuinely odd pairing on paper, and it works precisely because neither release is compromising to fit next to the other. They just happen to share a home.

The 89th Passenger :: Hidden Soul EP (Analogical Force)

Analogical Force has long occupied the productive tension between experimentation and the dancefloor’s accumulated memory. Hidden Soul sits firmly within that tension, fluent in its established language and meticulously composed. But perhaps the most exciting possibility lies just beyond that fluency: not abandoning the listener, but trusting them enough to take the familiar somewhere unfamiliar.