Experimental Electronic Music
A veteran of groundbreaking music-video and visual collaborations, Ben Stokes puts his most personal stamp on Dimensional Holophonic Sound (DHS), his singular project blending acid electronics, old-school analog imagery, and experimental video production. Simultaneously, Stokes has built a distinctive career at the intersection of sound, art, technology, and visuals.
Concept Record not only works as a creative tool; it demonstrates what can be created when Professor Ben’s instruction is heeded. The concept is to use this record alongside other records to make new records, while providing a legitimate D.H.S. album of its own right—one that embraces the features that help make physical records so fun and appealing.
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.
Hip-hop was never my main musical obsession, but it pulsed through the background of my youth—skate sessions, cheap forties, porch-side blunts—quietly shaping the soundtrack of growing up. Ben Pedroche’s Independent as F*** a vibrant history of indie rap from 1995–2005, taps straight into that world, revealing how artists built their own freedom and infrastructure far from the grip of major labels.
Life scatters its milestones unevenly—some slip into obscurity, while others remain etched in the mind, vivid despite their distance. These rare memories, intimate and haunting, reawaken with uncanny clarity when immersed in soundscapes like those crafted by Factsimile.
Seamlessly weaving together the pulsing rhythms of house with the atmospheric textures of electronic jazz, Highway Project unfolds like a cinematic score for nocturnal wanderers—a sonic companion crafted for midnight drives and the open road’s quiet mysteries.
Swimming together in the tangential downpour of torrential media percussion and repercussion, all of this material can be considered as an excavation of a lost futurist consciousness.
“I’m enthusiastic about so-called distortion, noise, blur, etc. and began to find energy in the exploration of signal-to-noise ratios and what true clarity of signal means to me. Accuracy, as I had previously understood it, is of little concern to me, and I’ve found that clarity in spirit has a high level of distortion as one of its most desirable traits.” ~Jairus Sharif
Both artists transcend mere nostalgia as they not only use sampling as an important part of their creative process but also structure their tracks on original synth lines and beat making that bring freshness to the production.
Quality Time Volume 4 slices a deep cross-section through the label’s unique sonic vision; to encapsulate a myriad of abstract electronic music structures and blend them seamlessly in this fourth volume. It might also be fitting to find more quality time and head back to Bonding Tapes’ earlier volumes again.
