Experimental Electronic Music
Ludovico Franco’s Open Field (Rohs! Record) is a seven-part ambient work blending field recordings, improvisation, and electronics. Inspired by James Tenney, it was recorded outdoors with musicians and audience sharing the space. The result is a series of immersive soundscapes that feel more like living environments than compositions.
Recorded in live conditions Rebirth/Omen is an intricate and captivating abstract and darkly meditative release with some liturgical and spiritually-everlasting properties.
An epic imaginary soundtrack for a fanciful film noir. In a dreamlike and nocturnal atmosphere, filled with rain and decaying sounds, In Darkness Let Me Dwell—available on Owl Totem, a “dark vibes” division of Dronarivm Records—deconstructs, reworks and wants to pay homage to the imagery and clichés of cinema noir.
Feedback loops emergent from tape recorder interactions served as a guiding principle, indeterminacy notwithstanding, fostering infusion of a certain fragile sensibility.
Highlighting hundreds of releases in 2024 (and allowing December to set in), we’ve compiled a list of our favorites along with links to their corresponding Igloo reviews and release pages. Since the lists are arranged alphabetically by artist—and a snapshot of tracks are featured in our Soundcloud playlist along with selected Bandcamp tracks and random artwork selections—there are, as usual, no winners or runners-up.
A collection of cameos rendered in feathery tones and dusty pitches by Todd Gautreau aka Tapes and Topographies, Plumage’s sonorities, languorously looping and limned in treated effluvia, point to timbral and spatial elements as its primary zone of sonic inquiry.
Tape enthusiast from an early age, fiddler and twiddler with loops, synths and field recordings alongside his trusted guitar and effect pedals,..
Adaptation adds to a growing back catalog, with languorous, looping motifs accruing through judicious entrainment into an overall suite whose doleful resonance is as strong emotionally as timbrally.
Elsewhereness revisited is an occasional feature documenting the drift at the margins: ambient gasbagging and blurb blah, ’tube-d, ’cloud-ed ’n’ ’camp-ed up, complete with new companion […]
