Experimental Electronic Music
For The Portent, Snowbeasts (Robert Galbraith and Elizabeth Virosa) drive punishing beats and low-end pressure, while Virosa’s drifting vocal lines remain suspended throughout. In contrast, James Miller’s Solypsis continually splinters structure, reshaping corrupted rhythms into unpredictable forms.
Aura leans more toward the hip-hop beat era than straight IDM, experimental in spirit, with enough left-field nuance that it resists being filed simply as instrumental hip-hop. It’s a document of a producer figuring out his own DNA in real time, two decades before anyone thought to look back and call it influential.
Within the latest Speaker Music transmission, Brown returns to the bastion of seriously adult musical content that is Planet Mu Records for the frankly exquisite Synoptic Audio. With its theme-first offering to the experience, De Forrest proposes sound itself as a system of critical inquiry.
Tschernobyl serves as an immersive depiction of such a wasteland and as a medium to cement the band’s feelings regarding the catastrophe. Both the music and the various vocal samples scattered throughout feel incredibly apt for painting images in the listener’s head; a sense of melancholy is sometimes present, while at other times the tracks become rougher and much more industrially influenced.
Across eleven diverse movements, SICK STREET displays rhythmic elasticity, aural sculpting assembled from found sound, cellular technology, environmental residue, postcode mosaics, and a restless multiplicity of influence.
Across its duration, A Wave Of Alarm navigates the long architecture of inner turbulence, invoking something akin to a dark night of the soul: a descent into fertile voids where collapse and liberation begin to mirror one another.
Ouroboros emerges as a fully realized assembly of extraterrestrial circuitry, endlessly bent, folded, and reconfigured into excitingly unique forms.
Across The Dreamers Of Dreams, Bowman detonates maniacal braindance mechanics, electro errorfunk ripped into synthetic ribbons, and a cut-and-paste sampladelia that early Coldcut would likely have fought over releasing.
Air Signs rests at its distinct sound. Everything is pieced together very well, and all the noises, melodies, and synths are family—they all align track after track. Deschamps has a gift for cohesion. Even when he’s working with degraded loops, reversed recordings, and heavily processed guitar, nothing feels fragmented. Everything belongs.
The waters here are torrid. But the result of swimming in them is to emerge somehow richer than before. The sound of subtraction through propulsion: the old and archaic riotously stripped away to leave space for the new. A violent recalibration disguised as transcendence.
This succinct observation offers a glimpse into a language in which Mayer seems uniquely at ease. Through gathering otherworldly effects and artifacts that might otherwise be dismissed as errors, Matters animates unfamiliar forms and hidden possibilities.
