Experimental Electronic Music
Cicadas does a beautiful job using an experimental musical lens to help focus our attention on an often overlooked yet fascinating creature who lives in a world completely different from ours, yet that is also exactly the same (a beautiful expression of German phenomenological biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt or life-world that is specific to the sensory perceptions of each kind of animal).
rust/wave, his latest, takes a different approach. The Hamilton, Ontario-based artist has compiled a beautiful piece of ambient work, and rather than introducing itself as some ambient drone or sounding like that, it’s actually really melodic and beautiful. A peaceful listen.
Passed Recordings thus signs one of its most mature operations: a collective, contemplative, rigorous work, capable of transforming C3 into a small sonic homeland, fragile and vast, familiar and remote, where time bends slowly and sound returns to being a form of attention.
Within that tension between structure and collapse, Sven Piayda uncovers a strange sense of ease. Intercelestial thrives inside instability, shaping corroded electronics and broken rhythmic patterns into something fluid, tactile, and strangely alive.
Graham Dunning emerges with Quern (Jollies Records) from a period of academic research into sound and self-built instrumentation with a collection that feels both tactile and purposeful.
Burial Grid (Adam Michael Kozak) has long occupied a fascinating space within the darker fringes of experimental electronic music, blending industrial grit, ambient decay, rhythmic abstraction, and noise-driven architecture into something uniquely cinematic and emotionally charged. With NORD Compendium, that vision feels sharpened to its most raw and unforgiving form.
The downtempo chug is still there, but it’s been processed through decades of IDM evolution, filtered through the same sensibility that informed Beans’ abstract hip-hop work and Schematic’s experimental roster. DL Poisons’ unsettling in the way that the best experimental electronic music should be, familiar enough to feel grounded, strange enough to keep you off balance.
SCALD’s latest release Asphyxia earns every descriptor thrown at it: darkly beautiful, elegant, hyper-explosive—punctuated by sudden, punishing noise blasts that feel less like ornament and more like structural necessity.
Ritual Machines fulfills its promise: a hypnotic, otherworldly passage through exploratory electronics, guided by ceremonial rhythm, subterranean resonance, and a persistent sense of sonic invocation.
The outcome of this endeavour is a series of traces that embody the distinct vision of the two artists involved, as well as the unique characteristics of the respective territories or places. These traces collectively offer a singular proposition, born from the irreplicable interplay of these elements and the intricate layering of the accumulated experiences.
Kin is a record that offers hazy soundscapes, with layers of noise stacked on top of serene melodies, making it almost seem like a series of distant tunes you can’t quite recall. There’s a faint melancholy woven through it, sure—but that’s not what keeps pulling me back. What really hooks me are the songs themselves; track by track, they’re just exceptional.
