Experimental Electronic Music
Much music is steeped in the history of the place where it was made, and here Jonathan Sharp, the musician behind this project, trawls the borderlands of fiction, imagination, and the real places written about in the Plague Dogs where he went to collect sounds for the album.
In Bernhard Living’s works, there’s almost always a straightforward title to express the context behind each one, and there is always a description paired with the record to fully elaborate on its concept. That ends up making music as minimalistic as this far more interesting to me.
Each chopped rhythm feels tethered by fragile harmonic strands, giving Echoloto its identity as a multidimensional collection of fuzzy glitch-hop abstraction, steeped in grit, grain, and faded sonic residue.
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.
