Tag: Sound Design

Otto Taimela :: Cheap Ingredients (Cudighi)

Taimela isn’t trying to recreate the 90s IDM and drum and bass golden era so much as he’s drawing a line from it to the present, letting those influences inform his melodic instincts without being consumed by them. There’s a lightness to how he carries all of that reference—it never feels like homework, never feels like pastiche. It just sounds like a producer who grew up on the right records and internalized them so completely that they became his own vocabulary.

Sleep Underwriter :: The Hexadecimal Era (Aduaine)

With The Hexadecimal Era, Sleep Underwriter delivers an album that celebrates electronic music’s past with joy and aplomb while sounding completely alive to the present moment. Here, then, is another superb release from Dublin’s Aduaine, a label whose catalog continues to set an impressively high bar through both consistency and relentless quality.

Foel :: Gwasgaru (Machine)

Knowing what Foel built this record out of—a difficult mental health stretch, a fascination with landscapes that are beautiful and hostile in equal measure, a process built on chaos eventually resolving into order, Gwasgaru earns its title honestly.

Unruly Disturbance :: Frisson (Not Yet Remembered)

Frisson is proof that Collingburn’s years in the club scene weren’t wasted. He knows how to build tension, how to pace a track, how to let moments breathe. But he also knows when to pull back, when to let the ambient drift take over. For an artist who’s spent nearly two decades navigating the underground dance world and another stretch exploring pure ambient, Frisson feels like the convergence of both.