Experimental Electronic Music
A veteran of groundbreaking music-video and visual collaborations, Ben Stokes puts his most personal stamp on Dimensional Holophonic Sound (DHS), his singular project blending acid electronics, old-school analog imagery, and experimental video production. Simultaneously, Stokes has built a distinctive career at the intersection of sound, art, technology, and visuals.
More techno from Bradley Strider, Death in Vegas, and Ryan James Ford with all three delivering their own expression of the sound with savage results. We have electro with Cultivated Electronics, To Pikap and Shipwrec, and breaks with DjRum and Withhold. Two hours of nonsensical anecdotes and lots of great music.
That exchange between past and present is central to Axial Opposition. Classic Multiplex structures remain recognizable, yet the melodic synthesis gives them renewed dimension, allowing vintage electronic language to exist alongside contemporary detail.
Solythode maintains an unrelenting presence, often opening with uneasy ambient-noise structures before expanding toward the outer edges of mechanical rhythms and threaded bass lines that seem to operate just outside our galaxy.
This is electro with its lineage intact and its eyes firmly ahead: studied, physical, detailed and properly funky. The lesson is simple. Know the form. Then push the production until the form starts pushing back.
Across Another World, Artificial Island keep things measured and textural, allowing minute sounds, gentle rhythms and shifting layers to carry much of the album’s character.
The depth and breadth of Documents of Different Reality is truly amazing. Cold Blow have done their homework and their research. This is a compilation of archaeological detail that brings to life the momentous machine music of the 1990s. In Spara’s own words, the collection connects “dots that people might have not connected before.”
For fans of CPU, Carl Finlow and electro’s wider continuum, IXRQ’s command of the language will be immediately apparent. But this isn’t simply reverence for what has been. These are familiar components arranged with enough curiosity to remind us that electro’s future has never been about inventing the machine. It’s about continuing to find new things for it to say.
Concept Record not only works as a creative tool; it demonstrates what can be created when Professor Ben’s instruction is heeded. The concept is to use this record alongside other records to make new records, while providing a legitimate D.H.S. album of its own right—one that embraces the features that help make physical records so fun and appealing.
There’s something particularly satisfying about hearing forgotten tracks recovered, revisited and finally released for others to discover. Off-Cuts (2014–2021) doesn’t feel like a scattered collection of archival material; instead, it comes across as a carefully gathered snapshot of a creative period, proving that these pieces still have plenty to say.
Leo’s latest six-track EP, Cicada Burnt, is a stunningly crafted collection of teknoid soundscapes where cutting-edge pulses scatter love bullets of intent with serious depth, weight and imagination.
