ETC | Winter '24/25: Μusic for Hedonistic Hibernation
An enchanted cornucopia of magical sounds featuring exquisite releases from a parallel universe of unknown pleasures, including a few vintage re-discoveries for extra timelessness
This biggest-ever edition of the Psychonaut Elite is book-length, featuring in-depth reviews of over 40 amazing albums, including some recently unearthed archival treasures. Enjoy an indulgent experiment in endless scrolling and aural extravagance!
*Please note that this article is much lengthier than is allowed by the standard e-mail content limits, so the full text can only be read on-site or in-app
1. “Fossil Cocoon”: The Music of K. Yoshimatsu
In the niche microcosm of crate-digging at the further edges of Japan's marginal sonic territories, few discoveries prove as revelatory as K. Yoshimatsu's “Fossil Cocoon”, a recently released collection that aims to re-animate the dormant ghosts forgotten in long-lost archives, amounting to a disarmingly sui generis jewel of a record, mesmerizing in its bizarre beauty that is as ravishing as it is strange.
This haunting collection of hyper-obscure 1980s home recordings unearthed from underground cassette tapes documents an extraordinary productivity of outsider experimentation that surveys a sonic idiosyncracy which systematically dismantles standard genre taxonomies while illuminating the radical potentialities of DIY cultural fabrication of late 20th century Japan. Through Yoshimatsu's work, we witness the emergence of an entirely new grammar of aesthetic resistance declaring the manifesto for a new politics of historical appreciation.
Akin to an ancient evolutionary stage of file-sharing platforms, the cassette club that birthed these works operated through intricate networks of postal exchange and micro-communities, notably exemplified by The Recycle Circle, an international pen-pal correspondence association for aficionados of obscure music. Members of the semi-formal group circulated free tapes of rare sounds to fans who otherwise would never have access to the original, often imported and expensive, vinyl. This matrix, founded by then-20-year-old medical student T. Kamada, represented a radical democratization of musical exchange, circumventing prevailing distribution channels through an economy of shared creativity.
DD. Records' staggering output of 222 cassettes over five years is proof of the explosive creative potential unleashed when artists bypass industry gatekeepers. The label's distinctive packaging - each release adorned with typewritten notes and xeroxed collages of found materials - wasn't merely a design choice but an ideological statement.
These handcrafted artefacts, now commanding astronomical prices among collectors, originally circulated as accessible vehicles of underground expression. German collector Jörg Optiz's subsequent archival work reveals not just a label catalogue but a complete alternative cultural ecosystem, one where Yoshimatsu's forty albums could coexist alongside countless other marginalized voices.
The DD. Records catalogue constitutes a vital counter-archive that challenges dominant narratives of Japanese, and even international, experimental music. Within this constellation, Yoshimatsu operated as a kind of sonic alchemist, transmuting raw materials of everyday sound into crystalline structures of possibility. His home recording practice wasn't simply a DIY necessity—it was a philosophical proposition, suggesting alternative modes of production outside capital's matrix of professional studios and corporate distribution.
Demonstrating Yoshimatsu's masterful manipulation of high-tech limitations, the collection's opening salvo, "Violet," is an exotic hybrid of strumming acoustic guitar and lilting keys, featuring an impassioned monologue sprightly spoken along a yearningly melodic bassline and gently plucked strings. The 4-track cassette's inherent compression is an obligate virtue, creating a spectral haze that obfuscates archaic outlines of fidelity and presence. This is not lo-fi as an aesthetic choice but a political statement - a high-minded refusal of high-production values that refers back to obsolete assumptions about access and authenticity.
"Poplar" reveals Yoshimatsu's advanced understanding of synthetic/organic dialectics. A playful baroque melody played on Nylon strings merges with MIDI arpeggiation in ways that collapse simplistic binaries between "natural" and "artificial" sounds. The result is neither bucolic nostalgia nor techno-fetishism, but rather a new hybrid generation of lyrical appositeness that points toward unexplored possibilities of human-machine interaction.
Perhaps most striking is "Pastel Nostalgia," which revolves around a brutal juxtaposition that excites the tensions lurking beneath its nostalgic surface, where childlike piano figures collide with wailing tones that evoke air-raid sirens - a particularly loaded signifier in Hiroshima, where Yoshimatsu still resides.
Yoshimatsu's prolific output from 1980 to 1985 (forty albums in five years!) mirrors the accelerated temporalities of Japan's high-growth era, while his home recording practice looks forward to technologically assisted alternative economies of future creative production. Appearing under various aliases, these works point to a fluid conception of artistic identity that presages contemporary discussions of multiplicity and virtuality.
The collection's title, “Fossil Cocoon,” proves apt—suggesting both preservation and renaissance, death and potential rebirth. These recordings, excavated from home-recorded master tapes, emerge like sonic relics used as instruments of predictive divination. They bear traces of a specific historical moment while remaining vitally relevant to contemporary and future concerns around production, distribution, and the politics of memory.
Beyond a mere historical document, “Fossil Cocoon” operates as a kind of time machine, collapsing past and present into a vertiginous dialogue about the spectral materiality of memory. In an era of algorithmic curation and streaming abundance, this aural excavation of marginal histories suggests deflationary possibilities - not just for how music was made then, but for how it might yet be made tomorrow. Through Yoshimatsu's lens, we glimpse not just Japan's musical past, but potential futures that never quite arrived, promising utopias that might still be possible.
2. “The Primordial Pieces” by Leo Chadburn
Leo Chadburn's recently released album represents a similar examination of music as memory, resuscitating archival sonic sketches from the millennium's precipice for a radical interrogation of acoustic experience.
Broadly belonging to the contemporary classical school of instrumental modernity, these five pieces function as perception adjustment instruments—precision tools designed to deconstruct and reassemble our understanding of sound, conscience, and temporal recursion.
The album posits a generative paradox as its conceptual axiom: musical materials conceived at the turn of the century, dormant for decades, are now reanimated through a process that is simultaneously methodical and speculative. Chadburn doesn't merely revisit these sonic fragments; he performs a critical intervention, uncovering the latent ambitions of seemingly static musical gestures.
Oscillating indecisively between the post-Romantic flourishes of Ravel and the pensive hum of desaturated drone backgrounds, "The Reflecting Pool" asserts itself as an emotional outburst tempered by academic introspection.
Within this tense juxtaposition of confrontational psychoacoustics, pianistic arpeggios are stripped of established narrative and reshaped into liquid architectures that decentralize institutional peripheries around invented and inherited sound. Each note departs towards a complex event horizon—not a discrete musical moment, but a vibrating portent of potential meanings.
"Camouflage" represents accurately this sonic sophistication, maintaining a seemingly unchanging harmonic contour while gestating persistent internal complexity. This is music as a dynamic system, where microscopic variations create entire perceptual ecosystems. The work suggests that stasis is in itself a prelude of potential movement, thus complicating fundamental assumptions about musical progression and temporal experience.
The string sections — in "Map of the World" and "De La Salle (Violins)", for example —operate at the intersection of personal expression, consciousness, and material investigation. Bow pressures and tonal modulations abdicate the responsibilities of technical virtuosity; they emerge as fraught negotiations between human intentionality and material resistance. Each sustained chord constitutes an acoustic laboratory, where the edges between player, instrument, and listener evaporate, reconvening as an alternative topography of exceptional beauty.
"A Secret," the album's concluding piece, is a culminating statement. An austere melodic line shimmers within a heat-haze of resonances, suggesting that musical meaning exists not in discrete notes, but in the spectral spaces between sound and silence.
Chadburn's work challenges the very core of musical aspiration by defining it as a sonic research project whose aim is a critical investigation that interrogates and utilizes sound as an affective modality of emotional inquiry.
By reactivating decades-old sketches, Chadburn reveals a heartfelt truth: musical potential is neither linear nor exhaustible, but contains temporal dimensions, waiting to be discovered, reimagined, and reinterpreted. This is not nostalgia, but a spectral dissection, a forensic analysis examining the betrayal of history by memory.
3. “Two Arrow Falls (From Chester City Walls)” by Giants of Discovery
Giants of Discovery's "Two Arrow Falls (From Chester City Walls)" is an album that presents itself as aural historiography. It transmutes fragmented lore into a contemporary soundscape that probes the intricate strata of cultural accretion. The delicate, pensive result unfolds as sonic lace of elaborate fragility.
The album feels gently acoustic, even if it is heavily re-embroidered with synthetic threads. The sound resonates in a haunting register, absorbing echo, dubs, reverb, and other textured overlays. Ultimately, it hangs in the air like a lightly perfumed sonic incense whose calming, gentle scent contributes to atmospheric tranquility while simultaneously exciting the senses, filtering reality through a multi-layered haze of uncannily familiar yet seductively disguised tones.
Norse linguistic remnants intertwine with avant-garde synthesis techniques, challenging established modes of historical representation in the words of Kevin Downey, producer and composer AKA Giants of Discovery: “The Wirral, where I was born and bred, has an incredibly rich Viking heritage and is the only place in mainland Britain to have documented evidence of Norwegian Viking settlers, from 902AD”
The work is anchored in the Domesday Book's precise spatial delineation of the Wirral—"two arrow falls from Chester city walls", crafting a refined soundscape that explores cultural frontiers, treating Viking-influenced place names as phonetic raw material to be deconstructed and reimagined. The elaborate soundscapes, melodically abstract yet harmonic in a luminous way, are intensely arranged and meticulously produced, crafting a conscious dialogue between Indigenous and settler cultures through an almost fantastical, in the sense of a literary inventive, approach to sound design.
The strategic incorporation of Christopher Saxton's 1577 Cheshire map as album cover art generates a provocative tension between visual representation by destabilizing inherited protocols of historical accuracy and daring listeners to experience the aesthetics - ancient vs. digital - of space and time as fluid, interconnected phenomena rather than fixed junctures.
Scintillatingly ornate layers of audio details are constructed and partially erased, folkloric shadows delineate studio static, the iridescent shimmer of all these fastidiously curated sounds and their elaborate processing reflecting linguistic evolution itself—each track is a sonic re-inscription where traces of earlier cultural interactions remain audible, alluding to a phenomenological experience of cultural recollection, where geographical and linguistic borders end up as audio for poetic dioramas, painstakingly crafted by a master stage-designer.
An elegant achievement of great sonic imagination, this memorial sonification of an ancient Viking settlement by Giants of Discovery exceeds known musicological taxonomy. Its spellbindingly ethereal fragility functions simultaneously as an imaginary historical document, a bold artistic statement, and an active involvement, playfully intriguing audiences to engage with history not as a static narrative, but as open to a dynamic, syncretic faith of cultural negotiation and emotional reinterpretation.
This auditory discourse challenges listeners to reconsider their relationship to both forgotten evidence and posthumous re-invention, offering a new paradigm for understanding the layered complexities of cultural heritage.
4. “Discarded Shadows” by Tudor Acid
In "Discarded Shadows," Tudor Acid's eighth (!) album, we arrive at the culmination of an extended, and meticulously planned, sonic itinerary. It’s a deep delve into electronic music's genealogy that simultaneously propels us into uncharted territories.
Serving as a nexus where the spectral echoes of 1990s ambient electronica converge with the pulsating undercurrents of Jungle, Trip-Hop, and Breakbeats, the album proposes a deeply personal sonic palette that posits itself decisively as a reconfiguration of a specific time and era.
This was the decisive moment, somewhere in the late ‘80s, when synth-pop took a sharp turn towards the avant-garde, splitting away from its chart-friendly, mainstream roots towards the futuristic visions of Kraftwerk, Eno, Tangerine Dream, as well as rediscovering the pioneers of Kosmische Krautrock and the radical experimentation of the Berlin School of Electronics. In the process, dancefloor beats were folded into the mix, providing a percussive, if jittery, backbone to the otherwise cerebral whisps of synth pads and arpeggiated keyboards. The entire scene of “intelligent electronica”, whose horrible genre name has unfortunately stuck, was best represented by labels such as WARP and Rephlex, but even more interesting were the infinite variety of independent and self-produced releases. I would dare to say that this development was the true heir of punk promises, an actualization of grass roots potential to upset the establishment while creating non-comformist cultural capital.
This album's most striking innovation lies in its embrace of live keyboard performance, a departure from Tudor Acid's previous reliance on quantised, grid-based constructions, a shift which introduces a raw, organic quality to the music, infusing the minimalist, repetitive motifs with a newfound fragility and humanity. The interplay between these live elements and the sequenced patterns creates an unsettling and captivating tension, evoking a trembling flicker of ghostly presence within the functional locomotion of systemic machinations.
Tudor Acid's approach to sound design is particularly noteworthy, especially in the idiosyncratic application of hiss and fizz. Sometimes, it is reminiscent of Autechre and the austere chaos of their deliberately (dis)organized (mis)calculations, haunting the edges of perception while adding layers of complexity to the album's dreamlike atmosphere. This attention to detail augments "Discarded Shadows" into a fully realized sonic environment.
The track "Encounters with Disaster Trolls" features a declaratory riff that reverberates forbiddingly throughout as if soundtracking an alarming trailer announcing some forthcoming dystopian documentary and is appropriately inspired by Marianna Spring's "Among the Trolls," a non-fiction book that delves into the unsettling phenomenon of online hate in the wake of tragic events. Tudor Acid's musical interpretation of this modern malaise unexpectedly blurs the lines between social commentary and abstract sonic art, bringing politics into a musical niche more accustomed to monastic, sombre pursuits.
"Discarded Shadows" also marks Tudor Acid's foray into the realm of classical music formalism, being an album whose cohesive sound follows an interpretation of the concept of “etudes”, the technical exercise of composing each piece of a suite as a reconfiguration of the preceding and following one. This unexpected fusion of electronic and pre-modern sensibilities further underscores the album's position at the intersection of multiple musical traditions, as well as contributes to its overall continuity and consistency.
Tudor Acid characterized the album's production process as both "exciting" and "scary," recording most tracks as live performances on two-track stereo channels, a risky setup that demonstrates a commitment to authenticity and spontaneity, capturing immediacy but also preserving the imperfections and “defects” that give the music its unique character.
In the broader context of electronic music orthodoxy, "Discarded Shadows" challenges the genre's often rigid adherence to perfectionism and quantization, advocating instead for a more fluid, organic approach to technique and performance. By doing so, Tudor Acid not only pays homage to the pioneers of electronic music but retains their rebellious authenticity.
"Discarded Shadows" explores challenging emotions and existential questions, particularly those surrounding human identity in an increasingly digital world, reflecting on the anxieties and uncertainties of the human condition today.
Ultimately, "Discarded Shadows" stands as a testament to Tudor Acid's artistic vision and technical prowess. It is highly considered music that feigns aloofness but never succumbs to apathy, its ambivalent mood balancing daringly on the edge of emotions, while its inscrutable gaze remains fixed on a grey horizon of contemplative sangfroid, offering new insights and resonances to an acoustic imaginarium very much reminiscent of the sounds produced, and canonized, by the now classic era of ‘90s so-called intelligent electronica (particularly, but not exclusively, by the legendary WARP label roster of legendary artists).
In crafting this album, Tudor Acid not only extend a personal sonic world but has also made a significant contribution to the ongoing dialogue about the evolving nature and potential relevance of thoughtful, individualistic electronic music in the 21st century.
5. “Sonido Cósmico” by Hermanos Gutiérrez
The alluring vistas conjured by Hermanos Gutiérrez's “Sonido Cosmico” unfold like a succession of desert mirages, each note radiating outward into infinite space. Through meticulous attention to texture and tone, the Swiss-Ecuadorian duo has crafted an instrumental masterwork that honours guitar music for the pure atmospheric poetry of its potential. The album's most striking achievement lies in its reconfiguration of silence and sound within a gently calculated rhythm of almost percussive guitar strokes.
The album's opening track "Lágrimas Negras" flows like a mountain stream – its weeping steel guitar lines constructing entire worlds of acoustic possibility.
An entire lexicon should be invented to describe the manifold ways that guitar strings are strummed, plucked, caressed and picked throughout the album. The intricate fretwork is an advanced study in microtonal interplay, where subtle variations in attack and decay create constellations of resonating harmonies. Masterful manipulation of reverb and delay elevates simple phrases into expansive sonic architectures, establishing resonant chambers where typical meter disperses as pure feelings of bittersweet yearning.
The erudite investigation of overtone relationships and modal frameworks elevates “Sonido Cosmico” above their previous works. The brothers' command of various playing techniques – from delicate fingerpicking to slide guitar atmospherics – achieves something genuinely transcendent: a musical vocabulary that speaks to the wonder of human connection through pure sound. This crystallizes perfectly in "Low Sun," where interweaving melodic lines create harmonic structures that hover like dust motes in the afternoon light, suspended in the dreamlike condition where wakefulness and reverie mingle.
Dan Auerbach's alert and sensitive production adds crucial dimensionality without overwhelming the brothers' essential dynamic. The subtle addition of orchestral elements and vintage synthesizers on the title track extends the guitars' timbral range into new realms of otherworldly beauty. This careful augmentation allows the music to explore questions of resonance and space while staying true to its intimate, quivering core of awestruck longing.
The brothers' experience of playing live in New Mexico is immortalized as symphonies of starlight, where each note flickers brilliantly across the darkness of a vast firmament expanding towards infinite tranquillity. "Until We Meet Again" constructs new modes of musical flow through its carefully crafted opportunities for important daydreaming.
Grounded in acoustic reality—through the tactile interaction of fingers on strings and the warm presence of analogue equipment—the album’s sonic materiality anchors the music's ethereal aspirations. This creates a tension that propels the entire work forward, while simultaneously inhabiting multiple harmonic planes in a captivating manner.
Humming along the perfectly unified cascades of tonal dialectics, “Sonido Cosmico” also manifests as a tour-de-force of musical telepathy, capturing the spirit of the call-and-response improvisational method, thus revealing the ineffable communication that occurs when two musicians achieve uncanny synchronicity.
The extraordinary understanding between Alejandro and Estevan Gutiérrez, evident in every interaction, big or small, between their instruments if not their souls, points toward possibilities for sonic pleasures far beyond the standardized outlines of solo monologues.
Their insistence on organic sound and natural acoustics takes on a particular poignancy. Their music indicates that pure, off-grid, wonder remains not only possible but necessary, discovered in those rare moments of genuine human connection that still grace our lives beyond the online matrix.
This record offers a serious engagement with the potential of guitar-based performance to create states of elevated consciousness and deep emotional resonance. Through their virtuosity, the Gutiérrez brothers have crafted a new audio vocabulary for these essential feelings – one that bypasses thought entirely to speak through vibration and atmosphere, welcoming listeners into spiritual spaces where the melancholic sublime still reigns supreme.
6. “Bodymelt in the Garden of Death” by Austyn Wohlers
An exotic flower blooming audaciously from the cracks of the contemporary sonic sidewalk, Austyn Wohlers' "Bodymelt in the Garden of Death" inscribes itself as a radical arbitration regarding the phenomenological experience of sound, personal trauma, and corporeal disintegration. This seven-track assemblage represents an exuberant deconstruction of musical ontology, transgressing established genre demarcations and challenging the very substrate of auditory perception.
The album's generative impulse resides in a moment of intimate vulnerability – a bodily encounter between Wohlers and her mother within a hot and humid garden environment following a near-terminal medical event.
This primal scene, extremely specific and radically personal, is presented as an existential crisis disconcertingly set on the florid stage of late summer bursting with glistening roses, a conflicted moment becoming a counter-intuitive emotional nexus and producing a complex acoustic geometry that maps the intricate negotiations of the human spirit dealing with the oxymoronic coexistence of natural beauty with organic decay, scientific mediation with sensory resonance.
From its inaugural track, "Grasshopper Heaven", the aural aesthetic reinvents assumed listening modalities. The omnipresent cicada drone functions both as environmental texture and fundamental creative strategy, whose simultaneously accelerating and stationary granularity threatens the equilibrium between rhythmic timing, found sound, primal reciprocity, and mechanical intervention. This deliberate erosion of margins suggests a more promiscuous understanding of sonic pertinence, where artificial and biological systems engage in continuous mutual influence.
Wohlers' aesthetic strategy involves a radical reimagining of sound as a fluid, unstable medium capable of encoding complex emotional and phenomenological states. "An Angel's Emerald Wing," featuring Ruby Mars' harp contributions, exemplifies this approach through its spectral manipulations. Celestial timbres gradually mutate, introducing discordant frequencies that disrupt any potential nostalgic or sentimental trivializing, initiating a state of sonic deterritorialization, where affective intensities are generated through unpredictable evolution and revelatory instability.
The album's central piece, "How Heavy the Slow World," explores layered acoustic strata as they accumulate and dissipate, creating a dynamic sonic environment that mirrors the non-linear, fragmented nature of memory as it ebbs and flows. Refusing a linear narrative, the ahistorical, atemporal sound structure presents itself as a complex acoustic event where the here and now coexist in a continuous negotiation.
"Bodymelt in the Garden of Death" demands active, embodied listening: sensually seductive, brimming with lush textures that unfold at a languorous tempo, Wohlers' production aesthetic deliberately undermines sterile as analogue warmth suffuses the recordings, introducing intimate corporeality, emotional complexity and affective transmission.
"Attachment Illusion" represents the album's most radical theoretical gesture. By progressively stripping away sonic elements from a wall of sound, Wohlers experiments with perceptual limits as the gradual dissolution of the track’s structure mirrors the unstable nature of listening, coming in and out of focus as disparate elements compete for attention until the endgame is revealed as silence, a pregnant acoustic space where meaning constantly emerges from and recedes towards.
The final track, "Meadow of Tears," functions as an intricate emotive resolution. Water sounds interweave with spectral electronic textures, creating an environment of primordial serenity for a concluding gesture of catharsis as a dynamic, non-linear process of spiritual ascension.
Wohlers demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to translate deeply personal experiences into abstract sonic configurations. Her work suggests that sound is not a representational medium but a generative force capable of producing new modes of understanding and experiencing the world. In this sense, "Bodymelt in the Garden of Death" transcends psychological critique, positioning itself as a cultured cogitative apparatus for reimagining human experience.
7. アマテラス (Amaterasu) & アンドロメダ (Andromeda) by t e l e p a t h
Originally appearing in 2014 on cassette in editions of 75 each, t e l e p a t h's “Amaterasu” and “Andromeda” are the first and second chapters \of a trilogy completed in 2015 by アンタラ通信 (Antara Communications.
Both of the first two volumes were recently unearthed and re-released on vinyl by the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based archival label Geometric Lullaby, and they prove to be worthy of their decade-long cult status as timeless classics of the slushier, less retrogressive or vintage-fixated edges of the vaporwave scene, a niche of alternative electronica that has managed to reach maturity despite its initial novelty status, now firmly established as a reliable source for hybrid flavours of ‘80s-influenced pop-ambient.
The inaugural “Amaterasu” is less meditative and much poppier than its diaphanous follow-up, “Andromeda”.
Setting the sonic narrative within an elaborately overlayed world constructed from snatches, snippets, shreds and particles upcycled from a deteriorating memorial archive of late ‘20th-century synth pop, the first album unfolds as a sonic study of digital flashbacks, where the verge between nostalgia and futurism dims into a hazy dreamscape haunted by flickering VHS ghosts.
Improbable mash-ups of analogue textures sampled from ‘80s synth ballads come complete with hyper-distorted vocal remnants. It's as if the tortured spirits of forgotten pop stars are still crooning over the neon edges of radiating riffs, woozy pads, and time-delayed keyboard stabs, their vague outlines glimpsed floating on the surface of chrome reflections. Colour-saturated nocturnes evoke an urban sense of temporal displacement and existential dislocation, as the listener navigates through the fog of artificial hallucinations that simultaneously reveal a flattering echo of the past while barely concealing a yearning anticipation for an unknowable future.
The repetitive melodic patterns that work as the foundation of tracks like "あなたとの短い瞬間" (A Short Moment with You) are sonic motifs vaguely reminiscent of instrumental filler culled from otherwise ignored yet lavishly produced albums and b-sides of aspiring mid-80s radio stars.
The focus on critically ignored, “outsider” sources, such as incidental music from soap operas, self-released demos, anonymous porn music backgrounds, advertising jingles, beauty spa muzak and other frowned-upon sub-genres of marginal flotsam and jetsam of commercial music production amounts to a deliberately affectionate engagement with the spectral remnants of a permanently demobilized media culture.
Their humble roots as evidence of subcultural detritus serve as mnemonic anchors, pulling at the tenuous threads of unorthodox aesthetics that remain stubbornly vivid even as they languish, constantly fading, relegated by their own deliquescent significance to the less accessible recesses of our mind.
t e l e p a t h's approach transcends straightforward sampling, instead reconstructing fragments of sonic ephemera into a cohesive mosaic that challenges our perception not only of time and space but also of critical appreciation. The atmospheric outcome dignifies his sources by extricating unpredictable nuances from what sounds like discarded offcuts, languishing unloved or even unheard in the lesser strata of once ubiquitous audio trivia.
“Amaterasu”, t e l e p a t h's prologue to “Andromeda”, takes its name from the Shinto sun goddess, signalling a shift in focus from the cosmic to the mythic. The album's sonic palette is characterized by shimmering synth textures and ethereal drones that evoke the radiance of its divine namesake.
These luminous tones create a sense of warmth and transcendence, unveiling a space of contemplation and introspection. The use of light as both a metaphor and a sonic texture throughout “Amaterasu” speaks to the album's reconnaisance of illumination as a symbol of knowledge and progress.
t e l e p a t h's serendipitous approach to rhythm on "Amaterasu" stands out due to the lack of predictable beat structures. This choice allows the album's harmonic elements to take centre stage, creating a sense of timelessness and aligning with the overall ambiguity of temporal progression, encouraging a more immersive and meditative experience with the music.
Throughout “Amaterasu”, t e l e p a t h employs a technique of gradual tonal shifts and subtle modulations that create a sense of constant, almost imperceptible movement. This approach mirrors the slow but inexorable progression of celestial bodies, linking the album's sonic journey to cycles of natural phenomena. The result is a work that feels both timeless and deeply rooted in the rhythms of the natural world.
t e l e p a t h allows moments of near-silence to punctuate the sonic landscape, creating a sense of vastness and allowing the listener's imagination to fill in the gaps. These moments of quiet become as important as the sounds themselves, serving as a reminder of the power of absence and the role of the listener in co-creating the musical experience.
“Amaterasu”'s elegant engagement with its debased source material, revitalizing sonic detritus into ethereal soundscapes suggests the flattening of aesthetic transcendence mediated through technology, questioning notions of the sacred and profane.
In its sepulchral grace, “Amaterasu” explores the potential for digital technologies to invent new purposes for obsolete mythology, engaging sustainably with exhausted ancient archetypes of experience.
t e l e p a t h's time manipulation within both “Amaterasu” and “Andromeda” is uniquely distinctive. The slow, repetitive melodic patterns create a sense of temporal dilation, stretching moments into infinity. These expanded junctures, originally period-specific relics, are converted into vintage sonic effluvia that not only belong to a recognizable historical period but are also purposely chosen, curated and processed according to a unique aesthetic protocol and procedural directive which prioritize the dreamier, softer, and more hypnotic strands of the fastidiously engineered sonic DNA.
A technical and academic exercise, both historically temporal and aesthetically defined but not necessarily period accurate or stylistically faithful, both albums illustrate how digital technologies have altered our experience of time, creating a perpetual present where past and future merge into a single, endless now, often shaped and edited according to our individual worldviews and personal tastes.
“Andromeda”'s structural configuration mirrors the galactic yet hazy vastness of its celestial namesake, with each track unfolding as a nebulous spectrum of sound. The album resists common notions of song structure, opting instead for a fluid continuum where melodic elements drift in and out of focus. This approach creates a sense of weightlessness, allowing the listener to float untethered through the album's sonic architecture.
The use of Japanese titles and characters throughout “Andromeda” and its two companion albums adds another layer of complexity to the semantics of the trilogy while emphasizing the local element of how Japanese musicians were early adopters right from the very start, almost half a century ago, and remain protagonists of a flourishing scene around synth pop, ambient and electronic music with a soulful playfulness at its decidedly underground core.
This emphasizing of Japanese identity is a supra-linguistic device that serves as a commentary on the international flow of aesthetics and culture and how these are mediated through pre- and post-digital spaces across the globe at the speed of light travelling through networks new and old. The trilogy is a site of linguistic and cultural hybridity, reflecting the interconnected nature of contemporary electronic music scenes across otherwise separate and foreign territories.
Production techniques further reinforce these thematic concerns. The abundant use of reverb and delay effects creates a sense of depth and distance, situating the listener in an imaginary space between the physical and the virtual. This liminal sonic environment announces a metaphor for the increasingly imperceptible line separating reality and simulation in our digitally mediated world.
Both “Andromeda” and “Amaterasu” methodically explore the intricacies of memory, identity, and existence. Their combined reflections are filtered and arranged through the subjective perspective of digital mechanisms and technical devices. These studio-centric recording protocols act as lenses, creating reconfigured illusions and offering prismatic potentialities.
Generative complexity is examined through an array of captivating viewpoints, serving as tools for imaginative interpretations while providing formal structure with their mechanical predictability and textbook scenarios. This reconfiguration of familiar sounds arranged in unpredictable yet also recognizable arrangements offers a glimpse into a future where the boundaries between human consciousness and data systems are irrevocably intertwined.
8. “Echoes” by Various Artists
The release of "Echoes" on the excellent Dusseldorf-based Piano and Coffee Records label, unfurls its iridescent splendour of spectacular principles to impress the listener with a mesmerizing display of history invented rather than inherited, confronting the betrayal of memory with the joy of innovation within the contemporary musical imagination.
This impressive fourteen-track compilation, each contributed by a different artist, ventures beyond the confines of homage or reinterpretation, presenting itself as a thesis advocating for dynamic negotiation between the gravity of classical legacies and the capricious fluidity of modern soundscapes.
Each piece is more than a grammatic declination of its long-lost and mostly supposed “original” forebear, aspiring to an act of sonic defiance against the very notion of canonical authenticity, establishing a temporary autonomous zone where invented echoes of the past do not merely resonate but refract, splintering into kaleidoscopic reconfigurations that challenge congenital notions of fidelity, temporality, and cultural authority.
Curated by Sergio Díaz De Rojas and Julia Graul, the project embraces a plurality of methodologies, situating its contributors in dialogue not only with canonical works but also with the medium of sound itself as a mutable and contested field.
The compilation serves as both an index of historical consciousness and a projection of possible futures, gesturing toward an understanding of musical heritage as neither static nor sacrosanct but continuously contested, repudiated and renegotiated, even audacious and eccentric. Here, the "classical" is not merely a repertoire but a vied terrain, a contested site where the electrified interplay of agency, technology, and idiosyncratic personal taste is staged, discussed and debated.
Vetle Nærø's contribution, an interpretation of Ravel's “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” anchors the compilation in a liminal zone where respect and irreverence meet. The pavane, with its evocation of ceremonial mourning, is not just reified in Nærø’s hands but also recalibrated, the melodic contours imagined as textures of affective ambiguity. This treatment enacts a subtle but significant intrusion into the work’s narrative of loss, reframing it not as an elegy to bygone grandeur but as an interrogation about the aspirational motivations of remembrance itself.
HOEHN’s guitar adaptation of Agustín Barrios Mangoré's haunting “La Catedral” offers a different vector of engagement, transmuting the intricate latticework of Mangoré's Paraguayan guitar idiom into a timbral language imbued with the irresistibly picturesque solemnity of a cathedral at dusk. The act is one of deliberate estrangement, as the classical guitarist’s forensic precision cedes ground to a survey of texture and tone that interrogates the hierarchies of authenticity and virtuosity embedded in the Western classical tradition, questioning the geopolitical contours of influence and power structures that have historically defined the perimeter of "great" music.
“Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C Major” receives an even more radical treatment through Casual Melancholia’s synthesized reconstruction. The transubstantiation here is not one of mere translation but a bold attempt at existential transcendence, where the well-worn arpeggios become spectral gestures delineating a parallel universe where escape velocity is the default state of consciousness.
The synthesized tones, shimmering in an ambiguous interplay of intimacy and awe, dislocate the prelude from its historical moorings, drawing attention to the conditions of its reproducibility and the seductive promises of machine-learning optimization. In this context, authenticity is not discarded but recontextualized, its contours radiant with the wistful glow of the melancholic sublime.
Zuzanna Całka’s exuberantly sentimental version of “Arpeggio in D Minor”, divinely inspired by Carl Friedrich Abel, acts as an ecstatic counterpoint to the more deconstructive gestures in the album. Całka’s enchanting wistfulness is an invocation, summoning the essence of Abel's sound world while suffusing it with her own wistful playfulness. This negotiation outperforms mimicry, proposing a mode of historical engagement where homage changes a primary setup with aleatory unpredictability rather than compliant deference, unfolding as an intricate layering of temporalities, a testament to how the classical can be inhabited without being ensnared by its weight.
A similarly expansive approach animates Swoop and Cross's interpretation of Handel’s “Sarabande in D Minor.” Here, the stately rhythms of Handel’s original liquefy, become an ambient expanse, reframing the work’s structural rigour as an open field of sonic possibility. The result is a celebration of structure itself, one that draws attention to the ways musical traditions can be repurposed to articulate experiences far removed from their original contexts. This tension between form and formlessness exemplifies the compilation's broader ethos: a refusal to allow tradition to ossify, instead positing it as inherently malleable.
Boris Rogowski’s stunning “For the New World”, inspired by Dvořák's 9th Symphony, engages perhaps the most overtly with questions of cultural identity and appropriation. Dvořák’s symphony, itself a fraught synthesis of European and American idioms, is reimagined as a prism through which Rogowski arrives at a charming vignette reminiscent of Gershwin at his most reflective.
The album’s final offering, Rubin Henkel’s electronic rendering of Sibelius' “Carillon”, operates as a kind of meta-commentary on the entire compilation. The bells of Sibelius’ original, regulated in digital casts, dither between the tangible and the ephemeral, their resonance suffused with the ambivalence of digital derealization. This act of sublimation crystallizes the compilation’s central concern: the simultaneous fragility and resilience of musical heritage in an era defined by flux.
“Echoes” resists closure, eschewing the reductive binaries of preservation versus innovation. Instead, it presents a vision of musical inheritance as a living process, one defined by rupture as much as continuity, positioning itself as a catalyst for critical listening, compelling its audience to confront their own assumptions about the nature of artistry, the politics of influence, and the possibilities of sound as a medium of collective memory.
This compilation is not merely a document of musical practices but an active participant in the anarchic terrain of cultural interpretation, a reminder that the echoes of the past do not fade but transform, shaping and being shaped by the conditions of their reverberation. This is music that challenges its audience to imagine what it means to engage with history not as a static repository but as an unfolding narrative, ever contingent, ever mutable.
9. “Nothing To Do But Dream (Fall)” by Joey Pecoraro
Joey Pecoraro’s “Nothing To Do But Dream (Fall)” is yet another chapter in his continuing anthology series inspired by seasonal moods. Unfailingly lush and blissfully centred, his deceptively simple sonic signature this time attempts an auditory contemplation of the serendipitous moment when the poignant passage of temporal flux arrives with the wistful introversion of autumn.
Filtered through the refracted lens of inspiration drawn from “Over the Garden Wall” (2016), the cult animated series, this short but sweet collection of five tracks encapsulates a similarly whimsical sense of wonder and adventurous imagination.
This EP moves deftly between the sedimented layers of sentimentality and the immediacy of experimental sonic design, abandoning the typical constraints of lo-fi production to articulate something far more elusive—an emotional questioning of illustrated memory, the power of imagination, and the phantasmagorical intersections where our personal past comes across with the universal nature of our momentary present.
What emerges from this melange of fragile observations is a recalibration of how sound, rooted in place and time, can evoke emotional and conceptual resonances that hover just beyond conscious reach, in an antediluvian realm still untouched by existential angst, still vulnerable to awe.
The opening track, “In Dream Limbo,” eschews straightforward layouts, inaugurating the EP with a deliquescent aura of soft-focus reverie. Pecoraro employs a microcosm of granular fragments, initiating sounds that remain irresolute, pulsing and hovering without conclusion, as if the music is satisfied to carve a space outside time, where travelling is a destination in itself.
This beguiling paradox of static continuum leads the listening experience towards remaining still while travelling, sleeping while dreaming, and mimicking the non-linearity of memory itself—a series of glimpses and echoes that resist straightforward interpretation, or even narrative structure. Each refracted tone is both an anchor and a dissolving edge, evoking the way dreams evaporate upon waking, leaving only a watery trace of emotional tint what was a vivid colour just a moment prior.
In “The Lonesome Monk,” Pecoraro introduces a narrative dissonance through the collision of detuned analogue synthesizers and deliberately worn textures reminiscent of warped vinyl. The piece evokes an unsettling simultaneity: the warmth of nostalgia enmeshed with the brittleness of its decay. By eschewing predictable rhythmic foundations, Pecoraro constructs a temporal elasticity—a soundscape that feels simultaneously antiquated and startlingly present. This tension between rootedness and flux mirrors a culture increasingly shaped by the immediacy of digital archives, where the past is both perpetually present and irretrievably fragmented.
“Over the Garden Wall,” the titular nod to its animated muse, operates as a study in negative space and tonal restraint. Pecoraro demonstrates an extraordinary sensitivity to the essence of wandering through the unknown, echoing the series’ surreal journey. Amplifying the muted, processed melodies that seem to emerge as though from behind a veil, Pecoraro’s reinterpretation encourages narrative expectation, creating an evocative canvas for the listener’s own imaginative projections.
Perhaps the most intricate track in this collection is “Somewhere On A Farm,” a work that thrives on dissonance and familiarity, conflicted between them to evoke a sense of estrangement. Processed acoustic instruments and field recordings intertwine with Pecoraro’s meticulous sound design, creating an atmosphere that feels at once arcadian and deeply uncanny. The fractured rhythm patterns resist cohesion, while subtly manipulated timbres favour intimate listening. This uncanny manipulation reflects the distortions of memory, where what is familiar changes as it is gradually tinged with an unplaceable strangeness, as though one were encountering a ghostly iteration of the self.
The EP concludes with “Happy Little Clouds,” an arrival that simultaneously perpetuates the narrative loop and gestures toward an undefined future. Unlike the prior tracks, this piece leans into harmonic layering, as gradually building melodies interweave in what can only be described as an evocation of cyclicality. It is as though Pecoraro is suggesting that the act of dreaming—of remembering, of creating—is itself a perpetual process, unmoored from any definitive conclusion. The work does not resolve so much as terminate at open-endedness, leaving the listener suspended in an ambiguous state of imminent departure.
What sets “Nothing To Do But Dream (Fall)” apart is its deeply intermedial nature. By transmuting the visual narrative of Over the Garden Wall into an autonomous sonic language, Pecoraro reformulates the very idea of adaptation. Rather than simply reflecting its source material, the EP fragments and reconstitutes its essence, creating a new medium-specific artefact that speaks with its own voice. His music does not merely evoke an atmosphere; it complicates it, forcing the listener to confront how the music reflects this duality of being an embodiment of a longing for the irretrievable while acknowledging the impossibility of stasis.
Pecoraro’s technical precision is inseparable from his aesthetic intent. Each track demonstrates a masterful command of the stereo field, using panning and spatial layering to create a sense of immersion. Frequencies are sculpted with care, allowing low-end warmth to interact with sparkling highs in ways that feel both intimate and expansive. His use of distortion and degradation is particularly effective, repurposing sonic imperfections into integral elements of the overall sound design. This attention to textural detail speaks to a broader philosophy—an understanding that the medium of sound is as much about absence as it is about presence.
At its core, “Nothing To Do But Dream (Fall)” is a refusal to adhere to ordinary structures or resolutions, challenging the listener to engage more deeply with the spaces between recognition and abstraction, rewarding active interpretation.
10. “FAÇADISMS” by Rafael Anton Irisarri
In Rafael Anton Irisarri's latest work "FAÇADISMS," the exhausted machinery of late capitalism grinds against the dissolution of manufactured consent. Inspired by a linguistic slip between "dream" and "myth" during a diner conversation, the album serves as a contemporary re-exemination of the requiem form.
It is akin to music played by a funereal marching band, not for a dignitary, but for an entire civilization. This forlorn, mostly voiceless, and wordless yet oddly vivid dirge, excavates the deteriorating foundations of societal illusions through eight interconnected sonic laments.
Their totality storms the threshold between ambient music (the de facto soundtrack of ivory castles floating away in celestial abstraction) and noise art (an academic niche far removed from everyday acoustic realism, even if, ironically, its practitioners often include sonic reportage such as field recordings and other ready-made audio in their work).
The surprising element of impassioned political commentary is an injection of vital, existential questions, about the often ugly, quotidian realm, far removed from the noble intellectualism of the odeons, concert stages, underground festivals and esteemed conservatoires.
The album's opening piece, "Broken Intensification," establishes an aesthetic outline for our century of disappointment, presenting a methodical approach to the deconstruction of the listener’s comfort zone, capturing a sonic equivalent of negotiating with the imposing significance of a decaying world whose abandonment and erosion manifests in the broken monumentality of industrial ruins and crumbling infrastructure.
Austere but not reticent, emotionally generous even as it retains the monochromatic solemnity of an abandoned industrial landscape, the far-from-cacophonous music sounds as if Irissari is proposing a compromise towards the acceptance of a civilization in ruins. Even cultivating an appreciation of the disappearing beauty, barely concealed by a sheer veil of elegiac serenity, that is never dull in its dreamlike, hypnotic tranquillity. This suggestion offers a symbolic view towards the redemptive vastness of natura universalis overwhelming human folly. Much in the romantic manner of a wintry seascape in moonlight or the dignifying equanimity of a silent snowfall, allowing for speechless wonder in the most desolate context. Resonating seductively with echoes of the melancholic sublime, the past is the equivalent of an overcast sky in the background of the imposing shapes haunting decommissioned concrete sprawls.
Each track follows a similar path to its resolution: initially, gentle sounds gradually submit to an encroaching static, a considered approach that manifests most powerfully in "Control Your Soul's Desire for Freedom," where Julia Kent's cello and Hannah Elizabeth Cox's vocals surface as sirens of resistance against the crashing waves of systemic obsolescence. The piece builds toward an overwhelming density that mourns the collapse of individual agency under institutional pressure.
"A Little Grace Is Abundance" introduces guitar elements that slice through established sonic patterns, creating ruptures in the album's carefully constructed atmosphere. These interruptions function as moments of possibility - brief glimpses of alternative realities that incrementally absorbed back into the dominant soundscape. The guitar's presence here operates both as memory and warning, suggesting paths not taken while acknowledging their ultimate impossibility under current conditions.
The middle section of the album, including works like "Hollow" and "Dispersion of Belief," deliberately employs wary atmospheres that straightforwardly simulate the numbing effects of perpetual surveillance, wittily usurping the illustrative mannerisms of library records and institutional radiophonic archives for a socially conscious variant of the experimental avant-garde.
By uniting two systemically oppositional genres of marginal music production, merging the narrative potential of both these (otherwise divergent) disciplines, the music wittily demarcates an aesthetic overlap of contrasting intentionalities, as both library music and alternative electronica exist in the service of capitalist exegetics, even as they emanate from very different points in the spectrum of commercial, aesthetics and even utilitarian purpose.
Here, Irisarri's sound interprets the deadening impact of mass media saturation, where meaning is swept away by an endless stream of manipulated information. The seeming emptiness of these pieces implies a commentary on the hollowing-out of democratic participation in an age of algorithmic control.
Throughout "FAÇADISMS," Irisarri employs noise not as a mere texture but as a metaphor for systemic violence. The album's treatment of distortion evolves from subtle manipulation to overwhelming presence, mirroring how power structures normalize their own brutality through gradual escalation. This technique reaches its apex in collaboration with KMRU on "Red Moon Tide," the final track where celestial sounds battle against industrial decay in a final acknowledgement of collective exhaustion.
The album's production techniques merit particular attention. Irisarri's mastery of granular synthesis and strategic use of compression creates spaces that feel simultaneously vast and claustrophobic. This technical contradiction serves the album's thematic concerns, suggesting how systems of control operate through the deceptive illusion of endless possibility within strictly defined parameters.
Drawing from his childhood memories of La Perla, Puerto Rico, Irisarri infuses "FAÇADISMS" with a deeply personal understanding of colonial power structures, and is most effectively understood as a complete system rather than a collection of individual pieces. The album's strategic use of repetition serves not just as an artistic choice but as commentary on the recursive nature of social control mechanisms. Its structure mirrors the cyclical nature of political disillusionment, where moments of clarity regarding systemic oppression alternate with periods of learned helplessness.
"FAÇADISMS" functions as a judicial anatomy of power structures in decline, capturing both the violence of their operation and the inevitability of their collapse. Through careful juxtaposition of noise and harmony, the album reveals how systems of control maintain their grip through the strategic deployment of delusional hope, while simultaneously pointing toward their eventual dissolution.
11. "This Cruel Life is a Shy Little Breath set in the Timeless Landscape drawn by Solar Winds" by Fallen
The prolific and polyonymous) Italian ambient genius Lorenzo Bracaloni AKA The Child of A Creek/Fallen has just released a long-form, over 42 minutes in total length, single-track album, on the (aptly self-described, at least for this occasion) Slow Tone Collages, an off-shoot imprint of the dependably brilliant Shimmering Moods Records label.
An immersive electroacoustic soundscape, nominally divided as a triptych whose overall title is Cruel Life (Parts I, II and III), this is another gem from the laboratory of exceptional sentiments that is Bracaloni’s musical imaginarium.
Softer in its sonority than his previous album, it nevertheless retains his signature harmonic charm, drifting off into surprising tangents that spiral around measured but potent intercessions of gently plucked acoustic guitar, shards of melodic piano phrases, otherworldly choral backgrounds, occasionally peppered with welcome bursts of delicate electronic percussion and refreshing synthetic effects.
"This Cruel Life is a Shy Little Breath set in the Timeless Landscape drawn by Solar Winds" dismantles cerebral approaches to electronic neoclassicism, presenting instead a radical reconceptualization of ambient music's relationship to detached perfectionism. The forty-minute triptych, released under his Fallen moniker, represents an acceleration of sound that simultaneously deconstructs and reconstructs notions relevant to the machinic processing of music production.
Bracaloni's deployment of both electric and acoustic piano, organ, and various guitars creates deliberate tensions between analogue warmth and digital distance, as field recordings interrupt and serenade moments of melodic clarity, creating zones of spatial interference, aural interruptions that mirror the dislocation of contemporary existence, where locality doubles as omnipresence.
The decision to record under the name Fallen carries particular weight when considered against Bracaloni's previous work as The Child of A Creek. This deliquescence of artistic identity parallels the album's broader examination of personal dissolution in an age of progressive saturation.
The album's development period allowed Bracaloni to construct intricate layers of meaning within each movement. The resulting work operates simultaneously as pure sound and as playful critique - each carefully placed note or electronic manipulation questioning assumptions about acoustic resistance confronted with passionate seduction.
Throughout the album's duration, Bracaloni employs quietude as an active challenge to the modernist tendency towards constant stimulation. The incorporation of voice elements further augments this dynamic, introducing fragments of human presence that seem to struggle against electronic erasure.
The album's meticulous sound design reveals Bracaloni's understanding of sonic discipline, both as a tool for artistic expression and a system of control. Each synthesizer sweep and processed guitar line serves multiple functions, operating both as pure sound and as a subtle emotional hint, igniting the fuse of reflective contemplation. This multi-layered approach inspires a grateful psychoacoustic disposition whose tranquil core hums gently with the serene triumph of a fragile accomplishment.
Particularly noteworthy is Bracaloni's treatment of time within his music. Rather than following evolving progressive structures, the pieces seem to fold in upon themselves, creating temporal distortions that mirror modern experiences of time compression. The album's structural complexity rewards a meditative immersion, asking its audience to swan-dive into the blissful ripples made by single themes skipping repeatedly on their reflection as they disappear, like musical stones decorating with momentary ripples the otherwise placid surface of their languorous duration.
Bracaloni's delicate manipulation of acoustic and electronic elements creates a constantly shifting sonic landscape that refuses easy classification not only in terms of genre but also because of its resistance to speed, proposing a deceleration of perception to be fully appreciated in its slow-motion emotional coherence.
"This Cruel Life is a Shy Little Breath set in the Timeless Landscape drawn by Solar Winds" stands as a significant achievement in Bracaloni’s impressive evolution. Through its careful balance of technical innovation, guileless sentimentality and reflective introspection, the album creates space for an age where existential questioning has become a primary necessity for spiritual survival. Bracaloni's work demonstrates electronic music's potential to serve not merely as entertainment but as a vital cultural critique propelled by a disarming emotional honesty.
12. “Unfurl / Refurl” by IKSRE
ISKRE (I Keep Seeing Rainbows Everywhere) is the project of Melbourne-based vocalist, violist, producer and sound healer Phoebe Dubar. Through its dual structure, her latest release "Unfurl / Refurl", defines itself as a study of digital sound mutation that asserts how electronic music can simultaneously repudiate and usurp established modes of sonic precedent.
An extension of Dubar’s 2019 debut LP "Unfurl", its 2024 companion "Refurl" bookends an interlocking examination across multiple interpretative frameworks.
IKSRE's initial "Unfurl" recording enunciated an array of inflexions in the tonal accents that demarcated the overlapping auras between field recordings of the Australian wilderness, classical music phrasing techniques and digital processing strategies.
"Black and Purple" and "7min 6sec", in their original iteration, demonstrated not just the technical feat of how field recordings from the Antipodean bush can become unrecognizable through digital mediation but also created new sonic territories that question assumed divisions between natural and artificial sound by juxtaposing both as continuous parts of a cohesive spectrum.
Layering non-verbal choral incantations with indeterminate environmental interpositions (maybe a bird, perhaps a cricket or a wind chime), both tracks also feature the viola, whose plangent timbre is sometimes stretched across the expanse of a mechanically time-delayed fermata drone, while at other moments the fuzzy soundscapes are dominated by a disarmingly pristine solo. These electro-acoustic assemblages don't simplify by combining elements - they forge entirely complementary potentialities of intersectional and multidisciplinarian transmissions exchanged between otherwise disparate aural plateaux.
As a classically trained violist, Dubar's decision to embed chamber music string instruments within electronic frameworks establishes a regime where acoustic and digital sounds coexist without hierarchy. This approach generates fresh perspectives on how classical instrumentation can function within contemporary electronic music production.
"Tall Roads," a ten-minute spaced-out centrepiece, combines minimalist, persistent, fuzzily filtered keyboard licks with paradisical bird calls and gauzy synth pads over ghostly vocalizations. As a classically trained violist, Dubar easily upends the position of the viola as merely another element in the mix by giving its plaintive sound the main role in "Crimson", a track whose sombre tone evokes lament in a way that recalls pastoral, even folksy, traditions.
"Refurl" takes these ideas further through multiple artists' reconstructions of the original material. Rather than usual dancefloor remixes, these versions function as equivalent responses to the source material, each contributing artist approaching the work through their distinct conceptual framework.
anthéne's version of "Black and Purple" stretches time and elaborates texture, foregrounding the melodic viola riff, augmenting the grainy hiss and crackle of the original’s field recordings and etiolating the vocals until they become an extraterrestrial sigh reverberating over nocturnal tranquillity. Willebrant's interpretation of "7min 6sec" emphasizes glacial drone elements for a desaturated background that highlights a languid bassline cresting on the undulating ebbs and flows of an atmospheric soundscape, whose gentle dimness is shaded with adumbrations of minute sonic gradations. Shelf Nunny's four-minute summary of "Tall Roads" introduces almost subliminal rhythmic structures that push against ambient music's typically static nature. Clariloops' reading of "Crimson" retains the bucolic spirit of the original, softening the edges of the viola with an insightful integration of other acoustic instruments, such as a clarinet solo discreetly weaving through the main melodic line, creating unexpected dialogues between chamber music traditions and contemporary tonalities.
awakened souls is the ambient music project of veteran electronic music producer James Bernard and Cynthia Bernard (AKA marine eyes): their 'Lost in Acid' rework of "ALONE. AT PARADISE" demonstrates how subtle alterations in arrangement and texture can fundamentally reshape a piece's emotional impact. Eliminating the dominant guitar lick of the original, this sci-fi reconfiguration focuses on an interplay between ethereal washes of highly processed vocal tones spurred by modulated electronic patterns that imply a lysergic undercurrent, revealing a spiked, trippier aspect of the serenely idyllic original. Tewksbury's interpretation of "Black and Purple" achieves remarkable cinematic tension as it dramatically juxtaposes vocal elements, string crescendoes, and environmental recordings, while Zoltan Fecso's contribution infuses the original with a percolating, almost percussive throughline that goes off in a sensual tangent with a Balearic aftertaste.
Party Store's extended reconstruction of “Tall Roads” stands out for its gradual development and innovative use of Dubar's voice, its timbre traced as non-verbal oscillations and reverberating cascades of pure timbre, thus becoming a sound generator rather than a carrier of meaning. zaké's closing piece "way up there I see everything (guuguubarra)" resolves the album's central tensions while maintaining productive ambiguity about the finality of any interpretation.
IKSRE is an artist whose practice emphasizes healing frequencies and restorative listening approaches, suggesting alternative possibilities for how electronic music might function beyond pure entertainment within an experimental framework, pointing toward new relationships between music and collective well-being.
The diptych structure of “Unfurl/Refurl” enables a deep examination of how sound functions as both personal expression and shared resource in digital culture. The original sources serve as the foundation for multiple variegations, each iteration adding layers of meaning while maintaining essential connections to the source material.
IKSRE's work contains an implicit emphasis on collaborative approaches over individual authorship, introducing alternative models for musical incubation based on shared ventures. The extensive use of field recordings and acoustic instruments alongside digital processing highlights how electronic music can engage meaningfully with environmental concerns without resorting to simple documentary approaches.
IKSRE demonstrates how contemporary ambient music can simultaneously engage with cutting edge contemporaneity and organic immediacy, proposing "Unfurl / Refurl" as a worldly investigation of sound's ability to cross multiple contexts, an inventive transcedence of aural origins imagined by the thoughtful curation of poetic synergy.
13. “Worlds Apart” by Marigold Sun
In the enchanted musical universe of “Worlds Apart”, Marigold Sun conjures a harmonic dreamscape resembling a sumptuous interior decorated in the most opulent taste by a most eclectic connoisseur. Breathing with the intimate warmth of early 20th-century Americana, the piano-centric pieces cast ethereal shadows reminiscent of metropolitan twilight and urbane sophistication.
Eric Li Harrison's (AKA Marigold Sun) is a delicate negotiation between the songbook tradition of George Gershwin, the timeless boldness of Aaron Copland, and the lyrical spirit of Errol Garner, compiling a recital of melodic references that are delightfully infused with gossamer electronic whispers that echo the melancholic ambient landscapes of the obscure ‘80s Japanese-influenced school of sound design.
The album unfolds like a cohesive series of musical short stories, each piece a microcosm of emotional geography. Harrison's piano speaks with a voice that is simultaneously familiar and strange—reminiscent of Gershwin's urban symphonies, yet inflected with a dreamlike quality that suggests alternate realities lurking beneath familiar melodic terrains. His touch recalls the way Garner could aggrandize a standard arrangement into a cascading, almost conversational debate, where each note seems to pause, reflect, and then dance away into unexpected harmonic territories.
"Comet Melody" opens the musical narrative with a piano motif that implicates the listener’s attention like a whispered secret, its notes dissolving into soft synthetic washes, creating a sense of suspended time.
In the title track "Worlds Apart", Harrison’s string arrangements swell with cinematic grace, yet there's an underlying current of something more ephemeral, as sonic geographies shift and genres become permeable, suggesting multiple simultaneous narratives, each melody a potential universe waiting to unfold.
The album's character resists finite categorization, existing in a state of perpetual metamorphosis. "Shapes in the Water" exemplifies this approach, where a seemingly straightforward piano theme is gradually altered, developing intricate emotional shadows that reveal deeper states of associative imagination.
Harrison's sonic palette draws from multiple traditions without being bound by them. The synthetic elements—ambient pads and delicate electronic textures—do not dominate but instead breathe alongside the acoustic instruments, deployed with a sensitivity that prevents them from overwhelming the music's organic core, creating a space for dialogue.
Each track feels like a carefully constructed narrative fragment, masterminding a seemingly simple premise into a labyrinth of thoughtful and emotional complexity, a meditative state whose serenity lies in its alchemical ability to glorify notes as portals of memory and imagination.
'Worlds Apart' is neither strictly classical nor electronic, neither purely nostalgic nor entirely experimental, existing in a luminous intermediate space that reveals new emotional contours, hidden melodic paths, and unexpected connections with each listening—a sonic reality far more fluid and mysterious than typical perception allows. Harrison has created a living, breathing musical ecosystem—at once intimate and expansive, confusingly familiar like a disconcerting deja vu and just as strangely alluring.
14. “Weeds” by James Murray
James Murray's latest album "Weeds" is inspired by a penetrating examination of sound, nature, and perception. As a distinguished artist in the genre, Murray established himself through a notable discography released on prestigious labels like Home Normal and Ultimae, and through his imprint, Slowcraft.
"Weeds" is conceptually ambitious, composting botanical subjects into fertile audio mulch. Murray challenges premeditated value systems by focusing on plants typically considered mundane or inconvenient, elevating weeds from overlooked entities to subjects of intricate musical investigation. Each track is named after a specific weed, serving as a sonic portrait that explores the plant's structural, cultural, and biochemical characteristics.
The album's structural ethos is characterized by a deliberate embrace of generative methods that prioritize spontaneity and organic development. Murray seeks to minimize any intentional influence, allowing sound to emerge and evolve with a natural, almost improvisational fluidity, simultaneously complex and understated, blending synthetic and organic elements with remarkable sophistication.
Tracks like "Mallow" and "Ragwort" exemplify Murray's innovative approach, juxtaposing bright melodic outlines with dissonant textures that mirror the plant kingdom’s inherent duality of beauty and toxicity.
Murray's technical mastery is evident in his sophisticated use of obscure instruments like the ASM Hydrasynth, Arturia Microfreak, and Soma Labs' Cosmos. These tools enable him to create soundscapes that are simultaneously precise and drifting, digital yet warmly organic. Tracks like "Feverfew" demonstrate this complexity, where algorithmically generated melodies intertwine with orchestral textures, creating a dynamic and evolving musical environment.
Murray's background as a self-taught artist decisively informs the album's ethos. His journey of experimentation and discovery is embedded in the work's creative philosophy, which emphasizes openness and alignment with creative flow. "Weeds" thus amounts to more than just a musical collection—it is a mystical contemplation of subjective perception, marginalized nature, and the subtle interactions between these seemingly disparate elements.
"Weeds" lulls the listener into a meditative soundscape where botanical nomenclature converts into an aural gateway for reflective quest, at once a technical tour de force and a deeply analytical engagement with the intimate relatitonship between sound, nature, and perception.
15."One Universal Breath" by Veryan
Imagine sound as a wilderness alive with its own heartbeat, where every note is a creature with a secret history, every silence a shadow that shifts with the wind. In “One Universal Breath”, Veryan charts this strange and unknowable terrain—a journey that begins not with an overture, but with a quiet gesture: a Tai Chi dancer tracing ephemeral shapes in a Parisian park, seen through the lens of personal loss.
In Veryan’s own words, “The inspiration for this album stems from a particular memory of sitting quietly in a park in Paris shortly after the death of my father. As I continued to battle my feelings of grief and loss, I found myself drawn to a solitary lady practising Tai Chi under one of the trees. I recall how much comfort and peace it brought me as I watched her carefully and silently perform each move with precision, focus and care. I began to appreciate and accept the duality of life – the yin and yang.”
This complementary duality is reflected in the music, which speaks no ordinary language: it’s simultaneously synthetic yet emotive, highly considered yet deeply affective, introverted and celebratory. It murmurs and flickers, speaks in glimmers of electrical energy, in vibrations that shimmer like distant memories catching the fleeting light of recollection. Each track resembles a pane of glass—not clear, but stained—colouring the listening experience with saturated tinges whose vibrant tints recombine into unfamiliar hues. Here, a loss is not an absence felt but a presence invoked, a resonant hum that alleviates the gravity of sorrow, permitting something akin to flight.
Rushing through the luxuriant ambience of synthetic pads and expansive tonalities, the subtle impetus of meticulously quantized beats resembles an alchemical process that conjures entire worlds—delicate ecologies of cerebral vibrations and sensual rhythm where the mechanical and the emotional dissolve into one another. Basslines rumble like subterranean rivers, carving unseen paths, while high frequencies drift upward like perfumed tendrils of acoustic incense.
Like an evolving conversation with pregnant silence, the music, although directionally progressive in its forward motion, does not march; it flows, while unpredictable melodies do not announce themselves but linger, like the way twilight reveals itself by degrees, a slow unveiling of the night, every new view made visible growing in detail with the patience of a spider spinning its web—knowing that emptiness, too, is part of its design.
This is electronic music unconfined by genre; it represents a multidisciplinarian sonic philosophy as it gracefully translates between the eclectic soundscapes of after-parties, chill-out rooms, alternative festival gatherings and immersive headphone listening.
The album’s layered, multidimensional nature does not resolve, does not explain; it remains a story told informally, even wordlessly but full of expressive gestures and richly textured with shadows and light, asking of us to listen with an openness that mirrors the music itself: to breathe through sound, to wonder at the fluidity of experience as it slips from one form to its next manifestation, to marvel at a balancing act continuing an ancient tradition.
In Veryan’s rich vision, experimental electronica is transmuted into a shimmering, elusive interplay of an indefinable moment where sound is acknowledged as something more than an accompaniment to the dancefloor or living room, resonating with unspeakable yet passionately felt emotion.
16. “I ett annat land” by Henrik Meierkord & Knivtid
This is sound unfolding like an origami paper flower—delicate, surprising, intricate. Cellist, artist and composer from Helsingborg, Sweden Henrik Meierkord and his compatriot musician Knivtid (AKA Daniel Andersson) have composed an album that exists in the luminous spaces between thought and perception, where music metabolizes pure possibility.
The album title translates as “In Another Land”, and is drawn from Mare Kandre's 1984 book, a story about displacement while travelling, a tale of an existence shaped by exile, aimlessly drifting like a windblown map of uncharted territories.
Meierkord's cello speaks in whispers and fragments, tracing invisible lines across electronic horizons and opening the acoustic view onto landscapes that exist only in the moment of listening—fleeting, prismatic, utterly singular. Knivtid's electronic currents engulf the strings—cello, double bass, violin—and weave narratives too subtle for language, too vivid for background scenery, revealing themselves to be the hidden architecture of the overall soundscape itself, a crystalline structure of unexpected grace.
The opening track "Drömmen" emerges like a watercolour slightly out of focus—acoustic and digital textures blending into a vision both familiar and alien. "Vid älven" shimmers with the intensity of a remembered dream, its surface a trembling membrane between perception and imagination. The track "Organisch" annuls the very concept of distance, folding and unfolding within a single suspended moment.
This is an album to be entered—a sonic architecture of pure potential. Meierkord and Knivtid have crafted a living topology of sound, where each sound is a gateway opening onto impossible worlds, unprecedented destinations and unexpected horizons, luminous, strange, perfect.
17. “Projections of a Coral City” by Coral Morphologic & Nick León
"Projections of a Coral City" by Coral Morphologic and Nick León is a sonic constellation of urban whispers and underwater dreams that asks where a city ends and an ocean begins. This collaboration between marine biologist Colin Foord, musician J.D. McKay, and electronic music producer Nick León invents a sound world that ignores such limits—a phantom landscape where urban pulses and coral rhythms interrogate each other’s wonder like awe-struck interlocutors.
Emerging from a 2022 projection-mapping installation in Miami, the album upcycles visual data turning information into a fluorescent immersive soundscape, a musical hallucination lit with ultraviolet light, drifting between psychedelic artifice and primordial pulse.
The aqueous frequencies of “Projections of a Coral City” hover between melancholy and revelation, tracing invisible connections across urban and marine terrains. Nick León's electronic textures and Coral Morphologic's biological insights create something beyond music—a speculative device that deciphers the secret conversations between concrete and coral, between human infrastructure and oceanic memory, mapping the uncertain geographies where conscious design meets elemental force. Imagine a record that conjures environments where submerged history imagines the future potential of urban environments not as they are, but as they might become: cities slowly reclaimed by rising waters, their edges floating into liquid possibility.
18. “Soundtrack for an Imaginary Film” by Austere
Navigating the intricate phenomenological terrains of aural imagination, Austere's "Soundtrack for an Imaginary Film" is a love letter to science fiction aesthetics, sonic dramatization, and the gossamer veils separating auditory perception from cinematic hallucination. This fantastical construct of a record operates beyond retroactive imagination, reverse-engineered as it is to execute an algorithmic translation of cultural consciousness, where each sonic fragment converts a quantum entanglement of filmic memory into anticipatory spectacle and spectral wonder.
The album's ambitious design strategically dismantles conventional narrative structures, constructing instead a fluid, non-linear listening experience that simultaneously inhabits multiple temporal and spatial dimensions, challenging listeners to recalibrate their auditory sensibilities.
"And Now..." initiates this sonic journey with computational precision, its oscillating synthesizer sequence interpolated with a screening announcement, the first of various vocal snippets sprinkled around the album, signifying a narrative sampled or invented to mimic not only film dialogue but the experience of cinema in its totality.
"Into a Frozen Lake, Under the Waxing Moon" twinkles like a glacial landscape, where sparkling frequencies refract like ice crystals suspended in temporal suspension, existing in a permeable state of perceptual equivocation that defies the differentiations between liquid and solid, sound and silence.
"Gemini" represents an intense meditation on duality and multiplicity, its structure splitting and refracting like a complex mathematical equation, suggesting an ontological promotion of artificial reproduction as an exploratory method of understanding singularities as a paradoxical plurality of similarly irreplaceable uniquenesses.
"The Zone" zooms upwards in vertiginous ascent, sprinkled with awestruck exclamations of vocal snippets and synthetic stabs, evoking a reconfiguration of spatial and temporal understanding as the track expands towards its widescreen otherworldliness. “Edith Head", named after the famous Hollywood costume designer, offers a charming nod towards old-school, on-screen creativity, its delicate brevity evoking the intricate choreography of cinematic imagination and aesthetic spontaneity.
"Entrez Le Samouraï" deconstructs epic narratives, by disrupting plucked sounds reminiscent of traditional instrumentation with the strategic interruptions of synthetic rigour, culminating in a throbbing pulse of synthesized percussion and arpeggiated signals. "A Chorus of Angels, Ascended to the Heavens" projects sweeping synthesizer movements and electronic frequencies in a double exposure of celestial expansiveness, evoking intricate networks that enable spiritual imagination and mystical experiences.
"A Distant Shore, Riddled with Eluvium" is led by strings and piano, its textural ambiguity insinuating the dissolution of divisions between artificial production and live orchestration as a method of participating in the cyclical nature of material and immaterial realities. "The Clockwork Astronaut" extends this cosmic dimension by layering processed utterances within the existential imagination of wondrous machinery. "Standing Atop a Hill, in a Far Corner of the Universe, Contemplating Nothing" distils the album's conceptual essence down to its essential cinematic aura, functioning as a formal punctuation. The concluding track, "Thank You And Goodnight," serves as an elegant closure, a sonic vignette that acknowledges the essential ingredients of orthodox science fiction audio cosmology while simultaneously suggesting the infinite potential of further sonic adventures.
With"Soundtrack for an Imaginary Film", Austere has constructed a sonic environment that operates simultaneously as an aesthetic experience, disciplinary critique, and narrative fieldwork, representing cinematic consciousness while actively generating a revelatory auditory encounter that reconfigures spectacle itself.
19. “Joy Paradox” by Cephas Azariah
Within the intricate artistic diaspora of migratory musical articulation, Indian-born British composer Cephas Azariah's debut album "Joy Paradox" unfolds as an aural essay about displacement, algorithmic consciousness, and the prismatic metamorphosis of emotional experience. This twelve-track collection transcends musical demarcations, functioning as a performative text that interrogates the pliable interfaces between cultural memory, systemic funneling, and subjective narrative construction.
"Joy Paradox" is conceived as a meticulously calibrated hermeneutic mechanism that excavates thirty years of existential experience, wherein the musical processing of lived experience emerges as a stoic apparatus for metabolizing existential rumination into powerful aesthetic expression. Each auditory gesture ignites a complex dialectical negotiation between achievement and sacrifice, revealing how individual trajectories of advancement necessarily entail intricate processes of psychological dissolution and recomposition—a precise alchemical process that transmutes pain into harmonic structures which simultaneously document and transcend the conditions of their emotional origin.
By articulating joy not as uncomplicated bliss but as a paradoxical state of perpetual becoming, Azariah's work refuses simplistic narratives of progress, instead creating sonic environments that interpret the fundamental human condition: every triumphant moment is undergirded by a complex substratum of surrender, as each musical note achieves a contemplative proposition about the intricate choreography of our individual growth.
Azariah's harmonic intentionality operates at an epistemological intersection where electronic manipulation and neo-classical instrumentation generate a soundscape that simultaneously deconstructs and reaffirms melodic seduction. The album's structural design suggests a finely calibrated negotiation with transnational identity, where each sonic gesture enacts an embodied intention of resistance against predetermined narratives of belonging. By deploying electronic textures that fragment and reassemble instrumental sounds, Azariah develops a linguistic system that articulates the diasporic subject's perpetual state of existential transcendence.
The opening track "Recompose" inaugurates a speculative landscape, immediately establishing a sonic environment where computational deconstruction mirrors psychological remapping. Glitchy textures and deliberately fragmented piano sequences suggest an ongoing process of reassembly, where identity emerges not as a static construct but as a continually negotiated performative experience. This approach resonates with poststructuralist perspectives on cultural understanding, positioning musical invention as a dynamic site of perpetual metamorphosis.
Within tracks like "Kintsugi" and "Contours", Azariah develops a metaphorical framework that deliberately incorporates found sounds as a statement about repair, resilience, and the aesthetic potential inherent in fragmentation. These solicitations refuse seamless coherence, instead celebrating rupture as a generative artistic strategy of existential reconfiguration.
The album's relationship with digital automation reveals an almost occult ruminative complexity. By utilizing instruments sourced through platforms like Facebook Marketplace and composing in a remote Scottish cabin, Azariah enriches the consensual understanding of personal creation and networked experience.
Tracks such as "Mellowness Of The Heart" and "A Prologue For Winter" exemplify an involved engagement with ambient soundscaping strategies. Here, Azariah moves beyond mere atmospheric construction, instead creating immersive environments with sparse arrangements and carefully modulated electronic transmissions, suggesting introspective musings that privilege uncertainty and potential over resolved narrative structures.
The album's titular concept—"Joy Paradox"—operates as an intellectual framework for understanding emotional complexity. Rather than presenting joy and suffering as binary opposites, Azariah reveals them as interconnected experiential states. This approach resonates with dialectical theories of embodied experience, where emotional landscapes are understood as fundamentally hybrid and mutually constitutive.
By integrating acoustic instrumentation—particularly the contributions of cellist Weslley Coppe—with electronic manipulations, Azariah creates a sonic ecosystem that challenges listeners to reconsider their relationship with the scientifically unknowable and the impossible quantification of emotional authenticity. Its carefully constructed tension and ultimate resolution suggest not a teleological progression but a cyclical understanding of experience, accepting emotional and cultural experiences as non-linear trajectories with intricate, overlapping networks of meaning.
"Joy Paradox" is a record centred around the potentialities afforded beyond the proscribed orthodoxy of existential integration, examining the prospects discovered in exile from cultural assimilation, and celebrating the spiritual freedom bestowed by not-belonging, a work suggesting that true artistic innovation emerges not from mastery of established models, either of being or creating, but from a radical willingness to inhabit uncomfortable yet fecund existential margins.
20. “Everything Changes, Nothing Ends” by Mark Barrott
"Everything Changes, Nothing Ends" is Mark Barrott's latest album, and it marks a radical departure point in his storied discography, not only in musical terms but also in its existential origin. Composed after the passing of his wife, the writer and poet Sara Kult-Smith, it is a record dedicated to her memory and inspired by their itinerant and adventurous life together, as they moved from Berlin in the late 90’s to Northern Italy, South America and, finally, the tranquillity of rural Ibiza.
A complex symphonic work recorded with orchestras and choirs across Europe, the album succeeds in its aspiration to be a sonic inscription of mortality's intricate choreography, where personal loss transmutes into a celebratory study of lived experience, expressed in expansive harmonies, elaborate arrangements and grand gestures.
The auditory landscape constructed by Barrott is a fluid ontological space where emotional cartography is rendered through meticulously layered soundscapes. "Pandora," the album's inaugural fanfare, executes a delicate alchemical translation of raw emotional experience, where surging cinematic strings and pensive keyboards interweave like memory's gossamer threads. The track's stylistic complexity, hovering between soundtrack fanfare and abstract rumination, suggests a representational encounter with loss itself—sound as embodied memory, sound as consciousness unfolding.
Each eclectic fluctuation, seemingly in permanent flight between genres, from ambient to orchestral symphonies, from cocktail bar jazz to blissful Balearic soundscapes, expands on a negotiated terrain where personal aesthetics are in dialogue with a non-chronological charting of emotional states—grief is processed not as a sequential progression but as a multidimensional experience, speaking to a deep understanding of how human experience resists simplistic narrativization. As a complex preoccupation with impermanence, connection, and the fundamental instability of individual existence, Barrott's pluralistic approach includes refined multisensory modalities.
Acoustic elements emerge and diffuse with a deliberate fragility that mirrors the album's central thematic preoccupation: the ephemeral nature of human connection. Instrumental voices—whether electronic or orchestral—are never presented as fixed entities but as dynamic, breathing systems in continuous evolution.
The album's emotional landscape traverses multiple registers simultaneously: mourning and celebration, absence and presence, individual experience and collective resonance. By refusing to stabilize these emotional experiences within predictable frameworks, Barrott creates a listening environment for music that does not represent feelings but embraces them as complex networks of meaning extending far beyond habitual relationality, engaged in a dynamic dialogue, each sound acting as a responsive agent within a larger, interconnected system.
The album's title, "Everything Changes, Nothing Ends," declares that what we perceive as endings are life-changing moments within larger, more complex energetic systems. Loss is not a terminal condition but a continuous process of metamorphosis and reconnection.
Through this record, Barrott offers a radical reimagining of how personal narrative can be translated into sonic experience, with music as an instrument for exploring the most intimate terrains of human vulnerability. Each formation functions as an existential probe, investigating the intricate relationships between individual consciousness, emotional experience, and broader ecumenical conditions.
"Everything Changes, Nothing Ends" is a landmark contribution to contemporary symphonic music, proposing an expansive, latent understanding of how musical experience can function as a critical mode of existential self-examination and be useful as a contemplative apparatus for understanding the fundamental interconnectedness of life.
21. “île Flottante” by Mr Beatnick
Mr Beatnick's fifth album "île Flottante" is as sweet and delicate as its namesake French dessert, a record that asserts itself as a witty interpretation of vaporwave tropes refracting myriad interpretations of nostalgic synth-pop, chill house, and other dancefloor-adjacent subgenres, challenging the orthodoxy of its very particular aesthetics, confronting its audience with effervescent tracks that feel less like finished works and more like open questions articulated through tone, rhythm, and texture.
The album’s title, "île Flottante", apart from the innocent pleasure of childhood treats, evokes a deeper sense of transience and fluidity, a conceptual anchor for the album’s Balearic inclinations. Across the record, Mr. Beatnick summons a carefree, summery vibe in which his gently uplifting music operates not as a static object but as a shifting, mercurial space of encounter. Tracks unspool lackadaisically, with a deliberate refusal of tension, their narratives avoiding predictable arcs in favour of an optimistic aesthetic of luminous emergence, a state of grace where pleasure principles interact in ways that are as contingent as they are deliberate.
The opening track, "île Flottante", sets the tone for the appealingly disorienting and immersive exuberance that follows. It feels at once precise and elusive, its melodic fragments darting like peripheral visions, just out of reach. Rhythmic elements surface tentatively, instead of following mainstream build-ups or drops, relying on textural accretion, a polyrhythmic pattern mirrored throughout the album, drawing the listener into a labyrinth of deferred expectations, compelled to navigate through suggestion and resonance rather than clarity or finality.
"Central Park" introduces a counterpoint with its serene atmospheres punctuated by intricate melodic threads. The track inspires a sense of wandering within urban space, where the frontiers between natural and constructed worlds are non-existent.
"Crystal Snowflakes" continues this voyage with a fragility that borders on the ephemeral. Its cascading motifs and shimmering tones feel like an evocation of fleeting phenomena, capturing moments that seem to vanish as soon as they appear. The track resists anchoring itself to a fixed rhythm, instead embracing a state of perpetual dissolution, its patterns refracting like light through the ice.
By contrast, "Katamaran" introduces a sense of propulsion. Here, rhythmic elements emerge with a deliberate assertiveness, though they remain far from predictable. The confrontation balances buoyancy with depth, its intricate percussive elements facilitating movement through fluid terrains.
"Low Tide" shifts the focus towards a more rhythmic landscape, with basslines and percussive elements that subtly shift in intensity, offering a sonic scheme of elusiveness and return. This interplay between rhythm and texture underscores the album’s overarching theme of movement and changes.
The final triptych of the album opens with "Cedar Sunset", a track that radiates warmth and introspection. Its timbres elicit the soft glow of twilight, blending organic textures with the electronic in a way that lingers in the threshold between day and night, its gently evolving structure that accommodates contemplation without demanding resolution.
"Ocean Spray" deepens the album’s engagement with fluidity, its undulating patterns and aqueous tones illuminating a midsummer night dream unfolding before an expansive seascape, its gently lilting harp strumming floating along the tropical syncopation, creating a seductive interplay between foreground and background elements.
Mr Beatnick's "île Flottante" closes with "Dance of the Dolphin", a finale that feels both celebratory and reflective. Its rhythmic vitality and melodic flourishes suggest a playful yet contemplative engagement with effortless flow. As the final notes fade, the piece leaves the listener with a sense of openness, a reminder that this musical mentality is not about conclusions but continuities.
"île Flottante" resists easy classification, not only in its genre-fluid aesthetics but in its conceptual underpinnings. This is not pop music as mere escapism or spectacle; it is the sound of modernity as amusing curiosity, a playful innuendo about the artificial pleasures of synth-pop, not because it withholds meaning but because it continually offers new ways of encountering and engaging with its vibrant frequencies. "île Flottante" insists on existing by offering a vision of what pop music might become when freed from the constraints of expectation and convention, provoking thought and feeling in equal measure, crafting a work that is as intellectually rigorous as it is emotionally resonant.
22. “Seminky” by Akamatsu
Akamatsu’s “Seminky” is a meticulous assembly suggesting a sonic experiment that both critiques and reimagines an array of expressive possibilities. Its fluid, transmutational essence resists codification, asking instead for an attuned ear, a listener willing to navigate its undulating currents and elusive trajectories.
Central to “Seminky” is its refusal of stable musical identities. Akamatsu, through his multi-instrumental dexterity and agile orchestration, resists the constrictions of genre. His work invokes the rhythmic logic of electronic minimalism, the intimate gestures of chamber music, and the jagged unpredictability of free jazz, but these influences are never discrete. Tracks such as “Saint Loup” demonstrate this synthesis, their pulsations recalling algorithmic systems while retaining the spontaneity of improvisation, proposing an entanglement wherein agency is dispersed and reconstructed; it’s music that swarms, interacts, and evolves.
The contextual frameworks of “Seminky” are as much folkloric as they are urban. Akamatsu layers disparate textures—lute riffs, piano motifs, motorik drum breaks, synthesized drones, and organic resonances—with a precision that recalls a spatial event, an unfolding of auditory volumes and surfaces. “Cuisine-Chimie” dissects and recombines auditory elements with clinical attention, its shifting layers conjuring a tactile warmth to the urgent tautness of its percussive locomotion.
Annaïck Domergue’s voice, present in pieces such as “Nantes,” “Longeville,” and “Là,” appears as both adornment and narrative incantation, complicating the emotitonal mise-en-scène, grounding it momentarily before unraveling into ambiguity. The lyrical content, suggestive of both geographic specificity and emotional expansiveness, interacts with the instrumental backdrop in ways that resist linear interpretation, heightening the album’s enigmatic quality ollective resonate in equal measure.
The organic materiality of “Seminky” situates the music as a tactile artifact of interconnection, a reminder of the human virtuosity embedded within its richly orchestratted layers, a record of something intimate and communal, a repository of shared and singular histories.
Perhaps the album’s most compelling feature is its capacity to navigate ambivalence without succumbing to incoherence. “Novembre,” for instance, is a search for thresholds — seasonal transitions, emotional flux, and temporal ambiguity. The lyrical interplay between the acoustic guitar motifs and piano’s introspective flourishes suggests a negotiation rather than a resolution, remaining perpetually contingent and open-ended.
In its entirety, “Seminky” challenges the listener to abandon familiar engagement protocols by expediting a shifting network of harmonic relationships that suborns eclectic modalities of polymorphously perverse listening.
Akamatsu’s refusal to adhere to obvious affinities or timbral consistencies aggregates a seductive pulchritude of simultaneous references that are neither fixed nor easily graspable. Each element, from the xylophone’s brittle resonance to the harmonium’s dense tonalities, contributes to a paradoxically fragmented and cohesive opulent totality. The music’s refusal of resolution mirrors its thematic concerns: movement, flux, and the permeability of borders.
The intellectual rigour of “Seminky” lies in its capacity to unsettle. Akamatsu’s intentions insist on a heightened awareness of sound’s capacities—to connect, to disorient, to reconfigure. This is music as praxis, as an act of sustained questioning about what sound can be and do. Akamatsu crafts a body of work that is simultaneously deconstructive and generative by dismantling accepted notions of genre and reassembling their fragments into new configurations. It does not seek to define but to question, leaving the listener suspended within its undulating currents of possibility.
In refusing resolution, “Seminky” perpetuates listening as a dialectic process. It is not an album that offers easy entry points or definitive interpretations. Instead, it asks for a reorientation of listening itself, a willingness to inhabit the liminal spaces it constructs. In this sense, Seminky transcends its medium, proposing a philosophy of sound that is as much about perception as it is about production. Akamatsu has crafted not just an album but a listening environment, a terrain of sounds that resist, provoke, and seduce in equal measure.
23. “Elkan” by Elkan
Elkan's self-titled debut functions, subtly but succintly, as a heterotopic elsewhere that intervenes, quietly but decisively, on the conflicted interface separating digital alienation and personal actualization, establishing a complex negotiation of identity's fluid outskirts and generating unprecedented modes of conscience building and perceptual extenuation.
Within this gentle sonic environment, each acoustic element dances an intricate ballet choreographed by fragmentation and reconstruction: music as a supra-aesthetic object aspiring to dynamic awareness, creating meaning through internal relational structures and becoming an autonomous mechanism of signification, moving beyond representational frameworks and establishing its own seductively mysterious linguistic ecosystem of murmurs, whispers, enchantments and spells.
The work's core approach involves a radical deconstruction of centralized structures, proposing instead a network-like approach to musical creation. Each sonic component operates as a potentially independent point, capable of organizing multiple interpolations without submitting to predetermined hierarchical structures, reflecting pensive investigations of identity, where selfhood is understood as a continuously negotiated constellation of experiences and interactions.
“Elkan”s textural stylishness — all glossy synth-pads, throbbing basslines, sleek percussion and spiralling keyboards — mines an intricate dialogue between elegant intentionality and synthetic discipline, a translation that is never straightforward; instead, it creates a complex feedback loop where mediated interaction becomes a transformative site of shifting sentiments and atmospheric insinuations.
The album's musical language suggests an acute comprehension of contemporary existential conditions — fragmentation, dispersal, instantaneous (dis)connection, and simultaneous isolation. These concepts are alchemically transcribed to sounds and then harnessed to intertwine in unexpected, dynamic configurations. Their totality functions as a microscopic investigation of transitional states separating (and connecting) a thousand plateaus of empirical contexts whose constant recalibration between their different ontological registers is momentarily fluid and eternally revelatory.
Elkan's work resists definition, operating instead in an emancipated territory of musical hybridity cultivated as a fertile site of radical opportunities for aesthetic disobedience, where each acoustic gesture carries embedded innovative propositions about contemporary electronica.
With his debut, Elkan demonstrates an extraordinary ability to edit conceptual complexity down to a convincing version of authenticity, arriving at a cohesive statement that does not merely represent contemporary alternative electronica but actively creates new modalities of perception and understanding.
24. “Superkilen” by Svaneborg Kardyb
The fruitful collaboration between Nikolaj Svaneborg and Jonas Kardyb explores the fragile connections between urban space, sound, and social experience. Their second album "Superkilen" investigates how music can reimagine collective interaction through carefully crafted sonic landscapes. Inspired by a Copenhagen urban project that reimagined a neglected urban sprawl as a shared community space, the album uses electronic and acoustic instruments as instruments of interpretation in the service of synergy between individual expression and collective creativity.
The duo's approach blends electronic textures with jazz improvisation, creating soundscapes that seamlessly blend electronic experimentation, Nordic jazz, and innovative sound design to achieve an enticing equilibrium of laid-back frequencies and harmonic gentleness. Tracks like "Superkilen" and "Cycles" weave together minimalist repetitions that breathe and shift, revealing a delicate inspection of their associations, where instruments communicate through subtle, microtonal interactions. The collaboration with Portico Quartet's Milo Fitzpatrick (on electric and double-bass) adds depth, expanding the album's sonic vocabulary and creating intricate dialogues between different musical voices.
"Tvilinger" stands out as a particularly evocative piece, where piano notes blend with musique concrète percussion, sparking a dynamic musical conversation. The closing tracks "Udsigten" and "Arendal" beautifully illustrate the album's underlying vision of creative solidarity and communal vision, offering a sense of grounded hope.
Svaneborg Kardyb's music results from an active, collaborative process of understanding where each sound ponders a fragile assertion of relativity, interaction, communication, and shared experience. The album speaks to broader questions of community, creativity, and mutually inspired achievements. It reveals how sound can bridge personal and cultural differences, create unexpected attachments, and offer an eloquent vocabulary of human coëxistence that goes beyond words.
25. “Ashram Sun” by Surya Botofasina
Surya Botofasina's album "Ashram Sun" explores musical memory, spirituality, and artistic lineage through an a deeply personal investigation of sound, weaving together improvisation, devotional practices, and experimental techniques into a complex musical experience that transcends standard genre definitions.
The album's opulent instrumental model moves beyond the austere propriety of conservatoire frameworks, creating a dynamic environment where musical traditions are simultaneously honoured and reimagined. Tracks like "There Will Be Brighter Days" demonstrate this approach, beginning with delicate sonic textures that gradually coordinate along new latitudes, introducing unexpected improvisational elements that disrupt listener expectations. Collaborations with Angel Bat Dawid on clarinet, Nate Mercereau on guitar and other figures who are part of a fertile Los Angeles scene that explores the overlapping spaces between jazz, ambient and devotional music, the record articulates a distinctive musical language that reinterprets inherited artistic traditions.
Botofasina's musical world is fundamentally relational, deeply connected to spiritual lineages, particularly those transmitted through his mentor, who was none other than the legendary Alice Coltrane, an iconic jazz musician, composer, bandleader, and Hindu spiritual leader who defined improvisational jazz with her revolutionary musical vision.
The album holds space for intergenerational dialogue, where musical memories are not simply recalled but actively reconstructed and reanimated. Every lush arrangement serves as a site of remembrance, where personal and collective histories intersect to generate new meanings.
The elaborate yet perfectly considered orchestrations facilitate a diplomatic engagement with the intersections of sound, spirituality, and meditative transcendence, acting as channels for energetic transmissions that create immersive soundscapes blending contemplative calm with passionate expression. "Chumash Pradesh Mandir Steps Reflection" illustrates this approach, with Randal Fisher's flute creating sonic abstractions that resist narrative captivity.
Beyond nostalgic recreation, "Ashram Sun" offers a radical reimagining of musical inheritance. Its sonic language emerges from a deep understanding of musical traditions while simultaneously challenging and expanding those legacies by integrating diverse musical vocabularies and inventing a polyphonic space where individual voices simultaneously converge and diverge, reflecting intricate social and spiritual connections.
"Ashram Sun" ultimately represents a mapping of sound as a method of accessing and reconstructing spiritual and cultural memories., transcending the elemental nature of music as a representational medium to achieve the potential of a life-enhancing practice for spiritual transmission by harnessing the innovative potential of sonic imagination.
26. “Golla Gorroppu” by Andy Aquarius
Berlin-based harpist, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist Andy Aquarius's “Golla Gorroppu” brings the Sardinian mountains to life through the delicate strings of his Celtic harp. This ravishing album of gentle instrumentals doesn’t just offer the idyllic respite of its mesmerizing lyricism; it invents a vibrant world where sound and landscape are deeply entwined. Each note carries the essence of the terrain, blending natural rhythms with human creativity in a way that feels immediate and grounded.
The harp is deployed as a tool for connection, resonating with the stories of water coursing through the mountains, the rustle of wind across rocky surfaces, and the subtle calls of animals that inhabit the region. The melodies evoke streams, rivers, and rainfall as if the very pulse of the landscape has been distilled into sound. Andy Aquarius’s music captures this movement effortlessly, creating a sense of being immersed in the living flow of the environment.
At times, the album shifts its gaze below the surface, channelling the weight and texture of stone. In these moments, the harp seems to echo the patient processes of geology, turning layers of primordial reverberations into music that feels both solid and ethereal, making the unseen observable through the sensory alchemy of sound.
Aquarius’s voice adds another layer, blending human breath with the harp’s strings to create an interplay between the natural and the personal. These fleeting vocal additions are subtle but potent, grounding the music in the experiential present while keeping it open to the wider rhythms of the landscape.
The album also plays with the mythology of the mountains as spaces filled with magical lore, hinting at nocturnal creatures, ancient spirits, and the timeless interplay of life and land.
Rather than standing apart from the world it evokes, “Golla Gorroppu” feels deeply embedded in it. Through his harp, Aquarius builds a bridge between sound and place, offering an experience that feels intimate yet expansive. The transportive result is a deeply moving journey into the mystical heart of the Sardinian mountains, where every note rings with the vitality of their preternatural cosmology.
27. “Daidara bou” by Norio
In the twilight of opportunities between documentary practice and musical inspiration, Norio's sophomore album "Daidara bou" emerges as a detailed fact-finding mission about ecological consciousness and mythographic sonority. Crafted in the mountainous terrains of Gunma Prefecture, the work follows a deconstruction of human-environmental interfaces through an intricate sound design that deviates far from routine acoustic narratives.
The album's conceptual architecture revolves around Daidarabotchi, a mythological giant from Japanese folklore, functioning not merely as a narrative trope but as a critical lens for interrogating spatial and temporal relationships between human perception and environmental morphology. Norio uses this folkloric entity as a complex auditory metaphor, where sound adjudicates a negotiation between corporeal experience and the fantastic imagination.
Tracks like "Giant" instantiate this conceptual framework through minimalist piano configurations that simultaneously evoke intimacy and vastness. Synthetic abstraction generates a sonic topology where each note operates as a cartographic inscription, mapping emotional terrains that resist regulated representational modes. By deploying delicate melodic phrasing, Norio challenges listeners to reconsider their phenomenological engagement with acoustic landscapes.
Collaborative contributions from artists like Satomimagae and Moshimoss further amplify the album's textural complexity, initiating a dynamic interplay between individual musical languages, and generating polyphonic narratives that negotiate a temporary alignment of disparate sonic vocabularies.
The album's aesthetic strategy deliberately undermines linear narrative structures, instead presenting a fluid, non-hierarchical sound environment. Tracks like "Negura" exemplify this approach, where sonic elements drift and dilute, creating an immersive experience that surprises expectations. This approach resonates with post-structural approaches to sound art, where meaning emerges through molecular interactions rather than predetermined semantic frameworks.
Norio's background in documentary filmmaking influences his musical methodology. Each sonic gesture operates like a carefully framed cinematic shot, capturing ephemeral atmospheric qualities that exceed mere representational logic. The album introduces a latent iteration of sonic ethnography, documenting not events but affective intensities and emotional resonances that circulate between human and non-human domains.
The mythological figure of Daidarabotchi serves as a critical hermeneutic device, allowing Norio to articulate complex relationships between cultural memory, environmental change, and sonic imagination. This yōkai activates a metaphorical conduit through which broader questions about digitized intervention, ecological consciousness, and cultural translation are explored.
By situating his work at the expansive brink of electronic experimentation, Norio reconfigures or remains purposely agnostic of, genre standards. "Daidara bou" presents a pluralistic sound assemblage that draws from IDM, ambient, neo-classical, and experimental traditions, resisting taxonomical essentialism.
The album's sonic architecture resembles a subtle critique of the Anthropocene worldviews. Through carefully modulated acoustic environments, Norio suggests alternative modes of relating to non-human entities, proposing listening as a radical act of ecological attunement. Each track inaugurates a site of potential transformation, where auditory experience generates new perceptual possibilities.
"Daidara bou" resists any conformist musical ethos, guiding a sonic deliberation on human-environmental relationships, cultural memory, and the sacred indeterminacy of aesthetic experience. Norio's work asserts itself as a fascinating mystery that provokes curiosity about the manipulation of perception through aural engagement.
28. “It All Levels Out” by Minotaur Shock
David Edwards, under the moniker Minotaur Shock, renders "It All Levels Out" as an intimate excavation of temporal consciousness. His tenth album ponders balance acquired through wisdom, examining aging through a sound-based trip through memory, identity, and the subtle gradations of human experience.
The title track vibrates with an almost phenomenological intensity. Piano loops unwind and reconstitute themselves, tracing the recursive nature of remembrance. Edwards captures something fundamental: how time does not simply pass, but folds and unfolds, revealing unexpected emotional topographies. Each melodic progression invests in impermanence—not as loss, but as perpetual resurrection.
"Memory Crates" excavates personal archives with surgical precision. Here, Edwards transfigures archival impulse into sonic poetry, where forgotten fragments become a living testimony. The track does not merely recall; it resurrects—bringing dormant experiences into a present charged with retrospective significance.
Generational tensions pulse through "Deflecting," where Edwards confronts the social scripts that constrain individual becoming. Refusing both nostalgic melancholy and naive optimism, the track proposes an impromptu navigation around collective expectations and personal desire.
The album's production—mastered by Richard Pike—achieves a remarkable transparency. Each sound feels distilled as if Edwards has removed everything extraneous, leaving only the most essential emotional resonances. This is not minimalism but emotive sound as a direct transmission.
"With Me?" concludes the album with a questioning elegy. Its haunting texture suggests the complex emotional terrain between connection and isolation—a sonic representation of human vulnerability.
"It All Levels Out" is a soundtrack illustrating how memory, perception, and becoming coëxist with intricate deliberations about mortality itself.
29. “You're Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever” by Bogdan Raczynski
Bogdan Raczynski's "You're Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever", the latest album by the legendary alternative electronica producer, continues his persuasive interrogation of online alienation and aesthetic resistance. This album represents a nuanced sonic exceptionalism, dismissing prevailing aesthetic protocols through its fragmented, deliberately ephemeral, yet uncompromisingly assertive, constitutional strategies.
The work's structural architecture comprises short, meticulously crafted electronic miniatures that oscillate between beatless ethereality and percussive lo-fi constructions, each track functioning as a discrete statement about systemic automation and human experience. Raczynski's inventive, even humorous, aesthetic lightness deliberately subverts expectations, creating fresh sonic vignettes that are simultaneously delicate and confrontational.
The album's unapologetic eccentricity teases the listener towards an aural examination of our century of disappointment, guiding the idiosyncratic mood through a complex mechanism of algorithmic disruption and aesthetic disobedience. By generating musical sketches that seem simultaneously AI-generated and then distorted by human unpredictability, Raczynski astutely captures the tense potential of silicone to dictate the sublime in the realm of carbon-based life forms. The tracks become microcosmic surveys of software entropy, where synthetic sound structures paradoxically reveal accentuated emotional glitches.
The album's cover—a monolithic QR code—serves as a provocative semiotic gesture, reclaiming a ubiquitous digital signifier into an artistic statement about omnipresent surveillance and commodification. This visual strategy mirrors the sonic landscape within fragmented, algorithmic, yet deeply invested in human emotional complexity.
Raczynski's sonic methodology suggests multiple generative narratives—whether AI-assisted creation, algorithmic playlist manipulation, or spontaneous weekend inspiration—each hypothesis disputes the genealogy of artistic authenticity. The work exists in a state of deliberate interpretative flux, challenging listeners to engage with musical experience beyond linear narratives of production and consumption.
The sonic palette fluctuates between moments of exquisite melodic fragility and abrasive interruption. Synth patches emerge like ephemeral digital memories, while percussion patterns suggest both mechanical precision and human imperfection. Each track summarizes a compressed edict about cultural acceleration and the increasingly fractured nature of our contemporary sensory experience.
Underlying the album's aesthetic strategy is a critical examination of late capitalism. The tracks function as sonic dispatches from a world saturated by algorithmic governance, where human creativity exists in perpetual tension with automated systems of production and interpretation. Raczynski's musical protest is motivated by socio-aesthetic resistance, creating spaces of unexpected beauty and emotional complexity within seemingly sterile silicon frameworks.
The album's brief, concentrated tracks suggest an aesthetic of radical compression—musical statements that refuse extended elaboration, instead presenting concentrated emotional and conceptual charges. This approach mirrors contemporary experiences of digital communication: brief, intense, deliberately incomplete transmissions that resist comprehensive interpretation.
By refusing straightforward contextual explanation, Raczynski deliberately activates an ambiguous interpretative space. The accompanying text—a poetic manifesto about artistic expression—further emphasizes the work's commitment to spontaneity and emotional resonance over explicative clarity. The music achieves an "overtone," existing beyond literal representation, inviting listeners to encounter a sonic experience as a variation of intimate, non-linguistic communication.
"You're Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever" is a sonic manifesto about civilizational decline, aesthetic resistance, and the increasingly intricate relationship between human creativity and algorithmic systems, representing a disruptive deliberation regarding silicon-based existential mediation.
Raczynski's album confronts listeners with a radical proposition: that artistic expression might transcend determinism, creating spaces of unexpected beauty, emotional depth, and critical resistance within an increasingly automated cultural landscape. Through these meticulously crafted electronic miniatures, he reveals the unconditional emotional potential residing within seemingly mechanical sound structures.
30. “Sending Signals” by Sophos
In the luminous overlaps of scientific imagination and sonic poetry, Ulises Labaronnie's (AKA Sophos) "Sending Signals" appears as a meticulously crafted avatar for the communicative potential of electronic music. Inspired by Sir Roger Penrose's speculative cosmologies, the album instigates a complex intellectual choreography, aligning abstract theoretical propositions with a richly textured auditory experience.
Labaronnie launches nine intricate arrangements that glide by serenely, floating along on frictionless synthesizer lead lines, their benevolent vibrations reminiscent of Vangelis's galactic soundscapes, their grandeur interweaved with glitchy textures, rhythmic structures reminiscent of ‘90s “intelligent” electronica and semantic contexts where sequencer patterns operate as musical syntax.
Labaronnie's polymathic sensibility, whose practice — encompassing musical production, pedagogical engagement, and interdisciplinary artistic research — reflects an understanding of sound as an intellectual technology, pulsing with intentionality, implying encrypted messages that exist simultaneously as aesthetic objects and conceptual provocations.
Dynamic lead lines navigate through imaginative sonic progressions, creating moments of exquisite tension and release. Suspended synthesizer chords mutate into pulsating arpeggios, while field recordings intrude like fragmentary witnesses to an unfolding sonic narrative. Themes flow with an organic spontaneity that belies their meticulous construction, each segment charged with potential energy and intellectual momentum.
"Sending Signals" is a discerning reverie on communication's ontological implications, an auditory inspection of how meaning might be transmitted across seemingly the incommensurable domains of universal (meta)physics.
Rich harmonies resonate with a cool, intellectual confidence, yet maintain an underlying warmth that encourages contemplation, radiating an elegant core of lustrous expansiveness, each aural scheme converging toward a wondrous state of cosmological awe.
32. “Intertextural” & “Intertextural Remixes” by Manuel Tur
Crafted during an era of unprecedented global suspension, the album and its companion remix collection can be regarded as an intricate, living, breathing laboratory experiment. The twelve tracks feature polished arrangements, each track a carefully constructed intellectual exercise where rhythmic configurations function as percussive algorithms that reconfigure listening experiences through unexpected textural manipulations between dynamic remembrance and radical invention.
Rhythmic angles reveal themselves as linguistic systems, where sonic vocabularies communicate beyond the rules of standardized musical grammar. Beats reverse, fragment, and reassemble—a constant metamorphosis that mirrors narrative disruptions.
Polished contours harness the harsh outlines of a mechanical process to an intimate choreography of sensory experience, as digital textures interweave with sampled memories, creating acoustic landscapes that cloud distinctions between methodological deconstruction and organic expression, existing as a fluid, intelligent system of perpetual transformation.
Remix collaborations extend these conceptual arbitrations, metamorphosing original references into a ludic game. Each reimagining embodies an autonomous creative act promoting the radical reconceptualization of musical potential. Artists from diverse geographical contexts engage in a borderless conversation between creator and interpreter.
Time signatures emerge, fade, and reconfigure with subtle grace—a recursive discourse of evanescent mutation that reflects multiple aesthetic potentialities, posits alternative epistemologies and constructs new modalities of comprehension, expanding our understanding of initial experience as a passive, predetermined encounter.
33. “Chrysalide” by Michel Moulinié
The posthumous revival of the singular album released by Michel Moulinié (French, 1945-2022) represents yet another eureka moment in experimental music's ever-shifting terrain. Released originally in 1978 and now resurrected by WRWTFWW Records, this work weaves an intricate sonic fabric that blends krautrock's angular precision with ambient's dreamy expansiveness. The twelve-string guitar, bass, and violin spark together in a mesmerizing conflagration of incandescent instrumentation and emotional expressionism.
Moulinié's music breathes with an almost sentient quality, each note carefully crafted to ripple through the listener's consciousness. The music unfolds like a terrain of inner landscapes—shimmering, translucent, and alive with hidden currents. Layers of sound cascade and intertwine, creating immersive soundscapes that feel simultaneously intimate and infinite. His approach eschews classical musical architecture, instead constructing auditory environments where time seems to disintegrate in relativist pulsations and its perception expands concentrically.
The album's rich textures are woven by delicate melodic threads embroidered on ambient atmospheres, participating in a unilateral transmogrification ritual, as the sounds drift and pulse, suggesting movement without prescribed direction, gazing occasionally towards recognizable acoustic horizons like passionate flamenco strumming or prog-rock solos, without ever arriving to any specific destination.
Intricate and subtle, the sonic patterns define a space between minimalism and cinematic soundscaping, capturing something ineffable dimensions connections between inner psychological states and broader universal rhythms. Each aural gesture feels deliberate yet spontaneous, like a whispered secret transmitted in vibrating air. Moulinié's furtive evasiveness implicates his audience to become co-creators, interpreting and reimagining the sonic landscapes through personal emotional filters. Played, mainly on guitars accompanied by swirling synth pads, the serendipitous developments evolve with organic intelligence, unfettered by technical constraints such as strict structure or harmonic specificity, suggesting that virtuosity can be a living, evolving entity in itself, implying proficient dexterity as autonomously capable of esoteric communication.
In his unique solo recording, Moulinié articulates an emotional vocabulary enunciated at the intersection of technology, perception, and raw feeling, creating a vibrant mesh that unifies intellectual curiosity and continuous rediscovery, an aural lace whose deliquescent beauty standing as evidence for music's capacity to transcend temporal and cultural distance, offering a gateway to inner worlds—complex, subtle, and endlessly fascinating.
34. “In the soar of leaves” by Maetzel
Hamburg-based Maetzel's intricate soundscape is a delicate convergence of electronic experimentation and emotional resonance that vibrates with unexpected acoustic mannerisms. What begins as an academic study matures via organic modification, breathing with the unpredictable rhythms of natural cultivation and deliberate hybridizaion.
The sonic DNA emerges as a detailed dialogue between mechanical precision and human sentiment, traversing an ambivalent spectrum of sentimental registers, blending electronic minimalism with intimate folk sensibilities.
Ambient structures fragment and reassemble, revealing multiple layers of melodic memory and elaborate compositional sedimentation. The work enacts subtle sorcery, solidifying aleatory musical ideas into a cohesive probabilism that speaks equally to alarming dissonance and the easiest of listening. Electronic frequencies pulse with biological certainty, facilitating intimate conversations between human tactility and machine-generated sensors.
Maetzel's approach to synthesis is a mnemonic excavation of musical memory, unearthing forgotten melodic fragments and reimagining them through their original intention of emotional solace, moving beyond synthetic production, and instead attempting the reconstruction of a bygone emotional geography where raw sentiment was still undiscovered territory.
The auditory journey progresses through delicate sonic intensities, where electronic textures tremble and undulate like moonlit ripples of water, illustrating the theoretical testing of limits—between machine and emotion, between calculating precision and unpredictable improvisation.
Seductive textural richness, such as electronic pulses intertwine with ghostly folk lullabies, is achieved through a very limited structure of carefully juxtaposed sound layers, where each frequency carries specific weight and conceptual value, surpassing its somber austerity to offer a multidimensional experience that navigates steadily while avoiding predetermined paths. The unexpected grace of this album is the result of faith in the musical possibility of counter-intuitive interpositions between programmatic exigency and acoustic tradition.
35. “Chroma” by Jasper De Ceuster
An electronically soundtracked nightdrive that unfolds like a carefully constructed dream, weaving synthesizer textures that exist in equidistance between nostalgic echoes and futuristic soundscapes, “Chroma” inhabits a quantum superposition where the oxymoronic nostalgia of vintage futurism meets contemporary production techniques, disrupting historical constraints by repurposing our present in the image of an idealized future dreamt up by a distant, and highly specific, aspect of the past.
Each track functions as a distinct dilemma, equivocating between modern relevance and archival re-animation, manufacturing intimacy by transcending distance. The sounds feel simultaneously familiar and alien, drawing listeners into a musical world that explores connection and disconnection through vintage FM synthesis repurposed and refined, stripped of imitational rephlex and recast as something innovative and compelling.
The album's structure reveals a considered economy of sound design. Drum machines, atmospheric elements, and synthesizer harmonies are rationed with surgical precision for a careful balance that creates a listening experience that feels lyrical despite its literal origins, challenging preconceptions about synthwave, vaporwave and other factions of instrumental synth-pop with aspirations above its radio-friendly station.
Rhythmic structures hint at memories of 1980s and 1990s electronic music while remaining decidedly optimized for contemporary headphone standards. The result is a sonic journey that slides between periods like a carefully preserved memory, refracted through the multiple prisms of many consecutive recollections, suggesting a dialogue between human experience and digital infrastructure, where personal histories blend with online browser interfaces.
Production techniques demonstrate extraordinary attention to detail, with luxurious synthesizer tones that shimmer and pulse, augmenting each musical throughline, updating nostalgic impulses and translating memorial contemplation into innovative sound design, boldly proposing an elegant exercise of exciting possibility.
36. “Bounds” by Craven Faults
Four intense tracks mapping Yorkshire's shifting landscape, spanning 37 minutes as they trace industrial and natural rhythms with delicate electronic pulses, their drifting bass undercurrents signalling immersive sonic memories of Northern England's changing environments.
The album unfolds through carefully constructed electronic textures: "Long Stoop", and "Groups Hollows", the latter stretching across an expansive nine-minute duration, breathe with subtle mechanical and natural rhythms, their taut propulsiveness directly drawing from the motorik trance of early seventies German Krautrock and the dispassionate detachment of late ‘70s UK proto-electronic pop wave by the likes of Throbbing Gristle, Thomas Leer, the Normal et al.
Rhythmic patterns evolve gradually, orchestrating a sonic initiation, moving between slow, deliberate bass movements and more dynamic electronic intentions. "Waste & Demesne" stands as the most expansive passage, a sprawling 18-minute long soundscape whose constant reconfiguration emulates the malleable legacy of environmental and industrial shifts, examining how the fact of movement, transubstantiation, and subtle power dynamics is embedded a priori in landscape and memory, as Craven Faults continues the appraisal of sound as a method of understanding place, history, and change.
37. “Mosaic” by Fennesz
Yet another intrepid sonic expedition into ethereal guitar drones absails steered by Fennesz, the famed Austrian electronic composer. The itinerary follows through a disciplined creative process: daily sessions structured like scholarly labour, where each sound fragment represents a carefully positioned tile in an expansive sensory mosaic.
Fennesz's trajectory through electronic music represents a continuous diplomacy, between systematically deconstructing the hidden limitations of digital processing by corrupting them with emotional resonance.
The current album advances this sonic philosophy by radically interrogating the ontological status of musical materiality. Where previous works suggested the digital parallax, "Mosaic" attempts a more intricate phenomenological dissolution of source materials. The six hard rock guitar riffs embedded within the final track "Goniorizon" are not merely processed but fundamentally transmuted - becoming spectral harmonic suggestions that challenge linear perceptual frameworks.
Aqueous echoes intertwine with processed guitar resonances, and industrial ambient textures merge with gossamer melodic caresses. A track like "Love and the Framed Insects" exemplifies this approach, its unexpected 7/4 time signature obstructing expectations while a crystalline melody emerges like sunlight piercing cloud-laden skies.
Influences drift across the album's soundscape - echoes of 1980s West African pop music surface in "Personare" — revealing the composer's alchemical approach, assembled methodically, without interruption, with each sonic element collected, experimented with, improvised, then meticulously composed and mixed. The working method itself became a pattern for ergonomic production: building complexity through patient, deliberate construction.
Hand dryer squalls, distant sirens, and distortion-crusted footsteps become raw materials for headphone concentration on microscopic sonic details - each auditory invention a bequiling gateway to unexplored timbral territories and imagistic realms.
38. “The Space Between” by Joanna Brouk
From the marginal peripheries of late 20th century music, Joanna Brouk's seminal album "The Space Between" persists as a memorable prophecy. Born in St. Louis in 1949 and later establishing her creative nexus in Berkeley, California, Brouk (American, 1949-2017) cultivated a distinctive musical approach through her rigorous academic education and working closely with avant-garde luminaries like Robert Ashley and Terry Riley.
This album was initially released on cassette and subsequently reissued as a limited vinyl pressing, representing a pivotal moment in experimental and meditative musical expression by crafting slow, sparse works expressly designed to facilitate deep introspective reflection. Brouk's sonic palette drew from a diverse array of acoustic instruments, vintage synthesizers, field recordings, and vocal elements, creating immersive soundscapes that articulated new-age music, then an innovative musical language that is now considered canonical.
Throughout the 1980s, Brouk distributed her musical probing through her independent Hummingbird Productions, finding dedicated audiences among alternative radio listeners, therapeutic practitioners, and experimental music enthusiasts, proposing sound as a healing ritual.
By 1985, Brouk transitioned from music, relocating to San Diego and redirecting her creative energies toward historical fiction and playwriting. Her musical legacy remained relatively obscured until a critical rediscovery in the 2010s, when experimental music scholars re-examined her innovative contributions to electronic and ambient sonic territories. Her passing left an influential legacy that continues to intrigue contemporary listeners and music historians. The reissue of "The Space Between" serves as an enduring ambassador of her unique artistic vision—a scintillating blueprint for sound's most delicate and exuberant potentialities.
39. "Zipair” by Precipitation & V. Kristoff
A collaborative effort, the album "Zipair" by Precipitation and V. Kristoff is a remarkable synthesis of atmospheres that confound geographical and cultural expectations, born from a single, unexpected jam session in Tokyo that showcases the magic of spontaneous creativity when talented composers connect.
Japan's role in the album's creation is more than just a backdrop; it's central to its aesthetic and concept. The city, often defined by its intense energy and tech saturation, provides an unexpected starting point for serene soundscapes, establishing a tension between urban dynamism and ambient calm that runs through the nine tracks, each a distinct mood piece that weaves together a cohesive narrative of acoustic respite.
Precipitation and V. Kristoff, who maintain an air of mystery around their personal identities, have established themselves as key players in the left-field electronic music scene. Their association with Jungle Gym Records situates "Zipair" within a broader context of experimental sound art that represents a unique fusion of creative voices, resulting in a work that exceeds individual contributions.
The album's levitating network of sonic events is defined by its ethereal quality, with azure synth arpeggiations establishing a foundational element, their crystalline sequences interlocking in radiant patterns, contributing to a shimmering surface that evokes flickers of light glinting off metallic surfaces, while beneath this high-end brilliance the subtle dubby pulses add depth and dimensionality to the aural balance.
The rhythmic elements flow with the lackadaisical absent-mindedness of daydreaming, their tactile, slightly imperfect nature contributing a shrewdly artisanal inaccuracy.
Throughout "Zipair," natural phenomena—particularly wind and water interactions—are consistently indicated by what sounds like wind chimes stirred by ocean breezes, artificial effects whose naturalistic quality emerges not from literal field recordings, but through carefully crafted synthetic sounds that mimic organic processes.
The album's title, "Zipair," intriguingly suggests both movement and stillness, just like its ethereal production techniques demonstrate a masterful understanding of space and texture. Reverb and delay are applied with subtlety, creating vast open spaces within the stereo field, allowing each formal element room to breathe and evolve, contributing to the album's expansive feel.
The collaborative process raises interesting questions about individual authorship in electronic music. Despite Precipitation and V. Kristoff being credited separately, their styles integrate so seamlessly that individual partitions seem to collapse, pointing to a more fluid understanding of artistic identity in the digital era.
As a cultural hybrid, "Zipair" reflects the globalized nature of contemporary music production. Conceived in Tokyo by artists connected to an international label, the album embodies the transnational creative exchanges characteristic of modern music-making. Its global perspective draws from diverse influences while avoiding explicit cultural markers.
Comprising nine interconnected pieces, "Zipair" summons the listener to experience it as a unified work rather than a collection of separate tracks, exploring gradient textures, suffused rhythm, and aural space in a highly considered manner belying its spontaneous genesis.
40. “Phantom Brickworks” (LP II) by Bibio
A veteran of the alternative electronica scene since the mid-’90s, Stephen James Wilkinson AKA Bibio presents "Phantom Brickworks (LP II)" emerges as a meditative consideration of temporal dissolution, architectural memory, and the haunting resonances of abandoned infrastructural spaces, unearthing layered narratives embedded within forgotten British landscapes.
Wilkinson's architecturally guided listening practice transmutes abandoned sites—industrial remnants, decommissioned bridges, submerged villages—into eloquent frequencies that vibrate with spectral histories. Tracks like "Spider Bridge" and "Dinorwic" represent locations as subjective encounters with spatial-temporal ontologies, where acoustic textures articulate the alignment zones of human activity and natural entropic processes.
Bibio describes his methodological approach as a figure of improvisational dialogue with acoustic environments, where looping techniques and vintage digital delay pedals become exact instruments of temporal manipulation. The deliberate acoustic degradation—what he poetically characterizes as "beautiful decay"—mirrors the gradual disintegration of civilizational ruins, configuring a metaphorical resonance between sonic and material erosion.
The album's acoustic palette—characterized by fragmented piano phrases, reverberant guitar drones, processed choral washes and delicate environmental recordings — functions as a multivalent spectrum, where gradations of memory, remnants of disused applications, and acoustic artefacts converge in intricate atmospheric relationships that are as impressively tense as they are delicate.
Particularly representative is the track "Tegid's Court", which synthesizes acoustic instrumentation, digital modulations, and environmental sound into a complex accompaniment for half-sung, half-spoken vocalizing.
Bibio's definition of nostalgia does not shy from disarming sentimental retrospection while remaining a dynamic, critically engaged mode of temporal reflection in the active service of hermeneutic processes—a way of reinterpreting historical fragments through the sensorial reanimation of a static archival record.
Intended as an effulgent illumination of post-industrial British landscapes, interrogating the complex relationships between systemic infrastructure, natural environments, and collective memory, the album carries political intent as well as emotional resonance, applying sonic artistry to the incandescent sources of historical enlightenment.
Bibio's methodology reveals an innovative approach to musical assembly that discovers or even dictates, elective affinities between field recording, improvisation, and deliberate sonic maneuvering. By employing techniques that incorporate tape manipulation, vintage digital delays, and carefully curated environmental sounds, he constructs immersive sonic environments that function as deliberate discussions about temporality, obsolescence, and the paradoxical romanticism of ephemeral presence and eternal eloquence signified by the inevitably fading away of human ruins as they disappear within the concurrently changing natural landscapes.
41. “Mistral” by HOEHN
Navigating their familial musical inheritance, HOEHN's debut album "Mistral" is a consideration of sonic kinship, where brothers Samuel and Silvan Kunz excavate the subterranean landscapes of their collaborative musical consciousness. Rooted in a genealogical acoustic narrative that pays homage to their 19th-century pianistic ancestor Alfred Hoehn, the album operates as a complex performative document of intersubjective artistic dialogue.
The brothers' instrumental symbiosis conveys a mature sound, where Samuel's jazz-inflected melodic constructions intersect with Silvan's radical timbral experimentations. Their approach deterritorializes guitar paradigms, generating an enigmatic acoustic interzone that oscillates between calculated technical adroitness and spontaneous emotional epiphany. Their methodology privileges "unfamiliar tunings as portals to childhood creative impulses," enabling a deconstruction of established musical morphologies.
Conceived during a picturesque Portuguese coastal trip, "Mistral" captures ephemeral sensory memories through fifteen live recordings performed in Berlin. Tracks like "Vacuum" and "Hurricane Flower" captivate through their unexpected sonic interpolations: bottleneck melodies are garlanded with silvery sound stratifications and occasional vocalized fragments decorate the instrumental solemnity.
The elemental metaphor of the mistral wind — a northwest Mediterranean atmospheric current — defines a potent conceptual framework, symbolizing the brothers' intertwined musical genealogy. This meteorological trope articulates the album's fundamental dynamic: fluid, unpredictable, simultaneously gentle and forceful, reflecting the improvisational spirit embedded in their collaborative practice.
In tracks such as "Ericeira" and "Rosalie II" technical virtuosity is a conduit for emotional catharsis as the brothers' instrumental interactions suggest a variant of non-linguistic communication, a haptic dialogue transcending familial proximity and envisioning far-flung musical destinations, addressing an acute awareness of collective memory, genealogical transmission, and the infinite plasticity of creative expression.
By deliberately instrumentalising, in more ways than one, recognizable guitar configurations, HOEHN unexpectedly arrives at a radical sonic ecosystem where classical conventions vanish. They describe their process as "returning to the intuitive creative vision of childhood," a strategy that simultaneously deconstructs and regenerates musical language while exploring fraternal communication, musical inheritance, and the transfigurative potentialities of shared creative consciousness.
"Mistral" is a lyrical scrutiny of familial resonance, a sonic manuscript documenting the intricate neural pathways of inherited intuition. Through their meticulous yet spontaneous approach, Samuel and Silvan Kunz generate a listening experience that offers a rare glimpse into the most intimate secrets of musical creation.
42. “Fragments (Volume One)” by Eric Loveland Heath
Eric Loveland Heath's debut album "Fragments (Volume One)" offers an intimate documentation of his musical creativity during the 2020/2021 UK lockdowns. Released by independent label Plenty Wenlock, the album contains twelve numerically titled tracks that charm with their immediacy and mystery, like indecipherably scribled notations from a musician's private sketchbook. Heath describes these pieces as "orphaned melodies, live undeveloped sound sketches, impromptu synth programs and songs which could have been," beginning his creative process through a collection that ranges from gentle ambient sounds to piano-driven moments that hint at angular unpredictability.
The album captures the emotional landscape of social isolation, reflecting how artists processed the collective experience of pandemic-era constraints as an opportunity to ponder the solitary nature of universal atomization in late capitalism. By presenting unfinished or partially developed musical ideas as a cohesive work, Heath challenges determinist finalizations about musical completion, entertaining us with an independent sound aesthetic while contributing to a larger emotional narrative about creativity under pressure.
Throughout the album, Heath maintains a distinctively bucolic gentility, deeply influenced by the idyllic qualities of the Powys-Shropshire borderlands, the verdant countryside where Plenty Wenlock is based, an approach that prioritizes intimacy. Released during "somewhat calmer times, though with the mark of those years gone never quite lost," the album serves as a time capsule of artistic response to crisis. As the first in a planned four-volume series, it promises an extended survey of Heath's evolving musical vision, potentially tracking the development of his creative approach over time.
"Fragments (Volume One)" is an inspiring gesture of artistic resilience—a musical testimony to creativity's capacity to flourish even under challenging circumstances. Heath engages directly with the raw, unpolished moments of musical invention, time-compressing the vast universe of personal isolation into brief moments of shared sonic experience.
43. “II” by Prism Capture
The electromagnetic exoticism of outsider folktronica arrives at a a most exuberant iteration in the music conjured by Prism Capture on their new album "II", out recenttly on the Preston Capes label. This being their second LP, it swiftly follows in the footsteps of their debut “IV”, out on Mahorka, an esoteric Bulgarian imprint. The results of a collaborative synergy between Jonathan Deasy's ambient drone engineering and Jonas Geiger Ohlin's kaleidoscopic aural confections, the album represents a critical deconstruction of parametric limitations.
According to Deasy in a recent interview, "Our initial interaction revealed an unexpected convergence of aesthetic sensibilities, where the boundary between individual artistic vocabularies dissipate into a mutually generative acoustic terrain." The metonymic process began with Jonas's reinterpretative version of Jonathan's "Adversary" album, generating the intermediary release "Ally"—a meta-textual dialogue that prefigured their more expansive sonic treks.
Preston Capes, the custodial imprint nurturing this work, operates as a critical nexus within experimental electronic cartographies, positioning itself beyond the customary musical distribution model. Its curatorial approach—emphasizing ambient, avant-garde, and musique concrète expressions—creates a discursive framework that engages with music as adventurous enthusiasm. Emphasizing limited-run physical media like cassettes amplifies material specificity and intentional scarcity, thus resisting the dematerialized, frictionless consumption model dominating contemporary digital music distribution.
"II" sprawls sensually across two expansive tracks that function less as discrete musical entities and more as interconnected manifestations of the same aural mirage, each piece breathing and metamorphosing with extraordinary subtlety, suggesting an almost liturgical approach, a seeking solemnity where sound aspires to the malleable state of spiritual pursuit—simultaneously structural and ephemeral, inhabiting distinct spatial configurations, scrutinizing the hermetic interactions between awed silence, ritualistic tempo, and harmonic thresholds. Ohlin reflected: "We aim to create environments that resist straightforward categorization. These sonic landscapes are not merely heard but experienced as complex phenomenological events, challenging the listener's fundamental understanding of auditory experience." Both tracks are long-form observations about acoustic possibility, pulsing, mutating, and reconfiguring themselves with extraordinary discipline, demanding and rewarding dedicated listeners.
An aesthetically rigorous and conceptually refined blooming of sonic potential, Prism Capture's "II" reimagines a critical site of aesthetic negotiation, where the vibrant tendrils of psychedelic hallucinations twist around the glowing flora of a phosphorescent neon jungle.
40. The Black Spider (OST) by Stelvio Cipriani
In the infinite resonance of the symphonic tradition, Stelvio Cipriani's "The Black Spider" (OST) exists as a phantasmagorical passage, each melody the result of a paradoxical geometry dreamt by an omniscient composer whose score is a metaphysical apparition of supra-aesthetic integrity, the product of a benevolent universe where mannerism transcends style and asserts itself boldly as a declaration of faith.
Legendary as a soundtrack composer, the great Cipriani (Italian, 1937-2018), was a scriptwriter of sonic dreams, a mystic who assisted otherwise negligible films in escaping their predetermined obsolescence. It proved impossible, for me at least and that says something, to verify which movie was this soundtrack written for, not that it matters if it is one of the two long-forgotten silent films with the same title.
Transmuting mathematical precision into pure musical essence, each vignette in this suite of 36 short sketches compiles a cohesive urtext recited infinitely by its companions, a repetition of narrative in complex, unpredictable variations. The repurposed chord syntax and echoing melodic signatures are linguistic patterns that resemble song lyrics more than calculated arrangements—each instrumental voice represents a rhyme or a chorus, ad-libbing or interpolating a call-and-response discourse, every harmonic progression a narrative twist that subverts expected trajectories. The strings speak in whispered metaphors, the harpsichord eavesdrops on personal arguments, while percussive elements infiltrate between unspoken words like cryptic punctuation.
In this acoustic universe, sentimentality assumes the form and function of audacious reasoning, rhythm insinuates a method of seductive tactility, and listening modality is omnipresently a superpositioned audition that exists simultaneously as pure abstraction and concrete emotional experience, a metaphor meant quasi-literally.
Apparently defined boundaries separating sound, thought, and sensation disappear into a luminous, indecipherable sensuality, each musical phrase unspooling at the outer perimeter of an evanescent borderline, each harmonic progression a potential frontier between known and unknown realms of interpretation. The score accretes less as a sequence of sounds and more as an aesthetic dogma actualized through the invisible yet powerful instruments of pure imagination.
Born in Rome—that eternal city where history and mythology perpetually intersect—Cipriani traversed multiple aesthetic territories like an artistic émigré, carrying beauty from one context to another: from ecclesiastical organ performances to dance hall improvisations, from cinematic soundscapes to experimental outliers: each transition represented not merely a change in genre, but an intrepid wanderlust between different modes of artistic existence.
"The Black Spider" crystallizes this perpetual movement, this ceaseless reinvention, this discovery of previously invisible connections and mysterious correspondences that reveal music as a cosmic nesting doll of successive ontologies, each containing infinite versions of itself. In defiance of linear predictability, the narrative exists simultaneously as memory and prophecy, as historical documents and speculative fiction, each instance a before and after.
Its temporal interiority replicates the nature of representation itself—how sounds might encode entire universes of meaning, how melody could be a profile of metaphysical exploration, a time-machine travelling through timelessness, flying over sui generis epochs, imaginary seasons, self-invented eras, arbitrary moments.
The music of Cipriani ticks like accurate clockwork whose scientific precision is perverted not by entropy but by its employment as a method of divination—each note an astrological chart, a Tarot reading, an I-Ching text, each silence a way of predicting future event-horizons by reconfiguring the meanings of skies past. "The Black Spider" is a Sphinx’s riddle to be deciphered, contemplated, existing in that delicate, impossible space where event creates thought, remembrance shadows possibility, and emotion bursts in an expressive storm of dazzling lightning and cathartic thunder.
Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, exclusively for the Psychonaut Elite, Berlin, November / December 2024