As a result of the deep calm I felt after the first few minutes of listening this, I was very much unprepared for its final third. I won’t spoil the surprise.
Categories
7038634357 – Winded
Tag: electronic
Categories
Apex Twin – zin2 test5
Lots and lots of fun music out today, but this is probably the biggest and funnest of the lot. The first new music from The Big RDJ in 5 years – the predictably functionally named Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760 – includes this tight, sinewy little roller which dissolves into those trademark melt-your-heart pads in its final third.
https://aphextwin.bandcamp.com/album/blackbox-life-recorder-21f-in-a-room7-f760
I came across this during a frantic Spotify cull of albums I’ve saved but rarely (if ever) listened to. Cucina Povera is the alias of the Glasgow-based artist Maria Rossi, originally from Finland, and this is taken from her 2021 LP Dalmarnock Tapes, throughout which she layers her own vocals to create a choir of one, with invariably intensely haunting results.
Part of a run of singles featuring new versions of tracks from Poppy Ackroyd’s 2021 album Pause, Hinako Omori’s offering starts sparse and delicate before the tension resolves into something richer and more comforting with the addition of radiant and increasingly prominent pads.
Categories
36 – Touch The Sky
Dennis Huddleston aka 36’s new album Cold Ecstasy is a pitch-perfect homage to 90s rave, focussing on “the happier side of the hardcore spectrum, which I feel was unfairly maligned at the time.”As a teenager obsessed with happy hardcore and later trance, I’ve always had a massive soft spot for the unashamed positivity of those genres. A companion piece to 2021’s Weaponised Serenity which was equally brilliant, this new LP is further proof that Huddlestone is one of the most consistently excellent electronic producers out there.
Categories
Trevino – Moodswing
Back in May 2016, Trevino a.k.a. Marcus Intalex released his debut album Front on his own Birdie label. Following the producer’s death in 2017, the follow-up album Back was released posthumously in May. Recorded between Berlin and Manchester, Back is at its strongest when it embraces the more melancholy aspects of electronica – as in the all-conquering Backtracking, still one of the best techno singles of all time – with Moodswing a clear highlight.
Categories
Katatonic Silentio – To
Increasingly, I like electronic music to make me feel one of two ways: extremely, nostalgically blissed-out or overwhelmingly anxious to the point of not being able to sit still. Katatonic Silentio’s output falls very much into the latter of these two categories, although To – from her recent Mantis 11 EP – is one of her more accessible pieces, with a clear, if apocalyptic, rhythm and only the suggestion of creeping, mechanical oblivion patiently lurking in the background.
Finding albums like Not Marshall’s Fragments of Varnished Visions makes me a bit happy and a bit sad: happy, as I feel like I’ve stumbled on something brilliant that hasn’t already had its praises highly sung; sad as this is flying so hard under the radar that it’s difficult to imagine any more than a small handful of people will ever get the chance to enjoy its magnificence. I literally can’t find anything about it online except its listing on AOTY, not even a Bandcamp page. It’s not often ambient is explicitly joyful, but that’s certainly the case with About The Desert, and the rest of this deeply buried gem is equally lovely.
Categories
Rrose – Spore
Rrose’s compositional process centres on “seed” sounds being fed through elaborate webs of interrelated audio processing: essentially a chain of sequences where changes in any one element have resulting implications further down the line. If that all sounds a bit technical its because its largely copied from the press notes, but I thought it was quite interesting. The new album from which Spore is taken splits its time between radical techno iterations and pieces which pare back the percussion, letting the synth textures uncurl in their own time and space. Spore lands firmly in the former category, and is among the most straightforwardly enjoyable tracks on Please Touch.
Categories
Not Waving – Fool
I’m back! Sorry for the extended silence, but Glastonbury etc. Slowly getting back into the new music swing though and just came across this glorious new album from Not Waving, The Place I’ve Been Missing, on which the Italian artist explores “grief, gratitude, and new beginnings” across a mix of ambient, electronica and jazz. Lead single Fool includes elements of all the above, and is really very lovely indeed.
https://notwavingmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-place-ive-been-missing
