Tag: experimental

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Music

OHYUNG – Nevada

Bruce Springsteen had his Nebraska, a bare-bones, notably bleaker record. OHYUNG now has her IOWA; stripped-down and self-produced. Ghostly echoes, mouth sounds, simulated tape hiss, late night gloom. Though beautiful, there’s an illness-of-ease to the music, a fog of threat, numerous points of rupture in otherwise serene tracks, massive subwoofer activations that could be heaven’s kick drum or the slam of a bomb. Sampled choirs in rapture, a fine line between terror and reverence. Happy Friday!

https://ohyung.bandcamp.com/album/iowa

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Music

Caterina Barbieri & Bendik Giske – Impatience, Magma

Caterina Barbieri and Bendik Giske’s collaborative project started during an artistic residency in Milan’s ICA in 2021, by invitation of Swiss artist and curator Jan Vorisek. This meeting, and the preceding closure of sites for cultural exchange, made their work together “feel like springtime” according to Barbieri. Throughout the tour, they continued to develop material live, and their album, At Source, feels true to that ever-evolving process of creation. Impatience, Magma feels like the centrepiece of this extraordinary EP, glowing and languorous, with Giske’s saxophone at its most affecting.

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Music

Mandy, Indiana – Life Hex

I really didn’t get on with Mandy, Indiana” celebrated debut i’ve seen a way, at all, despite multiple listens and various people telling me how brilliant it was. Their new album URGH, however, has definitely got me. Written during a residency outside Leeds and completed between Berlin and Manchester – with the band working through ongoing some pretty significant health issues at the time – URGH moves between industrial pressure, fractured club textures and metal (probably?), creating moments that feel both at times deeply claustrophobic, at others spacious yet still uneasy. But most prominently of all, it’s ragey – in a very satisfying way.

https://mandyindiana.bandcamp.com/album/urgh

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Music

Maria BC – Night & day

Maria BC’s third studio album Marathon lands at the end of the month, and Night & day is the second single: a haunting, reflective experimental folk song. The album itself is billed to deal with themes of “resistance, environmental ruin, personal disruptions and destruction”, which feels very 2026.

https://mariabc.bandcamp.com/album/marathon

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Music

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Thoughts On The Future

Kaitlyn’s Aurelia Smith’s last album GUSH was one of the best albums of the year, and didn’t get nearly enough love in the end of year list, except mine of course. There’s a risk new EP Thoughts On The Future will also get a bit lost as it came out just before Christmas when no-one’s really paying attention, but it shouldn’t. Entirely instrumental, and echoing artists like Kelly Moran in its use of slowly evolving rhythmic repetition, Smith described it as “a contemplative body of work that examines what grief does to the body and the mind – the necessary disembodiment & cocooning — how it suspends us, how it empties us, and how it quietly begins to rebuild us in its own time.”

https://kaitlynaureliasmith.bandcamp.com/album/thoughts-on-the-future

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Ethel Cain – Punish

And so begins the inevitable march of posting all the music from 2025 that I missed, starting with this beautiful, devastating track from Ethel Cain’s album Perverts. It doesn’t really do justice to listen to it in isolation from the rest of the album, but it is an undoubted highlight – if a ‘highlight’ can make you want to curl into a mournful little ball and never go outside again. Perverts is one of the bleakest, most sorrowful albums of the year, and I can’t stop listening to it.

https://ethelcain.ffm.to/perverts

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Music

µ-Ziq – Majadahonda at Dawn

Mike Paradinas returns to Balmat with his new album 1979, the spiritual successor to his 2023 label debut 1977. 1979 explores a synth-heavy landscape of ethereal soundscapes, ominous crevasses, and strange, psychedelic fugues, and leans more readily into ambient-adjacent moods and textures than most of Paradinas’s more lively recordings as µ-Ziq on Planet Mu.

https://mikeparadinas.bandcamp.com/album/1979

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Music

Betty Hammerschlag – Circlesss

Betty Hammerschlag arrives on blush with a beautiful set of abstracted folk diversions on her new LP fake girl. Sits somewhere between Grouper and ML Buch; with heartwrenching melodies submerged beneath layers of reverb, dust and melancholy.

https://blushtbc.bandcamp.com/album/fake-girl

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Music

Prurient – Poison Apple

As Halloween approaches, I’d like to recommend this terrifying album from Prurient, Noise For Halloween Night. Lock the doors, turn the lights off, listen loud and have a panic attack. Happy Friday! 🖤

https://prurient.bandcamp.com/album/noise-for-halloween-night

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Music

Klein – it is what is is in d minor

Klein’s sleep with a cane isn’t so much a “mixtape” in the conventional sense as it is a sprawling ambient dossier. She frames it as such herself – “an epic ambient tape” – but over nearly 90 minutes, the record travels through murmurs, ruptures, and confessional loops. It’s experimental, deeply personal, intimately bound to her London roots and a strong contender for ambient album of the year.

https://klein1997.bandcamp.com/album/sleep-with-a-cane