An album where you can hear all the things Philipp Münch has ever done, but in a very different perspective than what might be expected from him. Granted the sound may seem a bit dated from time to time, but it’s all in a good way – when you play some old Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire you won’t complain about older drum machines. So it’s enough to say that ‘dated’ is not the word; this is called ‘vintage’.
Category: Featured Reviews
synnack – v2.5
“v2.5” can be a very tough nut to crack as one of those albums that, upon first listen, one immediately knows is excellent but can’t really explain why. On occasion, listening it almost feels like tuning an FM receiver in the middle of the night: even if revisiting ‘familiar’ areas of the FM spectrum you never know what you will find or how it will shift.
Tholen – Neuropol
If you want to feel like you live in a collapsing cyberpunk dystopian world where pollution and human failure have caused the denizens to retreat to the murky underground, then leave this playing at all hours. It’s intricate and detailed enough for somewhat active listening, but un-intrusive enough to leave on while you do other life activities.
Karsten Hamre – Through the Eyes of a Stranger
If you can overlook the packaging, which looks like a bootleg B-horror film you’d get offered in an alley in Chinatown, you’ll find that Hamre delivers with some of the best dark ambient soundscapes I’ve heard this year.
Erdem Helvacıoğlu & Per Boysen – Sub City 2064
“Sub City 2064” is imaginative off-planet urban fiction, filling the background of a noir anime series or manga storyboard. Encouraged by the effortless sonic renderings, like beads of narrative on a string, listeners will embrace the sensation of being transported somewhere unfamiliar, gritty and, at times, not a little ominous.
Nin Kuji – Sayonara
It is on this album that Nin Kuji steps up his game and leaves behind the realm of electronic music production, entering into that of composition. “Sayonara” has gone far past simple sample manipulation and sequencing.
5F-X – Flight Recorder 5.0
From the very first kick, the sound reverberates and builds into a full-body experience that is as much felt as heard. Enough to send endorphins racing to the scene of the trauma and spilling over into massive adrenal release and heightened oxygen intake – definitely something every connoisseur of electronic music should experience at least once.
Iszoloscope – The Edge of Certainty
Leaping wildly from hypnotic atmospheres that resonate uncomfortably inside the psyche to pulverising onslaughts of merciless percussion, punctuated with some unexpectedly soft melodic constructs, all narrated by the archetype of evil genius vocal sampling – the kind that’s telling you to relax, this won’t hurt a bit, while all your instincts are screaming at you to run like hell…
Various – Minority
“Minority” introduced the Minor label, operating on the fault lines between abstract electronica and experimental ambient textures. Some tracks sound like the artists playing with plug-ins and leaving the tracks unfinished, but there are many interesting and unexpected things from obscure artists, all new to me. Some are perhaps defunct but several are worth investigating.
Sky Burial – Kiehtan
Solitary evenings spent among the dunes and pine forests of the Outer Lands provide the context for this release, and sonic experimentation is the method. Simply put, and to avoid wrangling over problematical categorizations, “Kiehtan” is archetypal stargazing ambient, a soundtrack for the spinning, light-flecked abyss.