Electronic / Experimental

2024 Repress. Tokyo's Ai Aso is a Japanese psychedelic pop singer-songwriter whose work has a whisper-thin acid-folk quality to it. She started performing as a solo singer around 2000. Her solo work, infrequent collaborations with White Heaven members You Ishihara and Michio Kurihara, Yurayura Teikoku, and Boris bring a level of fragility and hypnotism to the stage, recalling lost memories, small flavors of Coil, and serial playing on the verge of evaporation. As for her recent activities, she has performed on bills together with Sunn O))), Boris, Masaki Batoh (Ghost), Touri Kudoh, Kim Doo Soo, Mark Fry, Simon Finn, etc. Cut by CGB at Dubplates & Mastering.

In the 1970s, Robert Cahen turned to the burgeoning field of video art, where he became a pioneering artist. He was originally trained in musique concrète, his creative background, and joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1972. The pieces on this record were composed in the GRM studios between 1971 and 1974. They testify to a lively inspiration and imagination combined with a precocious formal mastery that already carries the seeds of later developments, which the artist cleverly and inventively deployed in the field of visual arts.

I wonder if my fascination for clouds (without being an obsession) may have risen at the end of the 80s as, whilst composing Micro-climat, I would regularly wander between the Vercors mountains and the high plateaus of the Monts du Forez discovering, through my eyes, body, breath, active observation and walk, that natural forms when constantly changing and yet swollen with a unity of matter (in this instance, water) open one up to a deep, fundamental breath and a clear field for the mind.
The sky and its forces: our ally.
A model for a natural music which, although fixed, as in musique concrète (a rule of the genre), moreover on a recording tape, will remain charged with such a poetic quality that (isn't it its role or rather its reality?) it will ensure a perpetual renewal for our senses, so as to reach another idea of the world, far more open and richer than what we could have imagined.”
Lionel Marchetti, 2011

Lionel Marchetti is a major figure of the “third generation” of concrète musicians, a term he values. Listening to these works, imbued with poetry and traversed by micro-narratives, one can indeed retrieve the original concrète spirit, the one that draws from the sonic world, with ears wide open, so as to extract a fertile, rich and multiple substance then shaped and conveyed towards a formal and musical abstraction. Lionel Marchetti has mastered this process, but his real distinctive feature is a truly unique talent for setting climates (as one sets traps) and keeping us on constant alert. The two pieces in this record perfectly illustrate the entrancing dimension of Lionel Marchetti's music, whose charm leads us, through each successive listening, to become voluntary captives so as to better liberate ourselves
François Bonnet, Paris, 2020

'Nekkuja' is a place for Herlop's warmest, sweetest sentiments to rise to the surface and crack through the topsoil. She describes the record as a way for her to seek and affirm inner light, and it's undoubtedly her brightest, poppiest statement to date. The forward-thinking, experimental touches that nourished 'Pripyat' are still present, but blessed with a level of positivity that's rare to find in a scene so entranced by darkness and melancholy.

Official remastered edition of COIL's 1998 drone/ambient masterpiece. “4 Tones to facilitate travel through time.” So begins the listeners’ journey into what has become one of the most treasured and revered pieces of COIL history ever released. Each of the four pieces on Time Machines is named after the chemical compound of the hallucinogenic drug that they were composed for, and the album was meticulously crafted to enable what John Balance referred to as "temporal slips" in time and space, allowing both the artist and audience to figuratively "dissolve time". Inspired by long form ceremonial music of Tibet and other religions, where the intent is to lose oneself in the music – to meditate or achieve a trance state – Time Machines became Drew McDowall, John Balance, and Peter Christopherson’s “electronic punk-primitive” answer to this tribal concept. Starting as a rough demo tape recorded solely by Coil member Drew McDowall, Time Machines started to take full form when McDowall enthusiastically delivered these demo recordings to Balance and Christopherson as sketches for a new Coil project with the primary goal of shifting Coil’s sound further into a more conceptually abstract direction. Largely recorded in 1997 using single takes with minimal post production, these four drones contain every intended fluctuation and tone, along with every glitch of the original – “Artifacts generated by your listening environment are an intrinsic part of the experience.”

〈Captured Tracks〉The biggest seller! Along with masterpieces such as "Salad Days", this is definitely an introductory board for this person! Mac Demarco is a current indie pop cult icon from Canada, known for his activities in Makeout Videotape, sampling Sekito Oshigeo's "The Word II", and the popular split single "Honey Moon" with Mr. Hosono. The 10th anniversary edition of the masterpiece "Rock And Roll Night Club" released in 2012 has been released as an analogue. A masterpiece of psychedelic and addictive indie pop that makes you feel like you're listening to Deerhunter's "Microcastle" cassette demo!

Waterfall Horizon, 7038634357’s second album with Blank Forms Editions, was written for live performance and workshopped over successive shows during a 2022 tour. Here, the song forms have begun to crystallize. Hallmarks of the artist’s prior, studio-crafted recordings—slow-burning ambience and obfuscating digital distortion—are pared back, revealing borderline pop inflections. Waterfall Horizon’s more traditional lyrical scaffolds allow verses, chorus, and interstices to flourish, all within a minimized, icy range.

Neo Gibson, born in Virginia and based in New York City, records, performs, and produces as 7038634357. This numerical alias, under which Gibson has been releasing work since 2016, offers a window into the careful ambivalences of the musical project. It conjures the impersonal—the opacity and randomness of data, a number that is hard to remember or even say out loud—while also suggesting a direct line of communication with the artist, down to an area code indexing their biography. 7038634357 uses a restricted palette to achieve music that is formally precise and emotionally direct. Their digital-native approach to production, in which frank melodies cross paths with heavy distortion, contains traces of both trance’s maximalist arcs and a songwriterly intimacy. Expressive details may appear submerged or abraded, subjected to a canny sense of dynamics and textural discretion.

With a particular interest in site-specific performances in non-musical spaces, 7038634357 has performed in a variety of contexts, including the mezzanine of the West 4th Street subway station in New York City and INA GRM/Radio France’s Présences électronique festival. The first 7038634357 vinyl record, Neo Seven, was released on Blank Forms Editions in 2023; previous releases include self-released cassettes and CD-Rs, as well as a pair of EPs on Genome 6.66 Mbp (2018, 2019).

In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began, environmental sounds were recorded in the dense forests of Kerala, India, and

in 2023, in the chaotic wastelands of Karachi and Lahore, Pakistan, where suicide bombings still occur, Peshawar,

where suicide bombings still occur in 2023.

This futuristic Asian music, created by blending traditional instruments with electronics and collage, mysteriously blends with Arab and African elements, evoking the scent of the earth despite being rooted in asphalt—a truly unique masterpiece!

The first analog version of the classic hip-hop jam album released in 2005 by Pardon Kimura and KILLER-BONG, the head of BLACK SMOKER RECORDS, is now available for the first time.

XTCLVR’s debut album for Sferic conjures a vivid, disoriented blur of ambient trap and dub techno, shaped under the strain of Ukraine’s wartime curfews and shelling. Written during long nights of uncertainty, these ten tracks navigate a fractured sonic landscape—lush yet anxious, synthetic but emotionally charged.

Unintelligible vocals drift through fogged beats and smeared textures, evoking both the disarray of conflict and the dream logic of post-party comedowns. Tracks like ‘Perspective’ diffuse vocoder lines into gauzy clouds, while ‘Allergen’ and ‘Storm Shadow’ crackle with nervous energy, recalling the destabilised rhythms of Nazar’s Hyperdub output. Guest contributions deepen the haze: BSW948 threads bars through the warped pulse of ‘Night Shift Cut’, OB3TH shimmers through ‘The Wise Mystical Tree’, and Indy appears on the ambient drill-laced ‘Acid Flavour’. Final track ‘Dead Smoke’ sinks into submerged dread, a murky metaphor for psychic fallout.

Fans of Topdown Dialectic, False Aralia, and Sa Pa will find themselves pulled into this blurred and flickering world—part escapism, part document of a brutal reality.

Special Guest DJ — also known as Shy — has spent the better part of a decade quietly reshaping the experimental electronic underground. Operating from Berlin under aliases like Caveman LSD and uon, their work weaves between dubwise ambient, smeared club textures, and lo-fi dream states.

On Our Fantasy Complex, they channel that tangled web into a 40-minute suite of fogged-out mood music: sensual, angry, dreamlike. There are trace elements of shoegaze, dub techno and quasi-speed D&B, but it’s more hex than genre exercise — a lucid tangle of textures shaped by peers like Ben Bondy, mu tate, and Arad Acid add an extra dimension.

This isn’t ambient in the blissed-out sense, but a darker, dirtier kind of psychedelia — music that melts the line between introspection and club detritus. From the looming bass pressure of ‘How Long Can I Burn?’ to the dissociative haze of ‘Yoro (pt I & II)’, and finally the crystalline closer ‘Dream’, it’s a record that lingers like smoke.

Lucy Duncombe and Feronia Wennborg compose a modern symphony for virtual choir on 'Joy, Oh I Missed You', muddling sound poetry with Nuno Canavarro and ‘Systemische'-style machine-damaged surrealism. It's mindbogglingly good, like a mashup of Lee Gamble's 'Models', Akira Rabelais' 'Spellewauerynsherde' and Robert Ashley's timeless 'Automatic Writing’ screwed to perfection in a mode that will also appeal if you’re into work by Kara-Lis Coverdale, Nozomu Matsumoto, Theo Burt, Olli Aarni, Sydney Spann, Hanne Lippard.

Duncombe and Wennborg have been chewing over ‘Joy, Oh I Missed You’ for four long years, working their process until they were "queasily intimate" with their arsenal of artificial voice tools. Tracing the history of the technology, from voice synthesisers and chatbots to AI voice analysis tools, the duo experiment relentlessly to develop a digital-age response to IRL extended vocal technique - think François Dufrêne, Yoko Ono or Phew. Less interested in replicating human sounds exactly, they instead test how various tools might cough up their own idiosyncratic tics as they stretch and stutter through attempts to mimic their "fleshware" counterparts.

Duncombe's got prior form here, most recently re-synthesising her voice on the brilliantly oily 'Sunset, She Exclaims' 45 for Modern Love, following a stunner for 12th Isle in 2021. Wennborg brings along experience from her tenure as one half of microsound duo soft tissue, whose 2022 LP 'hi leaves' was a haptic treasure. These approaches mesh remarkably well on their first collaborative full-length, with Duncombe's eerie bio-electronic incantations providing the ideal foil for Wennborg's carbonated hardware processes. It's not completely clear where the human voice ends and the zeroes and ones begin on 'Your Lips, Covering Your Teeth', as rolling cyborg syllables tumble over OS-startup womps and surprisingly svelte outcroppings of glassy, synthetic glitches. The music is surprisingly mannered, a sonic reflection of the cover, where a mouth is pixellated until only colour swatches remain. Duncombe and Wennborg trace the gradual erosion of their voices, leaning into the chaos as their various tools veer off into unique patterns of failure.

What sounds like a far-off, ghosted folk rendition (we're reminded of the Icelandic laments that Rabelais chewed up on 'Spellewauerynsherde') is offset by gnarled, bitcrushed machine faults and pneumatic lip smacks on the brilliant 'Residue', and on 'Brushed My Hair', the duo massage the voice until it sounds like a flute. Assembling stutters and barks and sighs into a celestial chorus alongside time-stretched moans, they create a levitational atmosphere on 'Smell It', freezing the energy from bizarre pitch steps to configure a zonked vocal ensemble.

'Joy, Oh I Missed You’ is an album that, like its source material, constantly morphs, testing the boundaries of its concept repeatedly without bubbling over into conceptual goo. In fact, it's remarkably euphonious, even at its most theoretically abrasive; Duncombe and Wennborg wring out uniquely angelic formations through a process of trial and error that packs a surprising, hefty emotional punch.

Florerntino’s Club Romantico label serves a deadly b2b from Bubbling legends Styn & De Schuurman, rendering the roots and future of the viral, Surinamese-Dutch dance style on a scorching, hour-long mixtape.

Since the late ‘90s, DJ Chuckie’s sped-up dancehall innovations have spawned a very particular sound in Dutch Surinamese communities that would break thru to broader acclaim after percolating blogs and forums in the early 2010s. Subsequent releases by the likes of Anti G and later from De Schuurman and DJ Shaun-D have ensured main stage and club headline slots for the sound, which also regularly lights up Florentino’s globe-trotting DJ schedule.

Time is ripe, then, for this tight as heck history lesson spanning the past 25 years of bubbling, pairing one side of rambunctious tear-out tackle from the early-mid ‘00s, sifted from now-obsolete platforms - MySpace, dead blogsites - and P2P services such as Limewire and Bluetooth for a buckshot side of squeaks, subs, and triplet tattoos suffused with Dutch house influence.

The B-side calibrates the crosshairs to bubbling in the present era and into the future, shelling exclusives by Styn & De Schuurman, plus a closing ace by Styn & DJ Rtje, all rife with carnival drum batteries, hybridised with grimy mid-range and UKF-type string vamps with a wile-out torque that galvanises, future-proofs the sound with a chromed-out zing.

A party in a box, basically!

One of contemporary Ambient’s preeminent figures lands on its leading label, enacting a transition into a new phase of rhythmic noise and tonal shadowplay laced with peculiar sensitivities, wrangling Dilloway-influenced tape noise thru ASMR ambience, fritzed Dub Techno, layered vocal drone and ritualistic mantras - big tip IYI Grouper, Porter Ricks, Pharmakon, Civilistjävel!

Perila steps up solo with a heavily satisfying debut for West Mineral, investigating negative space and states of subconsciousness. The shift in tone feeds forward into arcane realms of resonant dark ambient and dream-pop, harnessed in amorphous structures using dub-as-method. It’s wholly immersive stuff in a way that’s long been Perlia’s calling card, but here more careful in its command of personalised, atmospheric physics from the Coil-esque ‘cheerleader’, thru the deeply smudged and sexy trip hop of ‘lava’, and the oozing, sloshing OOBE-like spectres of ‘give it all’.

The title of the album is a reference to Carl Jung’s phrase "all haste is of the devil” which informs Perila’s writing process here; she slows down in an attempt to feel more and tap into her shadow self. Album opener 'cheerbleeder' is a doomed, tremolo-heavy mass of ghost notes, while the rattling chains and strangulated voices on ‘metal snax' sounds like they belong on a Wolf Eyes tape. 'grain levy tep dusk' strikes closer to recently unearthed industrial plates from Tolerance and Mentocome, with rusted clangs threaded into deflated, half-speed pulses. The album keeps growing from there, shifting and expanding as Perila exhales and absorbs her cognitive blind spots. She credits "trance states" for helping her let go, and we broadly get to experience that on the mantra-like 'thunder me' and the blurry all-vocal highlight 'hold my leg', which sounds like it could have been snatched from Grouper's 'Way Their Crept' sessions.

As with all of Alexandra Zakharenko’s work under various aliases - Aseptic Stir, Baby Bong, Wedontneedwords, Perila - her allure is self-evident to lovers of textured, diffuse electronics, and never more so than on this lip-bitingly potent suite of delicacies and primordial urges, perfectly balancing ancient and techngnostic aspects with an x-amount of seductive strangeness left in the margins.

Demdike Stare & Cherrystones unveil a long-in-the-making darkside fantasy weaving atmospheric and loose-limbed cuts recorded at labs in London and Manchester, brilliantly shaking a bush of ghostly trig points ranging from the Mars rehearsal tapes to Minimal Man, Randy Greif’s cut-ups, Conrad Schnitzler’s industrial prototypes and ‘70s ECM sides - with vocal contributions from Ssabae’s mesmerising Laura Lippie.

In dazed pursuit of styles heard on Cherrystones’ DDS tape ‘Peregrinations in SHQ (Super High Quality)’, the renowned London digger properly hexes sonic leylines with his label bosses on 10 wickedly grubby and hazed sound experiments. They tumble down the rabbit hole like some sixth sense-guided call-and-response, resulting in an exquisite unfolding of psychoacoustic spaces familiar to their mutually spirited sounds.

Honestly it's some of the dirtiest and most esoteric gear we've heard from Demdike; you can sense a lifetime of incessant digging drip through every loop and crack; grotty no-wave, industrial noise, DIY psych, proto-techno and gnarled concrète, further bolstered by Cherrystones’ perpendicular, equally insatiable and fathoms-deep areas of interest. With a focus on scrappy, feral cuts and hastily recorded edits, the trio roughly re-draw wordless chants and hyper-compressed knocks over a vortex of found sounds that curdle in rhythmic heat. Never staying sill for long, the trio get drowned by watery ambience, then shredded loops, Technoid shrapnel and electric bass prangs dancing into the aether.

The crankiest spirit perfuses the whole thing, evoking states of unravel and psychic distress as they pit a near-peerless collective knowledge into the void. Laura Lippie acts as human ligature to sanity, a fleeting constant found smudged into the hip hop chops of ‘Familiar Unfamiliarity’, spectral incantations of ‘Prophet in View’, or a channelling of Ozzy in ‘Thee Oath’, among more deranged tongues on ‘Observing the Crux’.

It’s the missing link between ECM, Earth and Dilloway we didn’t know we needed - up there with some of the most satisfyingly deep and frazzled gear this century.

Today, 4-piece instrumental band Yuuf announce signing to Ninja Tune’s Technicolour imprint alongside news of a forthcoming EP ‘Alma’s Cove’ out 20th June 2025.

Spanning 5 tracks, ‘Alma’s Cove’ is a meditative soundscape which takes the listener on a sonic journey through nature, connection and togetherness away from the stresses of day-to-day life. “Alma’s Cove is a dreamy tropical space free from stress, where you can feel content and present. A sheltered paradise to enjoy at your own leisure” the band comment. “When writing the EP the main goal was to create a space that’s the complete opposite of our London life: stress, anxiety, overwhelm. Reconnect to nature and enjoy the present. A dreamland”

Alongside the announcement Yuuf share the EP’s title track “Alma’s Cove”, out now on Technicolour. Rich with organic textures, shimmering details and psychedelic rhythms, the single invites the audience into the serene world of Alma’s Cove. “The listener is walking around and taking in nature, the sounds, and the views and reveling in its natural beauty”. The single arrives with an official music video, showcasing a full live session filmed during the band's recent trip to Crete.

Mixing international sounds and global influences is central to Yuuf’s ethos. Even its members all hail from different parts of the world – Switzerland, Denmark, France and England. “We naturally blend our diverse musical tastes from around the world to shape the sound of our music”. ‘Alma’s Cove’ is a prime example of this, inspired by classical Spanish guitar, Americana soundscapes and the music of Studio Ghibli.

Yuuf kick-off a UK tour in May, with multiple stops at various summer festivals including Wide Awake Festival, Green Man Festival, Lost Village Festival and Psych Festival. Full tour dates below. The band released their debut EP ‘In The Sun’ in Summer 2024 which has already gained over 1.5M streams on Spotify alone and received support from the likes of BBC 6Music, KEXP, KRCW and IG platform Somewhere Soul (919K followers). Released alongside the EP ‘The Sun’s’ viral live session video now has an impressive 1.8M views, 84k likes and 4k comments on YouTube.

Produced & mixed by Vegyn, all lyrics written by Francis Hornsby Clark.

This is a work synonymous with the Aphex Twin, featuring one of the most popular songs of their career, "Girl/Boy Song".

Under the right conditions, half-remembered dreams can meld seamlessly into hazy present moments. Time spent alone can be an emotional blank canvas, and an opportunity to deconstruct sense and feeling; a patchwork of snippets both rooted in memory and abstracted from reality. The title of ‘quilted lament’ perfectly captures the way Gretchen Korsmo and claire rousay’s overlapping missions come together to do just this. Worn polaroid melodies and snatched everyday noises seem overheard through windows onto the street. They feel emotionally twinned, claire and Gretchen, it’s not always possible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Their musical thoughts and DNA are sewn together into a mini symphony of warmly embracing movements.

Built remotely between pre-existing friends in the underground music scene, the duo layered ideas onto audio files, and sent them back (and forth). And these luscious instrumentals truly do feel assembled by intuition, casually crafted with little need for guidance. “claire and I are both emo,” explains Korsmo. “We are both former texas-dwellers [too] and relate over both the woes and beauties of being in the American DIY experimental music scene.” Buoyant piano keys and hushed layer vocals tracks sit alongside a humming field-recorded scrapbook; a neighbour caught in a moment of private inspiration while street noise elevates; a private hymnal in the bathroom while the washing machine ends its cycle. Both artists take field sounds from a wealth of Zoom and Tascam recordings made in the last half-decade in Santa Fe, San Antonio, Los Angeles, Kamakura, Japan and elsewhere – from a baseball game announcer in Santa Fe, to the sound of a friend eating a juicy peach. At times, the bedroom walls seem to grow thin amid atmospheric creaks and disembodied whispers. Despite its very emo core, this is a recording engulfed in an intense sense of bliss, more at peace than we’ve heard either artist before.

The future of underground music. A record that traces its outline! From the prestigious DDS label, run by Demdike Stare, which continues to update the deepest depths of the UK leftfield scene, comes the debut album by the mysterious newcomer NZO! A magical sound archive that seems to have arrived from another world, where the reverberations of a ruined city, a sense of rhythm from post-industrial, and ritualistic noise processing intertwine. A mysterious must-listen work that gives off the strength of a ghostly sound in the lineage of Blackest Ever Black and PAN.

LINTD, a pseudonym of Iyunoluwanimi Yemi-Shodimu, a notable musician from Nigeria, based in Manchester, will release his latest work in 2025 on vinyl from HEAD II, the cutting edge of the London underground. A strange work that can be called a modern dark audio fairy tale, with a strange fusion of gothic sensibility and experimental structure. The acoustic space woven between decadent and mysterious narration, strange beats, distorted melodies and silence is like a dark fable drawn with sound. A sharp and solitary strange work that reminds us of the narration x acoustic structure after Dean Blunt and even the illusion of The Shadow Ring.

Cortex of Light, a notable Italian trio that includes the leftfield techno genius Piezo and the experimental ambient genius xàr num, has released their debut album from 3XL, the label headed by special guest DJ uon! A futuristic therapy sound where environmental sounds and electronic sounds intertwine. Drone sounds, deconstructed rhythms, and grids of drowsy reverberation are sewn together, and the sound seems to trace the membrane of the city. It is the afterimage of a club, the architecture of a sleepless night, and an optical abstract sound image. While resonating with mysterious labels such as bblissss, West Mineral, and Motion Ward, the unconscious underflow that is characteristic of 3XL runs throughout the entire album, making this a prayer for modern sounds.

David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke's last proper Gastr Del Sol album, 'Camofleur' was originally released in 1998 and sounds fresher than ever, countering the conservative post-rock narrative with innovative fusions of folk, avant jazz and free improv, featuring pals John McEntire, Stephen Prina, Darin Gray, Rob Mazurek, Jeb Bishop, Edith Frost and Markus Popp of Oval fame, finally back in print...

Wave Field, released in 1995, was a departure from the first album into new composition methods involving the dirty textures of rock guitar, sounding in the open ears of many listeners (like Jim O'Rourke, who issued the disc in the US on dexter's cigar) as a synthesis of disparate elements — a nexus where Alvin Lucier, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and Eno blend together. Here, the clangorous potential of the guitar was emphasized, giving a metallic edge to the two extended pieces and "radio edit" coda. The jacket paid subtle tribute to My Bloody Valentine, which, along with the radio edit, suggested a harmony between musical directions as wildly disparate as minimalist experimental and rock. Today, such a paradoxical intent is more widely considered as a part of the artist's purview.