The tapes started arriving on April 7, VHS cassettes stickered with the Boards of Canada hexagon sun logo, sent from Warp Records to the homes of various people who’d previously purchased something from their Bleep.com retail site. The purposefully degraded footage contained therein featured various mysterious images including a Greek Christogram and a distorted image of US TV evangelists Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker, while the audio featured a reversed snippet of The Elegants’ 1958 doo-wop single ‘Little Star’ (taken from 2019 Boards Of Canada mixtape, Societas x) plus audio from an advert for the Moody Bible Institute’s long-defunct monthly magazine (“all for only $2.95!”) And the promise of a “free hexagonal flexi-disc…six voices and music to guide your…
Category: electronic
Think about music, all the music that is available to hear, all the music that’s been made, especially in the past 80 years of popular styles. Where does it all go in your mind? How do you get from one thing to another?
These questions matter for this album, because Haruhi Kobayashi started off in the public eye as a J-Pop singer, putting out the 2017 album Inside Out on Sony. To be frank, it’s an undistinguished derivation of American soul and soft rock, the kind of imitation of styles that young musicians work through to find their own voice.
Well, Kobayashi has found that voice, and it’s not just orders of magnitude distant from the earlier album, but a remarkable journey from the universe of pop music into the kind of…
Known in the fine art sphere as wildly praised disruptive painter and Degenerative Artist ‘Shardcore’, Eric Drass is also an in-demand (if acerbic) global speaker on AI, deep fake, and machine learning tools in art (he’s showed up as a guest expert at the BBC Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and even on telly explaining deep fakes to Ian Hislop). DRASS is his first solo music project. On the Hill was gestated through 2025 in Eric’s secret lair in Sussex (genuinely accessed via a hidden doorway in a bookshelf).
…With his rhino-horn quiff and black varnished nails, a classy dresser, he cuts a ubiquitous silhouette around town, at our juicier tech gatherings, or propping up the bar at a certain kind of indie gig. Furious and funny, debut…
Where has Ecca Vandal been? Nine years have passed since NME labelled the artist’s self-titled album “one of the year’s brightest debuts” for the way she attacked storming guitar riffs as easily as punchy synth beats. Much like Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes or Nova Twins, Vandal juggled her fiery punk spirit with plenty of vocal dexterity, earning support slots with Incubus and Queens of the Stone Age. But after the pandemic interrupted her momentum, she didn’t come racing out of the blocks to chase after it.
Vandal refused to rush her second album. Carefully crafted in producer Richie Buxton’s bedroom in Melbourne – the city where she grew up after moving from South Africa as a child – she hit reset, bided her time and named…
Paradessence spotlights the innate surrealism of Visible Cloaks shimmering, digital-powered exotica. Since 2014 the duo, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile, have forged a borderless space where echoes of globally dispersed music converge in a glimmering zone and the periphery between synthetic and otherwise is porous. Their albums bring to mind Yves Tanguy paintings, filled with impressions of familiar forms contained in unusual contours and doused in hyperreal sheen.
Visible Cloaks’ first full length since 2017’s Lex, Paradessence amplifies the portals and colourful intrusions generated by their crossing of streams. Opener ‘Apsis’ begins with slithers of synth that mutate between elegant brush strokes and serrated sequences. ‘Skylight’ begins in…
Who is music for? Listener – or musician? Is a perfect record what matters, or the journey to make it? These are questions Dutch DJ/producer Martyn stirs in his latest album Music for Existing, released via his record label 3024. Described as “a love letter to the communal act of making music together”, the record features a sprawl of collaborators and friends including Duval Timothy, Dan Only, Lucinda Chua, Mark Cisneros, Mischa Porte, Cees Bruinsma andMusa Okwonga.
Music for Existing is a record dedicated to re-establishing connection in an increasingly insular world, whilst simultaneously demonstrating Martyn’s “profound love and appreciation for jazz, both in sound and approach.” While not inherently new, the fusion of the regimented,…
Radioactivity was Kraftwerk’s fifth full-lenght release and their first fully electronic album. It is a concept album centered around radioactive decay and radio communications. As such it boasts a few big theme anthems surrounded by shorter variations of those themes with interconnecting shorter pieces of electronic music, sounds, and digitized voices.
“Kraftwerk built upon the international success of Autobahn by expanding their conceptual concepts to an album-length exploration of radio waves (and the band’s other favorite wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum). Musically, the album represents a quantum leap of pop sensibility; though still distinctly a “prog” soundscape, its brilliant melodic hooks (best represented by the title track and Airwaves) are organized in more traditional – read shorter – form.
This record was a quick work. Kelman came from his home in LA to the center of the dirty winter in MTL December 13, left on the 19th, and by February the record was done. Neither SUUNS nor Kelman had prepared anything, no idea what to expect. We showed up as musicians should – prepared only with the thousands of hours logged at our instruments, agnostic to outcome, only curious about what could happen in the room that day, that moment. Possibilities. We spent most of that time improvising and exploring while tape ran: different versions, getting closer to the idea each time, stripping away, playing less, fewer layers. The less you play, the more possibilities you hear.
Ben sat at a makeshift desk, writing lyrics, sounding it out through The Vocalist, a ghosty old vocoder.
Has Axel Wilner changed, or has the world changed? The artist who built an impressive career on making the same album over and over-and making every single one compelling-sounds a little different on his new EP Now You Exist, his first record in eight years. Maybe it’s because it’s on Studio Barnhus instead of his usual home of Kompakt, but it comes off loose and relaxed, unmoored from the clinical techno beats of his most revered work; it sets off on the wide-open path Infinite Moment laid out in 2018 and then veers ruggedly off road. With its over-the-top emotions and genuine hooks, Now You Exist recalls a more unhurried, washed-out version of his debut album, From Here We Go Sublime, sprawled out in the sun and left to bake for a while.
For fans of electronic music, 1977 represents a sacred frontier. It was a time when synthesizers were massive, unpredictable walls of cables and knobs, and live performances were high-wire acts executed entirely without a safety net.
Among the most legendary documents of this era is Tangerine Dream’s performance at the Place des Arts in Montreal on April 9, 1977, during their iconic first North American tour. Performed by the definitive “Sonic Trinity”- Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann- this breathtaking two-hour set captures the absolute zenith of the Berlin School of electronic music, serving as the final, radiant hurrah of their classic lineup right before Baumann’s departure.
Originally broadcast by Montreal’s CHOM-FM…
Schemes progresses from Kreidler‘s run of albums during the 2010s and ’20s which explore spaces informed by dub, funk, and Fourth World fusion. The tracks here are heavily spacious and atmospheric, yet rhythmic and kinetic. There’s pronounced grooves, but they saunter rather than drive. On a few songs, like opener “Beads,” there’s synth patterns or basslines that seem like they could be intros to dance tracks, but the group decide to hover in that space rather than move forward with a beat. Other tracks have drumming which is detached and unhurried, with airy guitar and synth sequences floating above the rhythms. “Bellboy” is a particularly curious track with haunting voices and a general feeling of a mischievous spirit snooping around.
For Mind Abandon, Ital Tek incorporated more live instrumentation into the creation process, rather than primarily composing on a computer. The tracks are often based on guitars and even processed vocals, as well as live percussion and other instruments played by hand. The album still unmistakably sounds electronic, but it has a human touch. Ten years on from 2016’s Hollowed, Ital Tek has firmly established a cinematic style that has almost nothing to do with the dubstep, IDM, and juke hybrids he used to produce, even if his newer work is still informed by the more beat-forward direction of his earlier releases.
Opener “The Ice Is Thin” is a sparkling inferno with melancholy bass, and “A Hidden Path” almost sounds like a dark version of new…
Critically acclaimed singer-songwriter and instrumentalist, Patrick Grossi, widely known as Active Child, released his new self-titled album, on Sony Music Masterworks. Co-produced with Alex Goose (Kali Uchis, Childish Gambino, Vince Staples), the album is Active Child’s most personal and introspective work yet, marked by a candid exploration of adulthood and fatherhood. A reflective portrait of his own journey, Grossi navigates the space between creative devotion and familial responsibility, exploring how love and quiet self-protection shape a life no longer driven by youthful idealism.
“Pursuing art feels less romantic and more chaotic as I age,” Active Child notes. “It demands a selfish, often solitary lifestyle…
Luis Garbán Valdeón is no stranger to parties: for years, he has commanded the international warehouse circuit, playing industrial, techno-forward sets under the moniker Cardopusher. Now, as Safety Trance, he offers his experimental take on mutated reggaeton through Venezuelan influences like raptor house, alongside dembow, ’90s Memphis rap, and witch house. The mix of genres and collaborators on his new album, sacrificio, feels distinct to someone who’s been integral to the neo-perreo movement for years. It’s the most readily accessible music of his career, as well as a glitchy, uncanny record that aims to crack through reggaeton’s status quo to reclaim space for counterculture and community.
Though operating at the center of…
Swedish producer Olof Dreijer is best known for projects with his sibling Karin: namely their duo the Knife, plus Karin’s solo act Fever Ray, with whom he created four brilliant tracks on 2023 album Radical Romantics.
For all that his beats on these records often had African-Caribbean-Latin syncopation, they also had a Scandinavian winter gloom.
Conversely, his debut solo album seems to crane upwards towards sunlight like flowers – and each of the tracks has a floral name. Dance heads will already be familiar with some of them (having appeared on EPs stretching back to 2023) but together they show quite how distinctive Dreijer’s own musical accent is: you can tell it’s him sometimes from just half a second of music.
Feeling Is Structure explores the relationship between physical form and human emotion.
Across 10 spatial audio-visual works, Cooper examines how structure in sound, architecture, biology and art, shapes the way we feel.
The album is built on the idea that our inner emotional lives are profoundly connected to our lived environment. Developed from a commission to create a live show for London’s Royal Albert Hall, expanding on this idea, Max explains:
“I’m fascinated by architects who can imbue brutalist buildings with humanity, or artists who can paint a block of colour representing their soul.” says Cooper. “We have this remarkable capacity to spill ourselves into the world through form. When I began working on a show…
Pigeon have recorded their debut album Outtanational in Margate of all places – the once-dying seaside town that has become, in recent years, a retreat for artists like Tracey Emin and The Libertines. The choice of location means something here. Like Margate, Outtanational announces itself as something genuinely hard to pin down.
Across 10 tracks, there are elements of afro-disco, krautrock, punk-funk and post-punk. Opener “NRG” sets the tone immediately as lead vocalist and percussionist Falle Nioke sings of smoke magic and energy vampires over a groove that is fresh, fluid, and plain unpredictable. It’s an intriguing sonic stew that certainly grabs the attention.
Nioke is the heart of the record. Hailing from Guinea-Conakry, he is a member…
Every other year, club culture is allotted one perfect track that punctures the underground-commercial barrier; one god-tier banger uniting both the 6 a.m.-arriving Nowadays member and the casual Friday-night goer-outer. In 2024, it was Nick León and Erika de Casier’s “Bikini.” Before that, the now platinum-certified (in four countries) “B.O.T.A.” This year, Jump Source, the duo composed of two of Montreal’s finest producers, Francis Latreille (aka Priori) and Patrick Holland (aka Project Pablo), are vying for the crown with their stellar debut album, Fold.
Entering 2026, Jump Source were in prime position to connect the dots between North America’s niche club music scenes and the mainstream. Over the past decade, the two…
Anastasia Kristensen has spent the better part of the last decade sidestepping expectation. Whether releasing via Houndstooth, Turbo or Warp’s Arcola imprint, the Copenhagen-based producer has consistently pushed against the functional rigidity of club music, favouring something more playful, unstable and deeply personal. Even in large-scale festival settings, her DJ sets rarely settle into predictable patterns, instead veering between moods and textures with a kind of gleeful unpredictability. That same instinct animates Bestiarium Sombre, a debut album that feels less like a conventional techno record and more like an invitation into an unruly parallel ecosystem.
Kristensen once described her ideal records as having “a face” – tracks with character,…
Lavender Networks marks the Warp debut of Fire-Toolz, Angel Marcloid’s hard-to-pin-down new age cybermetal project, which has issued albums on tape-friendly experimental labels like Hausu Mountain and Orange Milk.
Coming several months after a Danny Brown album loaded with guest features from the hyperpop and digicore scenes, Marcloid’s presence on Warp shows that the label has been paying particular attention to newer generations of niche Internet-based musicians with an anarchic disregard for genre restrictions. Marcloid’s record-store-in-a-blender genre fusion is well established by this point, but as with her last few albums, she’s continually refining her style while adding new elements and approaches.