By this point, Loraine James needs little introduction. For much of the last decade, she has been one of London’s most consistently innovative and emotionally expressive club producers, building a reputation over a series of albums of questioning electronica, expert sound design, and shapeshifting beats, whether it’s the watercolour techno of records like For You and I (2019) and Reflection (2021), the Julius Eastman-homage Building Something Beautiful for Me (2022), or her extraordinary ambient work under the name Whatever the Weather.
…Exactly why this might be, it’s hard to say. How much it matters, even more so, as James does have a significant and committed audience; it’s just that her body of work so far commands…
Category: electronic
What is so captivating about a pitch-shifted vocal sample? Is it just good old existing IP, scratching the same itch for the trillionth time? Is it the thrill of hearing a sound you thought was fixed respawn somewhere totally new? Loukeman’s eggs are in the latter basket. The Toronto-based producer’s wistful, anemoic dance tracks trawl for vocals across pop, folk, R&B, and hip-hop of the past decade, a net that dredges up Bryson Tiller and Lomelda with equal gusto. But it’s his rendering, like sonic sfumato, that’s the crux of his music. Using an Analog Rytm saturator and a few choice plug-ins, Luke Fenton approaches sung snippets like wet clay, endlessly moldable with a little osmosis. As he put it in an interview last year, he aims to “glue everything together…
Consistency may be disparaged as staid, or celebrated as style. “Art is the place where liking what we like, over and over, is not only allowed but is the essential skill,” writes George Saunders in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, asking, “How emphatically can you like what you like? How long are you willing to work on something, to ensure that every bit of it gets infused with some trace of your radical preference?”
For a house-music producer, it seems around a decade of emphatic consistency really gets the goods. It’s been 13 years since Maya Bouldry-Morrison’s first album as Octo Octa and 10 since she came out as trans — or, as she puts it in the closing poem of her fourth and latest LP, Sigils for Survival, started “finally living life.”
In Greek mythology, when the gods grant King Midas the power to turn everything he touches into gold, what first seems like a wish come true slowly becomes a curse.
In the case of L.A.-based producer Zhu’s fifth studio album Black Midas, however, the tables are turned, and what seems like a curse is musically transmogrified into a blessing.
Created in the wake of the Palisades Fire which saw Zhu’s charred Topanga home left uninhabitable for a year, the stripped-down 14-track melodic techno LP explores the luxurious spaces between sounds. It’s as much about its subtlety as it is the tribal percussion and shadowy basslines, turning darkness itself into a main character with all-black moods and low-register explorations.
…includes the entirety of their ‘Moderate Air Quality’ EP as bonus tracks.
The British-American poet W. H. Auden, in his poem “The Age of Anxiety” (1947), highlights humanity’s isolation in an increasingly industrialized and failing world.
Nearly 80 years later, The Sick Man of Europe is picking up the threads of the same discussion: how to navigate in a world that is diametrically opposed to our needs? How not to lose your ipseity in a data-driven culture vying for your attention? Sick Man of Europe’s eponymous debut album is an exploration of these existential matters — and more.
Yeah, the Sick Man of Europe does not shy away from fundamental issues — does he?
Glissandro 70 is a Canadian experimental duo consisting of Sandro Perri (Polmo Polpo, formerly of Great Lake Swimmers) and Craig Dunsmuir (Kanada 70, Dun Dun Band). They issued their self-titled first album, Glissandro 70, on Constellation in 2006, and its five songs are generally spacious and hypnotic, exploring areas related to Afrobeat, minimalism, abstract pop, and even techno (one song quotes Model 500’s “No UFO’s”). The two musicians continued working together over the years, with both eventually releasing a trio of albums as part of the ensemble Off World. G70 2: Bones of Dundasa arrived two decades after Glissandro 70, and it’s less a brand-new album and more of a collection of additional material the duo created over the years, some of…
They tell you not to judge a book by its cover, but what if that cover tells you what it is? In the concrete poem that adorns the vinyl sleeve of Ben Vida’s Oblivion Seekers, three lines pretty much summarise what to expect: “Muttering ambient language / cutting into the past / with the future spilling out around us”. Because that’s just what you get across the album’s four protracted, slackened tracks, where duologues of spoken word paint an abstract, absurd picture of living, communicating and feeling, broken up into poetic fragments set to music.
But before I scare you off, let me first say: this is a beautiful album, and that, it seems, is part of the point. Oblivion Seekers continues Vida’s move to a more analogue way of thinking…
…these songs resonate as loudly as when they were first created” – MOJO
When they were young, members of Cabaret Voltaire used to walk up to strangers at bus stops in Sheffield and spray them with sounds from reel-to-reel tape recorders. They wanted to liven up everyday life in a Northern industrial town, and observe what would happened when people were jolted out of familiar habits. This pranksterism sticks in the memory, not just because it speaks to the DIY graft that’s part of Cabs’ origin story, but because spending hours splicing sounds onto tape and then blasting them out for a few seconds touches upon a question lurking over the live performance of electronic music as whole: if all the work takes place in the studio…
Arcade Fire’s Open Your Heart or Die Trying, released for Record Store Day 2026, is a cinematic and ambient reimagining of their 2025 studio album Pink Elephant. Produced as a “score to an unmade film,” this experimental project strips away the band’s traditional indie-rock anthems in favor of meditative, synth-heavy soundscapes.
The centerpiece is the sprawling 8-minute “Director’s Cut” of the title track, which sets a vaporous tone for a record focused on atmosphere and hypnotic loops. While critics remain divided on its necessity, the album serves as a deep-dive companion piece for fans, leaning fully into the quiet, restrained creative direction the band established during their collaborations with Daniel Lanois.
…includes the original 13 tracks plus four brand-new songs and three remixes.
Tremor, the latest album from producer and songwriter Daniel Avery, shakes you up in the best way possible. You don’t so much listen to it as enter it — a slow-motion descent into a room where shoegaze guitars shimmer against industrial reverb and the ghosts of warehouse nights still twitch in the corners. It’s music for the afterglow: that hour when the club’s over, the street’s quiet, and you’re walking home with the bass still vibrating in your bones.
“Rapture in Blue” hovers somewhere between the club and the clouds. LA-based artist Cecile Believe breathes through the haze — her voice registers more temperature than lyric — while…
Yu Su’s spidery path across the globe has shaped her work at every step. First there was the humid downtempo she started making in the mid-2010s in Vancouver, inspired by the house music of that city’s legion of stoners and terminal chillers. As the fog lifted over the next few years, you could hear hints of her Chinese upbringing in tracks like “Little Birds, Moonbath,” with its shimmering textures and pentatonic melodies. Su’s debut album, Yellow River Blue, made the connection explicit, inspired by a tour across her home country playing the music she first discovered and developed in Canada. A breakthrough in popularity led to bigger rooms and bigger tunes, Ibiza gigs (and cooking residencies), and an eventual move to London; her DJ sets gradually took a slightly…
British electronic collective Seefeel reappeared after a 13-year hiatus with two mini-albums in 2024 and now present Sol.hz, their first full-length release since the 2011 self-titled LP. The group’s claim to notoriety is as one of the first guitar-based groups signed to the fabled British electronic label Warp, with their 1995 sophomore album Succour. Rock listeners may first have encountered them on the 1993 debut Quique, where the band pushed dream pop beyond guitar rock conventions by dismantling structures that Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine had just about held in place. Instead, Seefeel built their sound around extended tracks of hypnotically recurring motifs, rewiring traditional instrumentation such as strummed guitars and a full drum kit into…
Make your first listen to Seismo a naive one. Don’t think about its makers, and the many excellent projects they have worked on. Don’t think about how exciting it is to hear a bold percussionist like Valentina Magaletti collaborate with a producer who can match her inventiveness and unrestricted approach to form and genre. Try not to think about PAN, the storied label backing it. If you can, forget Moin, Midori Takada, Steve Reich, Nicolas Jaar, Miles Davis, Shackleton, or any other past collaborator or influence you might hear flashes of within its eight songs. Don’t think of its backstory: how it formed out of a commission by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, and what that setting might say about the music.
Just listen. It’s a record full of life, texture and…
nagoyaka na kaze / 和やかな風 – (quiet wind): a collection of forward-thinking electronic experiments sourced from central Japan – co-curated by Nagoya artist abentis for Facta & K-LONE’s Wisdom Teeth imprint. The project profiles a close-knit community of music makers operating in and around the Japanese city of Nagoya: one of the country’s most populous and industrial cities, but one all too often overlooked in terms of its cultural significance.
Curated in close collaboration with local scene organiser Yuya Abe – aka abentis – the record seeks to capture the creative energy of a community of artists making hard-to-define, future-facing electronic music away from the clamour of the bigger cities.
Until recently, Riya Mahesh’s biography nailed nearly every beat of all-American academic achievement, following a familiar arc from early piano lessons to being crowned prom queen, like Olivia Rodrigo’s well-adjusted Wario. But after hitting a snag and failing to get into Juilliard (happens…), the musician regrouped during the pandemic with a SoundCloud account, a trial run of Logic, and nothing to lose.
As Quiet Light, the Texas-born, Boston-based producer has gone on to release multiple albums of increasingly accomplished art pop, along the way nabbing opening spots for Nilüfer Yanya, Chanel Beads, Ana Roxanne, and Hovvdy. Naturally, she’s managed all this while also powering through medical school.
Is there more than mere semantics to the difference between remodeled and remixed? A remix takes the components of an original track, breaks them down and puts them back in a different order. A remodel may also include new components. AGATE is a set of “material refined through repeated performance.” The more Meitei performed pieces from his Kofū trilogy, the more he refined their sound, a process akin to the formation of agate. Three pieces survive the transition from Kofū; one crosses over from Kofū II; and two are remodeled from Kofū III, only six out of thirty-four tracks, plus a new piece that launches the set. The final product extends the discussion on whether there is ever a definitive version of a track; for Meitei, the music evolves with the performer.
Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin are kindred spirits, with their musical inclinations leaning towards improvisation, experimentation, and the testing of the limits of musical forms.
Branciforte, based in New York, constructs and produces process-based music – often implementing electronic keyboards – through his prolific label greyfade. Dumoulin, from Belgium, is recognized for his role in redefining the Fender Rhodes electric piano as a 21st-century instrument through extensive electronic manipulation. A chance meeting more than a decade ago led to the two of them recording what would become ITERAE, a record that brings together their passion for imbuing the Rhodes with electronics and processing.
David Sylvian-led Japan became legends of ‘80s electronic music, and Sylvian himself had a renowned solo career with a series of more and more experimental releases. Yet quite a few fans of the genre sometimes need to be reminded that all other members of the band had a series of good to excellent releases with their solo, joint or collaborative/band efforts. This is particularly true of Richard Barbieri, the man that many critics cite as the architect of the Japan’s synth programming, who has behind him not only a series of electro albums, but also became an integral part of prog rock favourites, Porcupine Tree.
Barbieri has been a bit quiet for the last five years (his previous effort was Under a Spell from 2021) but is now back with aptly titled…
Last Time Here serves as a stunning sonic time capsule, capturing The Album Leaf at a pivotal moment in the project’s evolution. Released in 2026 as a companion to the 25th-anniversary reissue of One Day I’ll Be on Time, this live collection transforms the delicate “bedroom” intimacy of the original 2001 recordings into something far more expansive and cinematic.
The album thrives on what critics call “aural photosynthesis.” While the original studio tracks were celebrated for their minimalist restraint, these live versions breathe with a new intensity. LaValle’s signature blend of Rhodes piano, glitchy rhythms, and soaring guitar loops feels more organic here. Tracks like “Vermillion” and “The MP” benefit from the live energy, where the transition…
Emerging from Cairo’s experimental underground, Mi3raj is a duo comprising poet/vocalist Mohamed Tarek Moussa and producer/muti-instrumentalist Abdelrahman Shaat. Their hypnotically immersive album, Callings of the Owed, centres on six poems written in contemporary Arabic by Moussa, which ventriloquise the thoughts of characters drawn from Cairo’s fringes.
‘I write to the locusts / whistle into bare air,’ claims one. ‘Pluck the fog from my joints’, pleads another. ‘At my naming feast / widows intoxicated me,’ another confides. The texts are rich and full of mystery, brought to life by Moussa’s dramatic delivery, using multiple overdubs to suggest a Babel of voices: at once pleading, declamatory and ritualistic. Shaat’s accompanying…