electronic

Liminal times be liminal. If there’s one thing that typifies the period i’m focusing on in this Lent Series, 1977–81, it’s the extent to which, with the proliferation of electronics, more than usually strange and wonderful things suddenly seemed to be possible. As i’ve explored previously, this led to some …

For the next album in the Lent Series – and this won’t be the only time – the chronology becomes more fluid. Cabaret Voltaire, comprising Richard Kirk, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson, formed in Sheffield in 1973, but it would be five more years before their music would start to …

Many of the albums i’m featuring in this year’s Lent Series feel as if they came out of nowhere, less part of a process of evolution than a sudden, out-of-the-blue flash of something fully-formed and entirely new. That’s very much the case with The Bridge, a remarkable one-off creation resulting …

Where Suicide sought to reduce, compress, focus and minimise music in order to maximise its emotional charge, Ryuichi Sakamoto goes in completely the opposite direction in his remarkable debut album Thousand Knives. Two aspects of it are particularly striking. First is its diversity, an absolute panoply of polystylism that nonetheless …

When i conceived this year’s Lent Series, it didn’t take long to realise which album had to come first. US duo Suicide, comprising vocalist Alan Vega and Martin Rev on electronics, brought out their eponymous debut album at the very end of 1977.

Getting to know Estonian composer Olev Muska’s remarkable electronic music last year, and, more importantly, experiencing it in the context of a live event held in the Tallinn club HALL over the summer, made me aware of the label Glitch Please. That in turn led to me discovering a whole …

In the last few years, US composer Kenneth Kirschner has been exploring very large-scale compositional structures – three pieces since 2023 have had durations of over 3 hours – so i thought it would be nicely contrary to feature one of his shorter pieces, June 23, 2013, which has a …

Today’s bit of freely-available music is by French musician Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou, whose fantastic album Choke Enough was one of my best albums of 2025. Earlier in her career, around a decade ago, she put out a number of self-released EPs, one of which, For the Beasts, was a …

Who’s up for some January stasis? German composer Robert Henke‘s 10-minute piece Oomoo is a beautiful demonstration of ambient stillness. It dates from late 2007, and is, according to Henke, based on “a single recording of a longer pad-sound of a Yamaha SY77 synthesizer” which “has been sampled, transposed, filtered …

i’ve been revisiting the music of Switzerland-based sound artist D’Incise (aka Laurent Peter) lately, and one work in particular i’ve found myself coming back to again and again and again. For many of his releases, Peter gives succinct information elaborating their inspiration and / or production, but for his 2012 …

So here we are again, the end of the year, looking back at the almighty heights scaled by the most intrepid few. Here’s the first half of 2025’s Best Albums of the Year, an absolute showcase of fearless invention and remarkable beauty that demands and deserves your full, undivided attention.

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To view this content, you must be a member of Simon’s Patreon at £5 or more

To view this content, you must be a member of Simon’s Patreon at £5 or more

To view this content, you must be a member of Simon’s Patreon at £5 or more

To view this content, you must be a member of Simon’s Patreon at £5 or more

To view this content, you must be a member of Simon’s Patreon at £5 or more

To view this content, you must be a member of Simon’s Patreon at £5 or more