Such authentic industrial music this is. Love it.
Dead Can Dance – Dionysus
The new Dead Can Dance album is just wonderful. For some reason I always have the idea in mind that they might go back to work in their early music style like before Into The Labyrinth, but this did not happen this time either and Dionysus just kept pursuing their ethnic music line of work. It is a beautiful continuation of what they did on Into The Labyrinth and Spiritchaser just matured and on a more grandiose scale. I love it.
Stream Sun Kil Moon – This Is My Dinner
I am not for the the indie folk songs, I don’t really like him singing, but the spoken word pieces are epic, and come with a 10+ minute average.
Public Memory – Demolition
A surprisingly triphop album in 2018 with an equal balance of rock and electronics. Reminds me of Archive most.
Old Man Saxon – The Pursuit
Probably the best hiphop this year so far. Short record with many flavours from electro-infected smasher through angry shouter to seamless flow.
The Necromancers – Of Blood and Wine
So many rocks from psychedelic through prog to even stoner, it’s many blends of hard rock, really something refreshing.
KOLARS – KOLARS
Alternative pops, garage sounds, dreamy moods, party out rocks. It’s like when the Asteroids Galaxy Tour was new, or the music to listen to at a festival bench while drinking up the more-than-tenth beer and shot.
Terence Fixmer – Through The Cortex
Dark industrial techno meets power noise.
Lorn – Remnant
I don’t really know how to label these albums anymore. When Loren appeared on Brainfeeder it was easy and obvious to call it dubstep not just because of the music but because it was those times. Then in the Ninja Tune years it was still related to that scene. But then the dubstep bunch dissolved and some started creating techno, others house, and then some continued this sort of evolution of dubstep into something like bass-dominated darkish ambient, which I wouldn’t call ambient per se, but I just don’t know what to call it.
Discogs labels this latest Lorn album simply as experimental, but I don’t think it’s experimental at all in a sense how I see a Pansonic record or something by Sakamoto being experimental electronics. Remnant has a lot of melodies, easy-to-listen textures, some beatless pieces but many with mid-tempo rhythm. This is not experimental at all, this is completely approachable and easy to digest even if it is for a specific taste – but that’s true for all sorts of music.
Nowadays I tend to consider these simply electronic music. Maybe add “atmospheric” as most of them could fit as a soundtrack for any movie, game or live performance. Bit dark but then not, bit ambient but then not, bit experimenting but then not, bit triphopish but then not. I am thinking of labelling these as IDM again, which feels weird because I have very specific moods attached to that genre because of Planet Mu, Plaid and such from the late ’90s and early ’00s, but the philosophy of that music and those releases are closest to what I feel now. So, all that said, we could call Lorn’s Remnant a modern, bass-oriented, moody IDM record.
Or this is dubstep still. It’s just that this is what dubstep sounds like 10-15 years in. (And probably I had come to this realization a few times in the past decade.)
Ital Tek – Bodied
Chilling, beautiful, intimate. Like Apparat with more Planet Mu in it.