Memory keeper. Mostly music, some movies, series, video games. Obscure darkness meets pop culture glow.
Not an innovator but a pretty good industrial electro-metal record, like in the footsteps of Rammstein but more on the party industrial side of things. I listened to a whole bunch of new releases from the industrial and EBM domains, I wanted to highlight some great surprises, but there were not much to mention at all. This one however is easily one that I am happy to relisten.
Slow moving, bass heavy, moody, atmospheric, ambient electro. For me it’s not that kind of dark to be dark ambient, but it has a gloomy scifi vibe for sure. Could be an alternative soundtrack to Moon.
I find this record enchanting. That nice kind of electronic music in the footsteps of all the wonderful creations by Moderat or Kiasmos. It has a lot of emotions but I don’t feel any cheesyness about it, it’s well crafted music, nicely put words, feels authentic to me. And especially the track Sirens, that’s a massive head and heart trip with goosebumps.
The Hacker is a timeless classic of Rother’s that I will always list within my top electro albums. I love this dry, cold, glass-eyed android electro that he served at the time. After a while he had faded from my radar and sometimes when I checked back I didn’t quite get some of his releases. And now it seems like he returned to the roots. It’s like classic Anthony Rother even with some Kraftwerk to it, too. Although, in full honesty looking at this from 2019 (and as something written in the recent years) some lyrics seem rather vintage and in that sense funny. Like saying “creator, the code is my command” has an aesthetic to it that I love but it’s retro, like how grandpa imagines the soul of an electronic calculator.
Funny thing this is so much Scandinavian, even without looking up just after two tracks the origin was obvious. If Knife is the archetypical nordic electronic act, this is the uptempo Knife.
It’s like IDM techno. Deep, melodic, atmospheric.
Supposedly the uptempo twin brother of Black Daisy Wheel with often melodic but mostly beat focused techno, house and IDM instead of the ambient landscapes. In 2015 these guys totally surprised me with my own reaction of how much I loved their record of the time, and now I feel the same. Lucky that I didn’t create any top lists last year because this one would be missing from there.
Ambient dreamscapes with occasional thumping rhythms. Atmospheric soundtrack to slowly panning images of motion frozen in still frames.
“The mindset is beyond paranoid, the discourse so far post-fact that only opinion and assumed identity matter. […] The impact on mental health is corrosive: fear, uncertainty and doubt multiply and replicate until the most ridiculous theories are invented to explain the most basic things: tarmac, banana skins, duvets. […] The distinction between the real world and the world of an auto-hoaxer is so blurred that reality melts away; you’re only ever one personal detail away from being doxxed, at which point reality bites back, hard.”
Interesting to see that almost all moody ambient music lately are released with sleeve notes about a dystopian present, social degeneration, meaninglessness of communication, an evaporating trust in anything or anyone, and so on. One thing to note here is that these are not about dystopian futures anymore, but a dystopian current state. The other thing is that there are no megacorporations, alien intruders, getting lost in seventeenth dimensions, or black magic, all the various tropes of dark ambient are gone today, and everything is just a large blur of resignation, pointlessness and disappointment of people, our lives, the world.
It was a wonderful experience. Probably one of the most artful horror films that I have ever seen, and I’m much relieved to say that none of the art in it felt artsy but rather proper art film cinema. I loved how the tension kept pulsating: it went awry for short bursts, then got back to its track of narrative although with a growing feel of unease, which built up beautifully for the final catharsis. All of its visual style, camera movement, editing techniques, acting performances were just fit, and by that I mean there was nothing drawing more attention than needed, and so it was a perfectly balanced piece.
Lot of stuff from the past few decades mashed together and it is a blast. In a way it’s like watching Stranger Things: it draws pretty direct inspiration from certain sources but still creates something for the now that I can interpret as the product of today. This music is many things from leftfield through techno to breakbeat, but it couldn’t have been written in those past eras because we needed to take that journey and get to the now with all these stuff in our heads to have this mash-up today. I am probably over-explaining this for the RA review that I’ve just read which lacks originality. Anyway, I don’t. I think FJAAK is unique in the blend it creates. It sounds like the soundtrack of me growing up. And I would absolutely love to listen to their selection in a party setting.