It’s this fringe kind of electronic music, with an electro aesthetic, electroclash perhaps. It’s exciting and interesting and has things to say, feels fresh and different. It has become my third big thing that I’ve stumbled upon in 2025 (after Heartworms and Ela Minus).
This woman has been keeping me mesmerized for about a month now. I stumbled upon Upwards randomly and can’t not listen to this album all the time.
Her music has a strong kinship with electropop classics that have this eerie vocal nature to them, like The Knife. However, her personal character, creativity, and connection to the hardware aspect of electronic music production gives me strong Björk vibes, too. And yet, she’s definitely her own thing: it’s not like I get reminded of these other performers and I get back to listen to those, but I stick with Ela’s album and keep listening this.
Beyond the fantastic music her lyrics are also so smart and interesting and artistic. There’s message to be told, layers of ideas to unfold. I don’t even know when was the last time I was looking up and reading lyrics for an electronic music record to understand properly all it has to say.
I do believe this is an album to mark and remember. I’d love to have it on vinyl and put it on display as one of the milestones of this year.
It’s so strange that I haven’t made note of Minuit Machine before considering how much I listen to their records recently. It’s a constant item in my cyberpunk playlists. It’s an amazing blend of electro and goth moods resulting in this beautiful dark wave atmosphere that I just strive in.
It’s really hard to pin down the genre for this album. The atmosphere is moody electronic music on mid tempo, city music, walk in the rain music. On Basecamp it self-defines as techno and downtempo by tags. But I’d argue that the reality of it is mostly progressive breaks. In any case, Circles is my track of the month: this is most definitely prog breaks, with a fantastic melody, beautiful vocals, and such a well crafted arch for the whole song.
Overall a nice electronic music record, and I couldn’t be more specific than that—it’s like those Booka Shades of the musical spectrum that could fall in many sub-genres depending on how you look at it or where you come from. That said let’s focus on the title track, which just knocks my socks off. It is some amazing achievement in being soothing and calm, but also high in energy and making me move right away with floaty-wavy arms. I can imagine listening to it on a dancefloor and rise to melodic mid-tempo electro heaven. It’s been a while that I listened to something and wanted to reach for remixes; I just wish there’s a slightly higher tempo version of this as well.
Steffi‘s Yours & Mine is my forever favorite work music. When I need to push push push it in the most efficient way that is my go-to. Now, this album is the pretty close to that. It is good music, has some great vibes and tunes and drag to it, but neutral and non-disruptive enough to be able to fully concentrate on what I’m working on. It contains a couple different flavors of electro and a general dub techno mood.
During the first track I was considering skipping this EP altogether, lucky I didn’t. This is a collection of some oddball electro tracks, which are too boogie to be IDM but too silly to appear seriously on a dancefloor. But it would be FUN to hear a track like Night Drive in a club. Although the one titled Pleasure Activism could totally fit a chiptune set.