#alt electronic

[acidlake]

irregular incidence // recency bias

i made a little music recommendation zine of a few recent albums i like and want more people to give a go to and im gonna have to make more

i printed it on a home printer but i gotta risograph it when i do more

text below the cut

Death Goals - A Garden of Dead Flowers

Prosthetic Records 2023

28 minutes

Chaotic Hardcore / Queercore

UK

The opening track of A Garden of Dead Souls grasps at you, cloying at your ears, its fingertips alight with need, desperate to peel away the skein between you and it. And after it succeeds the album is a churn in your spine, an emotional rain of needles, Death Goals need you to know how personal this is, where this comes from, the album is filled with this urgency. It comes as guitars whine as sirens, it stymies you across breakbeat and breakdown, as throat dry scream and discordant call and response.

It’s a serious hardcore record that feels all the more blisteringly raw for being a two piece with shared vocal duties. It’s a kind of bubbling fury and positionality that feels like a rallying cry and a burning flag - a statement of furious intent for the queer brit who cant stand the way this country fucking is.

deathgoals.bandcamp.com/album/a-garden-of-dead-flowers

—

Avenade - Our Raging God Unknown to Us

Avenade 2023

65 minutes

Noise Rock / Doomgaze

USA

“Our Raging God…” is a rumbling cacophony. its video footage of storm clouds being sped up and slowed down by an unseen force. sometimes its radio transmissions from a world of grey skies and sanguine temperaments.

Matt Hawkins makes an album where you can feel every vibration on the microphone, touch all the static on the line. All that noise, all that chaos acts as gilded frame to the melodious and sorrow rich lulls that can suddenly lurch up tempo to harsh and driving rises. Across the album he drifts between these modes and explores their variations and layers, dancing through shoegaze, doom metal, indie, post-hardcore, math rock, and the lightest dalliance with blackgaze. He brings in half a dozen collaborators with a dozen different roles to add to the rich texture of the album. It all becomes knot-tight within the vast scatter-sound laid around it.

This is an album where chaos and background radiation tie a spectrum of noise into a pinprick point, a Hilma Af Klimt painting of aural explorations. A juddering electrical signal snaking down raw cables of esoteric design. this album rules.

avenade.bandcamp.com/album/our-raging-god-unknown-to-us

—

Hakushi Hasegawa - Mahōgakkō

Brainfeeder 2024

34 minutes

Glitch Pop / Alt Electronic

Japan

Walk out the door. the colours blur, everything in your near field is vibrating and losing form. The sun is shining, everything bathed in pale pink. The parade fills every road. You are in love. All the concrete blisters into multifarious iridescent petals.

Mahōgakkō is a whirlwind, moving in whip-snap tempo, tearing, flinging, crushing, and soaring around and through the listener. It truly feels like a positional piece to listen to on headphones, almost unbalancing. Hasegawa maneuverers the album between light and airy spaces then into crushing labyrinthine celebrations of glitchy broken beats, and back again, tempering it all with her seemingly distant voice and moments of almost starkly lo-fi feeling instrumentation.

hakushihasegawa.bandcamp.com/album/mah-gakk

—

Agriculture - Living is Easy

The Flenser 2024

16 minutes

Ecstatic Black Metal / Post-Black Metal

In the Haela Hunt-Hendrix essay ‘Transcendental Black Metal’ she lays out a heuristic for understanding black metal and the history of extreme music in general, the Haptic Void, a space of sonic totality that extreme heavy music operates under the pull of. A space that she assets is fundamentally a lie. An empty promise of total sonic collapse. She lays out that only in approaching and denying the void can a new formation of extreme music be founded, for her this is the titular Transcendental Black Metal. I think few, if any, bands have more perfectly found this equilibrium than Agriculture. With Living is Easy they skirt, crest, and skim off the event horizon of the Haptic Void, and do it with a lightness and emotionality that is astounding for a record that runs a grand total of 16 minutes.

This EP feels like thrashing in the dark, as tearing through foliage by moonlight, it is bacchanal then quietude. It’s barely controlled chaos giving way with ease to reflection. It’s an almost impossibly hard balancing act for a Black Metal band to accomplish and this EP delivers it perfectly. It’s breakdowns and blast beats feel fervoured and perverse, a million miles away from that primordial Norwegian nihilism.

agriculturemusic.bandcamp.com/album/living-is-easy

[eclecticwhiz]

🎵 Echoes from the Void

A playlist I curated to mirror emotional friction, soft collapse, and rocking through shadow-plays.

It’s a sonic descent across synthrock, psywave, and retro-electronic/synthwave terrain.

Fragmented rhythms, haunted melodies, emotional glitches await you:

[iheartmoosiq]

Two Feet’s music burns with a sultry, sooty heat unlike any other. With that smoldering drawl, ridiculously cathartic riffs, and his cinematic, fog shrouded magnetism, Bill Dess has made a lasting mark on the electronic and alt-R&B landscape. When the New Yorker teased us with long awaited news of a fresh single, our hearts fluttered wildly in eager anticipation. And now, Pink is here, except instead of pink, this song is more of a crimson flame. It sticks to us like a dark viscous port with the bitter twinge of a grainy wine aged in toasted, leathery oak. The broiling anthem, an immersive pit of gloriously seductive brooding, is out now via Republic Records alongside an official music video directed by Johannes Lovund. There’s no better way for Two Feet to announce his heralded return than a song as magnificent as Pink. And we get to ogle his guitar wizardry while melting to the scalding heatwave of his sonic ingenuity. Pink is available for streaming/downloading, here.

[foreplayfriday]

“Hong Kong 2046″ - Hong Kong Express

Going down the street

[iheartmoosiq]

It’s a good thing I spent hours upon hours trawling my Soundcloud feed and other platforms for new music treats, otherwise I might have missed out on new Zola Blood. That would have been a disaster, considering our love of the British quartet and their profoundly mesmeric music. Needle In The Hay is a solemn electronic piece from the Londoners with darkly pulsating beats and a deeply ruminative atmosphere. You might recognize the song as a cover. Zola Blood has taken Elliott Smith’s song off his 1995 sophomore album and dressed it up in threads of nebulous mystique. You’ll be hypnotized by this viscerally charged and weighty creation from start to finish. Prior to this single, it had been two long years since we heard from Zola Blood. Hopefully, Needle In The Hay is an indicator of much more to come soon from the band. 

[iheartmoosiq]

Sacred Animals, a producer from Wexford in Ireland, fuses deep melodic beats and atmospheric electronica with minimalistic synthscapes. One listen to Sacred Animals’ new single MONO and we’re utterly hooked on his rich sprawling soundscape, introspective and contemplative yet feverishly pressing and intense. The track attempts to gain a small grasp on what it means to be a spirit living a human existence. The song, which premiered via The FADER, is darkly gripping. It’s a turbulent odyssey that captures the restless tirades of the heart. Sacred Animals will be touring with Talos this December in Ireland. Stream/download MONO, here.

[iheartmoosiq]

Renowned Danish musician Trentemøller is preparing to release his first record in three years. Obverse is set to drop September 27th via his own label, In My Room. In the meantime, he’s teamed up with Warpaint’s jennylee on a new single named Try A Little. jennylee is the latest in a long line of strong female artists to have collaborated with Trentemøller, including Savages’ Jehnny Beth, Low’s Mimi Parker, Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino, and Marie Fisker. His upcoming album also features Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell and Lisbet Fritze alongside jennylee. On Try A Little, as well as reportedly within the rest of his new album, the seasoned artist explores shoegaze, dream pop, coldwave, post-punk, and synth-based experimental soundscapes to create his singular sound. Obverse will be released on double-LP, CD, and digitally. Pre-order, here.

[iheartmoosiq]

I mentioned earlier that this past day has been full of sonic surprises. Though we’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of interesting collaborations involving Grimes lately, we still didn’t expect to encounter a Bring Me The Horizon release featuring the Canadian artist, who’s loved so much for her outlandish brilliance. English rockers Bring Me The Horizon have themselves been subverting expectations with their recent work. On today’s new single ‘nihilist blues’ they serve up a heaping of glorious electronic rock that hits harder than pop melodious offerings like 'mother tongue’, which you can stream below. Grimes contributes some haunting whispers and murmured vocals to the industrial-tinged anthem. Bring Me The Horizon’s new album ‘amo’ arrives on Friday. You can order the album, here.