industrial metal

metal / hardcore

stoner rock / psychedelic

post rock / math rock / progressive rock

alternative rock / hard rock

facebook

electronic / trip hop

post rock / electronic

stoner rock

metal

hardcore / black metal

death metal

dark folk / neofolk

Serge

electronic / ambient / downtempo

Blu Eon is an album released by ambient sound artist Echo Delta via Lithuanian underground record label Cold Tear Records. With nine tracks that usually follow the normal pattern of electronic ambient music, very long tracks exceeds all the ordinary lines, visuals and matters for this album, really capturing and captivating instantly from the core of its demanding proposal exceedingly reliable, philosophic and very consistent tones. Seemingly inserted in a universe inspired to fulfill imaginary waves of sound, wonderfully shaping and reemerging in all contexts of a sincere art of the soul all perfunctory dreams of a resonating dreamlike nature that easily perpetuates on the onset of an indefinite journey all the marvelous glory of a sound eager to diversify, define and clarify existence as a whole, Blu Eon is an album that perfectly fits spaces between galaxies, deemed to watch collisions among spheres of sound, as the mastermind of an eye that never overlooks the possibilities towards the infinity. 

With a very credible and underlying patience that seeks to diversify all the main goals of a sonority hardly shaken by the ghosts of an unbearable utterance, Blu Eon is a calm, yet thrilling and majestic album, full of honorary greatness, despite what appears to be a transcendental rhythm of delightful regularity, with a profound and acquiescent sense of serenity, that never gives an ultimatum to its own meritorious simplistic benevolence. With an upward motion that chronologically harmonizes its own intrinsic nuances towards the values that always return to the barycenter of the force that generates the rhythm of the music, Blu Eon is a non-static dissonant ambient assertive upheaval, centered on a melodic axis of a slow metamorphosis dramatic intuition, grounded in a very precise indefinite disposition, that mathematically challenges the balances and the harmony between all the layers that fit together to compose the sound. 

Unbearable at the top of the lights created by its own vigorous audacity, although at the other hand exceedingly conformed to the normality of the standards usually bound to the genre, Blu Eon is an album that can be labeled as equal as it is, as well as different as it could be, as cleverly sets a very unusual pattern of standards on which the music rely on. With the remarkable ability to give different shapes of sound to a musical configuration that normally doesn’t have such diversified nuances, nor varied levels of harmonization, Echo Delta as an artist manages to establish and create its own style of musicality in the process, without losing a positive identification within the genre. 

With an exceedingly great and virtuous elemental nature of flexible sonorous beauty, Blu Eon, by Echo Delta is an amazingly pure, gracefully solid and gratuitously serene ambient music album, that rebuilds, expands and redefines every single element that composes the fundamental milestones of the genre, without infamously decharacterizing or unsetting its principles, but fiercely preserving the dynamics upon which the sound is recognizable and easily assimilated. Being a work of art made with heart and soul, Blu Eon, by Echo Delta is a bright luminous mesmerizing piece, with a serenity driven sincerity, that delays and outshines the limits of its own lucidity, while at the same time seeking to overshadow the reminiscent melodies of the sleepiness of the dawn of its own dark days of miserable uneasiness. With rising undertones of striking soft dimensional grounds of invisible relaxing soundscapes, Blu Eon is an astoundingly complete album, that revolves primarily on the underlying peaceful motives of an apprehensive beauty that runs between boundaries, never to set back on the definition of rhythms that compels the soul agitation to look permanently in the interior of a sonorous continual reverberation. An album made to produce crystallizing echoes throughout the universe, Blu Eon, by Echo Delta is certainly a monumental work of art, set to redefine and resize the ambient genre as a whole.  

Wagner Hertzog                                   

electronic / ambient / downtempo

Lightworker’s Delight is the second and most recent album by School Of Crystal Healing, an electronic ambient project by Swedish musician Olof Ejstes, released on June 18, by Troll N' Roll Records.

With eight tracks, being them Influx, Boutique Sternway, Parallax Oasis, Seven Stages of Empathy, Lavender, Cherry Blossom, Lonely Planet and Fruity Loom, each song has seven to nine minutes in general. With very consistent and exceedingly poignant harmonies, remarkably solid and not so overtly ecstatic, School of Crystal Healing, on this album, really expands and surpasses in interesting, but very subtle expressive devices, the boundaries of the genre, consolidating a sonorous element of virtuous audacity, that breaks the uncompromising opacity that engulfs the more hidden layouts of the genre. 

With an embracing sound that inhabits the globe of an atmosphere that creates within its own sensibility the calm beauty of infinite spaces, the invisible forces that searches for unusual sound distinctions on the verge of its own gregarious intuitions seems to reveal that School of Crystal Healing’s objectives are all but simple, eager to segregate, active and disseminate several colors of protuberating, yet hidden, senses of completeness. Summarizing the circles on which the music – and the music alone – contemplates the vastness of its own intrinsic harmonies, sleeping in the soul of a consciousness that never fails inside the universe that grows in the shoulders of an underlying greatness of symbols, all the melodies flourishes near the boundaries of rhythms never felt before in the core of ethereal senses, permanently hiding its infatuated brilliance in the nothingness perpetuated by a dormant sense of introspection. Nevertheless, as calm as it is, Lightworker’s Delight will heal and wake up your senses, activating them to a configuration ready to fit in a dimension where everything delusional seems empty, and yet, it conforms existence to a reality on which time is never stranded within a space bound for human thoughts.

So, if you’re looking for something highly unusual, and as infinite as the outer space, this work will exhale vast principles of unlimited possibilities through your imagination, creating an appealing framework of undeniable romanticism and peace, that will instantly undermine in the distinctive paths of your mental lucidity a whole new set of rainbows that will easily reinstate a groundbreaking thrill of majestic desires within your soul. Perfectly matching tranquil, peaceful and serene moments of overtly absolute quietness, building them near the internal algorithms of the psychosocial environment inherent to your life, Lightworker’s Delight, by School Of Crystal Healing, easily combines the exact elements for an interior discovery within yourself, that escalates to a time travel throughout the cosmos, brilliantly consolidating a sonorous journey of overachieving miracles, that doesn’t end when the album finishes. Although wisely disguised as an ordinary album, seemingly similar to others of the genre, Lightworker’s Delight is an impressive masterpiece, that suits perfectly all ambient music lovers out there, highlighting a very intelligent and sensitive pathway to a vigorous form of sonorous enlightenment, managing to open up in a simple manner very complex forms of graceful healings, that personal ethereal satisfaction is brought to light with a compelling cohesion, hardly believing what music can accomplish, when grounded in a soul system of relief. 

But this is only a little, from a handful of reasons and perceptions why you should listen to this amazing album. Fiercely grounded upon a remarkable sincerity that makes every atom and molecule of your body to transcend all the boundaries of the universe altogether, Lightworker’s Delight is a state of the art album, made by one of the best artists of the category. Bound to be a colossal force within several genres, like Ambient, New Age, World Music and Easy Listening, amongst others, this work is a fundamental milestone for meditational and transcendental music alike. And I would not be surprised at all if, in the years to come, this work turns out to be a main reference within all those genres. 

Wagner Hertzog                               

electronic / downtempo / ambient

Scann-Tec is an ambient musical project, developed by sound artist Vladislav Isaev, that defines his art as cinematic downtempo. Unyt, his most recent work, was released recently, on June 16, by French label Ultimae Records.

With ten tracks, being them Snova I Snova, Unyt, Quantum Evo, Ne Viden, Svet, Klinostat, Parsec, Delta-V, Nadezhda, and Turgenev, the almost seventy minutes album can be described as a reverberating conceptual work, stylized over the pretext of a rewarding and infinite sonorous artistry, colossally upgrading scales on a journey focused on an overwhelming and super exposed galaxy of subtle intuition. With an ambient that expands over the borders of its own galactic sphere of an imperial promising demise, the phosphorescent and luminous side of Scann-Tec’s music provides the counterpart for dimensions of numbness and despair, that achieves a highly diluted abyss of sinister darkness, eager to disappear in the silent vastness of a tormented, and almost idiosyncratic derisive atmosphere of transcendental colorful acceptance. 

With a great deal of technical excellence allied to a very intuitive, ambitious and lucid sonorous objective, the uniformity of the album, counterbalanced with very peculiar and unique fragments of enchanting melodies, does a lot for the greatness of the work. Superbly engineered with the mastery of a zealous regard for feeling, atonement and creation, the redemptive side of Scann-Tec’s music is an indefinite expansion of a universe generating its own derogatory emptiness. Calculated by an enthroned ambivalence of sentimental destitution, Unyt is an album that breaks its own limitations, fiercely predisposed to create time, driven by the nucleus of hidden harmonies, stoned over solid rhythms that seems to be ecstatic and in motion, at the same time. Revolving in a parallel pattern, where everything delusional seems disproportionate, the contiguous melodies that undertakes a dismissing anguish throughout the relics of its own ascending rhythms undergoes an unforgiving sense of reason, led by a sonorous surreal trail of forgotten anxiety, where everything pure is torn apart by the sake of an interior discovery. 

In an ethereal world, devoid of solid grounds, Scann-Tec’s Unyt seems to lacerate and dilacerate everything that seems reasonable, while at the same time forgiving, accepting and evoking a peaceful sense of exhilaration and wisdom, where a sonorous journey develops your life through you, and within you, and around you, generating a soundscape of the soul throughout the galaxy, ever reasoning an ambience of intriguing mesmerizing infinity, making you severely acquainted with the hidden potential you have, inside yourself. 

With secrets hidden in each and every second of it, the more subtle, although extremely metallic melodies of Unyt make this record somewhat unusual and surprising, with a very individual style of composition, sonority and resourceful sound devices. With hidden beauties, and a very transcendental calmness that flirts wonderfully with the cosmic vastness makes this record quite appealing, with qualities that defines several layers of sonorous tonalities that rearranges to a totally different path the amalgamations of  dimensional music, distilling different patterns of symmetry, in a compelling, but remarkable longitudinal panel, where everlasting retributions seems to be groundbreaking journeys of light.                  

All in all, Unyt, by Scann-Tec, is a remarkable album, exceedingly gracious in the sinister and dubious, but nevertheless brightly colorful space scale, on which the album is inserted. With a somewhat stricken, but very easy listening appeal, it has all the greatest elements necessary for an astoundingly sincere, reverberating and tempestuous ambient album. You should hear, to believe!  


​Wagner

dream pop / trip hop

Although people usually see me as a metalhead, I've always been a fan of electronic music. From Kraftwerk over Front 242 to the whole new beat scene and later variants in drums & bass, trip hop and IDM, I've constantly been following the odd world of electronics. Yet, I have to admit that many of today's electronic acts are quite stale and soulless. Many of the acts I've seen live lately, sounded exactly the same, a light version of dubstep perhaps.

But here we're dealing with something very different, something very good indeed. Obviously, the fact that this is gloomy dance music is a massive plus but regardless of darkness, this album is energetic, full of soul, dreamy and immersive. But what would you expect from seasoned musicians Dean Garcia (Curve, SPC ECO) and Preston Maddox (Bloody Knives). Their experience in the alternative underground certainly did them some good.

What you get on this album is dance music, sometimes eighties industrial loaded songs like 'Do It Now' or 'Secret', sometimes eerie and trippy dubstep-induced pieces like 'Dead Right', and on other occasions dreamy trip hop tunes, like the title track 'What We Want', reminding me of Massive Attack or Tricky. All of these songs are layered with dream pop arrangements, shoegaze soundscapes and gentle, subdued vocals, making this album stand-out in today's electronics scene.

In fact, the whole thing reminds me more of 4AD bands (like Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Slowdive) than the DJ-driven manure of the electronic dance music world, even though 'Deeper' could be a massive club hit, part Eurythmics, part Daan, part Terence Fixmer. I also really dig the ambienty 'Slow' and the deep 'Trickery'. Hell, I like all the songs here, but my favorite has to be the haunting 'A Thousand Cuts'.

Now comes the hard part of this review. Who do I recommend this album to? Shoegazers? EDM fans? Dream-poppers? Trip-hoppers? Well, let's simply go with all of the above. I doubt that there will be anything more hypnotic and immersive being released this year. You can bet your ass that this album is going into my "sweet electronics" playlist where it gets the company from fine people like Massive Attack, Bonobo, Plaid, Tricky, Subheim and Miwon. I suggest you do the same thing...


​Serge

electronic / downtempo / trip-hop

bandcamp

Green is the most recent release by electronic Russian musician Lo-Sky, a five track EP with very melodic undertones and soft electro upbeats, being primarily downtempo in definition. With a very intelligent quotient of harmonies at the core of his songs, Lo-Sky manages to give to the audience a very decent and true to the elements rewarding downtempo EP, with smooth songs, very pleasant to the ears, and with a very easy listening emotional feeling.

A work easy to decipher, and yet, pleasurable to hear, with its great ambience surrounding stratosphere directed tracks, this is an EP that really does have it all, regarding technique and beauty. With the purity of a soul lying calmly on the ground, the strictly pure elements that form the basis of these songs can be a real, elusive and direct superb confluence of notes, that will surely be considered an astounding motive for pride to the genre.

It is beautiful, and although it can be considered, to a certain extent at least, “radio-friendly” for solitary stations at dawn, it also highlights a very club scene atmosphere, brightly melting exceedingly diffusive electro music elements, which makes greatly astounding the final result of this magnificent work. Nevertheless, despite all of its beauty, like I’ve described above, it is a very short and easy listening album, almost ambient on its simplicity of tones and rhythms. 

But I should point it out that it can become indispensable for fans of this specific genre. In my case, it was love at first sight – or better – at first hearing, if you prefer. Magnificent harmonies that elevate you towards the sky, regardless of what you’re thinking, in the simple commonalities of day to day sound, transforms the ordinary and vulgar into something bigger, with essence and meaning. This is what this EP really does, and without despising the proficiency of its pragmatic techniques. 
 
With a real and satisfying refreshing essence that seems to purify to a certain extent the exaltation of this more calm and introspective genre of electronic music, Green is an EP that is as remarkable as it could be invisible. A solid perception of sound, on the other hand, will never pass unnoticed to the ones who are most sensitive to soft, slow and gentile rhythmic upbeats, relying on the ground of kind and sensible harmonies that can easily convince you that you are completely alone on your own universe, and, at the same time, discovering a lot of different things inside yourself. 

This EP is highly recommended, although it is set, obviously – despite all of its beauty and idiosyncratic content – to a very specific audience. Lo-Sky is certainly becoming a fundamental milestone on the solidification of his soft-ambient styled genre of electronic music, helping to build, consolidate and define a genre that is breaking boundaries after boundaries, and enlarging its audience, as time goes by. Pure as nature could be, Green is a very protuberating configuration of a beautiful and new kind of sensibility, on the current electronic music scene, setting grounds for ambitious conquests as powerful as the genre will ever be!   


​Wagner
      

shoegaze / trip hop

I think I've said it before, but there seems to be something special when a band contains siblings. They grow up with basically the same music, in this case Pink Floyd, gospel and motown music, and they've known each other for way longer than any other band members possibly can. Twins also seem to have another thing going for them: if you let them, they create their own unique language, completely incomprehensible for other people but perfect for their own, often secret, communication.

Musically, it often translates into something magical, something that goes deeper than the limitations of the instruments used. With The Veldt, that is no different, even though the songs on this album could be seen as nice and mature pop songs. The band was founded by identical twins Daniel and Danny Chavis from North Carolina (USA). Aided by a number of likeminded musicians, the band is about to unveil this excellent ep, a blend of shoegaze and electronics with a lot of heart and a lot of soul.

The ep opens with the emotional 'Sanctified', which is also the single. For me personally, it isn't the best song on this ep, which actually says a lot about the whole thing. In fact, 'Sanctified' is a very strong song, perfectly suited to be a single but the talents of De Veldt go way deeper. 'In A Quiet Room' and 'The Token' for example are brilliant songs in which Massive Attack meets The Jesus And Mary Chain. Closer 'And It's You' sounds a bit like Tricky covering a gospel song while giving the guitar player carte blanche.

​My favorite song on this ep is 'One Day Out Of Life', a Bauhaus meets Slowdive meets Cocteau Twins kind of song which is pretty damn immersive. This really is something for the dark dancefloors, late at night. The whole album is. So yes, I'd like to recommend this to all shoegazers out there, whether you like electronic music or not.  This certainly is an interesting trip, quite a psychedelic one too at times.

​
Serge

electronic / folk / trip-hop

All that metal is all good and perfect for most occasions, but sometimes I need something deeply emotional to let the tears flow. I guess music has more to do with emotions than most people think. Of course, that only counts for good music. I'm still not buying the cheap emotionalism and the blatant porn of today's pop music industry. No, I prefer different things to identify with, things like this little ep for example.

The Natural History Museum are vocalist/writer Carol Keogh (The Tycho Brahe, The Plague Monkeys) and producer/composer Dunk Murphy (Sunken Foal, Ambulance [Planet-Mu]). Together they combine acoustic finger picking with soothing electronics and atmospheric synths. The result is pretty inspiring, a bit danceable and certainly a welcome addition in my play list for today.

The ep opens with the nice tune 'Jeweller'. From the very first seconds I'm reminded of Johnny Cash meets Tricky, aided vocally by Carol. I don't really know who I can compare Carol's vocals with but that doesn't matter. They're perfect for this combination of folk or country music and electronics. Another act that comes to mind, is Monophona, who we reviewed last year and who we had the pleasure to see live a few times.

And there's more goodness on this ep, like the nice cover of Si Schroeder’s ‘C4’ or the strange, somewhat psychedelic 'Corvic'. Or how about the slow and gloomy dancer 'Button Moon', which drives on an eighties-sounding electro sequence. My favorite however is closer 'Little Match Girl' which seems to bring Kate Bush and Klaus Schulze to the modern day electronic ballads era. Yes, I like this song. I like this whole ep and I like this duo. 


​Serge

Denovali

This april, Denovali Records treats us to two beautiful releases by Turkish composer and multi​-​
instrumentalist Başak Günak.  Two years ago, she released the Flesh e.p. herself before she was discovered by Denovali and added to their extensive high quality stable.  Bastards is the new full-length, to be released on CD, LP and as a digital download.  It has become a beautiful blend of electronic percussion, voices and deep basses and it's well suited both for the quiet living room and for the alternative dancefloor.

Bastards

The songs on Bastards resemble living creatures, each with their own character and set of emotions. Somehow they are related but they have their sep​a​rate lives and their own, distinct vision about where they want to go and what they want to reach.  They're like a family that lives far from each other but comes together every now and then to participate in a delightful feast that is almost mythical.  There's a touch of magic in each song​,​ peaceful and uplifting magic.

Ah! Kosmos has opened for the likes of Emika, Kiasmos, Daddy G (Massive Attack) and Darkside and it truly seems she has taken all these influences and incorporated them into her own sound.  'And Finally We're Glacier' and 'Always in Parentheses' are solid ambient-dance tracks with a floaty trance calibre.  Other songs come very close to trip hop with a firm focus on a deep, gloomy atmosphere and to its creepy brother, witch​-​house. 'Trace of Waterfalls' is a perfect example of this and probably one of the best songs on Bastards.  Closer 'Never Again', another amazing highlight​,​ drives on several  deep basslines (including a Joy Division influence) and creates a haunting dub atmosphere.

Başak Günak enforces the dreamy quality of her music with her distinct and equally dreamy voice, somewhere between Zola Jesus, Jo Lemaire and Siouxsie.  In 'Home' there's a subdued spoken voice that give​s​ the song something wicked and shadowy.  But also in the other songs, the voice never takes the upperhand.  Instead it becomes an extra instrument and an emphasis to the soundscapes and rhythms floating in an out.  Together, all these different textures of basses, percussion, vocals and lengthy sounds truly create some magical moments.

Flesh e.p.

These three tracks were released earlier but they deserve a second life in the form of a 10" and CD release.  These are mainly dark dub or witch​-​house tracks with a deep, resounding atmosphere.  Like the songs on Bastards, the ones on Flesh are both danceable and restful.  It's hard to say w​h​ich of both releases ​is better.  They resemble a similar, deep atmosphere and a similar variation in rhythms. 

So, just get both of them if you're into calm, soothing but refreshing and surprising electronic
music.  They're well worth it because both are high quality efforts. These works by Ah! Kosmos ​are highly recommended by a relaxed and slightly happy


Serge...