the electroscape has been soaking up a library of new electronic albums released over the past few months. Issue 3 of survey of the electroscape highlights just a small sampling of them. This issue features some well-known artists in the scene, some just breaking in, and its scope is wider, including dreamy synthpop, dark ambient, juke, ritual drone, and more. That’s the electroscape. Step in and discover something new.
Keep an eye on our Album of the Day for a living list of electronic releases. You can send us recommendations to feature as the Album of the Day here. We also recently published and in-depth story of visionary artist CZARINA. Read it here.
Albums are described in alphabetical order.
Breathe by Zer0れい
Breathe is a dark ambient release. The songwriting meets you halfway, providing a minimalist, open soundscape for the stage your mind does the acting upon. Melodies seemingly emerge out of nothingness, and the notes played are like climbing giant spider webs across black, bottomless pits. Zer0 れい is an expert at creating sounds with texture and elasticity, and melodies seemingly follow their lead of the sounds they are constructed from, set against atmospheres that can be dark and ominous. As Breathe plays, it straddles the line between dream and nightmare, light and dark, inviting and invasive. Initially, it plays like a dream that only occasionally dips down into a nightmare. As it goes on, it dips down more frequently, eliciting feelings inevitable terrifying moments to come and a false sense of security, all built from notes that come slowly, at their own time, like swinging on ropes between trees so far apart you’ll wonder if you’ll make it to the next. As Breathe closes, it has a heavy daunting feeling, the nightmare consumed what was once a dream.
Clones by Shadows & Mirrors
Clones is a story about a grim future envisioned by Rockford, IL natives Shadows & Mirrors, a future where machines, information, and data are all that remains in a technological wasteland. The front and back cover art offer us clues as to how the story unfolds – a machine who sees itself as a human looking back at it in the mirror on the front cover, and heaping piles of old televisions on the back. The songwriting on Clones is progressive and the soundscape open, built from exquisite use of minimalist beats and atmospheric synths that transport the listener to new dimensions, eliciting feelings of fear, isolation, and loneliness. The story on Clones unfolds across the album, opening with the brain beater, “Kill Your TV,” and it is good advice because all the TV portrays are news reports of savage murders. On “Digitalia,” the listener hears the perspective of the electronic clone who feels they’re becoming human. And soon, there will be nothing but machines roaming Earth. Clones closes with “The Machine,” painting a picture of end of days. It’s sound is mechanical, wet, and gray and repeats turn on the machine, not unlike a subliminal message transmitted through the static on the TV, a bleak fate ensues for a species who gave themselves the machine only to wipe themselves away.
Dead Air by Alpha Chrome Yayo
Dead Air is brimming with grim vocal melodies that bruise their way through thick layers of staticky, fuzzy, and gritting textures. Alpha Chrome Yayo is a fearless artist. His lastest releases vary widely, from Open House, a meditative, ambient album and Page Me, an album loaded with raunchy jazz and deep cuts. Now, Dead Air, a wash boarding of your brain by a madman at the piano playing dinner music on a cruise ship sailing through waves of white noise on an old tube television. Dead Air showcases an impressive range of sounds, from a lullaby playing in an old haunted farmhouse on “Shards,” a reverberating tunnel that’s about to collapse on “Bunker 47,” and battering, dragging, and pleading on songs such as “Bloodthirsty Little Imp,” “Black Noise,” and “The Black Broadcast.” Dead Air has soft moments, too, such as the dreamy rendition of “Liebesträume No. 3 (Gut Machine).” But soon you realize you’ve been lured into surgery, and no anesthesia was provided. Dead Air feels like a warped fun house built by the insane. And when it’s over, you’re insane, too. So, come on in.
Emotion Engine by Sferro
Emotion Engine is a big, bold soundscape the listener feels physically, psychologically, and emotionally. The songs are grounded in thick bass lines, hard hitting beats, sticky textures, ambient synths, all topped with melodies that lasso your emotion, leaving you to their mercy. Sferro’s layering and precision shine on Emotion Engine. For example, on “Almost Caught a Break,” “Stargazer”, and “Caprica,” every note plays like a step in an endless staircase, and every time the top seems to be just around the corner, you start over, entering an infinite loop. Sferro opens up the soundscape in places, too, offering a reverberation through ambient spaces or a free fall across empty blue skies, such as on “Ghost Tours.” The lone vocal track “Modular Origami” is sung by Mecha Maiko, which invites you to pause and allow her voice to hovering in the space. The entire album feels like it’s spent in motion, one foot in the past, one in the future.
If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power by Halsey
If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power lures you, enticing you to inquire further, and then it hooks you. As a long-time listener of Nine Inch Nails, I was initially curious about the album because it was produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. What I discovered was much more than I could have anticipated. So much shines here. Halsey’s vocal rhythms meander like streams with long stretches that are straight and narrow before twisting, turning, winding, tumbling at times and free falling at others. Her vocals are soft, hard, raw, and drawn from depths that are painful, troubled, yet equally often, liberating. The lyricism is poetic, telling stories and eliciting connection, shared experiences, and imagery. This all against a powerfully dark soundscape that brings to mind elements found on The Downward Spiral and The Fragile, a masterful use of sounds and rhythms that stick to Halsey’s vocal melodies like glue, sometimes aggressively leading the way, sometimes wallowing in deep, still waters, and other times leaving space from behind, but always close by. Perhaps most striking is If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power feels cemented in time and space, an album that cannot be replicated.
Moving Spaces by Laura Dre
Every song on Moving Spaces feels like a hit. The vocals and lyricism are genuine, and the authentic dance vibe is sexy. You may find yourself dancing under bright retro colors, such as on “All Day, All Night,” or in a dark underground, back alley club, such as “If Looks Could Kill.” The vocal melodies are catchy, and Laura’s voice is a simply intoxicating instrument. The lyricism on Moving Spaces is a journey into love, sometimes fantasizing about it and other times digging into its spellbinding, lustful, and obsessive qualities, but always acknowledging it can both burn you and complete you. The songwriting on Moving Spaces also shines, such as on “Loving You Is a Beautiful Sin” and “Superficial Cyberlove,” which allow the music to tell the story, never rushing. Laura also released a new single, “Beautiful Summer” which carries through the dance vibe on Moving Spaces and indulges in the high only summer love can provide.
Painful Enlightenment by Jana Rush
Painful Enlightenment is a dark, experimental, and haunting release from Chicago-based artist Jana Rush, whose music builds on historically local styles, such as footwork and juke. Painful Enlightenment isn’t a collection of songs that can be described in a genre-based fashion, however. It’s a psychological and emotional experience. Jana invites the listener inside the inner workings of the mind, and, in this case, that place is deep in the subconscious, a door cracked open that we step in only to find the dwelling place of mulling, wailing, paranoia, anxiety, and tension. The semi-colon on the cover is fitting because its job is to bring together, and this album strikingly brings together feelings of “painful” and “enlightenment.” The music is a window into the state of mind, emotional experience, and complete tuning in, and just as emotions and thoughts evolve on the time scale of milliseconds and seconds so does the music. The ebb and flow of each song remarkably captures the disjointed, stuck, and fluid qualities of emotions and thoughts. Painful Enlightenment is perfectly experienced on headphones, where the sounds of the outside world are silenced, and the music has direct input to the brain. Read a first-person view of the album from Jana on Bandcamp here.
SUPERSYMMETRY by Parallels
The opening moments of SUPERSYMMETRY transport you to a spectacular pastel colored dreamland, and you get to stay there until the last notes played fade into the distance. SUPERSYMMETRY is as intangible as the magical feelings it elicits. The soundscape and vocals are infused with a warm, bright character that can be as light as stardust, whispering through the clean forest air, or they can exert great fantastic force, moving you like waves brewing in an oceanic storm. The music is richly textured, built from layers of guitar sounds, reverberating, majestic synth sounds, and bright percussion. The vocal melodies shine, seemingly emerging from within themselves, capture you before subtly twisting and turning, mercilessly pulling you along the way. They lyricism is poetic, sometimes metaphorical, sometimes otherworldly. The depth of the soundscape and vocal harmonies are exceptional. Take the time to tune into them and you will be rewarded.
The Book of Secrets by 空YAMAHA
The Book of Secrets by SkyYAMAHA is welcoming and open, and the depth of the nuances you’ll discover are infinite. It gently nudges you to awaken the spirit within, letting the flickering light shine bright. The album has a noticeable meditative quality with great imagery. The pitter pattering of the gentle percussion creates a stable base while notes appear in your consciousness and disappear into empty spaces, like a drop of water, one at a time, into a still pool, disrupting it momentarily, returning to its tranquil state before another drop falls. SkyYAMAHA exquisitely creates warm tribal, earthy undertones of vast, dry desert landscapes as well as noticeable cool hues, like water flowing through green meadows. The layers set in the background and foreground are equally interesting and the bringing together of quite natural and electronic sounds is exceptional.
Wanderers by The G
Wanderers has a classic, elegant, and smooth synthwave sound. It is well balanced from beginning to end with instrumental offering built around mesmerizing melodies that turn over themselves through time, not unlike the geometric design on the cover art, and vocal tracks sprinkled throughout that deliver a heavy dose of nostalgia. The vocal tracks harness the blue-collar spirit of 1980s pop rock so many people were drawn to then and cling to now, such as the notion love is all we need or the rut we’re living in is just the beginning of better things to come. The G delivers a sound with a noticeable perfect touch. Nothing is rushed. Every note, entry of a guitar solo, and percussion is in its place at its time for a reason. Wanderers elicits a noticeable wanting for it to last forever, and sometimes it feels like it just might, but it can’t, and so it doesn’t. Maybe that’s nostalgia and, maybe, The G perfectly captured its essence on Wanderers.
Works and Days by Alina Valentina
Works and Days is the debut album from Netherlands-based artist Alina Valentina. It has a vintage electro horror vibe, topped with trip-hop inspired flavors. Alina can transform a seemingly fleeting thought into a song, transmitted through a paranormal experience with gothic electro melodies grinding in the background and haunting, ghostly vocals delivering psychologically gripping lyricism in the foreground. For example, on the title track psychotic melodies precede vocals singing, I want to ask you if you would come sit next to me and just stay quiet, pleading just for one day, and again pleading desperately, I don’t want to ask again and again and again. Alina often delivers haunting, ghostly vocals that hover above electro melodies that twist, turn, winding endlessly in the background over percussion that tips and taps. This beautiful minimalist soundscape allows the listener to experience a vast range of emotion and imagery, such as a fearfully running through the forest trying to escape an unwelcomed visitor in a dream or an organ playing in an abandoned church. The lyricism feels prophetic at times, telling of truths society has offered and the harsh reality that our choice to consume those truths sometimes cost us our lives, such as on a “Horrible Place to Die.”
Yoldath Aloho by John 3:16
John 3:16 is a sculptor. Much like peeling away layers of clay or chipping off pieces of stone to bring about the form of the statue, John 3:16 crafts stories through sound, seemingly using the sound to pull the story out, to bring it to life. I first discovered John 3:16 while reading a review of his 2020 release, Tempus Edax Rerum at Love Across Light Years. I immediately noticed a physical sensation, a sort of twisting of my insides, like wringing out the rag of my organs. Yoldath Aloho – which refers to Mary, mother of Jesus – wakes a subconscious that should be sleeping, never to be free to wander crowded streets in the mind. The opening track “Panagia” has sustained distorted drone sounds that grind, buzz, and hum, evolving into a ritualistic setting created through vocals and percussion that grow in intensity over the course of time, coming and going until the song comes to an end. It has a noticeable soundtrack quality, climbing to a peak, dipping into a valley, only to rise again. The title track creates an infinite loop of horror with a noticeable tribal quality, ritualistic vocal sounds, where one sustained sound folds into the next as yet another dissipates, creating a sense of a ritual with a lingering aftermath. This storytelling is only possible with purposeful and patient songwriting, and Yoldath Aloho is exceptionally patient.
Your Future Awaits by Electron Odyssey
In 1975, an artist sat down to write a synthwave album and sent it to the future. He titled the album, Your Future Awaits, the craftsmanship of Electron Odyssey who brought about an authentic retro-sounding debut release, brimming with the clever fusions of musical mastermind Jeff Spoonhower. The sound classic and elegant from beginning to end. The progressive rock core is one of its most attractive attributes, with dynamically evolving songwriting used to create vast landscapes where synth melodies lead the way. This is salient on many songs, such as “Show Me The Way” in which the lead piano play is so beautiful, meandering with no sense of time, “Where Memories Go” where the lead synth melodies play like walking down long hallways and doors and stairs to retrieve a memory, passing it down through the hands of 1000 miniature digital mailmen before it lands in your consciousness, only to be repeated again the next moment. Electron Odyssey allows the lead synth work to do its complete work, such as on “Dream With Your Eyes Open” and “Reborn,” where it cuts open the space and takes control. The cover art crafted by Spoonhower himself is fitting, with a landscape and color palette a perfect match for the soundscape.