Porter Robinson’s music has often treasured escapism. Whether making ecstatic dance or cinematic pop, the producer has long imagined his work as a portal to other realms, as if, through enough head-spinning drops and intricate synth programming, he could create… Read More
Hackneyed as it may sound, you can learn a lot by taking the right drugs at the right time. You can also learn a lot by quitting drugs, but the emotional and physical lessons of substance experimentation aren’t to be… Read More
For claire rousay, ambient composition is not just a studio practice; it concerns real bodies in physical space. As a percussionist turned sound artist, the San Antonio-based musician has put out a whopping 19 releases since 2019, many featuring dizzying… Read More
A decade ago, the Manchester-based electronic musician Andy Stott extinguished the dub-techno torch he’d been carrying for Basic Channel and plunged into some lightless place where all the usual values got switched around. From that murk, he retrieved a pair… Read More
One of music’s chief pleasures is the way it conjures up a sense of the now, of displacement from the rest of the world into moods and grooves and hooks and melodies. But nowness isn’t just about sonic immersion, it’s… Read More
Like so many forces of electronic music—see Warp co-founders Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell, or Kelly Lee Owens—Japanese producer Yoshinori Hayashi spent formative years working in a record store. Hayashi’s time at Tokyo’s Face Records comes through in his genre-melding… Read More
For those in the know, commercial “electronica” was always a sham: a marketing scheme masquerading as a genre that haphazardly threw together artists and scenes which often had little to do with one another. Originally used in the early 1990s… Read More
After the dissolution of Japanese techno-pop pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra following 1983’s Service (their final album until the one-off reunion Technodon a decade later), each of its members were eager to go their own way. Reluctant to call it a… Read More
Years before they formed the Drain Gang collective, Ecco2k and Bladee were in a hardcore band called Krossad (“crushed” in Swedish) as schoolmates. This fun fact has become part of the Stockholm group’s narrative: their noisy 2007 demo CD has… Read More
After the tragic death of SOPHIE earlier this year, the Miami duo Basside wrote in memoriam that the artist “wasn’t from this planet.” They were far from the first to observe the galactic magic of SOPHIE’s music, but the phrasing… Read More