■ The A. O.: The track from “uoying” that we prefer is “horrow (feat. Canaan Balsam)”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Euan Dalgarno: Canaan Balsam and I first connected while we were both putting out music on Modern Obscure Music. Since we’re both based in Edinburgh, it was only natural that we started exchanging ideas, tracks, stems—and the occasional beer. When this track called for a bit more grit, I gave Canaan a shout and he sent over a few pad layers, some of which had been run through a RAT distortion pedal, giving the track just the edge it was missing.
► That’s a deliberate march to an unknown horizon. Each step feels purposeful yet uncertain, carried by subtle pulses that suggest both movement and hesitation. The soundscape is wide and enveloping — textures drift and intertwine like shifting clouds, creating a sense of vastness tinged with melancholy. Time is slow, but it cannot be stopped.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Silence About To Break” that we prefer is “Stardust Cluster”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► The Earl of Dean: Interestingly this was the first track I actually released publicly albeit after getting some feedback from some fellow Edinburgh based artists Tayus and Last Post Society who gave me the confidence to make my music public and just roll with it. The track was me initially thinking id like to create a spacey ambient track and once I got the individual parts across my suite of synths and an inkling on how I’d piece the recording together I just went for it recording live .through my mixer into Ableton before mastering in Bandlab. I think I did 3 takes before I was happy with the track . Bear in mind I’d been playing about with my synths as a novice from September 2024 understanding the functionality and what I could extract sound wise from each of them. Painful at times but great fun!
■ Genres: Experimental / Lo-Fi / Electronic ■ Rating: 6.4/10 ■ Favorite track: “und die ganze welt sang mit mir (thank_you)”
► This is the first section of a sonic journey into the author’s past. (thank_you) deals with childhood experienced through a new awareness. Music succeeds in evoking the innocence and mystery of early perception, suggesting the imperfections of remembering. The piece captures the raw emotional texture of infancy: curiosity, vulnerability, wonder.
■ The A. O.: The track from “A Walk Through Dark Places: A Photographic Record” that we prefer is “Hipparcos Catalog”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Jashiin: There were several “catalog” tracks, all named after astronomical catalogs of stars, nebulae, and such. They were all made using a free pipe organ sample set I found online. I created an algorithm to process the samples: applying several effects with parameters randomized, then changing the loop points, also randomly. I had no idea how it sounded until I connected it to a midi keyboard and started playing, discovering the sounds as I went along. It took a while to learn which keys do what, which loops I like, if and how the pitch changed. I recorded many takes and kept the ones I liked best. “Sharpless Catalog”, from the parent album “A Walk Through Dark Places”, was the one I fell in love with the most and kept tinkering with. Two more catalogs, including Hipparcos, ended up on “A Photographic Record”, and there’s a couple more, either unreleased or hidden in the tracks of “A Walk”.
► In our humble opionion, that’s simply one of the tracks of the year. The gentle interplay between piano and xylophone establishes an atmosphere of innocence and calm, before slowly dissolving into darker textures. As layers of synths and distant echoes emerge, the instruments seem to fade, pulled gradually into a vortex of abandonment. The descent is mesmerizing — graceful yet unsettling — capturing the beauty of letting go.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Changes” that we prefer is “RainSong”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► David Aimone: Well, about half way through making these tracks I realized there was a theme that was loosely about seasons. I love a nice rain storm, just like waves at the ocean, and can zone out on these sounds. I decided to create an atmospheric piece, fairly straightforward, to end “Changes”. I used two guitar like arpeggios, left and right, to emulate the steady rain through phases of harmonic changes. I backed this up with actual rain sounds, and some contained but expressive musical motifs in the background. I ended up using environmental sounds in most of the songs on the album, not always depicting specific seasons or weather events, but also atmospheric sounds to place the music into a place and time. Meadow sounds, distant church bells, thunderous synth recreations, and so on.
“Each song is thoughtfully made for a variable in Euler’s Identity and feels like its own carved out imaginary space. Notes trickle and dance through time to create moments that straddle the line between chaos and order, never quite settling in, always fluid in their direction and motion. The mood is peaceful and consciousness sparked into a wakeful state to appreciate the cloudy soundscapes with transient sounds of, at times, sharp contrast and fizzing, and at times, tranquil winds blowing. The album culminates in slow brain rattling pulsations”.
► This is truly moving. The fragmented use of a choir sample creates an interplay between voices and strings with a deeply melancholic consistency, like tears streaming through fractured memories. That’s a poignant reminder of impermanence of things.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Within (0045)” that we prefer is “Tree of Life”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Cells Interlinked: This album of our project Cells Interlinked became for us a kind of contemplative diary of internal states experienced during the war — the invasion of the Russian army into Ukraine. When the war started, it was a big shock for us. In the first months it was simply unbearable for the consciousness to be “outside”, in the flow of terrible external events — missile attacks, explosions, news from the front line… Working on this material, which we began to record partially a year before, became a kind of therapeutic practice, allowing the consciousness to focus and change direction, to turn “within”. The beginning of work on this track seemed to push apart a narrow slot in the wall dividing our reality into “outside” and “within”. At first we recorded a viscous bass improvisation on a vintage analog monophonic dual-oscillator synthesizer Vermona Synthesizer. At the time, this instrument, released in a limited edition in 1981, was a slightly belated reaction of the East part of Germany, occupied by the Russian army, to the stormy evolution of Moog synthesizers. This layer describes quite well the thick darkness of the waters of the unconscious, into which we gradually sank, meeting with the archetypal flow of symbols of war that burst into our everyday life. Then a simple four-note sequence appeared, played on Virus Snow. With its leisurely looped movement, it reflected the movement of the mind, moving at random in the fog of obscurity and searching for the perspective of vision. And then came the moment when the concentration of this meditative work on the composition became an open door leading from the nightmarish absurdity of external reality — to “within”, to the feeling of true reality, to the hidden root of reality, covered with the husk of random external events. This moment became key for the writing of the entire album and this separate track. It was something that in Greek is called metanoia — a sudden illuminating change in vision, in the very way of looking, a fundamental change in consciousness. It was as if consciousness penetrated inside itself, and the problematic of external reality dissolved. The Virus sequence theme sped up, merging with a hand-played bass arpeggio. A vocal improvisation theme spontaneously emerged. All of this reflected a deeply internal experience of having found the axis and foundation on which everything external was strung. It was a feeling of discovering an internal dynamic structure that is ever expanding, embracing with its branches, leaves and tendrils everything that appears, lives and disappears in the world of time and space. In the flow of this state, we completed work on this track, which opens the album, is invisibly present in each of its tracks, and ends with a short ambient piece, “Nightfall”.
► Is meditation nothing more than the highest and/or the most desperate form of distraction? This is what this track asks. Is the gradually deconstructed pulsation of the minor guitar phrase an invitation to merge with the world or to alienate ourselves in the dark? We still don’t know.
► Here it comes a sonic entity struggling to hold itself together. The result is meditative in its unpredictability, inviting the listener to sink into the irregular patterns and shifting atmospheres. It blurs the line between mechanical and organic.
■ Genres: Ambient / Electronic / New Age ■ Rating: 7.0/10 ■ Favorite track: “RainSong“
► We feel like we are listening to an acoustic reproduction of Penelope’s canvas. The fascinating choice of harmony is woven together and moves back and forth like a single wave, which arises and dissolves in itself with geometric rigor.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Limbic Atlas” that we prefer is “Lirae”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Eir Drift: This is the first piece I made for the Limbic Atlas album. Lirae was ultimately born spontaneously even though it was the result of a long reflection on how to approach ambient composition. My goal was to merge the illustrative music I’ve been working on for years with a minimalist ambient format built around slow progression. Cinematic composition, for me, is about crafting a build-up that tells a story — with a beginning, a sense of tension, and a resolution. The idea was to experiment with that kind of narrative structure in a very slow ambient appropriate progression. I started with a suite of 4 piano chords that I wanted to be both tense and ethereal; I then transcribed, looped and slowed everything down in a sequencer… I had this ambient bass sonic base with a gradual build that you could get lost in and dream within. From there, I added textured layers and smooth one note drone to emphasize the transitions and builds. In the end, “Lirae” runs 16 minutes and holds a surprisingly introspective, experimental dimension that I hadn’t entirely anticipated.
answering some questions. We have already observed his electronic / noise / experimental / industrial work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “Refractions” that we prefer is “Refraction 4”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►EIII: A little over a year ago, I was recording underwater sounds in the river that runs through the city where I live. The bubbling of the water, the trapped air released by my steps, and the occasional jet ski or motorboat formed the foundation of the piece. Later, I added layers of synths to build on that.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Seven types of silences” that we prefer is “VII”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Marko Josipović: That track came to be similarly like all the other ones of the album. I found a motif or a melody on the guitar, then I would sit with it for some time, and the composition/arrangement would very naturally reveal itself through that. I often work very sporadically and like to jump from idea to idea, but this album unfolded quite linearly, so the piece had a “definitive” feel whilst making it. I remember I wanted it to feel like a forceful emergence from the sea, violent, but also purified at the same time, leaving just enough space for the things to come. That tension between violent transformation and a kind of subtle holiness is what I intended to run through the whole album. The imagery of water and sea also played a big role in how I shaped the sound of this album in general.
► It’s time to stand up and move. Pulsing synth arpeggios form the rhythmic backbone, gradually evolving in intricate layers that build both tension and atmosphere. Sweeping pads and cosmic tones create a sense of vast space, while subtle modulations keep the journey dynamic and engaging.
► This track unfolds like a slow sunrise. The harmonic path is built around resonant chords that radiate introspection and depth. The pacing is deliberate, allowing every passage to breathe fully, evoking feelings of calm, quiet wonder. A precious listening.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Nocturnal Reverie” that we prefer is “Sewer Sea”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Risbo Tazeg: I wanted to create an album that could be a film soundtrack but without being connected to an actual film. I wanted it to be really evocative, to have strong – but abstract – narrative components. Sewer sea in particular involves improvisation sessions. I started with one layer of synth, and made a 10 minutes long drone-like track. I had no plan in mind, just wanted to play. I then added a 10 minutes layer of cello on top of this drone. Listened to the whole and got rid of some parts of the cello. I did the same with another synth, listened, carved. I repeated the whole process several times with several synths, with the cello and another string instrument. There has been quite a lot of editing and I don’t think there is anything left from the first 2 layers but somehow the structure that emerges organically from the first few improvised sessions is still there. The rest of the album has been planned a bit more in advance, but for Sewer Sea I would just play, observe the outcome, edit, repeat. Layering and carving.
■ The A. O.: Can you tell us how “WOG 2206“ came to light?
►STGLTZ: I recently moved in with my girlfriend and as I went through my stuff, I came across this old function generator, which was given to me by a friend some years ago. It has WOG 2206 written on it. I ran it through several effect pedals, liked the sound and recorded it, that’s how the foundation of the track was made. Then I played around with different things, for example a noisebox, to add more sounds and textures.
■ The A. O.: The track from “d | d | d” that we prefer is “distanz”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►lebenerde: I was preparing for an upcoming music theory exam and had to learn chord names lol. I used an old Yamaha keyboard to play along with the example chords and then I had these two chords that I really liked. Somehow I forgot the exam and just ended up in Ableton, throwing the Yamaha sounds in a granulator and then started just adding effects to find timbres and textures I like. I wanted to have this degradation of sound quality over time and really did not want to hurry with it and just let it take its time. That’s true for all three songs on this EP actually. I never made tracks this long before. I think it’s because I thought that nobody would listen to something this long but I figured that’s stupid. The duration allows you to just be in it.
► Drifting can be sweet at times, just as shipwrecking can be saving. This track feels like drowning in amniotic fluid. Remember when you were floating there? Likewise, at least for a moment, memory forgets itself here, and if there is nothing to remind there is nothing to suffer from.
■ The A. O.: The track from “The Bee Resort” that we prefer is “A Mind Consumed By Meaningless Data”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
►Bee Resort: This song was born during a time when I felt quite overwhelmed by work, and at the end of each day my brain would feel drained. One night I sat in my little synth corner and just let everything out, and that’s how that song came into this world, I believe it was created in a single, refreshing session. The title if I remember correctly comes from something a music critic said about Thom Yorke’s style of writing lyrics; that sentence came to my mind while working on this song and it just seemed perfect to describe how I was feeling.
► Here there’s little to say: if you like ambient and/or electronic, allow yourself to listen to this. There are no falls, there are no negligible moments. This album can easily be considered an instant-classic of the genre. The experience is completely immersive and beneficial, we are facing 50 minutes and more of pure bliss. Simply one of the best works of the year so far.
► Try this if you want to surf on fractured rhythms and distorted urgency. Layers of erratic synths and jarring percussive bursts mimic a nervous system on edge, creating an atmosphere both chaotic and hypnotic. Subtle modulations and ghostly textures surface just long enough to vanish, heightening the sense of unease.
■ The A. O.: The track from “A Possible Wind” that we prefer is “Atmospheric Drag”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Alan Graves: For more than a decade now I’ve been taking a field recorder with me everywhere that I travel and recording the sounds of the atmospheres that I find myself in. I had been going back through my archive and pulling recordings of wind from different environments to use as the foundation for this record. For the track ‘Atmospheric Drag’ I used a field recording I had taken of the wind while hiking through a bamboo forest in Hawaii. I started the track by running that field recording through a series of hardware filters and effects and turning it into the basis of what I would build the track on top of. I created patches and performed synthesizer improvisations to those field recordings in layers. It was actually the first piece that I made for the entire record, and it helped inform where the rest of the project would end up.
► We are moving on a black carpet. We are struck by electric flashes, mechanical echoes. We drag ourselves in chains to a forced destination, surrounded by hostile forces. Having no choice, somehow, lifts us from all remorse.
■ The A. O.: The track from “Mana” that we prefer is “Kella”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Asha Patera: The album is a collection of tracks inspired by my surroundings. ‘Kella’ is the name of an area about four miles from where I live – it is so small as not to even be a village, just a few houses in the winding countryside lanes, but the name is evocative of dreamy summer afternoons, idling away time, and I tried to capture that in the music.
► Oh, we simply love this kind of jagged electronic music. Abrasive textures and stuttering pulsations buzz and convulse like exposed wires, while sudden drops and bursts of distortion keep the listener on edge. Still nothing is chaotic, everything seems skillfully carved.
■ The A. O.: The track from “painting the sky” that we prefer is “a bridge above, a river below”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► ellipses: “a bridge above…” came to me while on one of my daily walks. there is a great walking bridge near me with a small park at the end of it. While standing on the bridge overlooking the park, i heard some great bird sounds, wind through the trees, and the sound of water below me. I quickly pulled out my phone to start recording the sounds i was hearing. I had started getting into field recordings before this, having quite a few sitting on my phone for a while. Once i started working on this track, I realized i was really into field recordings and it drove me to buy an actual field recorder. This track and one other (a far pavillion, which was the first track i recorded for the album) are the only once to include the original phone recordings i had done, as a reminder of where i started in my journey.
► This is a clear example of a combination of sounds that goes beyond their simple sum. In other words, sonic interactions *really* generate emergent properties in this case. This approach leads you to a visceral experience—haunting, immersive, and unnervingly intimate—pulling your head into a spectral world shaped by decay.
answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electronic / dark ambient / experimental work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “Anachoreisis” that we prefer is “Flooding”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Auditor: My functional memory was hijacked many years ago. I imagine I was probably teaching myself to play a Gymnopedie or Gnossienne and listening to them on repeat. I have a sampler, an SP-404. I likely fed it things that were then abstractly regurgitated and reassembled by hand and heart.
► The synths pass through us, the harmony is fluid, amniotic. But everything is filtered through an opaque lens, which gives the sound a trembling subsoil, as if you were waiting for a restless time. As if you don’t want to leave the present.
► This is a powerful and relentless march, punctuated by a syncopated bass that dictates its tempo. Although the drone is totally immersive, the horizontal space of the sound spectrum is intelligently preserved by percussive elements and digital cascades, panned all around our head. It’s time to travel again.
► Okay, now we’re mesmerized. The circular advance of the synth phrase has completely captivated us. The starting Baba O’Riley subtle urgency slowly melts into the entrance of the pads. The result is highly uplifiting. Take your time and enjoy.
► This music moves like a wave. When you sail, circumstances can change rapidly, and the short synth phrases that pop up cyclically are there to remind that. This uncertainty is emotionally precious: the result reveals a dreamy expectation, and it’s up to you to define its color.
► It’s cold out there. The wind blows hard. No time to figure out how to protect yourself. No way to find a direction in this desert of ice. Only regret for being there, trapped in boundless spaces, alone in the unspeakable white.
► This synth, in all its purity, envelops us and leads us on the journey. The evocation of interstellar space appears natural. The opening major7 arpeggio has the color of discovery; the rest of the harmony reflects the fear of revelations, along with their necessity.
►There is something liberating and threatening at the same time. The bass is like a snake crawling at your feet, but the cascades of high-frequency drones make you look up, searching for shooting stars to ask for hope. You’d better act.
■ Genres: Ambient, Electronic, Drone ■ Rating: 6.2/10 ■ Favorite track: “a bridge above, a river below”
► There is a warm drone, and we all know what is going to happen. It will probably last forever. But not here: there is a sudden harmonic modulation, two steps above keeping the major key, and after that another minor, ascending climb to the summit. It’s time to close your eyes and breathe.
► The synth phrase is really charming. Even though it’s in a loop, it’s not easy to find the beginning and the end of it, and that’s its secret. Maybe it is not the right way to say it, but it’s like Boards of Canada have gone on vacation.
► Well, just to be clear: this track is quite a masterpiece. There’s something charmingly hypnotic about the words, the syncopated beat, the echoes. We got totally captivated by the texture, every spark of this beauty has become precious and necessary in our head. And when the synth gets in: oh boy. We won’t forget this music.
■ Genres: Ambient, Electronic ■ Rating: 7.8/10 ■ Favorite track: “A Mind Consumed By Meaningless Data“
► There is a kind of inevitable circular path that digs a deeper and deeper furrow. Minor add2 chords paint a disperate picture. The synth bass moves 4 steps downward over and over again, buried within Freud’s repetition compulsion. This path is interrupted in an extremely significant pause around the middle of the track, only to resume inexorably.
► In the midst of dark drones echoes, synhts phrases burst in. That’s intriguing because it emerges as an act of rebellion against the swamp that surrounds us. We can stand, somehow.
► Listening gravitates around a distant kick drum. As much the synths create an underlying tension, this pulsing core offers a safe haven. The harmonic use of bichords is cleverly elusive. The Doric mode reflects, in its resolutions, the search for relief from background noise.
► This can make you either hunter or prey. It’s up to you. You can follow the main beat and march, mirroring the strength of your stride, or run in circles trying to escape your fears. The space is wide, you cannot be alone.
► We all love warm drones but, in our opinion, they need to be shaken up in some way. Here it happens. The use of inversions and sixth chords is clever. This creates slight imbalances and interesting ambiguities that lead unexpectedly to synth storms.
► You may recognize Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1. In this reinterpretation of the masterpiece, lulling nostalgia seems to founder in a maelstrom of torment. What could have been when hope was still alive is gone. It is a brilliant aural rendition of a surrender.
► There is something really significant about the use of space. Panning acquires the dignity of a real creative tool. The choice of samples is skillful and, at times, moving; their deconstruction is simply masterful.
► The reassuring harmonic solutions are sometimes disrupted by unstable passages, which give the track a variety of contrasting yet perfectly balanced colors.
