Electronic / IDM / Ambient / Drone listening club

Hmmm… that’s weird. Seems to work for me…

Do either of these work for you?

I’m just glad it exists and I haven’t had a complete mental break from reality.

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Works alright for me

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Ah! I think this might be because Spotify lists it as a ‘single’ despite it being an hour long, because there’s only four tracks.

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Ahhhhhhhhhhh of course!

Just hope you find it worth all the fuss now :grinning:

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This is amazing!

Right up my street. Natural drone, and Lear almost pushing into doom territory with its glacial movement and low throbbing hums.

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:slightly_smiling_face: Really pleased it’s landed well. I’d thought to myself beforehand that if just one or two people enjoy it then that’s a win, so this is a good start!

Yeah it’s great. The depth of Lear is perfect. Wonderful stuff

Nice to see Lagoon West down there. Think I’ve got a busy week what with DiS releases and Pauline Oliveros.

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Think that’s my favourite track on that record. I love the slightly Twin Peaks keys that hold it down whilst the rest of the synths bubble and drone around them. Really good record and one that I think is going to take me a lot of time to fully discover. Thanks for picking it!

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I liked your description!

My inability to load the album was a waste of time - it had already been added to the Spotify playlist, in all it’s glory, so thank you whoever is in charge of that!

Some thoughts on the previous pick;

I loved Virtual State (FAO @funkycow) Really deep era-Warp album that was far more interesting than I was expecting from the first track. I love the sounds it uses and how dark it seems, really tips into drone quite a few times, pulling in from my memories of early Tim Hecker, which is obviously nonsense as it is chronologically the other way around. Also, at times, it felt really urban which is maybe my projection on to it. One of the things I love about albums like this is the way you can hear the compositions straining against each other on the record, it’s so dense and dark that there’s barely a glimpse.

My favourite track might be the second one, Frequency Road I’m a sucker for high synths and low rumbly base. Defintely can hear a of the work that Frank Klepacki put together for the Command and Conquer: Red Alert soundtrack, a sound track I’d highly recommend listening to if you avoid the Hell March first track which is classic, but a bit much and almost parodic.

As an side, it’s quite fascinating for me to go back and listen to late 1980s and early 1990s IDM and ambient and see that whilst I was listening to all this amazing electronic chiptune stuff on SNES and MegaDrive games, and utterly adoring it, there was entire back catalogues of stuff being released into the world that I’d go back and utterly adore in time. It is funny that those artists influenced the soundtrack artists, which in turn influenced me (and many other people of my generation) and then in turn we either became fans, made music, or like me - became a podcast host. It’s a funny way for the genre to propagate.

I’ll put together a new IDM episode in a few weeks once we’ve got a few more releases in the bag.

I’ll get round to listening to this week’s pick today.

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Because I am a total dweeb, here’s some analysis on the picks so far.

Age
The releases have been picked from the region of 1989 to 2012, with three picks being 2012 releases. This gives the average age of the albums as 14 years old, pulled down by the recent 1989 pick. Graphed, this looks like this.

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This obviously is only for fun - but it is interesting to see that we all started around the 2010s and have dipped right down into the older releases recently.

Discogs Score
The only reason I put this in was that a lot of the albums weren’t reviewed on Metacritic and Discogs is as good as a aggregator for scores for this stuff as possible. The lowest scored one is the first choice by @Twinkletoes with 4.36/5. The highest scoring album is @wonton’s Brambles pick with 4.89/5. The average score for these is 4.60/5, which is pretty high!

Capture

Also to note we’ve not had a repeat Label yet.

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:heart_eyes:

Have been pretty slack on this thread in terms of feedback, there is so much good stuff being recommended & I’m really having my ears opened!

This album is absolutely brilliant. I hadn’t heard it before, but mentioned it to a mate who knows his stuff on electronic/IDM & he started raving about what a genius Richard H Kirk is & how this particular album is a classic.

Such an eclectic record - but it hangs together wonderfully. The Feeling (Of Warmth & Beauty) is one of the loveliest pieces I’ve heard & Freezone really is a proper banger.

Thanks for a great recommendation… will be on heavy rotation for a while.

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Diving into this now. It’s so expansive! Nuts that this is nearly 30 years old.

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Makes me want to turn the reverb up to 11 and make a glacial drone album

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