From architecture and drawing to music theory and light design, Iannis Xenakis was a luminary of the 20th century. One hundred years after his birth, his astonishing work continues to challenge how music can be imagined and shared. This once musical outsider used innovative musical techniques (arborescences, stochastic synthesis and proto-granular synthesis) to create high-impact musical events, sensory immersion, spectacle and noise. We begin the mixtape with the opening track of La Légende d’Eer, a milestone of electroacoustic music where the prolific utopianist integrated his stochastic synthesis sounds for the first time. Together with ‘Persepolis’ (a piece of visceral intensity and mechanical brutality), it’s one of the longest works he composed.
We continue along the same lines with a short track from Pan Sonic’s Aaltopiri. The Finnish minimalist techno duo are still one of the most oddly fascinating bands of our time, and this album (an essential reference for noise and industrial musicians) is a great testament to their singular vision and Avant-noise innovation.
Vantzou’s latest and fifth installment weaves fleeting configurations of piano, wind, strings, synthetics, and field recordings into serene and isolated sonic landscapes. Taking her laptop, headphones and material she had been gathering since 2020, she withdrew to the small Greek island of Ano Koufonisi in 2022 and leveraged electronics, programming and digitalization to shape new forms of neo-classical experimental music. The result is bewitching compositions that brim with natural beauty.
French Poet Felicia Atkinson’s reflective music appears to welcome the immensity of the entire world inside of it before reducing it to a subtle ambient narrative. The multidisciplinary artist stands out in the contemporary scene for her artistic sensibilities, and her 2019 album The Flower And The Vessel is a stunning study on calm, loneliness and intimacy.
In 2020, and forty years after its release in the UK, Alva Noto (Sep 21 / Oct 21 / Dec 21 / Aug 22 mixtapes) dropped a tribute to The Cure’s long-standing classic that captivated generations. Through this abstracted cover, he crafted an expansive, deconstructed version where the reverb-heavy guitars, organ and flashes of synthesizers dissolve into a fusion of warm chords, melodic fragments and oscillating digital tones.
On his mournful and contemplative 29th album ForeverAndEverNoMore, Brian Eno (Aug 2022 mixtape) meditates on folly and annihilation and sings for the end of the world. As usual, long drones underlie most of his tracks, but on this record, the ambient master also sings for the first time in 17 years. On ‘Icarus Or Bleriot,’ he wonders whether we will end up like the tragic Greek hero who flew too close to the sun and fell to his death, or the pioneering aviator who was the first to fly a plane across the English channel.
Moving at a glacial pace and commissioned for The Acousmonium (a legendary loudspeaker orchestra devoted to pure listening), Living Torch II is the long-awaited follow-up to Kelly Malone's 2019 cult masterpiece, The Sacrificial Code. The Swedish composer's control, patience, and attention to detail are unparalleled, and this 2-part 33-minute work is an overwhelming journey of great mystery, wonder and intensity. Endlessly shifting in slow-motion beauty, much of the magic lies in the textures and the subtle transformations. The closer you listen to the details, the more profound the emotional resonance will be.
Last year, Not Waving joined forces with Romance for a glorious and reverential album of elevated ambiance. Together, they explored the intersection of secular and religious music, reflecting equally on bliss and terror. With its sublime beam of synths piercing through, ‘Kneel For Mercy’ wrenches highly emotive arrangements and evokes imagery of the Final Judgment.
We continue with more harrowing and funeral music from Sweden. Sonja Tofik's debut album Amoni is a haunting collection of electroacoustic and ambient pieces that deal with themes of self-doubt, solitude, death and emotional rootlessness. Grounded in self-introspection and emanating darkness, the record questions the effects of losing sight of social and moral guides; the negative results of exposure to anomie.
Known as the skilled mastering guru at Berlin’s famous Dubplates & Mastering studio, Rashad Becker has also contributed his own music to the experimental electronic sphere. On Traditional Music for Notional Species Vol II (a follow-up to his 2013 debut album Vol I), he puts tonal fixation and non-linear movement at the forefront. The opener ‘Themes V’ recalls alien imagery and features carefully manipulated cymbals that get drawn into formless drones.
Former one-half of the now-defunct pioneering dubstep duo Vex’d, electronic composer Roly Porter (Nov 2020 mixtape) focuses on building dense walls of sound using classical instruments and heavy, distorted bass tones. Boasting a rich sound palette and breathtaking sound design, his third studio album Third Law is an epic exploration of harsh and controlled distortions. The utterly absorbing ‘In System’ features lonesome tones drifting across inky emptiness, punctuated every now and then by seismic sub-bass.
After realizing at a 2019 Slovenian festival that they shared something in common, two of my favorite electronic music composers decided to come together and dropped an extraordinary 4-track EP earlier this month. On 'Traverse Within,' Mogard's love of Buchla 200 and Serge Modular sounds (Jul 20 / Feb 21 mixtapes) meets CoH's razor-sharp minimalism (Jan 21 / Mar 22 mixtapes) to deliver grainy electronic dirt drenched in rich, microtonal drones.
We continue with the epic, gripping and cinematic ‘4101’, another highlight from Roly Porter. On this track, he savors the silence before smashing it, and with metallic shudders and black-hole reverb, he punches harder than ever. The disorienting juxtapositions of lulling expanses and jagged free-falls result in one the most stimulating and spine-chilling pieces of music I’ve heard recently.
Although the German cosmic music band Popol Vuh is mainly associated with West Germany's 1970s krautrock movement and Werner Herzog's movies, they are also considered progenitors of new-age and ambient music. Blending elements of Western classical music, Asian music and space rock, their deeply spiritual third studio album Hosianna Mantra was conceived as a musical reconciliation of East and West. On 'Kyrie,' Korean soprano Djong Yun's sparing and distant words hover above droning tamboura, simple piano patterns and ethereal guitars before all instruments coalesce into a trance-inducing arrangement.
The Sounds of the Sounds of Science is a soundtrack Yo La Tengo scored for rarely-seen underwater documentary shorts by French Avant-garde filmmaker Jean Painlevé. Written and recorded without ever seeing the footage it was designed to accompany, this lo-fi indie ambient album is an aquatic sojourn that rewards astute listening. With its gentle synths, the downright narcoleptic and hypnotic ‘Hyas and Stenorhyncus’ is pure oceanic drift to lose yourself into.
We end the mixtape with an abstract composition of graded hues and tonal warmth. Following up on For Varying Degrees of Winter (2007), A Colour For Autumn is the second in a series of editions from Australian musician Lawrence English that trace the experience of seasonal changes. His discrete sonic mastery stands out on ‘Watching It Unfold,’ a series of open static phrases reflecting on the slow changes of the season in Brisbane.
