Part 2 of my monthly dive into contemporary experimental electronic practices within the UK, artists producing at the intersections between post-ambient and power-ambient composition, electroacoustic methodologies, and the frameworks of deconstructed club. These works explore timbre and texture as forefront compositional components and demonstrate advanced approaches to sound design and signal processing. Non-linear form, wonky rhythms, and process-driven compositional systems take precedence over traditional structures/form, rhythmic or harmonic progression. 21st-century work that draws from the spectral, noise, and post-industrial lineages of the 20th century. This approach to composition is shaped by an informal pedagogy transmitted through technology, online channels, production techniques and club contextualisation rather than through formal institutional structures or genre formulae.
1. BJ Holy: ‘Earth Sign’
BJ Holy is a multidisciplinary artist who seamlessly switches between roles: composer, producer, and instrumentalist. He effortlessly combines elements from electroacoustic, avant-club, ambient, and folk styles, performing live vocals, flugelhorn, and guitar alongside electronics.
‘Earth Sign’ (track nine from his debut album ‘Broken Horns’) offers just a snapshot of the record’s range. A structure built around an evolving motif alongside a patient build of texture that leaves you suspended, waiting for all the elements to converge (the drop), and for the full weight to be realised. With guest vocals from Charlotte Mandell, the pair move in call and response, their voices (at parts) intersecting in atmospheric bliss. Both vocalists recite abstract poetic musings, including fragments reprised from track three of the project ‘Clean Slate’:
– “It’s my clean slate, perfect hideaway.”
– “It’s my earth sign, it’s my third try.”
Colliding fragments dissolve into one lingering question: What’s your Earth Sign?
2. Damsel Elysium: ‘Shoreline – Alex Faingold Rework’
‘Shoreline’ is a cut from the London-based experimental sound artist’s 2024 EP ‘Whispers and Speaking’. Known for their multi-faceted practice, particularly their integration of strings, voice, electronics, and site-specific field recordings. Elysium weaves a textural composition that blurs the line between environment and instrument, grounded in their practice as an established cellist. Faint vocals like a siren song, electronic murmurs, and processed cello texture quietly bubble and recede. Tectonic audio plates shift beneath the surface, creating subtle drama. Saturated rhythmic stutters gradually move to the foreground, later swept away by sounds of the ocean. You’re taken on a real journey, like traversing a desolate landscape.
Both Elysium and Faingold were in the short-lived band ‘Maine’. The release of their only album, ‘Barbary’ in 2023, strongly embodied my taste at the time, and I would still highly recommend it. It’s great to hear another collaboration from them, even in a different form.
3. MOBBS and Susu Laroche: ‘AXE’
Susu Laroche, one half of the currently inactive duo ‘The Fertile Crescent’ (with producer Oxhy), continues to carry the torch of a distinctly ritualistic strain of post-industrial in this collaboration with MOBBS. The ZEPO EP landed on Modern Love, a fitting home given the label’s history of atmosphere-driven releases from Demdike Stare and Andy Stott.
‘AXE’ is evocative, built on a driving, almost processional rhythm that thuds like distant war drums across the cavernous mix. Laroche’s vocals sit front and centre, layered chants upon a bed of vocal texture that sound plucked from antiquity. It feels less like a song and more like a rite, folkloric, a call to return to the primordial soup.
4. Myriad Myriads: ‘Fifth Shard’
Track five from the London-based producer’s ‘Shardcore’, an album intended to be the aural representation of taking consecutive keys of Ketamine. As K’s use on the dancefloor has exponentially grown, it’s a fitting concept. To give a curveball comparison, it’s not unlike DJ Screw and ‘Chopped N Screwed’ – where tempo drag, chopped repetition, and syrupy production aesthetics emulate the sensations of being under the influence of that purple drink. Every track on this project is brain nourishment (more so than K itself, which isn’t nourishing for your brain or for your bladder). This is my favourite ‘shard’ of the album, brittle and jagged synths sequenced with thematic wonky rhythms and motifs that stretch, condense, and resolve in the most satisfying way – replicating old Ken’s effects of time dilation. Like the Caretaker’s: ‘Everywhere at the End of Time’, but instead of slowly degrading memory, you’re moving closer to the K-hole. Released on ‘The Trilogy Tapes’.
