The best electronic music of January-August 2025

Catching up on 2025's new music with a round-up of 41 EPs and albums from the first half of the year

Hello! It’s been a bit of a quiet summer for Infinite Speeds, but I’m now back with a new round-up post that catches up with the new electronic music released between January and August of this year. I didn’t really set out to do a “half-year list”, but there were a few delays with my usual quarterly round-up posts, so I decided to just put everything into one big post that incorporates everything released from January 1st to the end of August¹.

So this one’s a pretty big one now, featuring over 40 albums and EPs from all over the electronic music landscape — ranging from Benjaminian first wave techno to auto-tune mysticism, mojito tech house, Korean electro-acoustic cyborg ASMR, nu-skool garage bangers, retro chill-out room bliss, tranced-out weirdo reggaeton, portal ambient, digital dub alchemy, lush interstellar jungle, experimental gamelan-techno, and more … I had a lot of fun putting these together, so I hope you will come across something you like here and maybe even discover a few new artists! — Vincent

PS: I recently had the opportunity to interview techno legends Dave Sumner and Karl O’Connor about the history and legacy of the seminal Sandwell District project for the Tone Glow substack. You can read it here!

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F7 - Lost In Flower [Acting Press]

Few projects have ever managed to capture the spirit of techno's primordial first wave sublime as well as Acting Press has over the last decade. Keeping with that ethos, the label's new 3x12" Lost In Flower imagines itself back to a time when techno was not yet a global dancefloor sound, when it was still little more than the aching bedroom dreams of a few dozen Detroiters and Beneluxians. It pays tribute to that moment in time less through exact historical accuracy (there are motifs lifted from all over the last thirty-five years of dance music here) than by embodying the emotional gestalt of dance music in its embryonic state, when nothing seemed off-limits, when anything that could be imagined could become possible; the general intellect of dusky BFC-era Carl Craig cassette textures, the naively fluttering patterns of a 909 still found in pawn shops, the abyssal pad-scapes of Ross 154, the yearnful FM fragments of a young Luke Slater …

Much like Walter Benjamin’s arcades were never about mundane acts of shopping, but about the amorphous promises held in their steel, glass and lights, this is not a record about dance music’s history, but about its pre-history; the virtual state in which it was still unburdened by having been actualized into a concrete form, nothing but a field of dreams and potentials … not history as it really happened, but history as a fantasy of what could be, the dreams lingering in our present² … but then why not indulge those dreams and imagine yourself as free from history as it really happened, free from genre blueprints, and production standards, and “what works" on the dancefloor, and DJ careers and festival bookings, and Twitter discourse and Instagram … what would that be like then, to make electronic music like an embryo, facing nothing but the machines in front of you and the night outside the window and the gleaming stars above your bedroom?

Jules Reidy - Ghost/Spirit [Thrill Jockey]

Having always admired the timbral possibilities of auto-tune abuse (which I think has generally remained pretty under-explored in many underground genres), I was pretty much instantly mesmerised when I first encountered Jules Reidy’s unique mixture of metallic microtonal guitar harmonics and distorted autotune warbling on 2019’s Real Life. And while the use of vocals on Reidy’s older records was often more sporadic, Ghost/Spirit goes all-in on the auto-tune articulations, with sublime results like „To Breathe Lightning“ — if auto-tune is the soul of the early 21st century, then this is 21st century mysticism.

Noah Skelton - MINDHELMET16 [Mindhelmet]

This originally came out „vinyl only“ in mid-2024, but it seems like the label has since come to its senses with a digital release, so I’m putting it on here now. Because this is some absolutely killer nu-skool UK garage — just listen to the title track „Used To Say“, it’s got that two-step skip down perfect, a gorgeous bassline, and just the right amount of drama in the vocals and keys. „Smooth Liberation“ is more lounged-out and jazzy, with a relaxed groove and sultry vocal chops, while „Gazer“ swings into 4/4 with rich bubbling chords and “Aleph Null“ veers into borderline Burial territory with a mournful reese and pitch-shifted vocal wailing. Finally, the closer „Cold Heat“ rounds things out nicely with a tripping groove and a soulful piano sample. S-Tier.

Beatrice Dillon - Basho [Portraits GRM]

Beatrice Dillon’s 2020 album Workaround was a welcome return for a PowerBook era structuralist approach to production that’s gone a bit out of fashion. Five years later, she’s now back with an extended piece that explores territory similar to Workaround, albeit from a different angle — if Workaround was all about finding rhythm and structure in the initial attack stage of sounds, then on Basho everything revolves around the concept of decay, the angles and curvatures in which sounds trail off and extend themselves into the distance. File under: “spectromorphology”

T. Jacques - Fingertrips [Limousine Dream]

Oh boy, this new Limousine Dream’s got some deadly, deadly, y2k London tech house bump on offer. Honestly, every track on here is a certified party rocker, but I’ve been particularly fond of “House Control”, it’s got those really lush and addictive stabs — I’ve always called them “Mojito stabs”³ because to me they just sound like a vibing upscale cocktail bar on a Friday night — swept with a filter resonance so smooth and buttery that it almost sounds like it’s all about to melt into a creamy puddle. As good as house music gets.

Sa Pa - Ambeesh [Short Span]

In contrast to the traditional Chain Reaction school of dub-alchemy that has primarily focused on exploring the accidental byproducts of the degradations inherent to analog signal processing, Ambeesh experiments with degradative reactions within the digital realm, where what used to be inherent and inevitable has become decoupled from the basic process. So even though Ambeesh is about as mushed as it gets, none of it was accidental, its tendency towards degradation deliberate and clinical in a way that was never possible in analog. It pairs highly degraded and hyper-compressed textures with sounds that have remained mostly unscathed and retain a high degree of mobility that allows them to traverse the space as they please, resulting in a discordant sense of spectral dynamics where the landlocked pressure of the bottom center is contrasted with bird-like figures freely drawing circles in the brisk air above the sludgy tectonic plates. After alchemy comes geology.

Antraum - Koisuru [Omakase]

Six releases in, and Antoine Quesnel’s and Romain Reynaud’s Antraum project just keeps on cranking out flawless house bombs like “Koisuru”. This is what true mastery in the martial art of house sounds like. Only the bare fundamentals, the lightest of touches, a maximum of restraint and control; just as lethal.

Ariel Kalma & Asa Tone - O [Good Morning Tapes]

Another floaty new-age tinged ambient album? Admittedly, this is the kind of thing you might press play on with a sigh already half-formed, expecting the usual set of tropes. But then all that just evaporates within the first few seconds of being cast into a place as wonderful as the opener “Interlace” … there’s really a sense of fantastical whimsy — think “glistening magical elven forest” — here that is rarely captured in electronic music and stands out sharp from the glut of merely pleasant ambient releases. Genre: portal fantasy.

Mike Parker - Envenomations [Samurai Music]

Painter-producer Mike Parker leans further into his recent experiments with broken beats on his new EP for drum & bass label Samurai. For an artist that’s been somewhat notorious⁴ for sticking with a highly specific sonic palette across his thirty-year career, I find it quite striking how different this material sounds in comparison to Parker’s more minimalist 2010s period. Whereas back then, his tracks were often exercises in stark reduction consisting of nothing more than a kick and a single sequence, here, there’s almost a kind of excess; a bristling and busy instrumentarium that ranges from synthesised cosmic cries to ring-modulated insects, brushing snare figures, mutant 808 hits, and funked-up halftime breaks dancing the robot.

Yetsuby - 4EVA [Pink Oyster]

On her debut album 4EVA, Korean producer Yetsuby shows off the full range of her impressive production chops, effortlessly combining pretty show-offy IDM production with a cutesy, all-pastel aesthetic grounded in a penchant for addictive hooks and solid grooves while never sounding contrived⁵.

Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force – Khadim [Ndagga]

After a good decade of approaching his Ndagga Rhythm Force project from more of a neutral recordist perspective, Mark Ernestus has found the confidence to take on a more directly creative role and to put his legendary dub engineering skills in action, resulting in a killer fusion of hypnotic drum virtuosity and Kreuzberg dub abstraction that makes for what is easily the best Ndagga album yet.

Pangea & Leonce - Dusted [Fabric]

“Dusted” is a UK garage club track that borrows liberally from K-pop (just listen to that stabby staccato vocal chorus), which was itself heavily influenced by UK garage via the likes of Disclosure. Full circle fun.

Roseen - Conditioning Chamber [a.r.t.less]

On Conditioning Chamber, Berlin techno purist Roseen pays homage to that early ca. 92-93 H&M chord memory⁶ sound, looking towards a period in early techno’s development that, despite its historical importance, remains quite rarely referenced in contemporary techno. It’s also just a sound I’ve always adored on a sonic level — just listen to those pumping metallic Alpha Juno chords liquefying into a bright melted sizzle on the title track “Conditioning Chamber”. Beautiful.

Tape Pack - Light Years [Loom Recordings]

Light Years is some of the absolute smoothest atmospheric jungle you’ll hear all year, and while the Good Looking era ROMpler⁷ tropes have definitely been laid on pretty thick here, I frankly don’t really care when tracks sound as sweet as „Antares“. A cosmic journey straight to planet lushland.

Ryu Hankil - Rhythm Machine [Self-Released]

Rhythm Machine? Yeah, that sounds about right. It’s a weirdly organic machine though, maybe more of a cyborg, because my brain really can’t make out whether what it is hearing here are “frogs turning into creaking doors”, or “doors turning into printers”, or “printers turning into insects”. But either way, it ends up sounding strangely satisfying on a very immediate and visceral sensory level. Actually, with how popular ASMR is, I really do wonder if music like this wouldn’t be significantly more popular if it was marketed as some kind of “relaxing binaural ASMR beats” thing, rather than as “experimental avant-garde computer music” — because at least to me, this really is the musical equivalent of having your back scratched. By a cyborg.

Carré - Body Shell [Tempa]

While Body Shell is in many ways a pretty traditionalist dubstep record, there’s a certain techno sensibility in the programming and arrangements here that subtly moves away from the traditional garage skip paradigm. Or, to put it another way, it is simply impossible to listen to any early 2004-2006 era dubstep without being constantly reminded on every snare that those Brits all grew up listening to garage. But twenty years on, the passage of time is now affording younger producers like Carré to take a strategic distance to that London thing, resulting in a new-found freedom that Carré is really making the most of here with her agile and gorgeously produced take on the classic halfstep formula.

Yaleesa Hall - Halfway Gone [Timedance]

The master of the boom-boom has returned with four heavy and massively slamming techno-breakbeat-bass exercises on Batu’s Timedance label. Despite a few more experimental nods like the vocals on “Voices”, the Yaleesa Hall project really has always been about the hard-hitting beats, and when it comes to sheer sonic impact, few hit as hard — DJs, tread carefully, because whatever you play after this may suddenly sound real puny in comparison.

Iri.gram - False 04 [False Aralia]

I have no idea who “Iri.gram” is, but these are great tracks that remind me of the enigmatic⁸ Topdown Dialectic project in their mixture of lush dub abstraction, quirky rhythms, and sampler weirdness … actually, funnily enough, on closer inspection it appears that this is a new sub-label of Peak Oil — which has previously released multiple Topdown Dialectic LPs — so maybe this is all just another alias sock puppet game. Either way, this is a lovely sound that is really only coming out of this specific West Coast orbit, so I’m just happy to have more of it. Also recommend: False 01, False 02, False 03.

Guy Contact & Solar Suite - Perfect Harmony [Wax’o Paradiso]

Perfect Harmony has seemingly made it its goal to slap together every single 90s downtempo and chill out room cliché it could find. It’s all here, from the sloppy slo-mo breaks and gurning trip-hop basslines, to the ethno ROMpler licks and sexed-up vocal babbling. In the wrong hands, this could easily end up being rather eye-roll inducing, but it’s all working here, somehow … the year is 1997, it is seven in the morning, you wake up and find yourself on the floor of the rave’s chill-out room; fur and neon, everywhere you look.

Marcal - Nature Of The Future [Spazio Disponibile]

Over the past few years, Brazilian producer Marcal has made a solid contribution to the funkier and toolier end of techno with a charming and personal take on techno dancefloor mechanics. While all of the cuts on this new EP for Donato Dozzy’s Spazio label are very solid, the opener „Glasshouse“ is probably my favourite here with its shifty bassline, noisy hats, comb-filtered vocal splinters, and keen sense of groove.

J. Albert - Return To Sender [Self-Released]

Return To Sender goes into a similar direction as J. Albert’s previous self release i want to be good so bad, presenting another collection of glitchy, IDM-ized ambient-dub sketches. As with its predecessor, what is really drawing me in here are the moments in which bare and skeletal tracks like “Genie’s Coma” and “Soma” begin to veer into an unexpected euphoric haze; something strangely anthemic that is lending them an irresistible tranced-up pop quality. Pop ambient dub hits, vol. 2025.

Nate Wooley - Henry House [Ideologic Organ]

Sitting somewhere between an album and an audio play, Henry House develops a strange and abstract spoken-word narrative over a backdrop of ghostly minimalist drones. To be honest, I can’t quite make sense of what exactly is going on with Henry, but perhaps that is the point — there’s a sense of being thrown into a strange and uncanny setting here that is surprisingly captivating, just as long as you go in with open ears. I’m not sure what exactly would be the best time and place to listen to something like this though … maybe give it a try while doing the dishes?

Metro Skim - Tales Of The Celestial Rift [Warm Up]

Dutchman “Metro Skim” (aka Mike Storm, aka Michael de Winde)⁹ has been putting out a steady stream of solid Millsian sci-fi techno for well over a decade now, and his new album for Oscar Mulero‘s long-running Warm Up label is no different. There’s no new gimmicks or genre experiments to be found here, just eleven all-mono techno one takes; usually made up of nothing but a 909, a bassline and a few sequenced bleeps. This is the kind of dance music that is so relentlessly dedicated to its own form, and nothing but its own form, so thoroughly and unapologetically artless, so radically unfashionable and unconcerned with being “tapped in”, that I just can’t help but adore it. An acquired taste, perhaps, but it can be quite fun here, in the shadows beneath the discourse.

Seph - Fiera [Insurgentes]

This one’s one of those records I just randomly saw pop up on the Hardwax website one week. I know basically nothing about the artist or label, but I really dig these little excursions into playful, SND-style IDM abstractions full of rapid-fire filterchord acrobatics, chaotic rhythmic plastics, and a touch of early Detroit techno harmony.

Nico Lahs - HOV018 [Housewax]

Every once in a while, you come across a producer that just understands a certain sound on a very fundamental level, that knows exactly what makes it tick and what doesn’t. Nico Lahs is one of them. When I first heard his two EPs on U Fit last year, I was immediately struck by their effortless proficiency in the language of deep house. Effortless is also a fitting descriptor for the A1 “Coming Down Baby” on his new Rawax EP; pretty much just an eight-minute loop, but it’s one of those loops that just has hit on that recipe for magic, everything slotting together perfectly, as if it never could have come together in any other way.

Impérieux - Rezil [Macro]

Not quite IDM and not quite bass music, Rezil respects the rules of neither, switching freely between controlled trickery and all-out aggression as it pleases. While the rhythmic ideas are also great, I especially like the versatile melodic work here, ranging from pitch-bent car alarm staccatos (“Delirium”), to tranced-up arpeggio swirls (“Gider”), LFO-wobble madness (“Sword Fight”), and even wailing indie melodrama (“Young”). A record that does it all, but never quite in the way you would expect.

Michael James - Mega Drive [UVAR]

Over the past few years, UK producer Michael James has become one of the most reliable sources of tracky and workmanlike house grooves. I'm particularly fond of "Rough Dub", with its bold bassline and sweet stab motif, but I also dig the Detroit-y forward push of "Mega Drive" and the airy swing-bounce on "Together". No need for fancy ornamentation when you’ve landed on all the right grooves.

Annie Hall - Practical Optimism [Delsin]

Despite having kept a relatively low profile over the years, Annie Hall (aka Spanish producer Ana Artalejo Moreno) has made some of the best electro of the past fifteen years, starting with 2009’s Elephant Road. On her new EP for Delsin, the opener “Divergent Thinker” kicks things right off with classic bubbling Detroit bass, lush sweeping pads and angelic vocal swells; all the right ingredients for a classic melodic Detroit electro number. “Ability To Multitask” looks towards the UK with strong nods to the optimist melancholy of early B12 et al., while “Managing Nothing” takes things in a more upbeat and slightly frostier direction.

Chris Doria - MP07 [Magic Power]

This one’s a reissue of a tribal techno (also known as “hardgroove” these days) EP from 2001 that was originally released under a wrong name due to a pressing plant mix up. While a lot of tribal from that era honestly hasn’t aged particularly well¹⁰, this one does hold up pretty well even twenty five years later, thanks to its careful and considered approach to composition that hones in on just a few select percussive elements and constructs nimble grooves and fluid patterns in the process.

Uwalmassa - EP3 [Sundial]

Occasionally, wafting through the new release section on Boomkat¹¹ does pay off, and you find some strange and lovely things you would have never come across otherwise. This little EP from the Indonesian collective Uwalmassa is one of them. I don’t know a lot about gamelan, but I guess this qualifies based on the instrumentation and harmonic language. That said, what Uwalmassa are doing here is hardly traditionalist — these are strange and rapid electro-acoustic blends where I can barely even tell what is acoustic and what is electric, oten frantic to the point of almost tumbling over themselves. With the right crowd, the rolling and burping bounce of “Untitled 14” in particular would probably go crazy in the club. I know I would!

Leo Gibbon - Orbit Step [Mudline]

With its soft, melancholic glow, controlled drums and gleaming keys, “Orbit Step” isn’t exactly your typical grime beat. Veteran grime MC Trim hops on anyways and totally kills it, both contrasting and synergising with its rhythmic and melodic contours via a tightly controlled and sputtering approach to flow — “my 16s don’t get old / not my 16s / not my 16s / my 16s come with a flow”.

Steve O'Sullivan - Green Trax 2 [Trip]

Following the first Green Trax collection from 2021, this reissue collects the second half of London producer Steve O'Sullivan’s Green/As It Is (1995-1998) label along with some previously unreleased material. While O'Sullivan is mostly known for the deeper dubwise sound he later developed on Mosaic and its many sub-labels, I've always been quite fond of his early Rob Hood influenced minimal techno exercises. While many of these tracks are frankly pretty badly produced by modern standards, they do come with a certain vitality that mostly disappeared with later, more dancefloor focused iterations of dance music minimalism — the inner life of the loop, flickering with an abstract spirit worthy of the legacy of high modernism.

Doc Sleep & Delta Rain Dance - Beats Unlimited 2 [Hypno Discs]

On their second Beats Unlimited EP, Melissa Maristuen (Doc Sleep) and Glenn Astro (Delta Rain Dance) get together for some cheeky and genre-ambiguous exercises that combine nimble and freewheeling beats with lush chordal ornamentation and warm, floaty pad backdrops. This is one of those records where the fact that the artists were clearly having a great time in the studio has manifested itself in tracks that are just as fun.

Polygonia - Dream Horizons [Dekmantel]

Over the last few years, Polygonia has made a name for herself with a software-driven production style that is both precise and psychedelic. Dream Horizons continues this trajectory with an album’s worth of idiosyncratic and charming tracks. The opener “Crystal Valley” sets the scene with its sweeping and atmospheric glassy FM tones, while “Set Me Free” modulates its eponymous vocal sample over dry clicky drums and “Whirlwind of Hearts” goes into oddball electro-jazz territory. With how omnipresent the hunt for “analog sound” and “warmth” often seems to be these days, it is refreshing to hear someone go in the complete opposite direction and chase the secrets of the crystalline instead.

Nathan Melja - Djo Sinego [PARODIA]

Only halfway through the opener "One More Last" and I'm already all Leo pointing at the TV here … that bassline, those vocals — that's some big time early 00s twinkle prog! The following tracks alternate between more nods to prog ("Tricks", "Cement Brain") and deep house influences ("Drake Fan", "Magic Bells"), until the final track "Babyface Djo" goes straight for the prize, by which I mean I have Put Out the Light era early James Holden. Glorious.¹²

DJ Trystero - Cantor’s Paradise [FELT]

DJ Trystero is the elusive Japanese producer behind the equally elusive City-2 St. Giga¹³ label. His new album consists of foggy and dubbed out sketches that have been reduced and distressed to the point of almost vanishing. The landscape of Cantor’s Paradise is an alien and desolate one, populated by little more than a few traces of texture and rhythm, isolated shadowy noise figures, and a steaming mist of gaseous pad-vapours emerging from the depths … but within, there does lie a strange kind of warmth; radiating throughout the space, welcoming and inviting. It might be strange in these lands, but it is not unpleasant.

Verraco - Basic Maneuvers [XL]

Few contemporary producers know how to channel musical discordance like Verraco does. Take “sobe sobe (feat. MC Yallah)” on his new EP for XL. It starts out normal enough — okay, here’s the first few seconds, sounds like it’s building up to some kind of noisy dubstep drop? Wait, no, I guess that was just a bluff and it’s actually all about those comically melancholic gated trance pads … that actually just serve as the backdrop to a high-energy reggaeton MC performance? … alright, so we’re halfway through now … and now here’s that noisy drop hinted at in the beginning bursting in anyways, as if that trance/reggaeton combo wasn’t already weird enough, and what the track really needed was SpongeBob bouncing around all over on top of everything?! Quite a ride, and make no mistake, in the hands of most producers, this all would probably sound exceedingly gimmicky. But Verraco isn’t like most producers and so, somehow, all that discordance ends up coming together perfectly in one beautiful whiplash of a track.

Ribé & Roll Dann - Klockworks 40 [Klockworks]

Two years after Ribé & Roll Dann's last Klockworks release, the Spanish pair is now back with another EP of slinky and booming techno grooves. The opener "Interludio" wastes no time and comes in with a swinging clap pattern over a frantically bubbling lead and skittish noise. "Tregua" is a bit straighter, tunneling forwards with a pumping bassline and a faint dusky lead, while "El Nexo" is an acrobatic number with blooming reverb-drenched figures and relaxed hats. Occasionally, a frozen spectral seascape floods the mix, upping the tension for just a moment, until things drop back right in, and the groove goes on.

Jonnah - Me, With You [co:clear]

Me, With You is only the third release from Jonnah aka Pierre Paumier, which I find pretty impressive, because there is some gorgeous production of the kind you usually really only get from veteran producers here — 4K, 60fps, ultrawide, with majestic basslines, far reaching atmospheric backdrops and sensory pad swirls. That said, as nice as they sound, the pure ambient tracks here are maybe a bit too compositionally conventional at times, so the album’s most interesting tracks are really the ones where a bit of unexpected pop drama creeps into the scene, culminating in “40years“, a grandiose blue ambient melodrama with an adoringly emo chorus — get a little bit close / get a little bit closer …

Stefan Gubatz - Fliester Dubs [Primary Colours]

Coming in at about eleven minutes each, both sides on this 12” really like to take their time. But then again, why wouldn't they, when everything has already been mapped out and calibrated; all that's left is for the dub to take its course, tracing topographies and lighting up the territories along the way, until all that remains visible is a hazy, glowing luminescence.

Novisad - Seleya [Keplar]

One of the fun things about the history of electronic music is that, no matter how well acquainted you might be with a certain sound or period, completion is impossible, and there will always be yet another classic you’ve never even heard of. Case in point, I’m generally pretty familiar with early 00s ambient and IDM, so I was surprised that I had never come across this delightfully weird little ambient oddity from 2001 until this reissue on Keplar. What I find particularly striking here is that, while this is mostly a pretty typical y2k ambient record that could have come out on labels like ~scape or Mille Plateaux, there are also parts that sound weirdly analog, with a haunting warbled quality that sounds more like ancient tape loops than anything else … from what little information¹⁴ I can find about the artist, this was definitely done purely on a computer though … were there ghosts in that machine?

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1. I may permanently switch to a “month X to month Y” format for my round-up posts, as it allows for a more flexible posting schedule than a strict quarterly format.

2. I’m avoiding the word here because it’s really become associated with a very specific style and era of music, but this is basically also Mark Fisher’s concept of hauntology.

3. There’s a certain, pretty obscure, late 90s German tech house record that first prompted my use of this term — it’s playing in my head, but I can’t think of the name right now … will dig for it in my shelves later.

4. I used to be a part of a now-defunct techno production forum where Parker was often an object of memes and derision for his single-minded dedication to the “Mike Parker boing sound”. I’ve always found this hostility towards producers that stick with one sound throughout their career a bit odd — after all, nobody really bothers painters for painting variations of the same motifs over and over again.

5. Unlike certain British producers with knighted dads.

6. Some 80s analog synths like the Alpha Juno have a feature called “chord memory” that was designed to let less skilled users play complex chord shapes with one hand. Somewhere around 1991 to 1992, Jeff Mills and Robert Hood discovered that this could be exploited to create polyphonic step sequences by sending a sequence from a regular monophonic analog sequencer into a synth in chord memory mode. While pretty useless for most song-based music reliant on chord progressions, the sound of chromatic barre chords playing in perfectly metric 16ths just so happened to be absolutely perfect for techno, and would come to form the basis for much of Hood’s and Mills’ seminal mid-1990s work.

7. "ROMpler” is a shorthand for late 80s and 1990s synths like the Korg M1 and Roland JV-1080 that create sound by triggering and combining a set of pre-created samples from their internal storage (the eponymous ROMs), rather than synthesizing sounds from scratch. This is technically obsolete in the age of computers, but there is a very charming and specific character to ROMpler samples that just screams “mid-1990s”, so these synths have become quite popular among retro-oriented producers, especially since they are now available in VST form.

8. I was told who was behind the project a few years ago, but I’ve honestly already forgotten, it wasn’t anyone you’d recognize from their other aliases.

9. I only just realized that these all mean the same thing.

10. Nobody tell the zoomers.

11. Speaking of zoomers, it’s recently occurred to me that (outside of DJ circles), in our post-Spotify age, knowing how and where to dig for music without relying on prior curation is no longer a common skill, even among people into very underground music. So I’ve been thinking of maybe doing a short post that details where and how I actually find all the music for these round-ups … would that be useful?

12. If you are like me and have a boomer — e.g. superior — taste in trance.

13. Just before sending this out, I came across this tweet from shy🎀 about a 90s Japanese radio station and label called “st.GIGA” that I had never heard of and that I have to assume the name of Trystero’s label is referencing — you never stop learning!

14. To my great delight, his wonderfully web 1.0 mid-2000s personal website is still online.