Now Listening: Introspective Dance Music, Crab-Walk Rhythms, Diasporic Drum'n'Bass
Records by Mineral Stunting, Plumes of Enceladus, Lara Sarkissian, Yetsuby, and Cahl Sel.
Mineral Stunting – Come Rain Come Shine (Drift Ritual 2025)
Irish artist Eamon Ivri, who also records as Lighght, has taken to calling the sound of this Mineral Stunting album "gulch." It didn't make sense at first—what does "gulch" even sound like, anyway?—but after numerous listens, it clicked. Come Rain Come Shine is a wet, squelching, verdant record: it sounds like washing mud off your hands in a rushing river. It sounds like a hillside in March, flush with green after a winter's dousing. The tracks lurch and limber, ambling aimlessly, leaning sideways on crab-walk rhythms. The compositions are deceptively simple: looped samples, gentle synth melodies, and the occasional drum pattern are layered atop one another, keeping strange time. But the gestalt is something else altogether. It's strange, beautiful, and at times, bizarrely catchy. "This is who I am—this is what I do," Ivri intones, on the album's only legible vocal. I'm not sure I've ever heard anything else like it.
Kevin Moyles
Two EPs by Plumes of Enceladus: L: Enceladean Program; R: Tealsummer / Biscuit Tin.
Plumes of Enceladus – Enceladean Program + Tealsummer / Biscuit Tin (Patern 2024 + 2017)
Oftentimes, against my will, phrases get stuck in my head and just won't leave. Case in point: "The IDM You Like Is Coming Back In Style"—nonsense attributable to the fact that both 1995-era Autechre and Twin Peaks are responsible for a good deal of my personality—has been stuck in there for ages, but Plumes of Enceladus, aka Chicago-adjacent artist Joshua Davison, proves that I was right all along. These two EPs are pitch-perfect contemporary twists on the classic early '90s Artificial Intelligence sound, but they're neither throwbacks nor rehashes. Instead, they're pristinely composed glimpses of a cybernetic futuretopia that, judging by present-day headlines, isn't coming to pass anytime soon. The minimalism of these dual EPs sets them apart: percussion is spare, melodies are ethereal, and grooves are carried by basslines as much as drums. It's gorgeous listening, no matter whether you've listened to Tri Repetae as much as I have.
Chymera/Merrin Karras
indek
Lara Sarkissian – Remnants (btwn Earth+Sky 2024)
Last year, I listened on repeat to L.A.-based producer Lara Sarkissian's EP Born of the Sea, her first solo record since 2018. Only five tracks long, I craved more: "Perhaps an LP will come next," I wrote then. Months later, she announced Remnants, her debut full-length album, and it's exactly the follow-up I hoped for. Like the EP that preceded it, Remnants is a cinematic listen, a tale of the Armenian diaspora told through music. Stylistically, it runs the gamut: rippling electro-acoustic passages glimmer beside serpentine saxophone drifts, and chest-rattling drum'n'bass workouts commingle with traditional Eastern percussion. It all coheres so well because, at the album's core, is Sarkissian herself. It's an intensely personal listen: a reflection, in sound, of ancestors and unwritten histories. We get just a glimpse, of course—not the full story. It's the ambiguity, the spaces between, that keeps me re-listening.
everett
Yetsuby – 4EVA (Pink Oyster Records 2025)
Neon-lit. Sun-kissed. Polychromatic. I can't remember the last time I heard something as synesthetically vibrant and colorfully joyous as 4EVA, the new album by Yetsuby, aka Yeijin Jang, an artist from South Korea. It grabs your attention at once: the opener "s2WINGSs2" cascades into "FLY," a swirl of lush melody and stepped drums that sounds like smiling feels. Afterwards comes "Aestheti-Q," a spring-loaded wonder whose razor-sharp, snap-shut percussive sample has been stuck in my head for weeks. Then there's the title cut, a blissed-out breakbeat excursion with reversed cut-up vocals in the manner of The Field. I don't know if Yetsuby is a gamer, but listening to 4EVA gives me the same sense of unbridled wonder and sheer delight I felt the first time I played Katamari Damacy, decades ago. The world is hard right now, and everything seems to be getting worse; this album is a balm in the meantime. I'll take it wherever I can get it.
dlberes
Two EPs by Cahl Sel: L: Blue; R: Every Moment.
Cahl Sel – Blue + Every Moment (Reflective Records 2025 + 2022)
The beauty of these two EPs by San Francisco artist Cahl Sel is that they're timeless in a very particular sense: they were released in 2022 and 2025 respectively, but I wouldn't flinch if they were dated 1993 and 1995. Cahl Sel operates in a specific lineage of floaty sci-fi techno commonly associated with the UK—see the aforementioned Artificial Intelligence series—though the sound owes as much to Detroit (Kenny Larkin, early Carl Craig) as it does to San Francisco (Spacetime Continuum, Single Cell Orchestra). Both records pair three kinetic club-ready cuts with a wispy, beatless closer. On Every Moment, the uptempo tracks approach NYC deep house moods; "February," the last track, is lush and dreamy, blissfully so. Blue feels more UK: see the rollicking basslines on "Focus" or the choppy drums on "Panoptic." These may be Cahl Sel's first two records, but their sound is exquisite, dialed all the way in.
McHoob
Justin Neofotistos