2024 Music Enjoyer Pt. 7
All Aboard the Intergalactic Light-Rail (Midnight Metroplexus Line)
The Grand Intergalactic Light-Rail spans a million galaxies and more stops than can be counted in any terrestrial lifespan. Suffice to say—name a feeling, a type of place you want to be, and destinations matching your desires shall appear, seemingly without limit, arrayed upon the glowing surface of your ticket. Here, we find a few stops along the Midnight Metroplexus Line, home to rain-soaked cyber-dystopias and geothermically active rogue moons, riven by volcanic bass eruptions and crushing subzero nightsides. Alright then, all limb-parts inside the ride, we’re off!
E.R.P. - Faded Caprice
Fellow Dallas native Gerard Hanson has been making some of the finest electro and techno on our particular Earth-variant for decades now, and shows no sign of slowing down any time soon. Both his more electro-oriented E.R.P. project and the dub-techno focused Convextion alias have seen quite a bit of activity in the last few years, and I am here for all of it. One of the biggest highlights of 2024 for me was seeing him perform live earlier this year at the utterly wicked 3-day music festival (Jackie O Body’s School of Dance Vol II: Electric Boogaloo, hosted at Rubber Gloves Studios here in Denton TX). I feel relatively confident in saying that most of the international techno glitterati would have given a chunk of their souls to be in that room, seeing him blend beloved classics of his repertoire (TX Trill anyone?) with insane brand new material, crammed inside a cramped black shotgun-box of a room, stuffed to bursting with rapturously sweat-drenched electro-freaks, all collectively losing their minds to this music.
The new E.R.P. album settles into a vibe that’s somehow both comfy and warm while also feeling ice-cold and distant, a bit like staring out across a frozen alien landscape from inside a steaming greenhouse-habitat.
Plant43 - Luminous Machines
Like ERP, Plant43 has been putting out top-quality electro for decades now, and also shows no signs of slowing down at all. With “Luminous Machines,” he’s taken a slightly different approach which I think works really well — the album’s vinyl version is purely the beat-driven electro heaters, and while the digital version intersperses a whole mini-album’s worth of evocative ambient synthscapes in between the main tracks, giving home listeners a whole different experience. If you’ve heard Plant43 before, you know what to expect — if not, you’re in for deliciously well-produced, cybernetically-enhanced, emotionally resonant electro music out there.
Ole Mic Odd - Mythical Realm
Sometimes you just need to blast beats from your ride, to serve as both warning to would-be foes and rallying-cry to all allies. Whether it bangs from the trunk of a limo-coded terrestrial-crawler, the straining sails of a wind-surfing hovercraft, the shredded wake behind a Black Atlantic wavejumper, or an event horizon diving cruiser-class starship — this album, my friends, satisfies all instances.
MetaComplex - Synthetic Flesh
Perfectly crafted lab-grade electro suitable for grappling up the side of gleaming neon skyscrapers on your way to hijack some black market military weapons-tech. If you get caught, this recording will self-erase from your playback history.
So don’t get caught.
Legowelt - A Field Guide To The Void
Legowelt is one of those producers whose discography is like a runaway alien kudzu variant that doubles in size every time you turn away for five seconds, and now that he’s been at it for (good god) nearly 30 years now, it’s a whole planet-sized jungle unto itself, teeming with fantastical cryptids communicating on invisible sensory wavelengths. You could get lost for days in it, and still only see a tiny fraction of the whole.
Here, helpfully, we have A Field Guide To The Void, which wraps some of his tastiest vibes into a single 3xLP package from eternal scene warriors Clone Records — aquaculture electro, mist-hazed hardware house, biomutant breaks, alien stadium anthems, time-portal italo, and other sounds seemingly plucked from alternate realities.
Aserrín - Signal Decay EP
Another quasi-local Dallasite, Matt Ballenger aka Aserrín, runs an excellent small record label (Pan-Am Tracks) and splits his time between TX and Colombia. This is one of two extra-juicy star-blessed electro EPs he’s released this year (the other one is included on an upcoming post), in addition to a very solid label comp and a vinyl-only outing distro’d by Clone from DVS NME & Krypton 81.
DJ Stingray 313 - Industry 4.0 EP
DJ Stingray 313 has been putting out some of the hardest-edged electro & techno on the planet since the early 00s, and their output has only become more refined over time. At this point, roughly 10 minutes of new music from them is enough to blister the heat-shielding off a spaceship. Pure machine energy music.
Lanark Artefax - Metallur
Bots and bees, beings and nulls — we have before us, here, a blade-running dystopian audio-film from the one known as Lanark Artefax, rendered directly unto whatever part of your consciousness can be said to “hear”. I can give no higher compliment or review than to say that I literally bought two (2) copies of the vinyl pressing.
Cybotron - Parallel Shift
It would be grossly uncouth to gloss over a BRAND NEW CYBOTRON RECORD in a list like this, so here it is my fellow freakbots: two tracks (and a bonus edit) of flawlessly executed, ice-cold but deeply funky electro from the undisputed grandmasters of the genre. This one’s for all the A1 robot breakers out there, waiting for something special to unleash their ultimate moves on the dancefloor of unsuspecting normie humans.