Unlike some of the people whose music has been recommended to me, Luludj seems to be completely unknown, and it is for that reason that I implore you to listen to this album. It's one of those rare moments where an album can be so minimalist with its songs but can keep you captivated even as it reaches 70 minutes.

Structurally, the album reminds me of 310's The Dirty Rope - another highly underrated album - where the energetic tracks are right near the beginning, as if both them and ... read more

It's hard to talk about music this personal through a critical lens because of how candid the artist is about their own experiences in their work, and in that regard I don't wanna say I "enjoy this album" per se because that feels wrong, but you get my general opinion from the rating.

Dreamdeathdream is a tender album, not a casual listen by any means. Some songs begin gentle and insular before exploding outward like a built up emotional exorcism, whereas others stay small ... read more

Viscerally explosive and emotionally tender in equal measure, it's a wild beast of an EP. A great deal of character is established in the 15 minutes it runs for.

Me and my boyfriend found this album in a record shop not long ago, and neither of us knowing any Yes but being interested to dip our toes in, we bought it. Oh christ. Anyway it's been a few months and now that we are heavily into both the Yes Album and Fragile, we've relegated this entire album to an ironic inside joke where we go BIIIIIIIIG GENERAYDUH while doing a wide-armed stadium clap - I can tell you right now, clapping along to the choruses of the first two songs definitely ... read more

Love's a funny thing really. What's even funnier is how fake a lot of music with "lovey" sentiments sound when something like ROCKET SCIENCE II comes along. Small human emotions that have had their edges sanded down to make them easier to package were always gonna look stupid when you found the real deal.

This is one of those albums that reminds you how love should be represented in art, a work that depicts how magical it actually is to be in love with somebody. It's a ... read more

I've always found "stream-of-consciousness" projects fascinating, you know the type of thing: the ones that only have a few tracks but oh boy, those track lengths. You know you're getting something good there. It's just nice to see an artist who would usually make an orderly album, every new idea signposted by a new number in the tracklist, encouraging you to go in completely blind. You can really pick the brains of an artist when they do projects like this, because ... read more

Ever watched an old 144p phone recording of a gig from the 2000s, where the mix is all warped because the sound's bouncing off the walls of the venue and the crap phone mic makes everything all fuzzed/crunched out? It's something that on paper would threaten to turn the music into garbled mush, but instead gives it this almost beautiful sheen, like looking through a frosted glass window on a night, seeing what it does to lamp posts, blowing up their shine and creating weird shapes out ... read more

I like to think of myself as a pretty fair Boards of Canada fan (bocsucker, if you will?), and unfortunately that means when it comes to this EP, for me the quality is split straight down the middle: first two tracks are great, last two are meh. The title track has bugged me for a while because although it sounds like it should be good, it's like the most archetypal BoC tune they've ever done - children laughing? check. vocoded cult samples? check. floaty synths that straddle the line ... read more

It isn't often that albums get me near-full force on the first listen, but Cras sure did. Apologies that I haven't yet had the chance to listen to 310's post-Leaf work (and am therefore comparing this to music they made twenty years ago), but here they've taken all their best qualities - their ear for musique concrète, their ethereal melodies that sound like they're being beamed in from space, their great love of percussion - and have really dialled them up. ... read more

Director's commentary pt. 6: "violet signal" was made in late 2022 while I was still at my hard yet enjoyable Christmas job, and "ego depth" was made about six months later, during my long uneventful summer of 2023, where I tried so hard to find work and came away with nothing. Two complete different worlds, I dunno if it comes across in the music though. Retrospectively, I do find "violet signal" to have more of a carefree vibe to it - just having a fun ... read more

Director's commentary pt. 5: not much to say here in regards to how this came about, long story short I was going through and remastering my projects, and I thought it might be nice to make an extra odds-and-ends release consisting of a bunch of SoundCloud exclusives, label comp exclusives and remixes, not necessarily in any particular order but it's funny to me how the first two tracks were both finished in 2020. For most here, there isn't much to be said in terms of background ... read more

Director's commentary pt. 3: I've always seen a small character in the middle of the artwork, stood there in a sea of lights and colour. That isn't the first time with Petrol 3 where I unintentionally did something. My way of working on most of my songs was like a type of hypnosis: I'd often get a good idea going, entirely lock in and nail the whole thing in a single night. This was the case a lot back then, and although it means I can't remember much of the process, ... read more

Director's commentary pt. 2: 2021 was a tough time for me. I won't go too into detail in the interest of keeping this light, but I had an awful breakdown during the summer, the fallout of which coloured my musical output for the next few years afterwards. I found myself in a situation where I physically couldn't write anything tuneful. As mentioned in part two of this series, I've never been proud of PARTRAQ because it was finished around the time I began to lose faith in ... read more

Director's commentary pt. 1: poor old PARTRAQ. I don't know what it is about you, but I've just never really liked you. Not wholly for the music mind, the thing that does always stick with me is the fact I made the entire thing in a fortnight for a URL fest. I know my music is rather superficial, but this album's always taken the cake for me, even though genetically it isn't much different to a Petrol 3 - the favoured son and its twin brother (they were released ... read more

Director's commentary pt. 4: what is texture hop?

It's what it sounds like, really: creating conventional hip-hop beats out of blocks of sound design, the sheet metal boogie. I guess I coined the term because I had no other reference points, and that's super weird considering Autechre's got a bunch of texture hop tunes under their belt from years ago, I am absolutely not the first person to make stuff like this. IDM isn't specific enough a term to describe the music of ... read more

Can't sleep? Try listening to War Stories, better than white noise I tell ya

The problem with Heligoland is that it says basically nothing about anything, but because it's vague word soup lyrics delivered with GarageBand theatrics and production suggesting "gritty and delicate à la Portishead's Third", it's almost like it gives the illusion of saying something. Maybe it actually does say something after all, who knows, but the thing is, it may as well be word soup with GarageBand theatrics if the concept is so unclear that it flies far ... read more