As long-standing champions of underground electronic music, Inverted Audio immersed itself in a vast spectrum of releases throughout 2025. We extend our sincere thanks to every producer, record label and publicist who shared their music with us over the past year.
2025 marked a significant milestone for Inverted Audio, as our evolution from online music magazine to one of London’s leading electronic music specialist record stores continued to gather momentum. Along the way, we’ve championed the artists and labels we believe in, nurtured a growing community of like-minded listeners, and hosted in-store events with matsssiii, Will You & Philipp Priebe, Andy Green, Federsen and The MFA, alongside hosting and organising record fairs at Brixton Brewery and Trevino’s at Houghton Festival. Each moment brought people together through a shared love of electronic music. Thank you to everyone who has been part of this journey.
As is tradition, we’ve shortlisted the albums, presented in alphabetical order, that shaped and soundtracked our year. Reissues and various artists compilations have been excluded, culminating in our Best Albums of 2025.
Shortlist
2501 – Ulmeyda [Heaven Smile]
A Taut Line – Self-Surveillance [Diskotopia]
Alex Marsh – Trellis [Not Not Fun]
Andrea – Living Room [Ilian Tape]
Area 3 – View [Khotin Industries]
Aris Kindt – Now Claims My Timid Heart [Quiet Time]
Bad LSD Trips – Ultrafest [enmossed]
Barbarelle – Celesta [Hidden Harmony]
Barker – Stochastic Drift [Smalltown Supersound]
Ben Bondy – XO Salt Liif3 [3XL]
Ben Oyefeso – Sequenzmuzik [St Odes]
Ben Shirken – H.D. Reliquary [29 Speedway]
Benoît Pioulard – Steeples Writhe [Disques d’Honoré]
Bird of Peace Orchestra – Bird of Peace Orchestra [Do You Have Peace?]
Black Sites – R4 [Tresor]
Blawan – SickElixir [XL Recordings]
Borgesian Term – False 06 [False Aralia]
Box5ive – Dying Angel [Initiate Records]
Client_03 – Testbed Assembly
Cortex of Light – ILLUMINOTECNICA [3XL]
Cousin – Wake The Town [Moonshoe Records]
Debit – Desaceleradas [Modern Love]
Discovery Zone – Quantum Web EXP [RVNG Intl.]
DJ Trystero – Cantor’s Paradise [FELT]
Djrum – Under Tangled Silence [Houndstooth]
Elijah Minnelli – Clams As A Main Meal [Breadminster County Council]
Externalism – False 03 [False Aralia]
FaltyDL – Neurotica [Planet Mu]
Guentner + Spieth – Conversion [Affin]
Hieroglyphic Being – Dance Music 4 Bad People [Smalltown Supersound]
Holden & Zimpel – The Universe Will Take Care Of You [Border Community]
In Transit (Dave Huismans) – In Transit [FELT]
Indopan – In Opulence [100% Silk]
Iri.gram – False 04 [False Aralia]
J – Little Lock [Se Dessaisir Publishing]
Joe Seven x dBridge – Radical Apathy [Exit Records]
Jonnnah – What They Left [Second End Records]
JP – We’re Here All The Time [Theory Therapy]
K-LONE – Sorry I Thought You Were Someone Else [Incienso]
Kalani – Rain Man [Craigie Knowes]
Kelly Moran – Don’t Trust Mirrors [Warp]
Kolorit – Workshop XXIV [Workshop]
Kommune – Oast [Second Circle]
Leif – Collide [AD 93]
Light-Space Modulator – The Rising Wave [AD 93]
Loradeniz – SUN SHONE [Music From Memory]
Loscil – Lake Fire [Kranky]
Low End Activist – Airdrop II & III [Peak Oil]
Lucrecia Dalt – A Danger To Ourselves [RVNG Intl.]
Lukid – Underloop [Death Is Not The End]
Lynyn – Ixona [Sooper Records]
M. Sage – Tender / Wading [RVNG Intl.]
Mammo – General Patterns [Short Span]
Margaux Gazur – Blurred Memories [Smallville Records]
Max Cooper – On Being [Mesh]
Michael Grigoni & Pan•American – New World, Lonely Ride [Kranky]
Moomin – Into The Distance [Oath]
Musicentrydelete – Selfless [Mood Hut]
N Kramer & Magnus Bang Olsen – Pastoral Blend [Music From Memory]
Naemi – Breathless, Shorn [28912]
Now Always Fades – Into The Doldrums [Northern Underground Records]
NZO – Come Alive [DDS]
Oliver – Quiet Thud [North View Records]
Orchestroll – Corrosiv [29 Speedway]
Patioworld – Moonlight Beach [100% Silk]
Paul St Hilaire – w/ The Producers [Kynant Records]
Perila – The air outside is crazy right now [VAAGNER]
Polygonia – Dream Horizons [Dekmantel]
Primeiro – The Appearance [Danzee]
PVAS – Slipstream [Kapsela]
Rat Heart – Dancin’ In The Streets [Shotta Tapes]
René Najera – Painted Life [100% Silk]
Sandwell District – Hidden
Secondo – Over Under [What About Never]
Shine Grooves – Sequences for Fluttering [Not Not Fun]
Shinetiac – Infiltrating Roku City [West Mineral Ltd.]
Shinichi Atobe – Discipline [DDS]
Siriusmo – Buletten & Blumen [Monkeytown Records]
Skander Jaïbi – Who Has The Right To Closure?
Slikback – Attrition [Planet Mu]
Snares – Fusion [Ilian Tape]
SnPLO – The Cocaines [Pin]
Stenny – Sharp Fragments [Ilian Tape]
Stimming – Friedrich [Stimming Recordings]
Sweetzak – Intuitive Fields [Femacosmé]
SYNALEGG – Computer Series / Last Run [OOH-Sounds]
Tim Hecker – Shards [Kranky]
TREN – Tears of Things, Sorrows of the Universe [Not Meant To Happen]
U.e. – Hometown Girl [28912]
Valentino Mora – Biotope [Spazio Disponibile]
Vehicular – False 05 [False Aralia]
Whatever The Weather – Whatever The Weather II [Ghostly]
Will Long & DJ Sprinkles – Acid Trax [Comatonse]
Wrecked Lightship – Drained Strands [Peak Oil]
Xenia Reaper – Nept Polarisation [Delsin]
20. U
ARCHENFIELD
Lex
ARCHENFIELD is a deeply immersive exploration of landscape, folklore and collective memory, rooted in the borderlands of Herefordshire. Drawing on fragments of folk music, broadcast media, online archives and original production, U constructs a hazy sonic tapestry where myths, ghost stories and rural histories blur into one another. The album operates in a hauntological space, where sound becomes a vessel for stories shaped by retelling, distortion and time – ghosts as “holes in time”.
Comparisons to The Caretaker feel apt, though where memory loss haunted the internal mind, ARCHENFIELD examines memory embedded in place: pigeons, churches, fields and ancient ruins carrying emotional residue. Vinyl crackle, drones, distorted brass and spoken-word fragments conjure a pastoral England rich with unofficial histories, resisting the flattening of space and identity seen in modern life. Timely and resonant, ARCHENFIELD reconnects listeners with forgotten narratives and reminds us that meaning still lies buried in the land – if we’re willing to listen.
A special mention must go to the album’s layout and presentation: exquisite design work accompanied by a 24-page booklet. ARCHENFIELD stands as a true work of art.
Released: 10 October 2025
Record Label: Lex Records
Best Track: Ariconium
Read: IA MIX 397 U
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19. Darkness Darkness
Animation
A Visiting Link
After two compelling releases, enigmatic imprint A Visiting Link unveil their first full-length LP from Darkness Darkness – an eight-track album steeped in unconventional downtempo electronics. Titled Animation, the record drifts through abstract, ambient, dub and glitch-inflected terrain, forming a data-driven soundscape that feels both otherworldly and strikingly mutant. Fans of Actress, Purelink, False Aralia, Short Span and co:clear will find plenty to savour – a release made for altered states and adventurous listening.
Released: 15 January 2025
Record Label: A Visiting Link
Best Track: Darkness Darkness
Read: News Article
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18. Aris Kindt
Now Claims My Timid Heart
Quiet Time
Aris Kindt’s Now Claims My Timid Heart is a quietly powerful statement of what downtempo and ambient electronic music can achieve when it prioritises human feeling over mood-setting prettiness, further cementing Quiet Time’s reputation for emotionally literate releases.
Rather than chasing bliss or escapism, the album dwells in anticipation, longing, memory, and the interior spaces where desire, doubt, and connection coexist. Its sound world feels cinematic and in transit – like watching landscapes shift from a train window – using texture, rhythm, and timbre to encode lived experience rather than relying on melody alone.
Aris Kindt explore intimacy at a distance, the weight of unspoken histories, and the unanswered questions that accompany love, time, and existence, balancing moments of warmth and communion with tension and existential unease. Rejecting saccharine ambient tropes, Now Claims My Timid Heart is immersive, reflective, and deeply human, an album that asks to be felt and remembered rather than merely heard.
Released: 7 November 2025
Record Label: Quiet Time
Best Track: Saichh Sequences
Read: Album Review
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17. yeyo
farewell the past
soak
Kazakh label soak return with farewell the past, their third full-length release – a haunting ambient and experimental album from Saint Petersburg sound sculptor yeyo. Blurring bass, trip-hop, IDM and vaporous ambient, it drifts through dreamlike spaces with quiet intensity. For fans of bblisss, West Mineral Ltd., xpq? and 3XL.
Released: 25 April 2025
Record Label: soak
Best Track: Look At Me
Read: Track Premiere
16. James K
Friend
AD 93
Friend, the third full-length album from James K (Jamie Krasner) on AD 93, is a beautifully poised record that captures nostalgia without retreating into the past. Sitting at the intersection of dream pop, shoegaze and experimental club music, it balances forward-thinking production with a deep emotional warmth.
Softer and more intimate than her earlier work, Friend leans into misty ambience, dubby low-end and breakbeat flourishes, all anchored by Krasner’s unmistakable, angelic vocals. Collaborations with producers including Patrick Holland, Priori, Ben Bondy and Special Guest DJ lend the album a polished yet organic feel, while Krasner’s voice remains its emotional centre – velvety, hypnotic and quietly commanding. Lyrically, the album explores love, loss, vulnerability and self-discovery, often hovering between melancholy and uplift. Tracks like Play, On God and Doom Bikini highlight her range, turning heartbreak into something healing. Friend is immersive, tender and quietly powerful.
Released: 5 September 2025
Record Label: AD 93
Best Track: On God
Read: Album Review
15. Pancratio
Automatic House
Faith Beat
Berlin-based DJ and producer Pancratio arrives with Automatic House, a confident and highly assured debut album on Ryan Elliott’s imprint Faith Beat. Pressed across 2 x 12”, Automatic House moves fluidly through deep house, after-hours tech house, hardgroove hypnosis and garage-inflected swing. Thrashed prominently at Houghton, low-slung basslines and driving drums form the backbone, while cheeky, appetising vocal snippets flutter across the mix, injecting warmth and character. There’s a loose, lived-in quality to the production – never overworked, always moving – recalling the spirit of DJ Sprinkles’ more pounding moments as K-S.H.E. Automatic House is a debut that feels fully formed.
Released: 24 October 2025
Record Label: Faith Beat
Best Track: Deep Beat
14. Purelink
Faith
Peak Oil
Following the quiet impact of their album Signs – a record that earned a place in our Best Albums of 2023 – Chicago-born electronic trio Purelink return with Faith on Los Angeles-based imprint Peak Oil. Across six expansive tracks, Faith unfolds with patience and clarity. Dubbed-out rhythms pulse softly beneath layers of gauzy ambience, while live instrumentation and exposed vocals introduce a human fragility that feels increasingly central to Purelink’s work. The album invites stillness rather than spectacle – music designed for inward listening, late-night reflection, or recalibration. Faith is a record that resists urgency and rewards attention.
Released: 6 June 2025
Record Label: Peak Oil
Best Track: First Iota (feat. Angelina Nonaj)
Read: News Article
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13. Sa Pa
Ambeesh
Short Span
Following March’s The Fool EP, Australian producer Sa Pa returns to Matthew Kent’s Short Span with Ambeesh, his fifth album and one that quietly reframes a decade of work into a cohesive, immersive LP revealing a previously hidden body of material rooted in abstract ambient and dub techno.
Written between 2014 and 2019, the album has long existed in the background of Sa Pa’s output, waiting for the right context to surface. That patience pays off. Conceptually aligned with his FORUM debut, Ambeesh draws together layered field recordings, slow-burn dub rhythms and weightless ambient passages into some of his most texturally rich music to date. The tracks feel lived-in rather than archival – not relics of a past phase, but ideas that have matured quietly, gaining depth through restraint.
There’s a strong sense of continuity here: the atmospheric language, pressure shifts and submerged motion hinted at in the Enter Sa Pa production mix now unfold in full. Low-end pulses press gently against the body, while drifting tones and environmental fragments create a sense of suspended time. This is music that works at volume, yet remains equally intimate through headphones — responsive to the listener’s circadian rhythms, expanding and contracting with subtle force.
Artwork by The Designers Republic underscores the album’s considered presentation, but it’s the sound itself that lingers. Ambeesh dissolves the boundary between club-informed experimentation and deep listening with rare confidence, reaffirming Sa Pa as an artist unafraid to let ideas breathe. Forward-thinking, patient and singular, it’s a release that feels perfectly timed – not late, but finally ready.
Released: 21 July 2025
Record Label: Short Span
Best Track: Nonspiration
Read: News Article
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12. Oneohtrix Point Never
Tranquilizer
Warp Records
Daniel Lopatin delivers Tranquilizer, a record that reframes the familiar tension at the heart of Oneohtrix Point Never. It’s not the sound of sedation, but of resurfacing; not an escape, but an awakening.
Where R Plus Seven shimmered with crystalline arpeggiators and Garden of Delete convulsed in feverish digital spasms, Tranquilizer occupies a more grounded, tactile space. The album traces a passage from weightless calm to emotional release – a necessary cycle of withdrawal and return in a world that feels at once mundane and overwhelming.
Tranquilizer is OPN at his most lucid and cinematic, mapping the afterglow of digital dreams with a renewed sense of clarity and restraint. There’s warmth here, and reflection; a sense that after years of restless experimentation, Lopatin has arrived somewhere quiet enough to listen.
Released: 21 November 2025
Record Label: Warp
Best Track: Cherry Blue
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11. Ghost Dubs
Extended Damaged Versions
Pressure
Michael Fiedler returns as Ghost Dubs with Extended Damaged Versions, a formidable reimagining of material from last year’s Damaged album. Rather than a simple set of remixes, this six-track release functions as a parallel universe to the original record – heavier, deeper and more unhinged – with Fiedler pushing his dub techno language to its breaking point. Mastered by Stefan Betke (POLE), the sound is vast, corroded and immersive.
Opening cut “Dub Regulator” immediately sets the tone. Its seismic low-end grind and relentless, FX-saturated momentum somehow eclipses the original, swelling in weight and intensity as hypnotic, droid-like pulses lock the listener into its gravitational pull. From there, Fiedler begins a methodical process of distortion and decay, probing and disfiguring his own source material into increasingly warped forms.
The album drifts toward its conclusion with “Lobotomy Version,” where ambient pulses float in deep space, untethered from rhythm yet heavy with atmosphere. It’s here that Extended Damaged Versions most closely mirrors the alchemy of Ghost Dubs’ live performances — tracks unravelled and rebuilt through desk-side sorcery into something raw and spellbinding.
Crucially, this is not an exercise in repetition or excess. Extended Damaged Versions stands confidently on its own, transforming Damaged into a fresh dub odyssey. Brutal, meditative and deeply physical, it’s another vital chapter in Michael Fiedler’s evolving dub universe.
Released: 11 April 2025
Record Label: Pressure
Best Track: Dub Regulator
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10. Lord Of The Isles
Signals Aligned
Dusk Delay
Since emerging in the 2010s, Edinburgh-based producer Neil McDonald – aka Lord Of The Isles – has consistently blurred the lines between deep house, ambient, dub and kosmische electronics. His new album Signals Aligned sharpens that vision into one of his most conceptually focused and sonically adventurous works to date.
Inspired not by the dancefloor but by readings on anomalous phenomena – particularly ideas of hidden, multidimensional layers embedded within reality – McDonald channels fascination with perception, distortion and the unseen. Rather than following a fixed blueprint, the album evolved organically, shaped by accidents, degraded samples and equipment pushed beyond its limits. Granular processing, tape machines and modular systems behave as unpredictable collaborators, reinforcing themes of discovery through noise and instability.
Signals Aligned hovers between precision and uncertainty, pairing ethereal experimental electronics with dub-heavy undercurrents. It’s an album defined by tension: clarity and collapse, beauty and unease, always suggesting something just beyond reach. In an age of digital overload and algorithmic listening, the record also serves as a quiet defence of physical, embodied encounters with sound.
Both a continuation of McDonald’s earlier work and a step into new territory, Signals Aligned feels like a marker in Lord Of The Isles’ evolving trajectory – a moment of alignment before venturing further into the unknown.
Released: 12 September 2025
Record Label: Dusk Delay
Best Track: Re-ionization
Read: Feature // Interview
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9. RAVEN
Gnosis
Incienso
San Francisco-based musician Raven delivers a hypnotic dub ambient album on NYC-based record label Incienso. Known for his meticulous approach to sound design and genre-fluid style, this album melds warped synthesizer tones, trance-like melodies, and deep, pulsing ambient dub house. Highly recommended if you’re into Brothomstates and The Other People Place.
Released: 14 February 2025
Record Label: Incienso
Best Track: In Loving Memory
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8. Khotin
Peace Portal
Khotin Industries
Canadian producer Khotin uses analog keyboards and drum machines to elicit that sense of nostalgia for a long-loved record on the first listen. The warm synth patterns paired with woozy, VHS-like warps and scratches wraps you into a comfortable space and is easy to get lost in and revisit whenever you need a pick me up. His latest, ‘Peace Portal’, plays on our desire for nostalgia with genuine, near schmaltzy sentimentality in some places and tongue in cheek playfulness in others.
‘Peace Portal’ is Khotin at his best, as he leans into and slyly comments on our cultural fixation on nostalgia. The inviting nature of Khotin’s productions shine as always, gently making its case as one of the year’s essential releases. It stands apart from other analog ambient releases because he is wise enough to know the emotions and subtle humour inserted into his tracks make it compelling, whether he’s processing contemporary malaise with the rest of us or poking fun at our perpetual longing for the past.
Released: 23 April 2025
Record Label: Khotin Industries
Best Track: Oasis Bioreference
Read: Album Review
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7. Efdemin
Poly
Ostgut Ton
After a six year absence, Phillip Sollmann returns to the Efdemin moniker, and a revived Ostgut Ton, with ‘Poly’. As with previous records, Sollmann runs adjacent to sounds of inspiration rather than attempting to create a copy. Take 2010’s ‘Chicago’, where he applied a Chicago House template to his production, merging that city’s deep musical history with the cool, calculated textures of Berlin. His previous Efdemin full-length, ‘New Atlantis’, was an ambitious fusion of electronica and avant-garde minimalism. ‘Poly’ retains elements of that exploratory mindset with a multi-faceted exploration of micro-tonal sounds, polyrhythms, and grooving techno and house.
The album builds and flows like a DJ set, ramping up the energy from the opening cacophony of “Drift” that brings in unsettled vocal samples, crisp beats, and atmospheric synths. The rhythms of “Trophic Cascade” echo from wall to wall, showcasing an ace minimal dance sound that’s infectious in its simplicity. ‘Poly’ builds to higher BPMs while maintaining a claustrophobic mood, with the centerpiece being the stunning sci-fi techno of “Microphase”. Its hypnotic, saturated production rumbles like an earthquake.
While ‘Poly’ is rooted in the techno sphere, a handful of tracks act as an expert synthesis of the academic side of Efdemin’s production with his clubbier instincts honed behind the decks. Opening with live cymbal rides that quickly mutate back and forth between synths and electronic percussion, the title track is a headphone brain melter that utilizes all the speaker space to send sounds bouncing and rattling throughout the mix.
Released: 11 November 2025
Record Label: Ostgut Tom
Best Track: Signal to Noise
Read: Album Review
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6. Eletun Selona
Infinita Series
Sewer Sender
Infinita Series is the final vinyl release on sewer sender, the Swedish label dreamt up by martinou and Eletun Selona. This album is a labour of love not only from Eletun Selona, but it is also the result of the collaborative effort from his friends and loved ones to put together his final body of work, after the producer tragically passed away in 2024. It’s a culmination of dedication to music, and of determination to honour the memory, creativity and talent of a friend, which makes it worth listening to alone.
Released: April 2025
Record Label: sewer sender
Best Track: Intint
Read: Album Review
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5. Carrier
Rhythm Immortal
Modern Love
Guy Brewer has never been one for standing still. One of the minds behind the somewhat-legendary Commix project, whose forward-thinking and innovative DnB releases found a natural home on the unquestionably-legendary label Metalheadz, in the late 2000s a move to Berlin coincided with the creation of his techno-oriented Shifted production alias.
The Carrier sound borrows precisely and tastefully from each of these, combining rude tech-step sensibilities with blisteringly-cold ambient elements, clinical techno textures with deep dub inspirations. After a steady run of five EPs establishing an already ear-pricking body of work, the project-to-date is now crystallised with Rhythm Immortal, Guy’s debut LP release as Carrier, courtesy of the Boomkat affiliated label, Modern Love.
Not overstretched, packaged and curated with the same care and attention that each bar of each track receives. An album where the devil is in the detail, the intricately-woven pattern of rhythms and textures that offer up new sonic routes to explore on each and every listen.
Released: 24 October 2025
Record Label: Modern Love
Best Track: That Veil Of Yours feat. Voice Actor
Read: Feature // Interview
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4. Irini
Lost In Dreams
All Possible Worlds
The Traumprinz project is admittedly one of the most fascinating in the electronic music scene. A combination of genuine anonymity, rejection of mainstream streaming platforms, relentless output across genres, and lack of fanfare upon releasing new music has ironically built a fanbase with the kind of fervent obsession that’s usually reserved for major festival headliners, your uncle’s favourite arena rock band, or Taylor Swift.
Because, whether you believe the hype or not, the sheer volume and quality of work produced is quite staggering, and the reticence for public adoration, in a world where everyone appears to be seeking constant validation, is genuinely refreshing. The way he releases his work is simple. A mix is uploaded, people listen, and then wait in hope for a vinyl release. Perhaps that will arrive after a few years, or perhaps it won’t. The virtue of patience, one that seems ever-increasingly rare in a culture of instant gratification, is a necessary requisite for following Traumprinz.
In other cases, a shopping cart link is added to the all possible worlds website, and punters can choose whether to place their faith and hard-earned cash in the producer. And each and every time, people do. And I think that’s because, now more than ever, it’s nice to put your faith in something and actually see it repaid.
Released: 28 October 2025
Record Label: All Possible Worlds
Best Track: Concaved
Read: Album Review
3. CLARK
Steep Stims
Throttle Records
Steep Stims marks something of a return for Clark. After forays into Thom Yorke’s school of a vocally-injected kind of IDM, as well as a number of full-length soundtrack LPs, the endlessly industrious producer drops a record that would fit snugly on the Warp Records shelves. A spot Chris Clark would, in the label’s golden age, have felt very much at home as he established himself as a mainstay there, alongside the likes of Plaid, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada, Autechre, et al.
But despite inevitable experimental leanings, Steep Stims is heavily rooted in dancefloor aesthetics; it’s a record that, despite all its intricacies, feels crafted to be heard, in its heavier and more dramatic moments, in a strobe-slashed woodland or cavernous dripping basement. Indeed, a recent live set at Draaimolen received wide praise whilst tapping into the productions found on the album.
Released on Clark’s own Throttle Records, Steep Stims sprawls languidly across genre boundaries, utilising reverb-drenched trance arps, off-kilter piano and DnB workouts, and lush electronica soundscapes, all shot through with an irresistible sensation of 90s nostalgia that both recalls the earlier productions such as Clarence Park, and threads a coherent path through this delightfully chaotic sonic maze of mirrors.
Released: 7 November 2025
Record Label: Throttle Records
Best Track: Globecore Flats
Read: Feature // Interview
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2. Big Hands
Thauma
Marionette
Thauma, the debut album from Italian-born, London-based producer Big Hands – co-founder of the Baroque Sunburst label – arrives on Ali Safi’s ever-adventurous Canadian imprint Marionette. Conceived across two vivid dreams while crossing a storm-lashed Mediterranean in June 2024, the record seeks to preserve those imagined sounds and structures as faithfully as possible.
Across ten interwoven tracks, Big Hands layers tuned percussion – bells, balafon and other resonant timbres recorded while travelling through Italy, Greece, Egypt and Turkey – with contributions from a close circle of collaborators. The result is a hypnotic fusion of hand percussion, soft chimes and fluid polyrhythms that gently blur the line between ritual sound and waking life. Thauma feels less like a conventional electronic album and more like a lucid passage through memory, dream and motion: immersive, transportive and quietly enchanting.
Released: 11 April 2025
Record Label: Marionette
Best Track: Presagio – Hē thálassa hē kath’hēmâs
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1. F7
Lost In Flower
Acting Press
Two years on from PLO Man’s Anonymousmaterial EP, the ever-enigmatic Acting Press resurfaces with a statement release: Lost In Flower, a triple-vinyl opus from F7 – the collaborative project of Acting Press co-founder All Rest No People and Vancouver’s Downtown Solutions (Jean Brazeau). Even by the label’s elusive standards, this one arrived with serious mystique – and disappeared just as quickly. Limited to 500 copies and gone in a flash, it already feels like a cult artefact in the making.
Across 15 tracks, Lost In Flower captures the essence of Acting Press at their most dialled-in and expansive. Downtempo house, bleep-tinged techno and woozy sci-fi electronics intertwine with an almost telepathic elegance, every rhythm and pad imbued with a soft-focus haze. You can hear the patience in the process: the sense of two minds quietly sculpting sound over years, finding that sweet spot between restraint and psychedelic drift. It’s head music – deeply textural, gently euphoric, and endlessly replayable.
Acting Press has long balanced elusivity with influence, its releases shaping the underground from the shadows. With key figures like PLO Man and C3D-E now orbiting other projects (midi_bug and Pin), Lost In Flower feels like both a return and a renewal – proof that the label’s guiding spirit remains intact. All Rest No People’s history with the imprint runs deep, while Downtown Solutions brings an unmistakably Vancouver-rooted sensibility, honed through years of parties, tapes and left-of-centre experiments. Their chemistry here is seamless: machines in conversation, melodies emerging like half-remembered dreams.
There are nods to Detroit’s emotional techno lineage, shards of ambient dreamscapes, even flickers of psychedelic trance – but the record never settles into pastiche. Instead, it drifts forward with quiet assurance, sketching an alternate club continuum where the edges are blurred and the vibe is everything. Presented in a thick poly sleeve with a subtle front-sticker, the physical object matches the music’s understated allure.
For many – ourselves included – Lost In Flower isn’t just a highlight of the year; it is the year’s defining record. A sprawling, lovingly crafted world pressed across three slabs of vinyl, shared briefly with the world before vanishing into collections – exactly how an Acting Press masterpiece should be.
Released: August 2025
Record Label: Acting Press
Best Track: Aion
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Aris KindtBig HandsCarrierClarkDarkness DarknessEfdeminEletun SelonaF7Ghost DubsIriniJames KKhotinLord Of The IslesOneohtrix Point NeverPancratioPurelinkRAVENSa PaUyeyoA Visiting LinkActing PressAD 93All Possible WorldsDusk DelayFaith BeatInciensoKhotin IndustriesLex RecordsMarionetteModern LoveOstgut TonPeak OilPressureQuiet Timesewer senderShort SpansoakThrottle RecordsWarp Records2025