Ignoring the unignorable for a second, 2020 has been a productive year for the West Mineral/Experiences Ltd axis of artists, collectively contributing to a subtle recording of expectations in experimental electronic music. Prior to his collaborative record with exael on WM a few months back, i'd not heard of Ben Bondy, and now he's here with a huge double disc-er on Experiences, a record which also serves as the label's third release in a matter of months in what is their maiden year. Phew! What this says to me is there's an intimidatingly fecund electronic underground of connected characters, all chewing on the same ideas, but each pushing whatever sensibility it is that's emerging in their own unique direction. Taken as a whole, I'm tempted to consider this post-ambient (stick with me here), in that it displays characteristics typical of the genre and its various deviations (minimal, slow moving, abstract), but bends and mutates it in various abrasive and ethereal ways. With Sibling, it’s as if Bondy has installed a virus in an AI ambient generator, and in that subversion simultaneously raising two fingers to the 'Mood' playlist phenomenon that's made 'ambient' a mildly dirty word. Sibling is 15 tracks long, which i'd ordinarily baulk at, but Bondy seems to have nailed down his aesthetic with a micro level of detail. Texturally this is extremely rich - in fact, the texture itself seems to be the point, a prismatic symbiosis of the synthetic and real world decay. Like with that Folder record, there's a debt to glitch in the broken-down ghost in the machine sound, and as always with this world, the influence of Huerco S is writ large, but i'd concede there's even moments where the spectre of Burial looms, palimpsestic sound of hard-to-place origin - but this isn’t nostalgia: Bondy’s music seems to be haunted by a future yet to come. The Ulla and Folder records are deserving of repeat listens, but Bondy may have just turned in the best offering yet. An intricate, complex opus, heatsick and hyperreal like the hissing of fibreglass summer lawns. Limited to 300 copies
