Masma Dream World - PLEASE COME TO ME (2025)

Unsettling but spiritual, dark but filled with emotions, her live gigs are titled ceremonies. The Gabon-born and New York-based Devi Mambouka, known as Masma Dream World, opens up fantastic spaces to your personal use on her new album and it is recommended to follow her.

Her music involves "invokes, magic, and healing as a form of worship to the universal Dark Mother", making it clear that the experimental industrial dark ambient's biggest trait is its spiritual character audible in the forms of chants and backing vocals that are the leading force of the new album. But there is more, so much more. Even the pace changes as Seeking Your Protection offers a unique, industrial tribal vibes. Not every face of the artist on this album is what I like, but I appreciate the fact that the rather diverse album still feels like a coherent mass of sound.

I'm happy that I will be able to partake in one of her ceremonies during this year's dunk!festival in Ghent. I'm looking forward to this and getting ready my spiritual self. 

PLEASE COME TO ME costs 10 USD.

Check: O, Dark Mother

Country: New York, US

Genre: spiritual dark ambient

Label: Valley of Search

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Fragrance. - Salt Water (2021)

Matthieu Roche, a.k.a. Fragrance with a dot, comes from France and creates very unique blend of heavy club music with extremely airy vocals. His music is both moody and catchy so I couldn't miss the opportunity to post about his second album called Forevermore.

His music, in many ways similar to what another French artist, Hante, does, creates this peculiar feeling in the audience: the urge to dance and to sink in the melancholic atmosphere at the same time. The basses Roche creates are deep and the compositions very much club-fitting, but there's a touch of darkness in them as well. Darkness that is obvious when you listen to his vocals - airy, smooth and whispering-like, a true dream pop way of singing. This surprising and exciting marriage of genres is only more so when the music becomes full front dance-inciting in Bind Me Up with Your Flesh. This depressive dance feeling is so well explained in my favourite track on the album, Crisis: "You will dance your pain away/ You will dance it anyway/ Now the crisis’s back/ Intertwining dark". Easy - you're in pain but you dance anyway, like all of us.

But the true value of the album is how the tracks are both dreamy and extremely catchy at the same time with songs like Covered in Gold (with those fantastic backing vocals!) and Crises are simply speaking pure music hits and it's only fortunate that they, in some way, belong to the dream pop genre.

Salt Water costs 7 EUR.

Check: Crisis

Country: France

Genre: dreamy dark electronica

Label: Synth Religion

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Resina - Speechless (2021)

Karolina Rec is a part of the offstream music scene in Poland for some time now, to the point that she appears also in more mainstream surroundings. The school-educated cellist is well-known for her experiments with neoclassical music and those are very well visible on her new album called Speechless.

In her career, Rec collaborated with and supported so many top-shelf artists, both Polish and international, that it is pointless to list them here. She has left her mark on the experimental music scene here already and she seems ready to make it even more visible. Speechless has very little left from the artist's neoclassical background with a lot of attention put on the industrial and noisy atmosphere with some exceptionally ethereal elements, most notably the heavy use of choir singing. This makes the album both dark and unnerving as well as airy and beautiful. Those worlds collide in Resina's music very often, for example when the war-like drums take over the soothing choir singing in Failed Myth Simulation or when in Manic the cello sounds coexist with very brutal noise.

Although, as the album's title suggests, the release is solely instrumental, its main theme is to "explore ideas about language, the voice and the unpredictability of nature" (like in Darwin's finches, the birds that are a perfect example of said unpredictability). This album that shows music from very different parts of the calm/noisy spectrum, seems to be a good commentary on the nature and language's complicated, not to say experimental, ways.

Speechless costs 11 EUR (9 GBP).

Check: Failed Myth Simulation  

Country: Poland

Genre: choral industrial electronica

Label: 130701

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The Dreamless Sleep - A Breath of Colour | 2016​-​2020 (2021)

I know Matthew Chastney's project from the absolutely outstanding single Until the Sea, one I posted about almost exactly a year ago. Since then, the British artist gathered a good amount of material from the last four years and produced an album/collection called A Breath of Colour.

I knew what to expect and I am not disappointed at all. The artist's music makes a dense and dark take on electronic pop music with very noticeable traces of trip-hop. The compositions leave impressions of warmth and cosiness; they are all about feelings with the quiet love and painful melancholia seemingly accentuated the most. Until the Sea definitely remains my favourite one here, it's just too good, too dreamy and moody to say otherwise - this song slowly disappears in the sea of noisy electronica and this parallel with the lyrics is precious. 

In his work, Chastney is helped by a multitude of talented artists. The lyrics are sung by such people as October's Child's Britt Warner, “Songland" (NBC’s talent reality show) contender Axel Mansoor or singer and actress Faye Nightingale while other guest artists add the neoclassical vibes to Chastney's compositions with violin, cellos and trumpets all present in the atmospheric backgrounds. This makes the album rich and complex in a very artistic way.

A Breath of Colour | 2016​-​2020 costs 6 USD.

Check: Until the Sea 

Country: UK

Genre: dark electronic pop

Label: Through the Static Records

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Janusz Jurga - IST (2021)

Janusz Jurga not only has released five albums under his own name, he is also a member of the Vysoké Čelo collective and a cofounder of the Opus Elefantum label, one of the best on Polish offstream music scene. His newest album is called IST and provides us with everything we love in his music since 2018 and his debut album Duchy Rogowca.

Jurga's deep electronica/dub/techno music is, as always, filled with "dark, dense and oneiric atmosphere", similar to what one can find in dark ambient and dark folk genres. This mysterious and a little bit unnerving ambiance is seamlessly combined with deep-bass electronica making me think of the Lithuanian Giriu Dvasios, who, just like Jurga does, also draws inspirations from folk music to a high degree. Just like on his best-known release Hypnowald, Jurga decorates the electronic passages with forest-originating field recordings and this is something that couldn't fit this music better. This makes the forest dance in a rather ominous way, dance around you and everyone who's lost within. Another thing is the spoken word vocals that appear in the opening and the finishing tracks, performed by Żebyr, the lyrics make the whole album even deeper and more mysterious. Especially the very last sentence of the release: "I guess it doesn't matter what place we ended up in, we're here".

IST costs 2.5 EUR (10 PLN).

Janusz Jurga - Hypnowald (2019) EN

Check: WALD

Country: Poland

Genre: dark folk dub

Label: Opus Elefantum

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Hante. - Morning Tsunami (2021)

Hélène de Thoury, better known as Hante., is one of the artists who mix heavy and deep electronica with ethereal vocals, probably the best one too. Two years after her last album, she released the fifth one entitled Morning Tsunami and, as it is being commented, this may be her best one yet.

The album is "more electronic and brutal" then her previous works and "full of raw and dark emotions, this new production is a silent scream in our sick world". And when you go through de Thoury's social media, it becomes apparent that she is boiling with emotions indeed. It's always a good thing to transmute them into art which usually turns out to be genuine and touching as a result. In her music the feelings are expressed by the deep electronic sounds with very heavy, very dominant beats that bring the atmosphere of nervousness and anxiety rather than fun and joy. This is a particularly dark music in fact, the ambiance is suffocating thanks to the deep layer of electronic sounds with only subtle vocals laying on top. 

There's no wonder that it's true what the label says about Hante. that she's "one-woman powerhouse of electronic might and pulsating energy". This mighty music contrasted with extremely melancholic vocals results in such beautiful compositions like Wasting Time that "reflects some of [the artist's] most intimate thoughts and insecurities" in an extremely catchy way, or my favourite and the most ethereal Catharsis.

Morning Tsunami costs 7 EUR.

Check: Catharsis

Country: France

Genre: heavy bass darkwave

Label: Synth Religion

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O SAALA SAKRAAL - Heven (2021)

Three years after the album Etmaal, the Dutch collective O SAALA SAKRAAL is back with a much shorter release. The mysterious band creates a unique, innovative take on dark ambient/electronica and showed it on Heven, released by the great people of Cyclic Law label in July.

The album is meant to be an act of rebellion against religions as complex organizations of mind-altering ideology, a way of "cleansing and expulsion of the dogmatic metaphysical corruption that is dominated in today's mass religions". There's so much to the messages of each of the tracks and I'm not going to lie I understand all of this, you are welcome to read about those on the Bandcamp page provided. However, to achieve all that, the musicians serve a complicated and multi-layered mix of tribal-paced industrial electronica and dark ambient with a big chunk of sacral music (the project's name is not a mistake) within. The latter is achieved by including a four-piece choir that adds to the uniqueness of this project that consists of an ever-changing (sometimes this means "textural changes, sometimes organic and evolving, sometimes abrupt and overwhelming"), meaningful music.

Heven costs 6 EUR.

Check: Apokatastasis

Country: The Netherlands

Genre: sacral dark electronica

Label: Cyclic Law

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