Well, I'm finishing off this series I left in my drafts in January. I'm gonna stick with my selections from the Winter. This is the first half of the final installment.

A.G. Cook

PC Music mastermind and pop wunderkind, A.G. Cook is setting a stage. He's not doing it alone, but he's orchestrating it with diligence and foresight. Foresight the likes of which are typically associated with witch doctors and adolescent Dalai Lamas. It's adorned with synths that pluck the strings of your inner ear in pure, wet silence. Center stage sits an impalpable bath of velvet, electric water, bathing a hologram of your perfect lover. The central theme involves you breaking the plane, taking everything you want, but keeping nothing - save a little spit in your ear.

aids-3d

The American born, Berlin based artist Daniel Keller is much more than Aids-3d. In addition to engaging in said collaborative relationship with Nik Kosmas, he is involved in the simultaneously illuminating and obfuscating 'Absolute Vitality Inc.', a physical entity that shines light on the dark world of shell corporations by sharing an inconspicuous mailing address with several of them. This is probably one of 10 nails on 10 more fingers, but this cloud plays host to a series of live mixes and tracks which were surely performed to enhance the post-corporate-omniscience aesthetic purveyed by their executors. Honestly the musical end is pretty fucking free, but I love this perspective on tropical house, stadium dnb, disembodied Southern rap and r&b, Dutch bubble vibes, hardstyle, and everything else - musical and otherwise. Deeper in, you'll find Cash Money funeral dirges, Black Sabbath, and an oration of the 1788 most common Ted Talk words, in order of frequency, for the length of a Ted Talk. While they might ask you to reconsider, this shit is simply worth it.

Al Tariq

Tariq Hindic is a young, Norwegian artist living in Sweden. al Tariq or ill Tarik is a naked, reflexive project, featuring raw footwork, hip-hop, and textural dance tracks with hydraulically enhanced rhythms, dystopic orientation, and more than a few live electrical wires. While the immediate appeal lies in its' unhinged, origin-less, aesthetic expression of our technological time, this music works in no small part due to its' honesty. This creator's reality is visibly [audibly] shaped, but not necessarily controlled by our own culture's perpetuation of capitalism and consumption. Global u/dys-topia might be one and the same in Tarik's vision of the future and I am anxious to hear him out.

Forever Traxx

Nearly every post by this mysterious entity is adorned with a different rendering of the featureless gold buddy pictured above. The tracks, and there are many, reflect the figure's pristine yet casually simple construction and range from pure SFX design to near-negligent, pitched-up r&b from decades past, to visionary, pristine dancehall edits that sound like they were made by a supercomputer that went on the fritz in some distant, clean future. It's hard to read, but it's all dripping in texture - absolutely lathered. A positive vibe and distinct sense of flippancy provide the perfect accent to the little bits of sonic art that sporadically appear here.

T C F

Where to begin... I could use an entire paragraph just citing the title of a work by Lars Holdhus. Beautiful, impossibly dense and enigmatic music emanates from this man's machines - or these machines' man. The carefully crafted, cryptic, and ornately detailed titles bear many similarities to the music that they identify. The level of specificity and peculiar intention of these words and music call into question the mortality of their creator. What is TCF? Is this music being generated for/by a machine - mine or his? These rhetorical questions seem to play a large part in this small, yet immense arm of Holdhus' wide range of practices. Other projects include his TEA or Tiny Encryption Algorithm project, distributing global teas and music generated for each, locked USB sticks with works of art, music and the legal rights to them that may some day become accessible if the encryption software used to encode them is hacked. According to its' creator, or 'System Administrator', "TCF is an ordered list of elements of finite possible plaintexts, finite possible cyphertexts, finite possible keys, and the encryption and decryption algorithms which correspond to each key." Ohh, so... music, right? Holdhus has amassed a world of art and mystery worthy of revisiting on a regular basis. Here's to hoping he continues....