Electronic Favorites From Tom
Written By Tom Adshead, July 13th 2025
We’re filling up the blog in time for the website launch, so I decided to write some thoughts on electronic records I’ve been listening to. A lot of these have been useful for reference when producing my own stuff, some are just great for cooking dinner, and a few are both. In my own work, I tend to pull the most from artists who take genre conventions, and subtract until they’ve reached something hard to recognize. I think it’s useful to resist the maximal urge to keep adding and combining, when sometimes all you need is a little less.
John Beltran, 1996
A friend sent me this recently. Short loops thrown through a bunch of old-school delays, creating these really beautiful rhythmic ambient tracks. Really reminds me of a lot of Barker’s recent work, but a bit more pared back. It seriously feels like it could have come out last year.
“Deluge” is my favourite track I think. It’s built around these looped plucks that are delaying into themselves really beautifully. It’s really elegantly simple, and then an overdriven kick comes in at 2:13 which pushes the track into hypnotic techno territory. My absolute favourite moment comes at 5:00, when these reverb-soaked chords come in to totally recontexualize the loop you’ve been listening to. This would actually make me levitate if I heard it in the club.
Beyond Contact
Vivian Koch, 2021
I was digging through AD93’s Bandcamp and found this one. Spacey and “epic” for lack of a less annoying term. What really grabbed my attention was the amount of room she gives to the huge sub-bass lines. The last two tracks are on a lot of my playlists right now. I love the little glitchy percussive stuff happening in the second half of “Who.”
Vivian Koch, 2021
I was digging through AD93’s Bandcamp and found this one. Spacey and “epic” for lack of a less annoying term. What really grabbed my attention was the amount of room she gives to the huge sub-bass lines. The last two tracks are on a lot of my playlists right now. I love the little glitchy percussive stuff happening in the second half of “Who.”
pondlicker, 2024
Lovely EP from Montreal local Adam Feingold, using the alternate moniker pondlicker. I love the focus throughout on subtle grooves poking through thick, soupy drones. The percussion on “never hit the bottom” sounds like water-filled jugs being struck. “orchid media” has a swung groove that draws the outline of a four-on-the-floor kick without it being there. The whole EP has these danceable moments that also feel like the result of a subtractive process. I can’t afford to eat fine dining but I assume this is what it feels like to eat a single scallop for $60 (in a good way).
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma & Ilyas Ahmed, 2021
Super beautiful ambient with moments of live-recorded guitar. Tape hiss and droning bits everywhere. You can hear both sides of the collaboration really distinctly, which I always love. Not a lot to say about individual tracks, just listen to the whole thing. I think my favourite track is “Black Across White.”
Sade, 1993
Sorry to break the austere electronic thing. This compilation is awesome, some of the best night-driving music ever (I don’t have a licence but I can imagine). “Kiss of Life” and “Smooth Operator” is on super heavy rotation right now. It’s crazy how many recognizable hits she had around the early 90s, and they’re all great to make dinner to. Bring back some of this indoor-smoking lounge vibe.
jackzebra, 2025
I feel like a lot of my friends tried to tell me about Jackzebra before this came out. Getting a 30+ track album made of minute-long tracks takes me back to Drink While Driving if You Want to Meet God! coming out when I was in high school. Lots of tightly packed production ideas that don’t have a chance to overstay their welcome. “魔鬼似爪牙 (Devil-Like Minions)” is beautifully built on granular piano and big pulses of synth sub, layered with some sampled double bass. His lyrics are also very cool to read if, like me, you don’t speak Chinese:
“Marshmallow in the oven
Melted
Water in the thermos
Temperature’s not gonna change anymore
Tell me, should I trust you or not?”
Geo Rip, 2018
Full of breathy synths and kick patterns that are hard to understand. It sometimes has the pallette of melodic techno, but never leans into something totally recognizable. I really enjoy the idiosyncratic blend of synthesized industrial elements and drums that sometimes feel more at home in live-recorded settings. Would recommend to anyone who likes Against All Logic and Leon Vynehall, but it’s maybe a bit more impenetrable than both. “Expo” is a standout.
Louf, 2025
Big fan of Louf. He runs a great label with Tom VR that has some of my favourite dance tracks of the last few years. This EP is full of the micromanaged drum programming that I love from his work, paired with some beautifully detuned lead synth lines and squishy bass. The title track is my favourite, using some swung UKG-adjacent patterns and turning them into the basis for a track that feels emotionally arresting yet fun and danceable. His full-length record from last year is great as well.
Loidis, 2018
I’m not very shy about my reverence for Brian Leeds’ stuff. His releases under Huerco S. are some of my favourite ambient releases of all time. His reemergence as Loidis has kind of overshadowed his old work in some ways, with the recent One Day kind of householdifying his name. For a while, though, it seemed like Loidis was a one-off moniker used for this project. It has a dim, smoky grit that makes reference to some late 90s/early 00s club scenes I was too not-born-yet to ever dance to, and feels like a reactionary dismissal of the too-clean production techniques brought on by DAWs and iPads and so on.