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Fact Mix 806: exael
Fact Mix 806: exael
West Mineral Ltd. artist exael straddles the line between personal home-listening and social energy on a mind-bending mix.
Over the past nine years, exael has quietly built one of the most vital discographies in what could loosely be called “ambient”. However, the music of exael (who also produces under their own name naemi and various other monikers) is never quite so straightforward: within single tracks, exael can move from serene, beatless drift to throbbing, gated rhythms via electrifying shifts in mood. It shares the same kind of tangible depth, scale and unpredicatibility as the classic dub techno of Porter Ricks and Basic Channel, albeit charged with a simlarly zoned-out weirdness as vaporwave.
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Though few others than middle-aged alumni of the IDM listserv may realize it, from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s, Cristian Vogel had one of the greatest runs in experimental techno. Club avant-gardists rarely maintain their lofty standards for more than a quarter century; Surgeon and Jeff Mills come to mind, but not many more. But Vogel makes a strong case for entry to that pantheon with his 25th album,
Rebirth of Wonky.Â
âWonkyâ was a fleeting musical trend around the turn of the last decade, one that Simon Reynolds described in
Retromania as âstrands of glitchy electronic, experimental hip hop and spacey seventies jazz fusionâ whose âoff-kilter beat structures and mutant funk groovesâ were embellished with âday-glo synth tones and snazzy riffs that hark back to eighties electro-funk and video-game music.â Although Vogel certainly has created his share of âoff-kilter beat structures,â he never really be