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Lucid Sounds

Earlier this year, an exciting and creative movement of music caught my attention and has had me hooked ever since. The wave of electronic music I’m referring to cannot be easily categorized, save to say it takes influences from trap, grime and many other sounds whilst operating mainly around the 140bpm mark. Generally the sound is ambient, but with incredible emotional depth and heavy bass. The scene for this sound exists mainly on Soundcloud at the moment and so is very easily accessible, with much of the music available for free download. In fact there is a strong sense of independence and autonomy about the music – it is free from definitive genre, free from music labels and often free or very cheap for the listener to download. The artists also seem to be based all around the globe, from London to New York to Tokyo. The genre seems to truly be the product of the internet and the social media age; it belongs to everyone.

My personal journey into obsession with this sound came about during my final year at Uni. A friend recommended I check out the incredibly talented Spooky Black’s ‘Leaving’ EP, and after having it on repeat whilst studying for my finals, I knew I had to find out more about the producer – hnrk. Hnrk is and always will be one of my favorite electronic music producers; a few hours surfing his Soundcloud and I was hooked on his sound - totally new to my ears, exciting and emotional. If you haven’t already you need to put on some decent headphones and lose yourself in some of his frankly beautiful work, tunes like ‘fjarlaeg’, ‘Mantarochen’ and ‘Nesting’. Next I discovered drip-133, who collaborates with hnrk frequently and is a fellow part of the teamSESH crew, and fell head over heels for ‘utlimum' along with the rest of his ‘girl and boy’ EP. After a few more hours, the rabbit hole had well and truly opened up and I was enthralled by the sounds of artists like Klimeks, Misogi and Kareful, to name just a few. This is the reality of the movement on Soundcloud. Once you start digging, you discover that there are just so many artists contributing high quality, exciting music, that there really are no limits to where it might go. There seems to be a real sense of inclusion and community to the scene; some of the most talented artists I’ve come across only have a few hundred followers, but their work gets re-posted and promoted by other artists, making it easy to access. As a result, the movement seems to focus less on the individual producer and more on the constant flow of new and exciting sounds.

Other than gathering a growing following in its own right via Soundcloud and other listening platforms such as Bandcamp, the movement has recently seen a fair bit of promotion from DJ, producer and general tastemaker Plastician, something which I and other cloud-heads are really pleased about. As well as regularly using his Rinse FM podcasts and own Soundcloud feed to showcase talent from the movement, Plastician also recently put together a mix entitled ‘The Wave Pool’, which you can listen to here, purely with the aim of shedding light on the scene and encouraging others to explore it. His title couldn’t be more apt to reflect the sound’s lucidity and infinite depth. If you are at all interested in the scene, please check out some of Plastician’s amazing mixes and what he has to say about it. I am hopeful that with his support the movement can grow even further and receive some of the wider recognition it deserves.


I hope to use this blog as a creative space to follow the sound and its development, look into particular artists and their work in more depth, conduct interviews with artists and just generally express an appreciation of the sound. Since the movement has grown and developed so much over the past year and 2015 is drawing towards its close, I thought now was a perfect time to begin to reflect on it. If anybody would like to get involved in contributing to the blog, has anything they would like me to write on, or just any constructive feedback on how to grow the blog then please let me know – my email is sf.plant94@gmail.com. There currently isn’t anywhere near enough of this sound being showcased to live audiences in my opinion; despite Plastician’s recent assessment that a lot of this sound ‘wasn’t built with the club in mind’, I would love to hear more of this stuff on sound systems, and hopefully with enough support and attention there will be a high enough demand to make this a reality. 

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