For Köhn — the moniker of Ed Nolbed, that is another moniker for Jürgen De Blonde — electronic music is a colorful play field on which glitch, idm, shoe gaze, hypnagogic pop, improv, synth music, field recordings and kraut muzik are wildly jumping over each other. His 7th album — Kreis Plön (KRAAK, 2017) — documents 20 years of vitalist and joyful research. The album mingles past and future, deconstruction and construction, mourning and joy, noise and peace.

Mathieu Serruys reintroduces the grand ideas of Classical Romanticism into electronic Avant-Garde. Where the latter established an aesthetics of non-art, opening the way for formal experimentation and deconstruction, Serruys uses modernism’s innovations to inject humanity and melancholy into 2017.

His debut album On Germain Dulac (B.A.A.D.M., 2014) displays an array of electronic compositions, in which the serendipity of tape machines and unreliable analogue synths rethink both the idiom of Romantic Fugues as 60’s tape collage or sound synthesis.