Toshinori Kondo and DJ Krush - Ki-Oku(1996)

Fu-Yu
How does one communicate without words? What happens when you meet a stranger who speaks a different language from yours, but you've got something important to say to them? The Japanese duo of DJ Krush and Toshinori Kondo seem to have the definitve answer with this album. From its beginning to the end, the message weaved into the music is crystal clear: look into the future without forgetting where you came from, and, most importantly, chill out.


Shoh-Ka
DJ Krush's mellow grooves intertwine beautifully with the avant-garde jazz trumpet skills of Toshinori Kondo, creating a mosaic that's both light and deep: below the surface of the tracks, there is an amazing current of ambience, whether it's the trumpet echoing through, or electronic sounds that one would hear on a Boards Of Canada track. The album name, Ki-Oku, means "Memory", and all the track names are Japanese, with the exception of Sun Is Shining, an instrumental cover of a Bob Marley song. The whole album feels almost as though it's a broadcast from another world, simply telling us all to take it easy for a change.


Mu-Chu

Ulrich Schnauss - A Strangely Isolated Place (2003)

Monday - Paracetamol, the fourth track on A Strangely Isolated Place
When one thinks of Germany, one hardly thinks of happy electronic music. Darker genres like industrial, trance, and drum'n'bass are the first things that come to mind. Enter Ulrich Schnauss, breaking this mold with some of the happiest and laid back tracks I have ever heard. Ambient soundscapes and chill broken beats are commonplace, in fact the whole release seems to be permeated with what seems to be infinite optimism. It's an incredibly epic and powerful sound that has a certain energy to it - it calms, it inspires and it motivates. It opens your eyes to the endless possibilities of our world, and reminds you of all the amazing things you can find if you just take a good look around.


Track number three, A Letter From Home

Secret Frequency Crew - Forest Of The Echo Downs (2007)

The second track on the album, Neon Bridge
The name Secret Frequency Crew is only appropriate for this band, they are quite obscure. It's a shame, really, since this project weaves one of the most intricate and balanced sounds that I've ever heard. Somewhere in between ambient, hip-hop, and IDM, these guys manage to produce a very organic style that's both catchy and thought-provoking. Everything in these songs seems to be alive and talking to the listener as songs transition seamlessly through the album; robotic clicks and whirrs communicate some message that might already be forgotten, or indeed not yet found out, scratches echo and fade out into obscurity shortly after they appear. All of this results in an atmosphere that almost feels like listening to the sounds of a mechanical jungle, with analogue bird calls and the metallic bark of cybernetic dogs.

If Boards Of Canada is something that brings back memories of the past, I would say Secret Frequency Crew is definitely music that brings upon thoughts about the future.

Boards of Canada - Aquarius (1999)

BoC track "Aquarius" backed up with a fan-made video

The picture below shows the Scottish electronic duo known as Boards of Canada, They are known for their deep ambient one-of-a-kind sound. It might at first seem repetetive, synthetic and just plain weird - but it's much, much more than that.

Old television samples and random speech mixed with exotic warm background layers creates the unique ambience that Boards of Canada is known for. The child laughs takes us back to the perfect childhood, and the perfection that Michael and Marcus always strives to acquire in their albums.

This admittedly isn't your regular dancefloor bomb, but it takes you away like nothing else. Or to be precise, it takes you absolutely nowhere. It portraits the simplicity of life and nature, as being the basic and most near thing of all. And it makes you feel united with this perfection in life. People may not like electronic music, and claim that it's not real or skillful. But Boards of Canada proves that the mathematical beauty in nature can be expressed through electronic music, and possibly with more success than in any other genre.