Various – ‘Analog 2025’ – Unexplained Sounds Group
‘Analog 2025’ arrives with tape flutter, slow pitch wobble, spring reverb that sounds like a corridor, and the soft, humanised clipping that turns a tone into an animated corpse. It’s not nostalgic in the cosy sense; it’s in the same world as hauntology, a catalogue of misremembered broadcasts and futures that never quite arrived, handed to you as fragments and trusting you to stitch them into a story. Something niggles away at you and tells you this means something. It’s torture via déjà vu.
Sonically, the compilation is stubbornly narrow by design, and that’s its point. Where modern production often erases the machine, these tracks celebrate it. Voltage drift becomes melody, tape wow becomes phrasing, and the hiss under everything reads like a second voice. The palette is small – saturation, wobble, lo‑fi delay, field fragments, analogue modulation – but the way those elements are combined gives the set a surprising emotional range. A detuned oscillator can feel melancholic; a spring reverb can feel like a room you once loved and then can’t quite visualise. The music works like a moodboard with the edges singed – that feeling when you’ve finally remembered the name of an old TV programme, and it dies on the tip of your tongue.
Anasisana’s ‘Convergence of Clouds’ treats clouds as metal lungs, the patient pads and tape flutter setting the comp’s ambient, meditative baseline; Robert Rich’s ‘Particles’ shows the technical side of that mood, micro‑modulations and warm layering punctuated by drops of mercury being pipetted into your ear when you’re asleep; Sonologyst’s ‘Telescope’ pushes the modular angle, voltage drift used as a melodic parameter so the wobble becomes the hook. It’s like one of those optical illusions that makes you stare at ever-decreasing circles and then makes everything you look at seem like it’s in motion. Note to older heads – I’m not referring to the ’80s BBC sitcom, although ironically, that does have the same effect.
Pharmakustik’s ‘Nekrospur’ drags the palette into grit, where saturation and tape artefacts are weaponised for menace rather than comfort; and Lars Bröndum’s ‘Contemplation’ launches long, saturated phrases that demonstrate how distortion can sculpt rather than destroy harmony. These five tracks alone prove the compilation’s point. It’s not a grab bag of analogue nostalgia but a focused study in how wobble, saturation and decay can be compositional tools – warm, unstable, and insistently human.
This is a record about process more than product. Where a modern DAW would correct, quantise and sterilise, these pieces let the machine misremember itself and then treat that misremembering as composition. That decision is political in the quietest sense: it insists that texture and error are not merely quaint relics but tools with expressive force. The tracks don’t ask you to admire fidelity; they ask you to inhabit the space between signal and decay. That’s why the compilation reads as a manifesto for tactility rather than a nostalgia trip.
How it will age is naturally unpredictable. Culturally, ‘Analog 2025’ could sit in histories of the anti‑digital moment as a compact, stubborn argument: we chose wobble. It won’t become a mainstream touchstone because it doesn’t want to; its influence will be concentrated and cumulative. Producers in ambient and experimental circles might mine it for timbral ideas. Modular synth communities may point to it when arguing for characterful modules. Boutique hardware makers could use it as evidence that there is a market for imperfect, personality‑rich gear.
That kind of influence is deep rather than broad. It accumulates in patch notes, in liner credits, in the odd interview where a younger artist says, “I learned to love wobble from that comp.” It shows up in the slow adoption of techniques rather than in chart positions. There are risks. The narrow palette is both the compilation’s virtue and its weakness. For aficionados, the focused argument is a virtue: it’s a concentrated case for tactility. For outsiders, it can feel self‑referential, a closed circuit of like‑minded practitioners patting each other on the back.
Placed in the arc of 20th and 21st century sound, ‘Analog 2025’ is a cousin to mid‑century tape experiments and to the lo‑fi DIY ethos of punk and indie. It’s also a contemporary sibling to hauntological projects that mined public‑service broadcasts and library music for emotional residue. Unlike some predecessors, it wears its politics lightly: it’s not a manifesto against technology so much as a plea for balance. In an era of algorithmic sheen and AI‑generated perfection, it reminds us that texture, error and human timing are compositional choices with consequences.
Daz Lawrence