I didn’t want to leave that slightly grumpy post loitering around the top of the page for long, so I’ll just make a quick recommendation here to balance things out. The Books released their new album The Way Out last week, and it’s great: the epitome of the careful, exploratory type of making I was rambling on about. (The whole album is streaming here.)
To top it off, they’re running a track-by-track commentary every day on their blog, with loads of detail about what it’s like to make electronic music out of “krumhorns and sackbuts, viols, rebecs, and alpenhorns complete with cowbells in the background”. I’ve been going back to the album every day to listen to the music along with the commentary. Great idea.