Top 20 electronic music albums of 2022: Bot1500 – Surreal

     

It's time for my top 20 favourite electronic music albums of 2022. One blog post per album. Numbers 20 to 11 aren't individually numbered: I've sorted them alphabetically by artist. Let's start with B, which stands for Bot1500.

See the full countdown here.

Bot1500: Surreal (Lith Dolina)

Following a bunch of self-released works, Bot1500, the 1500th of all the bots, makes his album debut on AD-93 offshoot Lith Dolina. Its six tracks with paired titles are deceptively simple. The two Pearl pieces lead us from wavy half-house into deep ambient dub. The skippy breakbeat on Chartreuse 8 is beyond beautiful. And the Crimson tracks prove you don’t need to be drilling a hole through the floor to produce banging house music. 

I couldn’t tell you much more about Shinichi Kobayashi’s work as Bot1500, but if it’s as enchanting as this, I’m digging right in there. Might start with his slightly spikier 2018 EP Keeper of the Password, which has a curious IDM edge. I wonder what happened to the other 1499 bots?

From another website: The loose yet tangled braindance rhythms and crystalline electronics invite the listener on an inner journey. A must-listen for fans of Aleski Perälä, Aphex Twin and µ-Ziq. (Norman Records)

This is part of a series of the Best Electronic Music Albums of 2022. Read it all here.