Exael - Cartoon Goth (2021)

Exael shares their experience of “early quarantine mania” ranging from anxious metaplasmic flux to brain-licking plongs and aching ambient shoegaze for our Documenting Sound series of lockdown missives.

Through a microcosm of solo work and collaborations, Naemi aka Exael has become locus to a new wave of prism-pushing electronic music producers over the past half decade. As member of Critical Amnesia, Ghostride The Drift, and Micro Incubus beside the likes of shy (uon), Huerco S., Perila, and Ben Bondy, among others, they’ve been pivotal in shaping a fractious new take on ambient and dance music paradigms, restlessly morphing styles and patterns with lysergic lucidity and a lush sense of modern psychedelia.

Their contribution to the Documenting Sound series is typically effusive and elusive, with smoked out and deep-moving tracks that convey the thrill of working with new gear, while also making room for their special sort of of ambient tactility. The first half unfurls gyring rhythms and shearing synth dynamics that feel like a padded adjunct to Rian Treanor’s disruptive impulses and the viscous twysts of Goooose, while the latter half is given over to cloud formations that echo their core sound with gorgeous pads and virtually windswept choral voices intent on soothing your nerves.

Exael and their cohort are making some of this era’s definitive electronic music, metaphorically reading the room’s needs for new ideas, more porous stylistic borders and a finer tuned emotional intelligence, safely edging us ever closer to the end of this now year-long series of audio documents.