Looking for some new music? Thankfully the Perfect Circuit staff is here to dish out some hot recommendations for this glorious day: Bandcamp Friday! In case you've missed the memo, Bandcamp Fridays fall on the first Friday of most months, and
If you need some ideas, read on to check out some of the music we've been enjoying recently!
Jessica Ekomane: Manifolds
French-born, Berlin-based composer and performer Jessica Ekomane weaves electronic sounds into a uniquely immersive and spatial experience. Using Cycling 74 Max as her primary tool, she creates sonic narratives that push the boundaries of how we perceive the fundamental elements of music—rhythm, harmony, melody, and timbre. Manifolds, her nearly 20-minute-long tour de force released earlier this year through a collaboration with experimental music hubs GRM and Shelter Press, exemplifies Ekomane's distinctive and uncompromising approach to sound. In this work, she reshapes the listener’s engagement with sound, offering an intricate exploration of texture and form that disrupts traditional musical expectations without losing its emotional resonance.

The piece centers on polyphony, though in a broader, more abstract sense, where numerous sound sources clash, merge, and dissolve, forming a dense, captivating, and surprisingly emotive soundscape. Ekomane layers ephemeral sounds that shift and evolve like passing clouds, guiding listeners through a deeply imaginative sonic world. This multiplicity of textures and tones invites both intellectual engagement and visceral emotional responses.
Manifolds opens with a chaotic and disorienting blend of digital noise, which gradually gives way to a soothing synth drone. This transition leads into a hypnotic middle section, where resonant tones drift in and out of focus, creating an almost meditative atmosphere. But just as comfort sets in, Ekomane introduces an instability—pitches begin to waver, pulling the listener into an eerie, unsettling space. As the piece progresses, this tonal ambiguity intensifies, with rhythmic patterns playing off spatial limitations, creating a sensation that feels almost too expansive for the constraints of stereo sound. The final minutes of the piece return the listener to the safe space of droning sawtooth ensemble, providing a sense of closure.
All in all, Manifolds demands the listener’s full attention but rewards it richly, unfolding a meticulously crafted world of sound that leaves the listener in awe, offering a complex auditory journey that reveals new depths with each listen.
Listen to Manifolds on Bandcamp!
Charmaine Lee + Ikue Mori: Elevator Music
Iconoclastic improvisers Charmaine Lee and Ikue Mori have debuted their first official release since beginning their collaborations in 2019, entitled Elevator Music. This ~10 minute EP released under Lee's recently established Kou Records is a passing glance into the deeply rich musical language developed by the multi-generational Lee and Mori. Over three musical vignettes, listeners are treated to the ecstatic and electrified convergence of Lee's punctuated and feedback-transmogrified vocalizations, ripping, poking, and occasionally eliding in front of and behind Mori's dense webs of shimmering granularized samples and prickly, intervening digital tones.
The first track of the album, "Royal Flush", establishes the pattern of engagement between Mori's expansive textural waves of sound and Lee's comparatively articulate expressions, a feature heard throughout Elevator Music. Opening with a rosy and soft chorus of sampled voices before becoming tangled in Lee's punchy plosives, the first two minutes of "Royal Flush" extrapolate on the relationship of Lee's gestural vocalizations and Mori's digitized undulations, arriving at moments of kinetic exchange before spinning off and back again. A point of stillness emerges at one of these exchanges, and Lee enters to deliver a few verses with allusions to Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. This evocative poem carries the rest of the track out with a narrative tone, as Mori's morphing masses of sound crash and settle back into the familiar rosy chorus, now haunting in reflection of its context.

In "Three Shades and a Lime", Mori's glassy digital sounds pour out like an overturned bucket of crystal shards, exciting Lee's rubberized interventions. Here, Lee's use of feedback tones intersperse the duo's bouts of frenetic interplay, creating moments of suspension that Mori's grains of sound flutter around like the wings of moths on a porchlight. One of these moments gives way to a new section, called to arms by the reverberant vocal theme from "Royal Flush". Feedback and noise timbres press into the foreground as Lee and Mori continue their improvisatory dance, culminating in a final moment of fizzy stillness.
The final track, "Legacy (Rifted)" primarily features a smoothly shifting texture of noise and digital blips from Mori, with another short poem performed by Lee. The liner notes for Elevator Music clue us into the inspirations behind this characteristic sound world, taking cue from the scenes of heavy rain in Yasujirō Ozu's 1959 film Floating Weeds. The film's imagery of torrential rain is a clear inspiration for the textural support Mori adds to Lee's poem, which describes a decaying interior that traps the narrator within.
In addition to these three tracks, the digital album also features a remix of Three Shades and a Lime by jondownload, which percussively activates Lee and Mori's original recording, as if turning the original take into an instrument in itself. While the liner notes offer little specifics, the characteristic pop of a taut, unsnared drumhead suggests this remix may also be another improvisation, performed by jondownload rather than re-mixed in a traditional sense. Also included is a beautiful illustrated video by Chilean artist Aníbal Bley, which accompanies "Royal Flush" with a colorful and psychedelic world of movement that perfectly captures Lee and Mori's unique musical languages.
Elevator Music may be brief at only ~10 minutes, but the depth explored by these two intergenerational veterans of improvised electronic performance suggests a rich future of further recordings, which I can't wait to hear.
Listen to Elevator Music on Bandcamp!
Max Jaffe: Reduction of Man
Max Jaffe is a percussionist that uses sensory percussion combined with drumkit to create rhythmic texture structures. In his latest release, Reduction of Man this takes the shape of a jazz-inspired lenticular cloud with a solid ensemble of musicians. Recorded as part of a music residency at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY this collection of tunes feels experimental and loose while still retaining a direction and focus. While it's not completely Free Jazz, you can tell that there is a clear influence of that approach combined with the electronic experimentation of Jon Hassell.

Throughout the entirety of the album there is a focus on space and no track feels too dense. Often with something that is improvisational there is a tendency of the music to blend to create a fog of sounds disregarding the most important thing that helps create music: silence. Reading through the linear notes paints a more complete picture of the recording session as Jaffe used sensory percussion to trigger events that players were invited to react to. Those reactions are then processed live as a kind of call-and-response-and-response. "B+B," the final 15+ minute long track on the album is a wonderful example of how this can play out over the course of a deep session and feels like either the beginning of the recording sessions or the end. Something that is without restrictions or intentions, but retains an engaging throughline.
"The Ollie" is the album opener and brings you into the world painting a mystical lively picture of the world as though you are stumbling into the Shasta entrance of Lemuria. As the track progresses you get an energetic conversation happening before resolving of its own volition. It's hard to choose a few tracks to focus on since, well, there's not that many, but they are all also very good: it's clear that there was a careful curatorial ear taken to the recordings to craft a cohesive compositional cadence.
Reduction of Man is highly recommended for those who like Jon Hassell, brin, SML, Tortoise, Sun Ra, or generally enjoy hearing challenging, clean, electronic music that fuses acoustic sensibilities with technological advancement.
Listen to Reduction of Man on Bandcamp!
Patrick Shiroishi: Glass House

Glass House by Patrick Shiroishi is a body of work originally composed for a movement piece of the same name directed by Mamie Green for the Volta collective and stands up on its own as a meditative, immersive album that contains impressions of movement: shades of contortion. From the first track, "memories (i am in the vortex), you get a sense that this will be a slow and deliberate journey as soft field recordings and delicate piano creates a soft bedding. A full 10+ minutes into the piece is when we hear Shiroishi's favored tool: the saxophone, but treated or recorded in a space that makes the instrument sound like it's enclosed in a small yet reverberant space, tucked gently into the mix.
After the first track swells, we're led into something more focused and rhythmic with "what i do next makes no sense at all." This track has a strong synth flavor with upright bass and drums that are crisp and reminiscent of General MIDI/XG rompler samples in a wonderfully good way. Immediately after this interlude, we are presented "the procession," a slow and emotional piano driven piece whose accompanying video is a gorgeous presentation of aspects of the original performance. We end the album with a string and piano piece that swells with both harmony and atonality that builds to a luscious conclusion. The entire album is a complete journey and you can sense the influence of the original piece.
Listen to Glass House on Bandcamp!
Second Seasons: Immense Heaven
If you're familiar with music made using Max/MSP patches (if you've read this full article to this point, you should at least have an idea), you've probably got a preconceived notion of what that music might sound like. Granular ambiences, abstract and frenetic Autechre-derivatives, or just straight-up, academia-tinged computer music—these are all pretty typical directions for Max-based music to go in (not that we're hating, we love all that too!). But a rare treat is music produced by Max patches that actually fits into song-like structures, with a fair number of left-turns and general skronk that you'd expect out of a Max patch.

That's precisely what you'll find (and more) on Immense Heaven, released by Second Seasons via the Schematic Music Company record label. Across nearly an hour and a half of music, there's plenty of sonic variety for your ears to chew on. The aforementioned "songs" exist as waypoints on your musical journey—"all cycles" begins the record, "C+E" and "fL" are mid-album rest stops, with the track "our fracture" closing the album. These tracks feature vocal hooks and more structured arrangements, allowing the remaining, mostly instrumental tracks to stretch and glitch breaks, explore sound design, and generally have fun going off the rails.
Of course, the heirloom nature of Max patches ensures that nothing will be too predictable across Immense Heaven, and you're sure to uncover a lot of Max-isms if you listen closely. Exponential rhythms and gliding tempos atop static progressions and pulses tickle your eardrums without ruining your ability to nod your head in time with the music. Much of "squiggles~" is based around samples of a cat meowing and purring—who wouldn't love that? Approaching the end, closing tracks "`.'" and "our fracture" mellow out, embracing space and ambience. There's something for every fan of electronic music in Immense Heaven.
Listen to Immense Heaven on Bandcamp!