Will Charczuk

What a banging album. Could go nuts on TikTok or whatever the kids are into these days if it was released today.

It can be easy when making ambient music to just add a bunch of pads and drones and call it a day, but this album somehow tugs a bit at the fabric of ambient music and makes something new and dark.

If "Coming Home" was an homage to music in the 50s, "Leon" feels like an homage to the late 60s early 70s. And that's good!

What a great debut.

A really warm embrace of an aesthetic and tone from the mid-20th century but with modern polish and care.

Standout tracks: Coming Home and Smooth Sailin'

Scott was getting outside his comfort zone with this album, specifically by working with a vocalist and building the songs around the timbre of their voice.

I don't necessarily love the result.

I got into Tycho with Dive and played that album to death, but to me this is the best album Scott has produced and what I always come back to.

This is the most Tycho album Tycho has ever Tycho'd.

Classic, immense debut EP. Just front to back bangers.

Standouts for me are "Honest Enough" and "Something for Nothing".

A tremendous pop album.

More consistent in quality, though more varied in style and tempo, than Frank's later albums, this is still my favorite.

Standout tracks "Pyramids", "Super Rich Kids", and "Lost".

There is a special place for this album in the rotation for unwinding after a long day. It's like a xanax or some other psychosomatic implement to achieve relaxation.

It's hard to imagine being a bedroom producer and making an album like this.

It's short (EP length) but coherent and consistent.

Vibes of napping after a day in the sun at the beach.

There are two types of music people; people who've heard and loved Entroducing..... and people who haven't heard it yet.

The cornerstone of a sampler focused record collection, the tracks themselves breathe with life and timelessness.

It makes it all that much more impressive that this album was the result of crate diving somewhere outside of a backwater like Sacramento.

Standout tracks "The Number Song" and "Midnight In A Perfect World".

Typing "Aphex Twin" into the search box and this being the first result was a sign.

An immaculate collection of ambient tracks. It's not very coherent as an album, but as a well of tracks to seed a "music for working" playlist, it's unmatched.

There are few electronic albums that mix live instruments with synths well, and this is one of them. My first intro to Tycho, this album had probably hundreds of plays by the time the followup came out. It also cause me to drag my friends to see them live. The start of a journey that would ultimately result in me moving to SF (the erstwhile home of Tycho), and understanding more fully the environment that would produce sounds as blissful and varied as are found here.

Standout tracks are "A Walk" and "Coastal Brake".

One; I love the cover, the unrolled cassette cover matches the vibe here perfectly.

Two; the tracks are actually good!

"Lost You in the Fog" is a staple of my working-music playlists for close to a decade now.

A kind of sneering rock album that you could tell someone came out in 1993 and no one would bat an eye.

It's dark and moody in ways that are hard to articulate; the track "Stay" could be characterized by "what depression sounds like". Intense.

Standouts for me are "Cool in Motion" and "Stay".

A classic electronic album.

Growing up listening to Orbital and Underworld sort of set the bar in a weird place for electronic music and especially albums. This album is the prime example.

It's coherent and artful in ways that other electronic albums generally are not. The sounds are not dated, they're timeless and raw and full of energy.

I love Spoon's albums generally, but this was the first one I really got into and has a special place in my heart. "Everything Hits At Once" crawled into my skull and looked out of my eyes for a period in college that I can't forget.

Standout tracks are "Everything Hits At Once" (by miles), "The Fitted Shirt" and "Take A Walk".

Timeless. A must listen.

For me, memories of summer and the beach and driving with the windows down.

The album itself is an interesting academic exercise of forcing comparing more traditional African music with zydeco by placing tracks of those styles together. The African tracks are standouts, the zydeco tracks are kind of forgettable by comparison but still good.

What a howitzer of an album.

Taken out of context, this album would stand alone as a really excellent example of shoegaze, but taken in the context that this was the reunion album after ~20+ years of not recording together, it makes it that much more impressive.

Standouts for me were "Slomo" (by miles), and "No Longer Making Time"

I heard this playing in an Opening Ceremony in ~2016 and I don't want to admit that's where I get my music from but here we are.

The album is decent! I really like how Small Black cultivates moods in their tracks, though the lyrics are generally hit or miss.

If you like vibes for vibes sake, this is an album for you.

Small Black has a way of zooming in directly on "New York in the 80s if it wasn't a rat infested urinal" vibes and I'm here for it. Lush electronic layers and pop-adjacent vocals tinged with 80s synths.

Immense nostalgia for this record, mostly because their live shows were a dance party and super fun.

Highlights were "Jump in the Pool" and "White Diamonds"

It's good! Kind of the vibe of electronic you hear coming out of a gallery in the lower east side that has a Chinese kitchen operating out of the basement and is covered in graffiti.

Highlights for me were "Punching down" and the title track.