Late last year, the IoNiZeR set Infused Fear made a strong impression with its orchestral samples, its lush beats, and its artisinal dread. It was, in effect, a spy-flick score in search of a deserving spy flick. IoNiZeR characterized that collection, which had seven tracks, as an EP, but refers to his new New Global Disorder, with nine, one of them a remix, as an LP. Either way, the jump from Fear to Disorder, as it were, is an impressive one — in part because despite the continuity of surveillance-chic beats and string-section moodiness, it’s less easily pigeonholed as a would-be thriller score, and in part because those beats and strings are, while still strong, less prevalent.
The latter point is a roundabout way of saying that the transition brings to mind one that Amon Tobin accomplished early in his catalog, when, having perfected the danceable broken beat, he ventured off the drum’n’bass reservation and dove deep into the matters of nuance that respected and rewarded his listeners’ patience. Not that New Global Disorder has gone fully into the realm of the contemporary classical or the avant-electronic. The title cut, for example, sounds like it could serve as the opening credits for a Tom Clancy video game (something Tobin himself has done), but then there’s the hazy murk of “Nothingness,” in which whisps of tension play against echoed strings and various types of subtle percussion (MP3), and “Question Everything,” which not only slows things down further (MP3), but whose title could serve as the ruling dictum for the general sense of investigation that IoNiZeR brings to the whole outing.
Get the full release at dustedwax.org. More on IoNiZeR, who is based in Belgium, at his facebook.com and twitter.com pages.
The details associated with the latest Crónicaster podcast entry are either tantalizing or frustrating, depending on your point of view. Either way, the track, a lengthy excursion into sound narrative, is a sprawling experience — rough noises, minute tinkering, segments that pass like sequential scenes. As such, it makes for a solid parallel comparison with another songless mix of field recordings and synthesis earlier this week that suggested itself as a soundtrack to a film-less film, 
This year marks the 20th anniversary of The Difference Engine, the landmark collaborative novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, who in one weighty book set the bar high for the steampunk genre. As two science fiction authors with significantly different voices and visions, they produced a book neither of them could have — or, perhaps, might even chosen to have — written independently. The novel’s unique, tandem narrative engine came to mind during a listen to Credence, the recent collaboration between Christopher McFall and David Vélez on the Impulsive Habitat netlabel. Collaboration is nothing new in music, certainly, not even in electronic music, which has more than its share of solo laptop proponents.