Audiopile Review: First new 3XL release of the year for this swiftly moving 2025, this new one courtesy of Italian trio Cortex Of Light, arriving a full calendar year since releasing Naemi’s dreampop-coded Dust Devil, seemingly signalling a shift in the ambi/dub/glitch axis centred around the label. But Cortex Of Light returns the label closer to the mutated vapour dub and hot-wired IDM previously grappled by the likes of NUG, xphresh, Stone and, yes, Naemi’s previous guise as Exael, Dust Devil perhaps more of a blip than a changing tide. Cortex’s aims here aren’t nearly as obtuse and murky as their predecessors, instead referencing both the horizontally inclined sound of mid-90s backroom acts and the advanced sound design inherent in almost all forms of IDM at the turn of the century. The trio’s formative background in nimble-footed dance music is wielded with deadly accuracy here, restlessly hopping from spidery bass music, float tank breakbeats, sunrise cyber rave, and pointillist braindance melodicism, an electric current jolting through the session with a radiant spark that makes this feel very at home on 3XL. Plenty to reference here from electronic music’s past 30 years, but if you’ve been following the futuristic synapse explosions from the Wrecked Lightship crew, you’re in for a stunner. Edition of 300.

Illuminotecnica is a slacker’s exploration of ecstatic techniques in sound, echoing the free-form drift of elemental flows across the motherboard. Celestial data streams. Mineral rhythms loop in cycles within cycles. A glitch pulses at the heart of the sun while the sky turns green.

What reveals itself through divergent, simultaneous patterns?
What do we hear when we let the aural flood loose?

Set it free—let it spiral inside out. From the cracked shell, new forms emerge: thought-forms, feel-forms, signal-forms shaped by frequencies we don’t yet know how to decode. Shapes that shimmer at the edge of language. Emotions without names. Visions that flicker in the periphery—half-seen, half-sensed—like memories from a future that hasn’t happened yet.