The annual unusual sounds gathering in Barcelona is here again. The 2023 edition of the OMBRA Festival is a special one, celebrating the 5th anniversary. The festival is returning it’s former industrial aesthetics, after one year of transition from the former space Utopia 126, the industrial area in El Poublenou.
This year the festival will happen in a new and captivating venue that perfectly embodies OMBRA’s essence of industrial aesthetics, the former Mercedes-Benz factory, ENMASA.
The end of the year is always a good time to step back an reflect and for me is also a time to take a look at what our readers enjoyed the most on hipodrome. This is a summary of the top 3 albums, compilations and recordings that our readers liked the most this year. I’m really proud with our visitors and you can see they have a good taste in music.
The NE-21 return to She Lost Kontrol after their first pitch-perfect 80s dark wave release in 2016. After releasing a collaboration with Donato Dozzy with the project ‘Men with Secrets’ at the beginning of the year, the duo lands on the label with their new work “In The Realm of Electricity”. The album is a collection of 8 tracks composed and recorded between 2012 and 2020 at the Sy6 studio in Boscoreale. The outcome is a perfect blend of synth pop and minimal wave, filled with icy synths, shuddering bass, and anthemic vocals, ranging from mumbled vocoder to arch talk-singing. While diverse in atmospheric scope, swells of ghostly synths circle the driving beat throughout, producing a haunting totality drenched in an ethereal midnight trance; the submerge of cold, spectral vocals sing within the darkest depths of a starry soundscape – the gloomy romanticism of low, distant vocals bursting with post-punk melancholia. The album in essence sounds unashamedly distinctive, unique and charming. Whether you fall in love with the whole act or you’re just stunned by the bizarreness of it all, one thing’s for sure – you’ll be compelled and gripped right to the infectiously smutty end.
She Lost Kontrol records is an independent label focused on Electronic Body Music, New Wave, Dark Wave, Neo Folk, Industrial, Noise, Avantgarde. Melanchony and Romantic synth wave mixed with a clear post-punk roots and dynamics insistent EBM loops. On the A side 3 tracks from The-Ne21 known as Retina.it are the duo project from Lino Monaco & Nicola Buono who wants to come back to their new wave background. The duo, placed near the Vesuvio, explored all the capabilities of analogic synths since the beginnings,developing an its own idea of sound. On the B side we have 3 tracks from Bakunin Commando, Violet Poison and Diana Berti.
The Hipodrome Of Music 