‘Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 3’ feels less like an album and more like an encounter of two minds meeting inside a living system of wires, voltage, and accumulated history. Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones, working as Sunroof, don’t approach electronic music here as composition in the traditional sense. Instead, they treat sound as an event: something discovered rather than designed, navigated rather than controlled.
What gives ‘Vol. 3’ its particular gravity is the tension between experience and risk. Miller and Jones have been shaping the sound of electronic music for more than four decades, yet nothing here sounds like mastery flexed for its own sake. These nine tracks are recorded live, without overdubs, each artist confined to two channels of a shared four-track setup. That limitation isn’t nostalgic fetishism; it’s a philosophical stance. The music breathes because it can fail. Every pulse, smear of noise, or sudden rhythmic lock-in carries the faint thrill of collapse just narrowly avoided.
The album moves fluidly between states. At moments it feels architectural—slow, weight-bearing structures of tone and modulation that recall early kosmische musik or the exploratory patience of first-generation modular pioneers. Elsewhere, it snaps into motion, driven by tense, propulsive rhythms that flirt with ambient techno without ever settling into club logic. Tracks like “Ensnare” and “Conspiracies” pulse with a low-grade urgency, grooves forming as if accidentally, then mutating under pressure. Nothing repeats long enough to become comfortable. Even the most hypnotic passages retain a sense of alertness, as though the system itself might suddenly decide to go elsewhere.
There’s a striking physicality to the sound design. Oscillators don’t simply hum; they loom and scrape. Filters feel weathered, almost geological, while sequenced patterns twitch with nervous intelligence. On “Freezer,” rigid beats collide with church-like arpeggios, evoking a strange fusion of ritual and machinery. “Second Thoughts” drifts into more disturbing territory, voices mangled beyond recognition, suggesting transmissions intercepted rather than messages sent. This is electronic music that understands atmosphere not as mood-setting wallpaper, but as narrative pressure.
History seeps into the album in subtle, meaningful ways. The track “Splendid,” recorded using the same TEAC four-track Miller once used for “Warm Leatherette” from 1978, doesn’t read as a self-conscious callback. Instead, it feels like a reminder that experimental electronic music has always been about immediacy, about capturing an idea before it hardens into convention. The faint cassette hiss at the opening isn’t nostalgia; it’s texture, friction, evidence of hands-on machinery.
What’s most compelling about ‘Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 3’ is its refusal to resolve into a single identity. It works as deep headphone music, rich with microscopic detail, but it also functions as a shifting ambient environment, something that quietly alters your perception of space and time. Walking through a city with this album playing, it’s easy to feel slightly displaced, as if everyday surroundings have been subtly reprogrammed.
Miller and Jones don’t frame Sunroof as a legacy project, and ‘Vol. 3’ makes clear why. This isn’t a summation of past achievements; it’s a continuation of curiosity. Each track begins from zero, with no thematic blueprint beyond the act of listening to the machines, to each other, to the moment itself. The result is music that feels both ancient and newly assembled, like circuitry discovering its own consciousness in real time.
In an era where electronic music often arrives smoothed, optimized, and algorithmically polite, ‘Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 3’ stands apart as something braver and stranger. It reminds us that synthesis, at its most vital, is not about control but conversation between human and machine, structure and chaos, memory and the present tense.
Learn more by visiting: Bandcamp | Mute Records
