Broken beats have a way of sneaking back into the conversation every time dance music gets a little too clean. Right now the interesting lane sits somewhere between IDM, glitch and UK garage: swing that refuses to sit still, clicks that feel intentional, bass that moves like a club record even when the rest of the arrangement is falling apart on purpose. ALEPH has been working that edge for years. EN PARTE is the latest cut, tagged IDM / Glitch, UK Garage and Electronica, and it arrives under the same banner he has used since the project started: formless noise.
ALEPH is the alias of Kai Maynard, an experimental electronic producer whose Bandcamp lists Minneapolis and whose own bio marks Formless Noise Sound & Design as established in 2017. The project has never sat comfortably inside one genre. Drum and bass, half-time, glitch and bass music show up across the catalog, but the through-line is sound design that treats error as material. Debut album Ego Death landed on Renraku in 2021. Sepulchre followed in 2023 on VISION, a longer set that moved through tracks like MOTION IN DESCENT, GRADIENT and UNFOLDING LIGHT. Singles and EPs on his own FORMLESS NOISE imprint, including Out of Focus (Redux) and TERMINAL FIELD, kept the same habit of bending familiar club shapes until they stopped behaving.
More recent work makes the garage connection explicit. REFRACTOR, released on Renraku in March 2025, was written up as five pieces of formless noise that balance dancefloor focus with an abstract palette. EXO, out on Mesh in December 2025, was framed as five mutations on the rave continuum, rejecting algorithmic uniformity for weirder iterations of familiar styles. One of those tracks, RECALL, was described in the release notes as a glitched-out cut of machine-funked garage. That sentence is basically the brief for EN PARTE: UK garage swing run through an IDM filter, with electronica as the atmosphere holding the fractures together.
On a record like this, the interest is usually in the architecture rather than a big vocal moment. UK garage still lives on shuffled hats, skipping kicks and a bassline that leans forward. IDM and glitch pull the other way, chopping those same drums into clicks, stutters and micro-edits so the groove never quite locks. Electronica supplies the pads, the metallic tones, the sense that the track is a system rather than a song. ALEPH’s own notes on EXO talk about glistening textures, vocal fragments, robotic arpeggios and footwork dragged through abstraction. EN PARTE sits in that family even if the submission itself stays terse: established 2017, formless noise, and the three genre tags.
That combination is having a moment beyond any one artist. Glitch started as an aesthetic of failure in the 1990s, built from skips, bit-crush and software errors, and it never really left the experimental wing of electronic music. UK garage, meanwhile, keeps getting rebuilt by producers who want swing without nostalgia cosplay. Put the two together and you get club music that rewards headphones and a decent system at the same time. ALEPH’s catalog, from Renraku and VISION through Mesh and FORMLESS NOISE, has been arguing for that middle ground for the better part of a decade. EN PARTE is another entry in the argument, short on explanation and heavy on the idea that noise can still move a room.
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What do you think of this kind of glitch-garage electronica? Let me know in the comments.
