Self-Surveillance

"The Tokyo-based producer's boldest fusion of emotion, abstraction, and electronic form."

Self-Surveillance is the seventh full-length album from A Taut Line, the primary solo moniker of Tokyo-based artist, producer, creative director, and Diskotopia co-head Matt Lyne.

The album continues in the post-everything approach to electronic music that Lyne has been honing over the last decade or so. Disintegrated elements of post-punk, post-rock, ambient, deep house, trip-hop, dub techno, and more are all unexpectedly woven together to create a disorientating yet somehow cohesive sound. Each track is like a micro portal into a different fourth world, but the journey between them feels authentic, accessible, and never forced.

Self-Surveillance is, in many ways, A Taut Line's most emotionally charged and unflinchingly honest collection to date. Across nine tracks, it dissects the tech-conditioned mind—our thoughts monitored, our profiles mapped—as we watch the world unravel and feel our grip on it slipping away. It's creativity in conflict with collapse, as inner turmoil mirrors the dystopian turbulence outside.

Opening track 'Driass' recalls Mogwai filtered through a Wolfgang Voigt meets Huerco S. haze with a jittery Y2K-hologram-R&B beat slicing up the brain-fog. 'The Dark Path' fuses what sounds like if NIN had guested on Music for the Jilted Generation with Fugazi, Can, and Kraftwerk influences. Elsewhere, there are moments that recall Pan Sonic, if produced by Jan Jelinek, while sharing a studio space in Bristol with The Wild Bunch. 'Overwhelm (It's Over)' is one of the standout tracks — a heartbreakingly beautiful granular ambient serenade on a Benoît Pioulard or Loscil tip, inspired by the late greats Ryuichi Sakamoto and Harold Budd.

A Taut Line has long occupied the spaces between genres and moods, but here those boundaries dissolve completely — leaving something raw, intimate, and unmistakably human.

Early responses indicate that this is his best work to date.