Otto Taimela Returns to Cudighi Records with ‘Cheap Ingredients’

Otto Taimela has built a discography that refuses easy classification. Across labels like SWIMS, Cold Blow, Ultraääni, and Special Species Records, the Finnish composer and producer has moved between avant-garde piano, breakbeat, ambient techno, and neo-classical composition. With Cheap Ingredients, his second release on Cudighi Records following 2024’s A Life, he makes his most coherent statement on the IDM-facing side of that range.

The album sits closer to drum and bass IDM than to the more aggressive drill and bass or the conventionally melodic liquid drum and bass. The structures are abstract, but the low end holds real warmth. “VCXO” demonstrates that balance — measured downtempo electronica where the sub bass does the work without rushing the tempo. Melodies and atmospheres land somewhere between Roni Size’s early drum and bass and Plaid’s melodic sensibility, a pairing that makes sense inside Taimela’s controlled, unhurried approach.

Finland’s electronic music rarely gets the credit it deserves for its quiet introspection — a quality that runs through the country’s classical and folk traditions and into a generation of producers rooted in landscape and weather rather than dancefloors. Taimela carries that lineage without nostalgia. He isn’t recreating the 90s IDM and drum and bass era; he’s drawing a line from it to the present.

Tracks like “Glacier,” “New Life,” “Spell 3,” and “Formal Mass” stand out for their melodic clarity. “Spell 3” is particularly hypnotic, its loop recalling the kind of Boards of Canada repetition that doesn’t announce itself until you’re already inside it. The cover — two Mickey Mouse-like characters beside a palm tree in a deliberately naive hand — shares little with the music, which makes the package strangely coherent.