Russ B Transmission 13’s Leictreonaic is the sound of rural Ireland jacked into the mains, a flicker of neon cutting through Atlantic fog. It plays like a personal history of electronic music refracted through one musician’s lived landscape: motorik pulses, ambient drift, and cracked-radio hooks all sharing the same shoreline.
Electric ghosts of Donegal
Transmission 13, the long-running project of Donegal-based electronic artist Maurice Doogan, has been quietly building an underground catalog since 2009, earning word-of-mouth acclaim across Bandcamp and niche press. Leictreonaic, released in a particularly prolific year that also saw the album North by Northwest, feels like the moment his aesthetic snaps into sharp, widescreen focus.
Rather than chasing big-room drops or Berlin-school orthodoxy, Doogan leans into a more intimate, hand-wired vision of electronica: drum machine grit rubbing up against melodic synth lines that feel torn from half-remembered TV themes and pirate-radio airchecks. The record carries the unmistakable sense of a one-person studio operation, but the ideas are far larger than the footprint of the gear suggests.
Hooks in the circuitry
Leictreonaic pivots around pieces like “The Great American Disaster,” which first surfaced in Transmission 13’s wider body of work and here feels like a spiritual centerpiece. Its title hints at socio-political unease, but the track moves with a slow-burning, krautrock-influenced insistence that puts rhythm and texture ahead of sloganeering. Arpeggios cycle like warning beacons over a low-end throb, evoking late-night news feeds and fading shortwave broadcasts all at once.
Elsewhere, Transmission 13 threads in more reflective material that echoes the ambient-leaning passages from collections like Earthbound while keeping a firmer grip on song structure. Short, melodic motifs surface, repeat, and erode, giving the album a sense of narrative momentum even when the beats fall away.
A career in miniature
One of Leictreonaic’s quiet strengths is how it distills elements from across Doogan’s catalogue into something cohesive. The atmospheric tendencies of time will pass you by, and the stars shine through the darkness, seep into the pads and drones, while the collaborative urgency of albums like Vanishing Point and Under Surveillance is mirrored in the more rhythm-forward cuts.
That long view matters. Transmission 13 has been releasing music since the late 2000s, and you can hear that lived-in familiarity with structure and pacing: no track overstays its welcome, and transitions feel like edits made by a seasoned live performer who knows when to cut and when to let things ride. It’s an album that rewards deep listening but also functions as a surprisingly sturdy companion for late-night drives, coding sessions, or headphones-on walks through coastal rain.
The Irish underground, amplified
What really separates Leictreonaic from a crowded field of Bandcamp electronics is its sense of place. Doogan’s base in Donegal puts him at a literal and figurative edge, far from the big-city club circuits but tapped into a thriving Irish experimental scene documented in anthologies and live events. The music feels like it knows the weather: grey skies, salt air, the hum of a small town at closing time.
In that way, Leictreonaic slots neatly into a modern lineage of regional electronic storytelling, using synths and drum machines to map out inner and outer landscapes. It’s not a genre-redefining manifesto, but it doesn’t need to be; it’s a confident, fully realized statement from an artist who has spent more than a decade learning how to bend electricity into autobiography.
Verdict
For listeners who live somewhere between Tangerine Dream’s sequencer sprawl and the homespun aesthetics of DIY electronica, Leictreonaic is an easy record to recommend. It’s tuneful without being cloying, atmospheric without drifting into wallpaper, and quietly political in the way it frames its tensions and titles. Transmission 13 may still be flying under the mainstream radar, but this album makes a convincing case that the Irish underground has a few classics of its own.
Rating: 4/5
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