There is a certain kind of musician who never stops transmitting. Bakis Sirros, the Athens-based artist who has recorded as Parallel Worlds for more than two decades, is one of them. Explorer arrived on June 19th through Neo Ouija, nine tracks on CD, and it is already his second full-length of the year, following Transformation back in January.
Sirros works in hardware, racks of modular synthesis and vintage analog gear patched into what amounts to a private laboratory, and the sound that comes out of that room is instantly his. Warm, slightly detuned, alive in the way only voltage passing through physical circuits can be. Nothing about it sounds like a laptop. Everything about it sounds like a person standing in front of a wall of blinking equipment at two in the morning, turning one knob a quarter of an inch and listening to the whole universe shift.
The title is not an accident. Explorer is a record about process as much as destination, and the track names read like entries in a lab notebook that slowly turns into a diary. Bendophonic and Phase and Soundwise are engineer's titles, names for experiments. Then you hit Persistence and Patience sitting side by side in the middle of the sequence, two words that describe exactly what a life spent coaxing music out of unstable analog circuitry actually requires, and the album quietly reveals itself as something more personal. Still Unknown might be the most honest track title of the year. Twenty-plus years in, and the territory still has not been fully mapped. That is the whole reason to keep going.
What I love about the Parallel Worlds catalog, and what Explorer continues, is the refusal to choose between the head and the chest. This is music descended from the classic melodic IDM lineage that Neo Ouija helped define in the early 2000s, intricate and glitch-flecked and rhythmically clever, but it never turns into a spreadsheet. There is always a slow cosmic undertow beneath the detail, a drift that connects back to the earliest synthesizer pioneers, the ones who pointed their equipment at the night sky and treated electronics as a way of feeling rather than a way of showing off. Fullmoon and Tonight land in that register, and Octo closes the record the way these albums tend to close, not with a resolution but with a door left open.
The label matters here too. Neo Ouija is one of those quiet institutions of electronic music, a name that longtime IDM listeners hold in genuine affection, and its ongoing run with Sirros has become one of the most consistent artist and label pairings in the ambient electronic world. There is no algorithm anywhere in this ecosystem. There is a person in Athens with a room full of synthesizers, a label that believes in him enough to keep pressing physical CDs into the world in 2026, and listeners who show up every time because the signal has never once degraded.
I put Explorer on late in the evening with the windows open and let it run front to back, and what struck me most is how unhurried it is. Nine tracks that never beg for attention, never spike for the skip-resistant streaming era, never behave like content. It is an album in the old sense, a sealed environment you enter and leave changed in some small way you cannot quite articulate. In a year that has already been loud in every possible direction, that restraint feels less like a stylistic choice and more like a form of generosity.
Explorer is out now on CD and digital. Buy it directly from Neo Ouija on Bandcamp and follow Parallel Worlds on Facebook.
