A lean, blue-hued futuristic city adorns the cover of Ikonika‘s Distractions, her first album in the last four years. It’s not clear whether the processor-like structures depict a city or the inside of a computer, which positively describes the old metaphor of cities as relentless modern machines. This place, however, is not overbearing and it does not attempt to overwhelm your senses – on the contrary, it is quiet, almost ascetic, at least in comparison to the usual cyberpunk images of future electronic cities. The music is equally lean and direct, a reduction of the relentlessly mechanical to its simplest emotional keys: great beats, short experimental voice clips, a sense of echoing space at slow speeds and considered paces. The distractions within an ordered, functional machine are not the product of spectacle but of something much more low-key, a reductive passion in which speed and light do not…