In his monthly column System Focus, The FADER's favorite underground music critic Adam Harper stares deep into the internet's gloom to unearth emerging musical forms.

They said the internet would melt my brain and I laughed and turned up the heat, threw in armfuls of hi-octane, hi-tech, hi-speed, hi-intensity music. I dissolved at the speed of sound, fragments free-falling, dispersing and disengaging like it was meant to happen. But then my hard drive got corrupted, and my gray matter got flooded with exclamation marks, misfires, and "file not found" notifications. The music went straight through me like massless particles, and I realized I'd forgotten stillness in the surge of desire and transcendence.

After months and months of huffing the strongest stuff that online future music had to offer, I kind of blew a fuse. So much of what I've listened to and written about recently has focused on thrill in the domain of digital industry—whether positive, or negative, or, more usually, an ambivalent, provocative mix of the two. Acceleration might be the imperative of the moment, but it does get exhausting, even dangerous. I'ma just rest by the side of the road here, get my breath back for a bit. So I've been looking for music that's calming, sensitive, healing—soothing sounds to save even internet-accelerated brains. And I've found that much of it comes from—or focuses on—the very place that is so often associated with both love and fear of intense futurity in underground music these days: East Asia.