Back catalogue: All genres

Review: Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard revive the collaboration first aired on the latter's 2016 album Unde The Sun, this time across a full album reportedly four years in the (top secret) making. It's a compelling synthesis of Yorke's atmospheric melancholy and Pritchard's textured production. It expores a range of moods, from the uneasy tension of 'A Fake In A Faker's World' to the hypnotic rhythms of 'Back In The Game', while the eerie, spectral qualities of 'This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice' reveal the pair's ability to intertwine experimental soundscapes with a visceral emotional pull. Standout moments include 'Gangsters,' where Pritchard's intricately layered beats mesh with Yorke's haunting vocal delivery, and 'Wandering Genie,' which closes the journey with a strange sense of release. The music takes unexpected turns, not just as a statement of collaboration, but as a reflection of two artists playing with the unknown, pulling their sonic worlds into unexplored spaces. Each track is a feather in the cap of their combined ingenuity, with Yorke's vocal vulnerability and Pritchard's production wizardry in full synergy.

Review: Phaedra is the fifth studio album by German electronic group Tangerine Dream, recorded in November 1973 at The Manor in Shipton-on-Cherwell, England, and released in 1974 through Virgin. An icier, tempoless departure for a band otherwise better recognised for their sequencer-led, soundtrack-bred sound, this was a hidden moulin for frost-drone fanatics, and a deviant pupil of the otherwise strict Berlin School. Despite receiving little to no airplay, Phaedra gained significant traction through word of mouth when it was released by a rather more hippified Richard Branson's fledgling Virgin label, eventually reaching number 15 on the UK Albums Chart and remaining on the charts for 15 weeks. Its long-form pieces, such as 'Sequent C' and 'Mysterious Semblance At The Strand Of Nightmares', represent an indifference to constraints of timing, instead washing over the ears as diachronic, swirling, crisp ice ambient smirrs.

Review: Up next in the gamut of Coil-adjacent reissued gems is this 3xLP vinyl version of The Threshold Houseboys Choir's Amulet. Having gone down in whispered legend as the ultra-secret limited-quantity direct mail-order (we could go on) holy grail that flaunted Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson's then latest semi-secret solo guise, Amulet was an exemplar of Marshall McLuhan's definitive aphorism, "the medium is the message," coming housed in a hand-assembled 4xCDr mini-set enclosed in an original, circular Thai Amulet case. The second and final release of this short-lived and much coveted moniker, Amulet, now hearing the vinyl reissue it deserves, is a rough collection of obsessive ritualistic diamonds in the rough, stylistically drawing on dub, drone, power electronics and East Asian music, and brought together by Christopherson's trademark digitally generated choir - whose verbalisations are wilfully incomprehensible, with the intent to sound uncanny, dreamlike - and which he often reverses and timestretches to unsettling effect.