Staff Picks w / c 9 December 2019

Review: This is the most emotional and honest album from Space Dimension Controller so far. It comes after a turbulent time in which he battled addiction with the help of his partner and follows in his signature style of sci-fi musical storytelling. This time though his synths are softer and more tender, with good natured robots popping up next to cosmic funk, future retro downbeat and gorgeous astral ambient. It's a true album in that it really takes you to another world, miles away from your own, and leaves you wishing you could stay there forever.

Review: This one has been a very long time coming. It's difficult to name a single "great Hanukkah pop song", or indeed rock song, while fantastic Christmas tunes, for all the chintz and painfully sweet sentiments that saturate those festivities, are actually in abundance among the duds and cheap cash-ins. So here we have 12 odes to the Jewish holiday from a diverse range of artists, and not one that's anything short of good. Acts such as The Flaming Lips and Haim sidle up next to names like Jack Black, Alex Frankel and Adam Green, with musical supervision coming from the man like Randall Poster. If there's a criticism to be levelled it's that every band and artist included sounds exactly like you probably predicted, but that's hardly a real issue. After all, seasonal favourites are less about innovation, and all about celebration.

Review: Super limited new Stateside label that does what it says on the tin.Big drum breaks that work in their own right in instrumental form for these two massive dancefloor classics with the debut release for both tracks in a single 7 inch vinyl format .Heavy on the drums, heavy on the brass with driving instrumentation to take your dancefloor to B-Boy moves heaven. Saw the Allergies had been charting this for a while....Only 200 units !

Review: Honest Jon's "London Is The Place For Me" series has been dormant for a while, but previously offered a much-needed history lesson in the musical contribution made by Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the capital city during the post-war period. This seventh volume - the first for six years - continues this admirable approach by focusing on calypso, mento, Joropo and steel band music. It's a wonderfully eye-opening collection that includes a mixture of tracks by well-known musical SS Empire Windrush passengers - Lord Beginner being the most famous - as well as lesser-known lights who combined Island rhythms and instrumentation with lyrics about life in Britain. Superb stuff.

Review: Starting as it means to go on, or at least to some extent, the return of Duster is both surprising and completely logical. We always knew the San Jose, California rockers had more to say, it's just taken them 20 years - two decades, or more time than you thought anyone would wait to release a new record - to confirm those suspicions. In many ways there's not been a whole lot of changes to their sound. People once described the band as space rock, albeit we prefer to add some focus to the grunge nuances that are clearly audible through open ears. Today we're presented with, in their own words, "tranq-rock", as subdued and suited to zoning out as it is inviting, hook-y and powerful. Sounds oxymoronic? Just check the combination of woozy, druggy "Copernicus Crater" and scuzz-filled, heads chugger "I'm Lost" and you'll get it.

Review: Thanks to a plethora of pleasing releases from the likes of Nat Birchall and Michael Grossman, 2019 has been a vintage year for Jazzman's "Jazz 45" series. The last volume of the year comes courtesy of Jai Ho, an occasional studio "supergroup" who initially met by accident in the late 1990s. In fact, A-side "Short Story From Tabla, Drums & Trumpet" was recorded in a single day in 1996. The descriptive title is accurate, with squally, effects-laden trumpet solos riding a killer backing track of military style drum breaks, exotic tabla motifs and toasty double bass. The group met again for another studio day in 2003 and recorded B-side "Oye Maia", a wonderfully lucid and languid mixture of attractive Kalimba melodies, drifting trumpet and shuffling Indian instrumentation.

Review: REPRESS ALERT: Ever the educators, Emotional Rescue are now turning their attention to the 90s "Afro-cosmic" scene - a sound that spread through Europe following the influence of Daniele Baldelli and his pioneering DJing in Italy in the late '70s. Munich's The New Morning were amongst the many crews inspired by what Baldelli was championing, and they created incredible, unusual dance music that easily stands up to modern standards for its inventive fusions of global influences and electronic technology. From the heady house throw down "In Japan" to the cosmic dancehall flex of "Jay's Rhama", there's so much to vibe off here, all of it highly compatible with the adventurous sounds creeping into DJ sets in the current era.

Review: Dutch label AEX turns 10 with a sizzling six track collection that draws on a range of talent producers. The long established Tetelepta opens with a trippy minimal dub roller ("T5") while Human Space Machine explores dark, empty techno territory on "Rebirth." The superbly stylish and stripped back aesthetic continues with Nathan Surreal with the scintillating "Trunk" before the flip side resets with a Basic Channel style dub masterclass by Kaap. After the experimental rhythms of Denote's "Curl" comes a mysterious minimal tech-funk closer to make this a vital package of heady club sounds.

Review: Jonquera may be a new name, but the producer behind it is no fresh-faced beginner. Guillaume Lespinasse is best known as one half of The Pilotwings, a Lyon-based duo whose Balearic-minded musical experiments have rightly won praise in recent times. "Formative Dubs" is his first solo outing and is undoubtedly a more eccentric and out-there affair than his collaborative works. He sets the tone with the epic electronic dub opus "Umamami" - all echoing metallic hits, Middle Eastern influenced melodies, fizzing electronics and bubby drums - before bending reggaeton into madcap new shapes on "Hell Reggaeton". Elsewhere, "Smegta" is a wide-eyed ambient cut, "Jonquera At Caluire On The Rocks" a particularly spaced-out slab of ambient dub and "Escroc Voice In My Head" the sound of Pilotwings after a few too many high THC spliffs.

Review: Matthew Farrow takes a break from his Kepler alias to deliver this sure shot of garage rudeness to Burnski's Instinct label, and he's sounding absolutely on point. "Inside" has plenty of MC flava sprinkled over it, not to mention all the 4x4 rudeness you could wish for from the bassline upwards. "Steppa" is a more soulful cut with a crafty breakstep twist to it, while "Rouge Fader" brings it back to that naughty middle ground between uptempo house and proper swinging garage, DX7 organ and all. "Break" gets tricky with the drum licks again, completing a set of good time rabble rousing business.

Review: Not for the faint of heart, this one. Packing rage, bleak undertones, a distinct element of dread and dismay, Pop. 1280's fourth long form outing is an accomplished work of blood, guts, and raw emotion that you wouldn't want to come up against in a fight, but probably will want to lose yourself in its murky depths. Don't be afraid, though. Instead embrace these tomes that are at once doom-filled and honest. A darkroom, gritty and wholehearted heavy rock outing that still finds time to introduce delicate moments, both guitar and piano driven ("Under Duress"), in and among its ferocity. Its synth-goth overtures (the chorus of "Hospice"), its off-key eeriness ("The Convoy"); all that's here feels purpose-built for both sweat-filled venues and cinema screens, a combination that is unarguably difficult to conceive, let alone deliver.

Review: Backatcha Records continues to offer up excellent EPs full of rare and overlooked music. Their latest release delves into the vaults of Washington D.C band Theatre West, who recorded an album's worth of music for Black Fire Records in 1976 that eventually appeared on a limited CD in 1993. This, then, is the band's first ever vinyl release. There's much to enjoy throughout, from the gentle soul warmth of "Children Of Tomorrow's Dreams" and the feisty disco-soul goodness of "No More Junk" to the child-friendly sing-along that is Rhodes-laden disco-funk outing "Searching For Ourselves".

Review: If you're tired of coming across compilations that explore the same much-trodden ground, we'd heartily recommend checking out this delightfully eccentric and unusual set from Music For Dreams. It comes from Belgian DJ SoFa and focuses on children's songs that tend towards the more cosmic and intergalactic end of the musical spectrum. It's full of bizarre but brilliant concoctions that range from German school choirs singing about robots and analogue snynthesizer soundscapes, to bonkers cuts made by parents and their children, and even a dash of kiddie-friendly space disco built around dub reggae rhythms. It's the sort of enjoyable and eye-opening set we don't see that often, so both SoFa and Music For Dreams should be congratulated for getting it together. An inspired dose of musical lunacy for space cadets everywhere.

Review: Given the quality, depth and melodiousness of her productions, we always felt that Shanti Celeste would be capable of producing a great debut album. As "Tangerine" defiantly proves, we were right. Rooted in her dreamy but driving club sound but peppered with delicious downtempo diversions - see the Japanese-influenced new age minimalism of "Natura", the drowsy ambient bliss of "Sun Notification" and "Selected Ambient Works" style opaque fluidity of "Slow Wave" - "Tangerine" is a brilliant showcase for the Peach Discs founder's inimitable talents. There's a pleasant amount of variation amongst the killer club cuts too, with highlights including the intergalactic techno bounce of "Aqua Block", the mangled drum and bass mysticism of "Voz", the retro-futurist breakbeat garage bustle of "Want" and the dream house skip of "Sesame".

Review: Here's something to set the pulse racing: a reissue of Coil's 1992 soundtrack to the VHS-only sex-ed documentary "The Gay Man's Guide To Safer Sex". It's always been something of an in-demand curio, primarily because it sees John Balance, Peter Christopherson and Danny Hyde not in industrial or experimental mode, but rather exploring the dreamy chord sequences and warming horizontal of ambient house (albeit with occasional nods towards acid jazz/proto trip-hop and what Hyde describes as "sort of progressive house"). It's very good, though, and comes with two tasty bonus cuts, "Nasa Arab" and "Omlagus Garfungiloops", which are vastly different versions of other soundtrack cuts. These were originally featured on a CD-only release in 1992.

Review: As time passes, the increasingly prolific partnership of Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer moves farther into the wilderness, both artists emboldened by their shared sense of adventure and peerless skill. Here, on this LP for Mana, they're shrugging off all shackles in an exploration of synthesis on a molecular level. What's so thrilling is that patterns and rhythms do emerge from within this primordial soup, winding up in some of the most gorgeous and beguiling works we've tripped on for some time. Otherworldly, but somehow grounded with an earthly instinctive-ness, "The Clouds Know" will take time to wrap your head around, but therein lies the beauty.

Review: For the latest volume in his ongoing retrospective series "The Director's Cut", Jeff Mills has decided to offer us another chance to own his most iconic and celebrated track, "The Bells". All techno heads should know the 1996 original version that kicks off the EP, but if you don't, it's a stomping, heavily percussive romp rich in looped synth stabs and chiming melodies. Here it comes accompanied by the stunning version found on the "Blue Potential" DVD, in which Mills performed live with Montpellier Philharmonic Orchestra), and bonus cut "The Homosapien Sapiens", which appears to be a previously unreleased cut. While of interest, it's the version of "The Bells" that make the EP an essential purchase.