Juno Recommends Leftfield: March 2023

Review: Music For Dreams label head Kenneth Badger was so inspired by the Tangerine Dream soundtrack to the classic Michael Mann film The Thief that he and Tolga Bo0.95yu0.95k from the Turkish band islandman decided to write their own soundtrack to an imaginary movie. They managed to write 10 tracks within 24 hours while imagining a film that told a story about two people stuck on the arctic ice cap where one tries to fool the other. Influences from Vangelis, John Carpenter, and Tangerine Dream all feature in what is a superb and escapist listen.

Review: French synth duo Deux are real cult favourites. The pair met in Lyon in 1981 and soon started working together on what became their signature stripped-down synth-pop sound complete with chilly vocals duets. Minimal Wave now have a four-track EP from Gerard Pelletier and Cati Tete which comes following other outings on this label such as Decadence in 2010 and 2012's Golden Dreams EP. It features three remastered mixes of the eponymous underground classic 'Let's Go !' as well as a never before released version of 'Everybody's Night'. It's a must-cop for fans of this brilliant pair.

Review: Sure to be one of the best aids for astral projection you'll be able to find this year, Polypores' 'Praedormitium' is a long ambient dream of the new age diaspora. Continuing its mastermind Stephen Buckley's mission to convey the feeling of hypnagogic calm before sleep (a state often accompanied by auditory hallucinations), this is by definition a liminal album. Packed with seemingly incongruous ambient sounds that work together in harmony (many a string-tremble, spaceship bloop and vibraphonic flourish crop up), this is a deeply textural album, likelier than not to lull all you insomniacs out there into better nighttime hygiene.

Review: KPM Music might just be one of the most expansive music libraries out there, boasting a whopping 30,000 exclusive music tracks for licensing. Some of their earliest pieces are being reissued by Measured Mile, the latest of which appears here in the form of a split 7" by four of the label's most treasured contributors. 'Viva La Tamla Motown' helms up the A-side with wonky, laboured drumming and an excitable rock n' rolly guitar and harmonica. 'Main Chance' brings up the B with a more loungeified flutey strutter.

Review: Even a decade on, the prospect of Donato Dozzy reworking Bee Mask for the Spectrum Spool label is a mouth-watering one. Now the timeless album gets a special reissue to mark the 10th anniversary on double LP collection. Originally commissioned to turn in a remix of Bee Mask's 'Vaporware' track from last year's LP for Room 40, Dozzy apparently felt the track's inherent beauty merited more than just the one and sent over seven! This decision has resulted in a superb collection of reimaginations from the Voices Of The Lake producer, ranging from calming moments of serenity to bleepish, deep techno explorations.

Review: Sure to sate all of their North Face and/or Arcteryx-jacketed obsessives, a new reissues spate of Autechre's best albums is underway courtesy of Warp Records. This reissue of Confield (arguably one of their most straightforward and 'chilled' experimental records) comes in the form of a double LP and digital download. The album is characterised by its shifting in and out of tempo structures, as well as its serene pads and digital sloshing sounds, producing the overall sonic character of a transhuman rainmaker.

Review: Never before seeing an official LP release until now, 'Minimum-Maximum' was the first ever live album by techno pioneers Kraftwerk, disseminating a new form of concert in DVD form. The ubiquity of mass media - on which the band so readily commented - has now lent their efforts a solid deal in the form of a dual release by Transistor Music, spanning various appearances in cities including Tokyo, London, Tallinn and Warsaw. This version, 'Minimum', forms the album's first half, featuring such riveting retrofuturistic hits as 'Vitamin', 'Tour De France', 'Autobahn' and ''The Man-Machine'.

Review: Canada may not shout as loud as the US, UK or Germany when it comes to electronic music, with the exception of Richie Hawtin perhaps, albeit frequently assumed he's American, and is actually part-British. Nevertheless, the larger North American state has a truly remarkable legacy in house, techno, ambient, and synth-y odds and sods.

It's proof the apple never falls far from the tree, given proximity to some of the bonafide birthplaces of those sounds - Chicago and Detroit. Edmonton's Khotin is indicative of the difficult to define tones that emanate from the Maple Leaf and its people. So much texture, pouring with emotion, and fundamentally born of new ideas, or at least different ways of thinking. Release Spirit, his third album on Michigan's Ghostly International, is thoughtful, intelligent, downtempo electronic stuff, crafted with love and attention to detail.

Review: A new reissue run of Autechre's best albums is underway, courtesy of Warp Records. The seventh LP Draft 7:30 is one of their many lesser-cited projects, but easily rivals many of the greats for all its ahead-of-its-time tinkerings and extrahuman sonic abstractions. Highlights for those not yet in the know include the stop-start snares and machinic crunches of 'IV VV IV VV VIII', and the mood of psychic absentia conveyed by the rapid-delayed big beat breaks of 'V-PROC'.

Review: The first fruits of Be With Records' recently announced partnership with Tele Music is a reissue of one of the legendary library music label's most far-sighted and sought-after releases: Tonio Rubio's 1972 collection 'Rhythms'. Offering the best in deep disco-breaks, laidback Blaxploitation funk and killer groove-based instrumentals, the album now comes accompanied by extensive new liner notes from Rubio and many of the crate-digging DJs who have been inspired by the album. Highlights include - but are in no way limited to - the wonderfully cosmic and otherworldly 'Dead Slow', the low-slung delights of 'Bass In Action' parts one and two, and the Pierre Henry-esque brilliance of 'Latin Leitmotiv'.

Review: Michael Hoenig and Manuel Gottsching were two prominent German kosmische / film composers, with the latter particularly known for his helming of the world-famous Ash Ra Tempel project. 'Early Water' is a lesser-cited collaborative live album performed by the pair in Autumn 1976, but it wasn't released until way later in 1995 - and even then, the album remained accidentally deleted by the label Musique Intemporelle, and was thus unavailable for a period of time. A rare find and relic of the Berlin school, this is an impressively blue-mooded arpeggiator, as easy for soundtracking fantastical swimming pools as it is for home lounging.

Review: Where do you even start with a title like this? To say Hollie Kenniff has set out to try and tear through your emotional brick wall in the sweetest and most gentile way possible is full understatement of the century territory. Following up on her spellbinding 2021 ambient masterpiece, The Quiet Drift, her latest offering to the world almost sounds like a memory even before you know what it's called.

From the outset, these are lush soundscapes that ebb and flow behind and in front of piano keys, suggestions of notes that almost aren't there, with the consistent totem this overwhelmingly rich timbre. The arrangements, often deceptively loose, reflect the work of mind's eye, its ability to recollect but not necessary in 360-degrees, colour, or linear timelines. Tracks such as the aptly titled 'Momentary' introduce refreshingly clear structures of melody, before again vanishing into beautiful walls of brilliant sound.

Review: Many of ASC's albums never made it to wax first time round, something he's now addressing via a swathe of vinyl additions of classic back catalogue releases. The latest to get this treatment is 2014's 'Truth Be Told', a set that's amongst the San Diego-based producer's most inspired ambient works (and there have been many over the years, as well as plenty of killer experimental d&b and spaced-out techno). While it naturally makes use of processed field recordings and cutting-edge sound design techniques, 'Truth Be Told' is a very nostalgic ambient album. Those with a deep knowledge of the 1990s works of Pete Namlook will feel right at home, while the slowly pulsing chords, immersive pads and gently unfurling lead lines reminded us of Sun Electric's often overlooked classic '30.7.94 Live'.

Review: Mancunian producer Andy Stott laid down his trademark knackered house and techno sound with this album, Luxury Problems. It was made from eight tracks recorded over 12 months, with five of the songs featuring vocals from his old piano teacher who Stott hadn't seen since he was a teenager in 1996. The whole thing now gets a welcome reissue as one of the best in his discography. The opening track 'Numb' has the vocalists looped and layered vocals exuding a cinematic quality. The paranoid, dense, slow-moving qualities that Stott has made his signature remain, but they've been toyed with and manipulated, and the vocal elements feel like a calculated gamble - one that has truly paid off.

Review: So many artists were hammered by the pandemic, it's impossible to draw much distinction between who fared well and who fared worse. Psychologically, the impact of disconnect and isolation on major global stars would have been immense, while emergents had the wind taken out of their sails in such a brutal way, at a time when momentum was everything.

Kelly Lee Owens falls somewhere between the two, with the pandemic devastating plans for a world tour, indicative of where she'd got to, and where she was tipped for next. With all dates off, she opted to jump on a plane - as it happens the last plane to Norway before borders shut - where she hauled up in a studio with avant-noise supremo Laase Marhaug. No particular place else to be, nor a plan, their recording sessions are capture here in music channelling industrial electronica, Celtic mysticism, leftfield pop and something else.

Review: Jo Johnson is a rising name in the realm of modular ambience; here she presents her latest four track mini-album for Mysteries Of The Deep. 'The Wave Ahead' is an implicit homage to the likeness of sound waves and the moon-guided waves of the Earth's oceans, producing a nighttime calmdown for polyphonic synth in five tracks. For Johnson, both kinds of wave are nearly one and the same - 'diaphonous' - and the realisation is made manifest here in a stellarly arpeggio-heavy, sinewave-surfing LP, which recalls the work of Steve Hauschildt or Hannah Peel.

Review: Something of a cult classic born again - a little like the New Age philosophies that act as foundations for at least some of the work here - Soul Jazz presents the long-out-of-print Space, Energy & Light album. An expansive, often mind-altering, and unarguably far-reaching collection of pioneering work from the world of synthesised music, it spans a staggering three decades so there's an awful lot to experience.

Not just a celebration of forward-thinking tracks, though, what's here represents an historic archive of development in process and production technology. From bold advancements in hardware, to new approaches to software, it's a collection that runs from the lush and still criminally under-heard space-age soul of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, to Laurie Spiegel's science fiction overtures. Tracks which, even if people didn't realise it at the time, presented blueprints for so much of what is happening in electronica today.

Review: The Zenker Brothers's Munich-based Illian Tape label is one of the architects of the contemporary underground. After making breakbeats cool again, the label continues to branch out in various directions. This time out it is MPU101 who links up his machines, turns them on and lets them cook up a series of grainy, lo-fi and downbeat soundscapes. Some have gently suggestive rhythms, others float through space and all of them come laden with a certain sense of melancholy. Importantly, though, there is often beauty in the shadowy moods cooked up.

Review: It's a bold, bold statement to claim that a record was "recorded across decades". We all know genius can take time, and geniuses can be easy to distract, but there's slow and then there's starting a project in one aeon and ending it in another. In truth, Jon Iverson Meets Prins Emanuel, Golden Ivy, Inre Kretsen Grupp is that, and then not that. A collaborative project that sees some incredible minds meeting in the middle while never actually meeting. Starting with Iverson's original 1980 American home studio recordings, Seance Centre's Brandon Hocura took unfinished sonic sketches from the master musician and set to inviting 21st Century practitioners to complete the work. Looking to Malmo, Emanuel Sundin (Prins Emanuel), Ivar Lantz (Golden Ivy) and Martin Blomberg (Inre Kretsen Grupp) were drafted for that duty, and the result is this slow burn album somewhere between atmospheric badlands and kosmische.

Review: Electronic music is guilty of so many injustices it's hard to know where to begin. Among the least talked about historically is the lack of space made for South Asian and South Asian-heritage artists, who, despite the written pantheons doing their best not to emphasise it, have contributed an incredible amount to the canon's many genres. Things are improving in terms of representation and visibility, but there is still a very, very long way to go.

Even without the urgent need for more equal coverage, it was always going to be hugely exciting to get a copy of an Acid Arab album. And Trois does not disappoint. The Paris-based production duo invite us into ever-deeper corners of their sound, from the tense prog chug of 'Ya Mahla' and the stripped techno build of 'Rachid Trip', to the slick and sexy, writhing broken gem 'Gouloulou', it's as varied as the influences involved.

Review: Another gem of lowercase ambient music from Ohio, 'The Notional Pastures Of Imaginary Softwoods' is the latest statement by Imaginary Softwoods (John Elliott), who has worked in his own special brand of musico-horticulturalism since the early noughties. The longstanding project Emeralds makes up another flower to his daisy chain. With many of these pieces composed through elaborate rituals that often span many years, this is a hauntingly beautiful album into which reams of time and effort has been poured.

Review: The master of instrumental downtempo funk and soul returns with four more sides of gloriously laid back grooves as the label reissues his Before album. Fukagawa Kiyotaka was in top form here with supremely sunny sax motifs and deep, lush drums sinking you in right from the off. He then leans on his cultural heritage with Eastern melodies drifting over starry-eyed chords, layers in plenty of serene strings and even gets jazzy on the fantastic 'Feel It.' A downtempo and Balearic masterpiece for sure.

Review: Marlene Ribeiro's cult status has already guaranteed copies of this will be flying out faster than you can say "first album under own name after years as Negra Branca, a member of GNOD, and collaborations with luminaries from Valentina Magaletti to Thurston Moore". And her first offering as herself, as it were, rockets straight to the pinnacle of career highs to date, a record that's so full of ideas yet consistent and complete.

Produced between Ireland, Portugal, Madeira and Salford, partly inspired by Ribeiro's grandmother, Emilia, introducing her to the concept of "recording things, here and there". The result is this incredible combination of hallucinatory dream pop, found notes and captured moments, resulting in a vivid tapestry of hook-laden songs that are meditative yet catchy, late-night but bright and breezy.

Review: Pigeon Steve's Glasgow-based label Seated Records follows up release of rare demos from 1986 with another reissue joint for the heads from the same year. Pop Wallpaper only released a few singles in their short-lived span, but this one absolutely needed a fresh release. Shuggie Otis' evergreen 'Strawberry Letter 23' remains one of the sweetest soul cuts of all time, and this synth-pop group brought a distinctive flavour to the song when they covered it in 1986. This reissue also brings out the tougher porto-house flavour of the demo version, not to mention a wild, jacked up acid version from Pigeon Steve and Useful Tom's playful, punchy box jam rendition.

Review: John Frusciante of Red Hot Chilli Peppers fame has always had a fine outlet to explore his passion for electronic music courtesy of the Los Angeles label and 303 lovers at Acid Test. He's turned out plenty of EPs and LPs now and 2023 kicks off with his latest offering I. It is a double album with the scones part II also forming his first new solo material since 2020. He has said of the rather sculptural album: "This music was made from sequences which never exceed a single note, many of these pieces being made on a single pattern."

Review: Jon Hassell's later albums were increasingly influenced by the post-jazz composer's favourite philosophies and thinkers. 'City: Works Of Fiction' - reworked into 'Psychogeography: Zones Of Feeling' here - is a strong case in point. Inspired by the work of French anarchist Guy Debord, who wrote extensively on topics such as surrealism, anti-consumerism and art, culminating in an umbrella philosophy known as situationism, Hassell's later works are perfect hazes, indeterminate ambient jazz storms through which to experience the past via psychic explorations of one's immediate surroundings.