Back catalogue: Balearic/Downtempo

Review: Thievery Corporation veteran Eric Hilton is on a roll with his Montserrat House label, operating out of DC and adding new layers to his considerable legacy in downtempo sounds. As was teased by the 'Amor Astral' single from 2023, this new album finds Hilton working closely with long time Thievery collaborator, Argentinian singer Natalia Clavier. Her coolly soulful tone hovers over the buttery funk jams Hilton lays down, where the drums are tight and crisp and the basslines wrap themselves around the groove with snake-like grip, all the better to sink into when you need a little chill-out time from a certified master of the art.

Review: Humble folk compositions from Haruka Nakamura, a longtime fixture of the Tokyo singer-songwriter scene. From the outset, we can almost instantly tell the theme of Nakamura's 2018 album Grace: it's a waltzing meditation on daily life and lightly passed time - and our research proves this to be correct, with the album having been made carefully over three parts of a daily cycle. A crude but elegant blend of lo-fi elements, glorious soprano vocals and rough samplework make for an emotionally wide-ranging listen, from the outset of 'every day' to the closing 'cadenza'.

Review: Following a run of superb collaborative releases - including sets created with Ana Stamp, Suzanne Kraft and his old pal Gigi Masin - Jonny Nash has finally got round to recording a new solo album. It's his first lone LP for four years and draws as much from his love of folk and acoustic music as the immersive sound worlds of ambience. As a result, his usual lilting, effects-laden guitar textures, stretched-out synthesiser chords and immersive electronic textures rub shoulders with finger-picked acoustic guitars, pedal steel-inspired motifs, strummed chords and echo and reverb-laden snippets of his own voice (a sonic ingredient he has not used for some time). The results are as magical and mesmerising as you'd expect, with Point of Entry crashing straight in to the list of Nash's strongest releases to date.

Review: First released in 1997 as his sixth and final LP project, Colin Newman's Bastard came to the innovative "post-everything" label Swim a good while after the Wire member and electronic experimentalist had already made several splashes in the mitts of the infamous Cartel, the arch-distributor and de facto trade guild giving rise to labels like 4AD and Beggars. Keeping in close knit to such sonic romanticists helped propel Newman's sound into dreamier realms over the years, and this seven-tracker functions as the pinnacle of this tendency. First coming across as a more convincing analogue to contemporaries like Lush, Newman's sound here is less polished and thus more "authentic"-seeming, basking in militant breaks and techstep entrainments and which come blent with incredible pad and amped-up guitar washes. In the in-betweeny moments, we're also met with trip-hop delights resting on the lower-ends of the spectrum; the alien middle finger on the cover says it all, a veritable "fuck you" gestured by an early subject of dance music, a genre that Newman recalls was a misunderstood, much-maligned genre at the time.

Review: South Carolina singer and producer Niecy Blues describes her songwriting process like an undertow: "I feel a strange pull, and let it carry me, following swirling leaves/whole days roll by, forgetting about the body." Their full-length debut, Exit Simulation, captures this sense of deep-rooted divination, cycling between simmering ballads, ghosted r&b, downtempo gospel, and looped vocal improvisations - often within the same track. The title is taken from a science fiction novel she read during the purgatory of the pandemic, alluding to a dimensional ideation of departure - "the permission to imagine leaving." Recorded in her current home of Charleston, she characterizes the album's mood in terms both reflective and raw: an exploration of things suppressed, foundations beginning to crack, "talking myself off a ledge." The music of Niecy Blues transposes reverie and reckoning into emotive devotionals of keys, guitar, bass, synth, and bewitched voice, steeped in sacred atmospheres gleaned from a youth spent in a religious Oklahoma household: "My first experience with ambient music was church - slow songs of worship, with delay on the guitar - even if you don't believe, you feel something."

Review: After what seems like an eternity (four years to be exact), Aim and Niko have fired up their ATIC Records imprint to release the latter's first album in nine years. Produced by Aim, Electric Union is a pleasingly eclectic affair that rightly puts the Seattle-born singer front and centre. After opening with a dash of futurist, house-fired synth-pop ('It Could Be Love') and shiny new wave revivalism (the Goldfrapp-esque 'The Palace Discotheque'), the set sees Niko and her long-time producer sashay between analogue-rich electro-pop, kaleidoscopic downtempo loveliness and thrill-a-minute D&B ('You Used To Have Her'), all shot through with neon-lit synth sounds and crunchy machine beats.

Review: Johnstown, Pennsylvania isn't the first town on everyone's lips when it comes to deep dive electronics. But then, sadly, most people still don't seem to have encountered Nondi. Better known to some of those who have as Tatiana Triplin, the US producer and head of the 'net label HRR has developed a cult following for her experimental takes on some already quite leftfield electronic genres: breakcore and footwork, alongside Detroit-hued techno. What's remarkable about all this is the fact she confesses to only really having direct experiences of these genres online, as oppose to amid the sweat and frenzy of the situations they were first intended for. While this might lead some to assuming her work lacks authenticity, nothing could be further from the truth - it's all so authentic because the interpretations are entirely hers.

Review: Los Angeles-born and raised Jason W. Chung aka Nosaj Thing is back on Lucky Me with a new album, more than 15 years into his career. Continua is his fifth album overall and this one finds him working with a top crew of collaborators including Toro y Moi, Sam Gendel, Pink Siifu, Panda Bear and Eyedress. Renowned for his ability to craft soundscapes that draw on his life in music from early punk and DIY shows to his sets at the famed Low End Theory, here he again cooks up an all-pervading mood of absorbing synth goodness. Some rides broke beats, some is abstract, all of it is gold.

Review: There are few borders to NTHNG's sounds. His debut album 'It Never Ends' made a big impression back in 2017 as it mixed up dub, deepness and techno and he has since impressed with plenty of lo-fi sounds and ambient bliss-outs on labels like Lobster Theremin and Lobster Sleep Sequence as well as dropping his more raw techno Delsin. Here he is in soundscaping mode again but also drops some slick electro, downbeat and Balearic sound on There Is A Place For Me on Transatlantic. It is a cosmic work of widescreen design and immersive effect.

Review: On their debut album, 2016's the Tony Allen Experiments, Naples twosome Nu Guinea re-invented tracks by the legendary Afro-beat drummer as synth-heavy chunks of deep jazz-funk and nu-Balearica. For this follow-up - their first full length entirely made up of their own compositions - the duo serves up a set of jazz-funk, disco and boogie cuts rich in both their trademark colourful analogue synthesizer sounds and live instrumentation. It's a formula that guarantees a string of memorable highlights, from the sun-kissed peak-time brilliance of "Disco Sole" and rubbery, funk-fuelled "Je Vulesse" (a killer vocal number), to the wobbly downtempo trip of "A Voce E Napule" and Mizell Brothers fizz of closer "Parev Ajare", the album's most synthesizer-heavy cut.

Review: Despite selling out instantly on first press back in November 2018, it is only now that Nujabes' first solo album "Metaphorical Music" makes it to wax once more. This most spiritual of hip hop records - first released in 2003 - brings together downtempo, trip hop, instrumental, classic era boom bap, neo soul and funk into an accomplished collection of tunes that pack a dance floor as well as heartfelt punch. The album showcases some of the best music that the hip hop genre is capable of. Do not miss this, as it won't be around for long.

Review: Nokbient and Save Point's Video Game LoFi: Yoshi is a playful and charming electronic covers tribute to the classic video game character. A mix of chiptune-inspired synths and lo-fi beats, crafted delicately and softly for the modern listener, combine to create this lovely ode to everybody's favourite green, giant-nosed reptile. Yoshi's greatest character themes - including those from Mario Kart, Super Mario World, and Yoshi's Story - all combine in an unequivocally cute mood here.