Back catalogue: Experimental/Electronic

Review: The more discerning and concentrated electro head will be tuned into the work of Bot1500. It is an alias of Shinichi Kobayashi, a producer who since 2018 has landed on the likes of Analogical Force and Furthur Electronix with a unique mix of futurist sounds. This one is another brilliant EP featuring cuts like 'Chartreuse 8.' It's a propulsive rhythm built from silky breaks and overlaid with the sort of heart-aching and thought-provoking chords that will send you inward on the dance floor. The five other cuts are just as much a perfect mix of the physical and the cerebral.

Review: Fresh, warm and spontaneous - brainwave research center's eight track debut album is everything that electronic music sometimes forgets to be. Recorded and produced in the back of Smith's synthesizer/electronic repair shop, Specs Sales & Repair, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the project is a joint collaboration between NYC-based house/techno producer, Chase Smith (W.T. Records, Apartment, is/Was), & documentary filmmaker, Christa Majoras (School of Visual Arts).
Described as a distillation of influences from experimentalism of Steve Reich, Laurie Spiegel and Black Dice, the 90s ambient techno of The Orb and Pete Namlook/Fax and more motorik flavours like Kraftwerk, Suicide, Manual Gottsching, it's a gentle but lively affair from the Art Of Noise-esque 'ah ah ah ah ah' and bubbling jam 'Bird Brain' to the epic arpeggios v guitar closer 'Day Dreaming'. This is first of four releases that the artist has planned, but there's certainly enough here to get your teeth into for now.

Review: Brainwave Research Center is back once again with another superb album, and once again Chase Smith and Christa Majoras embody a unique DIY sound crafted from analog synthesizer experimentations. This is another entry into the duo's initial four-part series and it encapsulates the essence of summer. The A-side commences with a dreamy narrative that transitions into the gritty urban landscape of Brooklyn in 'Interceptor iii,' and concludes with euphoric sunset vibes. On the B-side, the music delves into the sensation of falling in dreams, reminiscent of their second album Mosaic, again blending electronic and acoustic elements. Feel Free, then, invites listeners into the everyday musings of Brainwave Research Center and is a classic listen for fans of locked-in rhythms.

Review: Now comes the fifth album by German electronic trio Brandt Brauer Frick, known for their electroacoustic collisions of house and techno with live-played instrumentation. Multi Faith Prayer Room is their most ambitious album to date, including collaborations with Mykki Blanco, Azekel, Marina Herlop, Kom_I, Sophie Hunger and Duane Harden. It flaunts a mastery over a certain modern, hybrid approach to making electronic music, combining drumming, bass, piano and vocals with drum machines and synths. A diverse, sprawling, border-melting, widescreen take on many dance genres out there.

Review: Keplar releases a vinyl reissue of 2001's Curve, the second album released by Frank Bretschneider on Mille Plateaux under his real name. Curve saw Bretschneider pick up on the underlying concept of 1999's Rand, but gave his explorations of the sonic and stylistic range of electronic music notably more space and time to unfold. Merging compositional minimalism with sonic complexity, the eight tracks display an affinity for the production techniques of dub music, which had already been a major reference point for Bretschneider's work before. Its subtle grooves, especially in the rhythmically charged pieces towards the end of the album, also nod at the dance music-inspired work of contemporaries such as SND or Vladislav Delay. Produced during a prolific time for Bretschneider, who had previously co-run the Rastermusic label and was at that time still active under his Komet moniker, he considers Curve to be a crucial album in his discography.

Review: After what seems like an eternity, Warp has finally decided to give Broadcast's Microtonics series a full release. Initially made available only to fans at gigs, the two-volume series saw the band experimenting not with their krautrock-influenced brand of trippy electronic pop, but rather the kind of music concrete and synthesizer experiments that were once the preserve of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Peter Zinovieff and the various modular synthesis fetishists that came in their wake. For that reason, it's not Broadcast at their most accessible, but if you're into vintage synth sounds and admirable experimental electronica, Microtonics makes for hugely enjoyable listening.

Review: Erased Tapes, London's purveyors of the new garde in ambient music, take on one of the legends in revered Oregon folk experimentalist Peter Broderick. On the Partners LP, he starts out with the spoken word poetry of the title track, then the sombre piano piece "In A Landscape", complete with eerie tape hiss lurking in the background. Other highlights include the emotional and bittersweet "Carried" and the awe inspiring closing track "Sometimes" where Broderick's vocals come gloriously come into the fold, on a price which is truly captivating and special.

Review: Cate Brooks is now up to a seventh release on Clay Pipes and with each new outing she always evolves. 'Easel Studies' is no different and sees the artist going further than ever before beyond the pale when it comes to sound synthesis and experimentation on the Buchla Music Easel. What results is melody that's both abstract and alien but still beautifully compelling. She layers it up in hypnotic fashion across ten tracks that range from the cosmic to the synthetic, the ambient to more rhythmic. It's the sort of record to put on loud and tune in to closely and lose all sense of space and time.

Review: If there's one collaboration that we have bowed down to over the last few years, it's most certainly this new found friendship between London's Kevin Martin aka The Bug, and American doom metal guitarists, Earth. One wouldn't immediately make the connection between inner-city future-grime music and suburban stoner rock, but the two styles were in perfect unison, and this is because they're both fascinated with dark, looming clouds of bass. Whether that's through virtual synths or badass bass guitars, it doesn't matter, because the mood is mightily present. Concrete Desert is the alliance's debut LP, and it's all guns blazing from start to finish; tunes like "Snakes vs Rats" or "Metal Drone" represent exactly the sort of freshen-up that each respective act needed - on the one hand, The Bug could have done with some more external influences to the melodic constructions, while Earth needed a new framework to enter the minds of a new, European audience. We've dubbed this style 'metal drone', and we're pretty sure that it's gonna stick after you've played it out for a few minutes. A blinding collab, right here.

Review: Of all the artists past and present who claim to let their music do their talking for them, Burial is one of the elite band of whom this truly is the case. In fact, so reluctant is he to engage with the cult-of-personality hoopla that surrounds almost every modern producer and musician of merit, that he remains a genuine recluse; he has never appeared live, only one obliquely-angled publicity photograph is known to exist, and the number of interviews he has given can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Yet despite this, his music speaks loud and wide, and the world has been listening ever since his 'South London Boroughs' EP debut on Hyperdub in March 2005. His eponymous album, which began life as a low-key release in May 2006, is now widely regarded as the benchmark release of the ever-widening dubstep genre, picking up unanimous critical acclaim along the way, and ending the year heavily featured in many 'best of' polls. Now Burial returns with 'Untrue', a new record of weird soul music, which lovingly processes spectral female voices into vaporised R&B and smudged 2step garage. Vocal lines are blurred, smeared, pitched up pitched down and pitch bent until their content is cast adrift from their original context and they whisper their saccharin sweet nothings into the void. The album continues with the debut's crackle-drenched yearning and bustling syncopations, haunted by the ghosts of rave, but also reveals some new Burial treats with a more glowing, upbeat energy. Kicking off with the skittering 2step syncopations and vocal science of 'Archangel', 'Near Dark' and 'Ghost Hardware', before long it descends into a space of radiant divas and ambience. Where 'Burial' first was humid, suffocating and unrelentingly sad, 'Untrue' is less sunless. Many of the tracks are so sweet, they become toxic, underscored by the almost geological rumbles of growling basslines. Unlike the overpoweringly melancholic prevailing mood of before, Burial's sound is now better defined as a downcast euphoria typified by the epic, muted optimism of the album's last track 'Raver'. Forget central heating the radioactivity of this album is all that you'll need to keep you warm this winter. 'Untrue' is available as full 13 track digipack CD, including recent underground hit 'Ghost Hardware', and 9 track DJ friendly double vinyl set, from which some of the beatless pieces have been edited.

Review: It wasn't so long ago we were writing about the joys of BVDUB's Fumika Fades, a new double pack in February that sunk us deep into moving ambient soundscapes. Now the Bay Area dub techno titan Brock van Wey is back once again with yet another album - he dropped plenty of them last year too so is clearly in a mad creative patch. Slowly Shifting Lakes comes in multiple formats, this one being a double CD. The ambient here is coarse and textured, fizzing synths stretching out over skittish rhythmic frameworks before sinking into calmer waters on cuts like the escapist 'Searching For Glowing Shores.' Another triumphant album for sure.

Review: RECOMMENDED
When electronic hero Richard H. Kirk returned in 2020 under the Cabaret Voltaire moniker - changing band to solo project for the first record in 26 years, Shadow of Fear - it couldn't have been more apt. Known for exploring darker and more visceral ends of synthdom, the musical boundary-pusher delivered a record that was alarming, challenging and completely unique, confirming that old habits really do die hard.

12 months or so later and the world is still trapped in the chaotic mess it was when that LP dropped, but Kirk has clearly opted to explore new ideas and break yet more new ground. Dekadrone lives up to its name, offering four lengthy movements that showcase the effectiveness of refrains and the musicality that can be created, or found, in extended notes and ongoing atmospheres. Another work of staggering genius.

Review: Richard H Kirk was rightly praised for 2020's Shadow of Fear, his first album since turning Cabaret Voltaire into a solo project back in 2014, and his recently follow-up EP, Shadow of Funk. Both distilled the essence of the Cabs' club-friendly industrial funk sound, re-formatting it for the 21st century. Dekadrone, though, is a different proposition altogether. Focused not on clubs but on immersive home listening, the four-phase, single track set removes Kirk's clanking, often paranoid beats in favour of dystopian aural textures (think dark, droning tones, abstract electronics, apocalyptic ambience and dirt-encrusted samples). Those who prefer the Cabs' more experimental, ambient-leaning works will love it.

Review: The arrival of a new Cabaret Voltaire album - the first since 1994 according to our records - should excite all those who hold the work of the pioneering Sheffield outfit dear. It's now a solo project from Richard H Kirk (he decided to keep the name after parting company with Stephen Mallinder in the late '90s), but the distinctive stylistic ticks remain (think paranoid sonic textures, metallic percussion hits, clear dub influences, plentiful spoken word samples, curious electronic noises and nods towards the industrial funk, EBM and post-punk). Naturally it's not as ground-breaking as Kirk and company's work in the '70s and '80s, but it is undeniably a Cabaret Voltaire album - and one that subtly updates the Cabs' particular brand of dense, dancefloor-ready paranoia for a new century.