Back catalogue: Experimental/Electronic

Review: The White Arcades ranks amongst one of Harold Budd's best loved solo works. The ambient pioneer and celebrated pianist is of course well known for his work with the likes of Brian Eno, but this 1988 album demonstrates how clear-sighted his approach became when he was recording on his own. There's a pristine quality to this kind of ambience which allows it to sink into any number of settings, but it's far from banal. The subtlety of Budd's composition and performance as the piano and synth lines enmesh is a marvel to behold, suggesting half-hidden mysteries waiting to be solved, but only when the time is right. If there was ever music to soothe a troubled mind, this would be it.

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: Over the last couple of years, author Justin Hopper has joined folk musician Sharron Kraus and vintage synthesizer fetishists Belbury Poly on stage to narrate sections of his 2017 novel "Old Weird Albion" - a "poetical, autobiographical and psycho-geographical account" of his experiences at Chanctonbury Ring in West Sussex. This album is, in effect, an extended re-recording of those performances, with Hopper reading choice excerpts from his book over an inspired fusion of traditional folk tropes - think recorder, flute, and drifting female vocals - atmospheric field recordings and 1970s style electronic instrumentation. Given that these synths have largely been used to re-record tudor style Baroque tunes (think "Greensleeves" and you're close), the results are not only delightfully eccentric but also admirably unique.

Review: La Perversita is something of a seminal French underground record first released back in 1979 but still sounds way ahead of its time today. It's a concept record and collage of found sounds, guitars and synths that was designed to "sublimate sexual perversion." It comes from Jacques Pasquier who was the founder of S.C.O.P.A./Invisible Records and a key part of the alternative scene that was rife in Paris in the 70s with producer Hector Zazou amongst other creative talents and outsiders. This remastered reissue comes with extensive liner notes from people in and around the project at the time.

Review: Wanderwelle & Bandhagens Musikforening's masterful Victory Over The Sun album gets skilfully reinterpreted by some of techno's most forward thinking protagonists. Amsterdam pair Wanderwelle themselves go first with a misty ambient take of 'An Unusual Sunrise' that sets a perfectly dramatic scene. Label boss Sverca serves up one of the highlights with his deep, pulsing hypnotic version of the title track and Anthony Linell sinks us way down below the ocean surface on his meditative dub roller. There is more energy to the busted beats and hidden vocal sounds of Celestial Crusade (E-Saggila remix) and plenty more greatness through the other tracks.