Back catalogue: Experimental/Electronic

Review: Japanese industrial noise duo The Grogerigegege are something of an urban legend within the underground music scene. Apparently meeting at a sex club where a shared appreciation for envelope pushing sex acts, punishing aural sonics and a bizarre avant-garde perspective on art would lock them together for ensuing decades of musical mayhem. Known for incorporating nudity, violence, broken glass and hoovers into their live set, the pair would even take a lengthy respite while one of the members simply disappeared for years on end before reconnecting with his counterpart. As If It Had Always Been Determined Since This Day Was Born transports listeners back to the pair's earliest forays into calculated extremity with blown out, overdriven remixes taken directly from the master tapes of their first 7" single released back in 1988. This includes the long sought after remaster of 'Mistress' originally used in the legendary Enoshima Beach Flexi Burning Live (which the pair opted to burn all original pressings of rather than make readily available). You do have to remember these are the same lads who sold dried out octopus tentacles in cassette cases during one tour as a limited release, and smashed up the master recording of another work and put the broken pieces in a metallic box that the listener shook to hear the album, hence the title You Are The Music Maker. If the utter lunacy of The Grogerigegege isn't detailed enough here, well this pressing comes complete with 5500 word essay-style liner notes penned by 55 year old Gero himself (Juntaro Yamanouchi).

Review: Kareem Lotfy and Heith are back with their Ghost Lemurs project, and arguably their most conceptual and captivating record to date. Describing Wombs & Spirit Aliens as "a type of folk music devoid of a specific homeland, but resulting from the authors' heritages, simultaneously divided and united by the Mediterranean Sea", it feels like stepping out of our traditional timeline and into another dimension. Unarguably psychedelic - you can almost hear the shooting stars wisp by core arrangements as you desperately try and stargaze in the mind's eye - it's also unarguably earthly. Polyrhythms and melodic motifs seem to be taken straight from the ceremonial practices of long lost communities and tribes. Those who built their civilisations around a connection with the terrestrial and extraterrestrial, something most of us can only really hope to imagine in 2024.