New releases last two weeks: Experimental/Electronic

Review: Nadah El Shazly returns with her second album and first on One Little Independent and Backward Music. The Egyptian-born, Montreal-based artist blends experimental sonics with Arabic roots and improvisation on Laini Tani, and crafts music that slips between worlds and takes you with it. The whole record pulses like a hot night stretching into morning. It's sweaty, surreal, and endlessly alive and each track is a vivid fragment: defiant, euphoric or quietly raw. El Shazly's lush vocals and layered metaphors weave a dreamstate of meaning and mystery that bold and chaotic yet controlled so is a record to get lost in, then hit repeat as you try to decode its hidden truths.

Review: Fashion Flesh aka John Talaga debuts on ESP Institute with two mind-bending tracks crafted from homemade electronics, circuit-bent gear and tape manipulations. Side A's 'Atoms Revolt' explores the secret lives of machines while channelling chaotic energy into controlled sonic accidents, layered distortion and surreal textures. Side B's 'New Freedom' evokes a dystopian adventure into Detroit's decaying industrial sprawl while fusing Geiger-like pulses and eerie oscillations with fragmented voices into a dark rhythmic storm. Talaga's ability to extract soul from machines is remarkable here in what is a visceral and cerebral EP.

Review: Legendary video game soundtrack-er Motorhiro Kawashima is best known for his efforts on the iconic Streets of Rage 2 and 3 titles. The latter is remembered as one of the hardest to define scores of all time, certainly in terms of a playable titles, and even 30 years on still amazes and baffles anyone who encounters it. Less well known are the artist's solo and standalone efforts, which came much later. Acrobatizm and Prepared Wave were the first two of those records, and emerged in the pre-pandemic late-noughties. Both draw heavily on the glitch and leftfield experimental techno worlds, which were in rude health at the time, doubling down on staccato rhythms and mind-blowing arpeggiation, with the punchiness and jerky vibes more than nod to the glory days of 8-bit gaming.

Review: Madrid duo Pablo Miron and Juan Vacas return with their second album, En Perpetua, which delves deeper into their signature decayed collage and psycho-acoustic soundscape while building on their debut Of No Fixed Abode. This time out they also embrace new creative confidence and the possibilities offered by a fresh Madrid studio and use violin, harmonica, voices, guitars, a looper, FM radio and diverse array of field recordings-from the Spanish countryside to exhibition sounds-to bring it to life. They craft eight re-pitched meditations that explore fractured music and rhythmic patterns which unfold through their distinctive, open-ended and immersive tonal journeys.

Review: Words and terms such as benchmark, revolutionary and paradigm shift are thrown around far too casually and liberally when writing about music. But if there's one electronic album that really does live up to those tags it's Ultravisitor. Still sounding like it's from another planet to this day, from the moment eponymous opener headbutts us with an ice breakbeat shatter to those very last guitar plucks on 'Everyday I Love', this is concentrated Squarepusher in every possible geometrical permutation. So many breakcore and IDM parameters were set on this exceptional body of work. From the metal militancy of 'Steinbolt' to the fantastical drive (and wild slap bass) of 'Tetra-Sync', this remains a wholly unique LP that's both wonderful challenging and definitely not of this earth.

Review: The most aptly-named record label in the world, Light Sounds Dark present another collection of wildly experimental bits and pieces cultivated in the lab of things that you simply don't hear in other places. Suitably christened 'Track 1', 'Track 2', and so on until 'Track 29', this is a huge point of entry for newcomers to the LSD realm and an excellent deep dive for veterans alike. Winds howl and thunder crashes before beautiful harmonies change the vibe from cold to warm, Gregorian chants echo in and out above dubby, stubby beats, and post punk guitars lunge forward beneath jerky, naive melodies. And that's just the first few parts here. A journey to the outer reaches of the musical universe, then back again, turning left at the industrial jazz and continuing through shoegaze, soundtrack, field and weirdo pop. Mind you don't get lost, now.

Review: What planet were you born on? To be honest, it never really matters with Light Sounds Dark. Sent off in search of intelligent sounds from across the universe, the label has been amassing but never pillaging a vast array of tones from various corners of the known and unknown cosmos for time now, although the exact hour and date is really dependent on your relationship with the continuum. LSD 046 makes this point clear as ever. Numbered tracks are all your getting in terms of being able to catalogue and make sense of what's here, adding to the idea that your lost in a realm that's neither there nor there. Tunes fizzle and gargle, slow strings refrain, lo fi Kraut shouts beneath the crackle of analogue, intergalactic organs ring out into silence. And then we run out of words to possibly describe what's on the record long before the last episode.