Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: Geir Jenssen (Biosphere) marks his AD93 debut with The Way Of Time, wrapping elucted echo and looping synth drift around spoken fragments of Elizabeth Madox Roberts' great 1926 novel The Time Of Man. A Midwestern gothic literary staple, Roberts' novel is about the daughter of a Kentucky tenant farmer, and Jenssen's haunting use of Joan Lorring's voice from the 1951 radio play adaptation readapts his usual icy predilections for suitably huger desert horizons. Rather than treating the vocal as ornament, he folds it deep into the mix, letting it dissolve into the melodic architecture.

Review: More than four decades after he first appeared in smudged eyeliner and a mop of jet-black hair, Robert Smith is still finding new ways to pull his music apart and stitch it back together. This new remix collection i assembled and curated by Smith himself i feels less like a victory lap and more like a restless dissection of a legacy he's still actively shaping. The collaborators here are hardly incidental: Four Tet, Orbital, Ame, Chino Moreno, Mura Masa, Trentemoller, Mogwai. It reads like a list built by someone still hungrily tuned into the present, not stuck in the past. And true to form, the results are all over the place i a feature, not a flaw. Some tracks lean into grandeur: Paul Oakenfold's take on 'I Can Never Say Goodbye' opens with all the sweeping melodrama you'd expect, while Daybreakers stretch 'WarSong' into widescreen synthwork. Elsewhere, Shanti Celeste and Ex-Easter Island Head bring a strange intimacy to 'Alone', teasing out its ache with a different kind of spaciousness. At times, you wonder if Smith enjoys seeing how far his work can be bent before it breaks. But it never does i even filtered through others' hands, his sense of tension, drama and deep emotional unease holds everything together.