Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: Honour's debut album, Alaafia, is a journey through the depths of the African diaspora, connecting Lagos, London, and New York. This album blends the darker tones of blues, hip-hop, free jazz, ambient and gospel with elements of Christian mythology and Yoruba folklore. As cinematic as it is painterly, Alaafia is a meditation on life, death and love, drawing inspiration from casual conversations, field recordings, literature, and personal archives. The result is an impressionistic vision that blurs boundaries between everywhere and nowhere, history and the present, the individual and the universal. Dedicated to Honour's late grandmother, the title track Alaafia began after their last embrace, infused with her spirit. This tape-saturated composition transitions from Lagos to London's smoky cityscape, reflecting the artist's grief and PTSD. The dream-like quality is marked by stretched guitar drones and stuttering loops, with their grandmother's shared faith surfacing through the music. 'When Angels Speak of Love' borrows its title from Sun Ra and bell hooks, shaping praise music into disorienting spirals with syrupy DJ Screw-inspired breaks and melancholic guitar splinters. This track engages in a conceptual dialogue with the spirits of both late thinkers, incorporating them into Honour's pantheon of ancestral guides. 'Giz Aard ($uckets),' the album's ninth track, features regimented drums anchoring a sombre melody that swirls with heartache, hovering between death and eternal joy.

Review: A beautiful exploration in Americana, string music and all the emotion that can possibly be wrung from their intersection, Ernest Hood's Back To The Woodlands was recorded in a 10-year period in Western Oregon, beginning with Reagan and ending with Carter; 1972-1982. Hood has gone down in folk music history as a mastermind of the chordophone, a unique experimenter in such hammer-struck string instruments such as the zither, the psaltery and the good ole' guitar (and really, if you look into the history of string instruments, one could argue they're all just zithers). Never before released, this is an extraordinarily emotional album melding the artist's use of field recordings, synths, zither flourishes and guitar harmonies, producing a mini-revolution in sound that expresses the many new possibilities opened up not only by being differently abled, but also awe-inspired by the world around you.

Review: Written and recorded between 1972 and 1982 in Western Oregon, Back to the Woodlands is a previously unreleased, and nearly lost, album made by Ernest Hood during the same era as his near mythical album Neighborhoods. A visionary combination of field recordings, zithers, and synthesizers, Back to the Woodlands offers an unprecedented depth of access to this singular artistic mind.

Review: Having taken time out to travel the world and experience new things (including psychedelic substances in California), John Hopkins planned to make Singularity, his ninth album, "a sonic ecosystem that starts and ends on the same note". He soon got frustrated by these limitations, so instead just laid down a fluid and hazy album that combines his usual luscious, ambient electronics with a variety of sparse, heavy and off-kilter rhythms. While undeniably laidback in parts, the album also boasts a number of foreboding techno workouts and uses a wider palette of instrumental sounds than we've come to expect (including some fine strings and his own intricate piano playing). The resultant set is rather impressive, all told, and while not quite a "sonic ecosystem", it's certainly an enjoyable journey.

Review: Jon Hopkins' fourth album Immunity is a bona fide classic that is now a full ten years old. To celebrate the milestone, it has been newly remastered for this special reissue. Listening back now reminds you just what a confident and adventurous record this was - a creative trip deep inside Hopkins' mind that brought totters everything he had done and learned up to that point. The focus was firmly on the dancefloor but still, the tracks come with plenty of emotional nuances, from sad piano motifs to stirring choral drones but shifting rhythms and real-world sound effects that brought the whole thing to life.

Review: With Ritual, electronica mastermind Jon Hopkins follows up his storied meditation-aid LP, Music For Psychedelic Therapy, for a return to the sublime uplifts that characterised his establishing sound. Somehow, Hopkins says of his latest full-length, "I have no idea what I'm doing when I'm composing. I don't know where it's coming from, and I don't know where it's going, nor does it seem to matter. I just know when it is finished." Such remarkable humility sits in in stark contrast to the deep grandeur of the record, which refreshingly seems to have been made without overconscious intent; Hopkins' describes his approach to the album as a simple matter of creation, without too much second-guessing or reasoning after the fact. This would seem to counteract Psychedelic Therapy's interest in self-reflection and personal enlightenment; Ritual, as we glean from the title, is more action-oriented, pursuing the many epic pilgrimages and blue beyonds that Hopkins was first known to have embarked upon.

Review: At this stage in his career, Jon Hopkins should be able to do whatever the hell he likes. After proving his synaesthetic abilities throughout the 2010s - with masterpieces like 'Light Through The Veins' and his last album 'Singularity'- it's clear this climactic electronica artist knows no bounds. Now he debuts a new full guided meditation-style LP documenting his ketamine-fulled revelations realised in a remote Ecuadorian cave. Relinquishing beats and drum sounds, this is a fully ambient affair from Hopkins, and routinely features soothing, sampled vocal snippets from the late yogi and guru Baba Ram Daas, as well as collabs with producer and psychedelic ceremony guide East Forest.

Review: Much has been made of Jon Hopkins' intentions with his new album Music For Psychedelic Therapy, but whether you're a devoted tripper or a sober psychonaut his new album has plenty to offer. Of course Hopkins has more than proved himself over the years as a phenomenal producer and composer, but here he's replaced his brooding cinematic techscapes for blissful ambience draped in rich overtones and gently drifting patterns of melody and rhythm. It's wholly invigorating and relaxing, clearly designed to soothe the listener in stark contrast to the shock and awe he normally inspires amongst his considerable fan base.

Review: At this point in his career, it seems that classically trained pianist come electronica visionary Jon Hopkins can do no wrong. Whether we're thinking of his unmistakable all-time great LP Immunity, or his more recent inward-bound journeys into a trippy serial panacea, Music For Psychedelic Therapy, the musician, in Domino's own words, is an established auteur, capable of casting a whole range of dark sonorous arts perhaps only the most storied audio wizards can cast. His latest record, Ritual, is the latest utterance to escape the Hopkins grimoire; staying true to the adage that a real magician simply does not reveal their secrets, Hopkins is deliberately cryptic about the meaning of Ritual, except for the fact that his music-making process is itself a ritual. Humbly, he insists "I have no idea what I'm doing when I'm composing". Well, from the various sublime, epiphanic, master-warlock's evocations heard across this record, it sure doesn't sound like it!

Review: Originally released in 1998, Mixmaster Morris & Jonah Sharp's Quiet Logic surprisingly flew under the radar when it came out.- perhaps because of the huge amount of electronic music being released at the time. The pair have some of the most important albums and tracks in their respected genres and are arguably two of the most important figures in the electronic music chill out scene from the 90s, and when you add the input of Haruomi Hosono from Yellow Magic Orchestra on two tracks, it becomes an even more essential listen. Chill out heads unite!

Review: The long running Late Night Tales mix series could have almost been invented for times like these, when the nights are drawing in and we're all being encouraged to stay home. What better way to pass an evening than in the company of one of pop and electronic music's most charismatic bands as they take us on a personal trip through their record collection. Next to tracks from the band themselves. there are retro-future lullabies, jangling synth disco cuts and passages of new age ambience that are all tender and inviting.

Review: You can always rely on PC Music to serve the sort of futuristic, inventive hyper-pop that no one else does. Clearing is a superbly captivating debut album from synth pop, witch house, dream pop artist Hyd, who used to be known as QT. It features some previously released singles but mostly new music that serves as a biography of the singer-songwriter. She has been part of this influential label since day one and here references everything from millennial synth sounds to 80s and 90s acts on the same lineage. It's a proper album too that plays out well from front to back as one coherent listen.