Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: Den Helder is the northernmost city in Holland, is surrounded by water and borders the North Sea. With a military history dating back to the 16th century, it is also the most bombed city in the Netherlands and was nearly destroyed during World War II. The Third of May was written and recorded in 2020 over six days in an old pumping station located in the dunes of Huisduinen near Den Helder. The story behind the album is set in this historic city, weaving its tumultuous past into a vivid, imagined narrative inspired by the area's rich and tragic history. It's as much of an emotional rollercoaster as you would expect given the concept.

Review: We all know that Matthew Herbert is a far out sonic experimenter who will look to make music with and from anything. But this project might be his most outlandish and extraordinary to date. It starts with him looking for the largest possible animal skeleton to explore though music. He settled on a full size horse and from that made flutes from its thigh bones and bows from ribs and hair. Gut strings stretched over the pelvis feature in the mid-section and even more bizarre than that is the fact he travelled to ancient cave paintings of horses in Northern Spain to record reverb at their door. Brilliantly bonkers as ever.

Review: Whitney Johnson and Lia Kohl's debut album has evolved over several years. Its roots lay in their shared practice of free improvisation on viola and cello and flourished into a unique neophonic orchestral expression. That makes For Translucence both stimulating and soothing - a very alive form of musical meditation where layers of acoustic strings, wispy synths, evocative field recordings and radio and sine waves intertwine and grow while mesmerising you even more. Though always moving and shapeshifting the effect is cathartic as a fine balance is struck between experimentation and cohesion and the organic and the electronic.

Review: Reissued and remastered for the first time, with its original tracklist and cover, Francis Lai's eerie-romantic soundtrack for A Man And A Woman, directed by Claude Lelouch, matches the film's subject. That is, two widowers meet for the first time at their children's school, and find themselves plagued by haunting visions and flashbacks of their former spouses. Netting the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1966, the film has gone on to set the benchmark for French romantic soundtracks, a mark set by the score's rose-tinted sonic scenery, diegesis-breaking narrations and almost automatic singing.

Review: Mike Lazarev drops his first album on Past Inside the Present and it's one that reminds us why he has such a great reputation as being one of modern ambient and classical's finest composers. After exploring notions of time on previous records, for this one, he embraces the here and now and that lends itself to a record steeped in mindfulness and meditation. As such, Sacred Tonalities is a perfect accompaniment to introspective moments with textural soundscapes placing you at the centre of them. The harmonics range from soft to gritty, the moods occasionally hint at trance and the layers of bass, piano and arps bring subtle and ever-shifting rhythms.

Review: There's no denying that Under The Skin was a cinematic triumph, and cemented Scarlett Johansson's status as a screen powerhouse capable of dynamic and highly varied performances of consistently high standards. The story of a young woman making her way through Scotland, seducing men and then doing horrific things to their bodies. An allegorical tale wherein the on-screen alien portrays the experience of immigrants and females trapped in a world of toxic masculinity, director Jonathan Glazer's long-awaited return to feature filmmaking is a bonafide classic.

Part of the reason behind its power is Mica Levi's incredible score. Taking inspiration from the work of Gyorgy Ligeti, a master of horror scores whose fleeting sounds and moments of near-silent tension can be heard on landmark such as The Shining and Lontano (both renowned for the effectiveness of their soundtrack), this isn't so much music as we know it, but aural motifs and movements designed to create a feeling of relentless unease.

Review: SuperEverything is a wonderful audio-visual project by multi-media artists The Light Surgeons. It takes the form of a live cinema performance pice which "explores identity, ritual and place in relation to Malaysia's past, present and future." It was commissioned in 2011 by the British Arts Council and was made with Malaysian audio and visual artists. It has since toured all over various well regarded arts festivals around the world and melts field recordings, documentary film making and music. The nine original tracks that make up the score are all pressed to vinyl here for the first time.

Review: "What was amazing about Liska's music was that, unlike most other composers, he didn't attempt to go with the mood of the film and milk the emotions but listened to the rhythm of the movie itself. Especially in an animated film, this helped to greatly enhance the sense of the picture's pace and drama. He was able to discover rhythms in films that even their authors weren't aware of." Jan Svankmajer, whose 90th birthday coincides with the release of this compilation, clearly holds Zdenek Liska in high regard. Respectively, a director and his regular composer-collaborator, the Czech artists worked on ten short films together. The original recordings of music for three of those have survived on tape - Don Juan (Don sajn), Leonardo's Diary (Leonard?v denik) and Jabberwocky (evahlav aneb sati?ky Slam?neho Huberta). Now here they are in all their surreal, folk-ish, playful, comedic and, at times, library-style glory.

Review: Bruce Campbell's character in The Evil Dead is up there with cinema's finest anti (or, possibly just accidental) heroes. Sam Raimi's landmark comedy horror movie about college students who accidentally open a portal to a terrifying underworld, with four out of five becoming possessed by demonic forces leaving one, our main man, to fend for himself, with or without two working hands, was exceptionally well written, combining genuine frights with visual and script gags, hitting all bullseyes in the sub genre. Evil Dead II was a high quality sequel, essentially telling the same story, only with a few tweaks. Again, it was laugh-out-loud funny and also pretty scary. A huge part of its impact comes down to the incredible music by Joseph Loduca. A Detroit jazz guitarist turned film and TV composer, here he combines fantastical instrumental movements, with surreal romantic piano phrases, knife-edge refrains and eerie reversed strings, creating a blueprint from which many others have looked to when trying to come up with an original horror score.

Review: Brian Williams' Lustmord project has existed in different forms for over 40 years, though it's only in the last couple of decades - when it has become a vehicle for his solo work - that new musical missives have become a regular occurrence. On Much Unseen Is Also Here, the former industrial musician turned soundtrack composer once again showcases his mastery of pitch-black sonics, creepy soundscapes and horror-inspired dark ambient workouts. As you'd expect, the sound design is incredible - listen on good quality headphones for the ultimate listening experience - while Williams' penchant for throwing in suspenseful chords, billowing aural textures and unsettling vocalisations adds further layers of paganistic mystery.

Review: You don't need to know that Craobh Haven was made during a one week residency at a tiny cabin in a remote Scottish village of the same name. One play through of the latest stunner to land on the ever-excellent ambient institution SWIMS and it'll feel like you were there in person. A witness to the creation of this strangely natural-feeling, highly technically-crafted, six tracker. Everything about the work by London-based musician and visual artist Loz Keystone and Glaswegian synth explore and jazz trumpeter Christos Stylianides feels in the right place. Its warm and fuzzy but vast and windswept. It's avant garde and abstract, but rounded and complete. It's incredibly inviting and slowly hypnotic. Distant samples of inaudible chatter and looped melodic refrains. Distorted walls of noise masking the patient power of aching brass. You get the point.

Review: Let's face it, Hollywood director Christopher Nolan broke the mould with his re-envisioning of Batman. Taking things closer to the original comic books, themselves forced to 'go soft' by censors in the early-1950s, his films payed direct tribute to the saga's direction from the mid-1970s onwards. A trilogy of movies that were visually arresting, tonally dystopian, and viciously unhinged. It's not clear if we'll ever get a superhero (or anti-hero) film series of that class and calibre again, the world on screen so immersive you quickly feel like a Gotham native. A big part of that universe-building comes through the music, which enlists two of the greatest names in the history of soundtracks to help weave the tales. Hans Zimmer has composed for more than 150 films, James Newton Howard in excess of 100. This compilation of their shared caped crusader efforts proves why they're so well respected.