Review: Senking and DYL reunite after their notable collaboration back on 2020's EP Uniformity Of Nature, this time going long on their first full-length, Diving Saucer Attack. This new work spans a total of six tracks, two of which have been produced individually and so highlight their shared passion for dub-heavy and adventurous electronic music while also bringing out the subtle differences in their styles. The album opens with 'Six Doors Down', a track featuring throbbing bass and haunting synths while subsequent cuts like 'A7r380R' explore intricate soundscapes before culminating in the sombre closing piece, 'Not Just Numbers.'
Review: The visionary electronic explorer that is Steve Spacek returns with a limited edition 7" release on his new label, SPA. It gets the full treatment with a full picture sleeve and he says there are no plans for a repress so this is your one and only chance to own SPA001. Opener 'Could It Be Your Luv' offers a gentle, soothing half-time rhythm that evokes a love bruk vibe that he says was inspired by the ethereal nights at the legendary Plastic People. The B-side cut 'Dancing In The Light' features a unique clippety-clop, horse-step rhythm that blends a futuristic lovers' rock style with bright synths and bold bass topped with a heartfelt vocal. It's designed for dancefloors that appreciate a one-foot skank.
Review: Transporting us to a waking dream of Los Angeles, two enigmatic music makers from the City of (Fallen) Angels present a truly stunning journey into hazy half-memories, afternoon fantasies, borrowed recollections and thoughts of things yet to happen. In many ways, Salt & Sugar Look The Same feels incomplete; tracks, half-tracks, movements, bits and pieces feel like our minds often work. Was that what we think it was? Did this happen? According to the official release burb, these 18 brief but beautiful compositions combine finger-plucked guitar work, the lens flare of electronica, and warped samples to create a take on the American primitivism music movement. The result is something that transcends boundaries of sound, time and place, and exists in a world of its own creation.
Review: Samuel Rohrer's ArjunaMusic has been minimal in its output since 2012's debut from the label-head himself, but what he's put out has been of the highest quality. While both previous releases were strictly CD-only, Ambiq has also been pressed onto LP format. It seems strange that the deep, intricate music on the label hadn't been released on vinyl, but we're not here to question, merely to tell you how great this piece of music is. Buried in a complex shell compred of strands of free jazz, psyched-out electronics and ambient, this is as experimental as it gets. Starting from the opener, "Erdkern", we're thrown head-first into a melodic frenzy, one which expands and contracts from more rigid structures such as "Tund" and dissolves back into the abyss. The breaks on "Touching The Present" are stupendous. So great to see that the free jazz dynasty has evolved into brighter, more contemporary spheres.
Review: Turin's reputation as an enclave of Italian alternative music and culture is well known. Southern Europe's Motor City has the stunning piazzas and palazzos we want from its country, but also the huge industrial areas, many now in decline or waiting to be redeveloped, that catalyse so much in electronic and industrial music. Meanwhile, a few miles beyond town we find spectacular countryside, national parks, mountain ranges, and inspiration for deep ambient. SabaSaba were born from and into this, and the duo have established themselves as one of the region's foremost purveyors of unusual tunes. Unknown City is a like a blueprint for what a contemporary horror score could be, whether that's the slow release of the John Carpenter-esque 'Night Plotters', haunting chants and shimmers of 'Wrists Free', eerie atmospheres of 'False Speech', or anything in between.
Review: It's eerie, deeply atmospheric, littered with what feel like found noises and strange abstract tones, but then rooted in impressive levels of musicality, possessing just enough form and structure to move beyond sound installation into full blown movements.
Or at least that's the case with the first part of this double release, Garden of Shadows & Light (Part 1), which sees melody used in almost abstract ways to bring emotional responses out of the listener. Meanwhile, Part 2 takes us into submerged realms that may or may not have something to do with whales. If all this sounds pretty out there then it should, after all this is Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Toop's live performance from The Silver Building in London in 2018, where the former performed sat at and inside a piano, while the latter used bone conduction and vibration motors among other things. Eccentric and innovative.
Review: Never one to sit still, Sasha used the change in mindset that came with the lockdown to inspire his approach to music. LUZoSCURA (which means light and dark) is the new compilation that has resulted having evolved from the playlist of the same name. It's packed with new music from the man himself as well as newer names and more established artists. There are floaty, synth heavy ambient pieces like the 'Yin/Yang' opener, lush melodic electronic grooves from QRTR, symphonic garage cuts from MJ Cole and crunchy old breakbeats with more than a hint of Renaissance from Because Of Art.
Review: Are there more consonants in this EP title than any other you will see this year? Probably. Does that make it even more essential? Definitely, because musically it is packed with goodness as Schlammpeitziger explores a world of loose but engaging rhythms. These subversive sounds play with exotic vocals, dubby hi-hats, new-age flutes, motorik grooves and spoken word samples. It's experimental but never forgets the magic of melody and rhythm to hypnotise, all with a twist of pop fun.
Review: At least one person has described Scythe's work as "expertly modulated space blues and isolationist architectures." First emerging from the ether (or at least that's how we like to think of it) through a series of clandestine cassette releases on Low Company in 2019 and 2020, Head X'Change almost feels like the culmination of all that has come before. A weird and truly wonderful place to spend time. A collaborative project between David West and R.A. Jones, elements of kosmische intermingle with a kind of earthy ambience, DIY electronics leading into white noise moments or new age melodies. At times it's so joyfully opiate you wonder if there's any way of getting back up off the pillow. In other moments, there's tension, eeriness, and uncertainty. Once you're in, it's a wild ride indeed.
Review: Seefeel's second studio album, their first for the feted Warp imprint, saw them expand on some of the ideas in their 1993 debut, continuing to embrace the lush soundscapes that typify shoegaze and rooting things in deep sub bass, while bringing fascinating new blueprints to the table.
Which isn't too surprising, given Succour landed in 1995, by which point the UK's rave scene had managed to find a way into almost every aspect of youth and pop culture. Far from a dance music album, nevertheless the record has clear acid house influences, from soaring vocal cries through to intoxicatingly loose types of syncopated rhythm crafted from heavily detailed percussive sections, with tracks like 'Vex' taking us all the way to IDM. Exquisite explorations so far ahead of their time they still sound new almost 30 years later.
Review: One of three Seefeel re-releases arriving together - shining light on the band's mid-90s 'Warp years' - St/Fr/Sp is the only one of these that has really never existed in the past. Comprising two EPs, Starethrough and Fracture/Tied, the outing also brings in a very rare Autechre remix of 'Spangle', making for a package that's got collector's item written all over it.
Musically, this is around the moment when Seefeel began to fully embrace the abstract and electronic, having just signed to Warp, and while the shoegaze of their past remains audible there are so many influences here plucked from beyond that spectrum. Embracing ambient, drone, rave chill-out, dub, acid, and psychedelia, this edition reflects two ends of that world - the blissful and largely astral first EP, and beat-driven and highly rhythmic second.
Review: Throughout is a new and exciting label out of Kyoto that impresses once more here with a brilliantly cool new collaboration between Jungle Brothers' Sensational and the producer Unbuilt. The former has laid down endless amounts of interesting sounds over the years and Poiesis now joins those hallowed ranks. It is aptly described as "a paranoid party-starter cast against a menacing greyscale backdrop of impressive dystopian grandeur." The production from Sensational is on point and a mix of basted and dubbed out while the bars remind of early underground rap greats - like Def Jux rewired through a more contemporary sound.
Serpente - "Perda Outra" (feat Kelly Jayne Jones) (7:41)
Serpente - "Em Vida Traz" (feat Maxwell Sterling) (5:45)
Serpente - "Sombra De Ra" (4:30)
CZN - "Fork In The Path" (3:44)
CZN - "Redline Gossip" (2:36)
CZN - "It's Always Aperitivo Time Hour Somewhere" (2:48)
Review: We guarantee you won't have heard percussion like Serpente for some time. Offering three tracks of disorientating, complex beats, from 'Perda Outra' to 'Dobra De Ra', the triptych is rhythmically challenging but absolutely captivating, and certainly the kind of thing that's going to prove demanding for anyone obsessed with smooth, clean transitions in a mix. Flip this wild six pack and CZN's trio of tunes are similarly beguiling. Space age desert folk drums, suppressed ritualistic thrumming, and top-heavy pulsating arrangements that seem poised to generate high energy while never managing to release the tension. Quality bits we don't really know what else to say about - genre obsessives need not apply, this is no place for you or your structures and rules. But trust us, letting go of such ideals and diving in here will be one of the best things you do this week.
Review: Ben Shirken's first self-titled release as Ex Wiish is a haunting work of digital archaeology. Created with close collaborators including Pavel Milyakov, MIZU and Dorothy Carlos, H.D. Reliquary blends trumpet, violin and modular synths into a fragmented, post-human soundscape that will send shivers down your spine. Inspired by the idea of a hard drive as a sacred archive, Shirken filters live recordings through neural networks and cooks up ghostly echoes of imagined sessions. The result is raw, contemplative ambient with a host of guests all adding to the evocative, filmic nature of these otherworldly soundscapes.
Review: Vocalist, composer, lecturer, performance artist. And we can throw visionary into the mix, too. Katya Shirshkova wears a number of different hats, each as innovative and creative as the next. However, few sound as good as when she's matched with celebrated musical architect David Maranha for a two-track single that's nigh-on impossible to describe. Let alone find much information about. We'll do our best to articulate, though. Le Heron and A Reuniono are polar opposites attracted by their overall impact. On the first, we have vocalisation taking on many forms and sounds, each as strange and beguiling as the next, and really showing the range human voices are capable of. Sometimes soothing, sometimes shrill. The second replaces this with an electric guitar, running through tune-ups, tune-downs, distorted crescendos, muffled breakdowns, and other out-of-this-world effects.
Review: Norwegian duo Smerz are experts at duality and creating tension between two opposites, be that dark and light, warmth and cold or tension and release. There is a real air of menace to this record for XL that layers zombie vocals over busted synths and murky breaks. Some tracks are bight and dazzling, others are swaggering and ominous like 'Rain' with its big strings and air of Bjork sound design. Recorded over three years and drawing on the members' time in youth choirs, this is an expansive and accomplished record.
Review: Dutch industrial techno producer Parrish Smith created Light Cruel & Vain over the course of nearly three years. Each track on the record was originally conceived solo, then further realised with the assistance of contributing musicians Sofiane Brahmi and Javier Vivancos. The collaborative where no studio sessions occurred due to the pandemic - the full collaboration conducted remotely. Notable tracks include the seething post-punk swagger of "Black Scarlet" or the brooding industrial rock of "Sway", to the industrial strength breaks of "Never Break Faith" and a frantic techno banger towards the end "I Wanna Be An Idol".
Review: Oakland's SNDTRAK dropped his long awaited debut album back in 2021. It was a big hit right off the bat and now it gets a welcome reissue. These are snappy beats with rolling drums, deep hip hop instrumentals that bring the best of the dusty school to fresh new school thinking. Delicate melodies are buried within, soulful vocal smears drift in and out of ear shot and well played bass slowly rotate sunder the tunes to bring languid funk. Sunny and heart aching, heat damaged and stoned, this is a warming soundtrack on many different levels.
Review: Soffplaneten takes us deep into a world of downtempo delight with the Samlar Damm LP on Sunken Rock Recordings. It is an eight-track odyssey that veers from the gentle rhythms of the opener to the languid dub rotations of 'Kom Till Mitt Talt' complete with twanging guitars and soulful vocal seductions. 'Hoga Mamma Moln' is a more percussive and upbeat cut built from loose drums and tin pot percussion but held together with smeared and heat-damaged chords. 'Tunnelbanan' is a whacked-out and laid-back stoner joint while 'En Suddig Musik' gets more experimental and unusual in its sonic collage. A wonderfully irreverent new take on Balearic overall.
Review: Drew Daniel is The Soft Pink, and he is also one half of Mateos, the quirky electronic pair who have put out tens of albums. This solo project started as a means to explore sounds that don't fall in the Mateos world - which is not many, to be honest. There is rave, dark metal, crust punk and plenty of genre curiosities all drawn up on here with the results managing to be both ethereal and hypnotic. Guests such as Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian (previously Dirty Projectors) and Jana Hunter are amongst many who add extra weight to the album.
Review: Esteemed American IDM producer Drew Daniel is back with a new album under his The Soft Pink Truth alias titled Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? Of the title, Daniel explained it's an actual question proposed to him which has become a mantra of sorts, with the album created as a way to imagine possible musical responses to her question. Created during Covid lockdowns, Daniel recruited a virtual disco band from friends across the world and traversing many genres such as disco, minimalism, ambient, shoegaze and jazz, then pieced together in his Baltimore studio. Guests include Turkish arranger Ulas Kurugullu, Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xu, Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes), Brooklyn techno artist Rose E Kross and Daniel Clark.
Review: Alex Somers has spent much of his hugely successful career either composing music for film and TV, or producing other artists. It's for that reason that it's taken him some time to deliver a debut solo album, though to make up for this he's simultaneously releasing two sets - Siblings and Siblings 2 - both of which feature music mostly recorded between 2014 and 2016. On Siblings, Somers dazzles with his versatility, offering a mixture of haunting, emotive and mind-altering compositions that frequently blur the boundaries between experimental electronica, neo-classical and ambient. The Los Angeles-based producer frequently combines swelling orchestration with crackly field recordings, ethereal vocalisations, immersive synthesizer sounds and off-kilter electronic sounds, resulting in a hazy, otherworldly musical journey that rewards repeat listens.
Review: The first release on SOS Gunver Ryberg's own imprint, Arterial Recordings, is a great example of how wrong assumptions and presumptions can be when based on labels. And no, we don't mean record labels. Ryberg is an award-winning sound artist, but what do we mean when we say things like that? Is it the dense theoretical and conceptual sonics designed solely as installations within the institutions of art itself, or something more tangibly recognisable as 'music' itself? Maybe it's neither. It can definitely be both. Spine proves that last point wonderfully. Yes, this is electronic music at the bleeding edge, strange aural worlds crafted from noises and gadgets that could be the controls of a space craft from the future for all the average person might know. But the tracks here are definite and deliberately designed to be heard as tracks, whether that's the serene, floating-past-the-cosmos ambience of 'Sensuous Sky', or the frantic breakbeat tension of the title track.
That Wisnae A Microdose/Melon Farmer/Epsilon/Sheep To Shepherd (21:33)
Review: Mad-heads, rave veterans and lovers of having their brains rewired by previously unexplored sonic realms unite, because here comes the first of four, yes four, new albums from the fantastic freak of nature that is Special Request. His 'What Time Is Love? Sessions' arrives in several different formats this month and across six sizzling tracks that re-wire the KLF's hit of that name, he taps into everything from "ephemeral ambiance to barnstorming hardcore, pummelling house to pointillist trance" and does so with a mix of the surreal and the psychotic, the psychedelic and the downright ridiculous. It's mental, and we love it.
That Wisnae A Microdose/Melon Farmer/Epsilon/Sheep To Shepherd (21:33)
Review: As you know if you have followed the work of Special Request aka Paul Woolford, it often comes in huge bursts and across several releases at once. So it is that this year the one-man production machine is to drop not one but a four-album run over the next 12 months, all independently. Quite what he runs on we do not know but we need some because once again on this limited clear vinyl version of his 'What Time Is Love? Sessions' he taps into the future as he rewires the musical DNA of rave, techno, bass and jungle into tracks that make your brain fizz and your body move. Unreal work once more from this unstoppable force.
Review: Arturo Stalteri might be best known to many as a Philip Glass collaborator (Circles) and avid (and talented) adapter of Brian Eno's works. In truth, the former member of Italian avant-prog-rockers Pierrot Lunaire has amassed a pretty extensive body of music that's well worth spending some time pouring over, not least because he seems to throw himself into some pretty conceptual ideas.
This 1979 album was put together when he returned to Rome after two months in India, and while this might raise 21st Century eyebrows in a cultural appropriation way, when you press play nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, it seems to overflow with exoticism, but the largely-organ and piano driven ambient work here doesn't belong in any specific place. Instead, it just has the same sense of fantastical adventure that comes with finding somewhere new.
Review: Plenty of electronic artists can claim to focus on repetitive layers, loops and timbre. Few can say they've explored these ideas to the extent Carl Stone has. Released to mark his 70th birthday, this collection looks not to offer a complete retrospective on the seminal producer, but instead a supporting document to the archival re-releases that have been doing the rounds in recent times. Trying to put a label on what's here is less relevant than the how or even why. Working at CalArts, Stone, a then-aspiring music maker, was tasked with preserving vinyl recordings by dubbing them to tape. This repetitive process was used to store 10,000 albums, from Renaissance to electronica, and involved re-recording multiple discs at the same time. After that experience, it's understandable that he'd find himself using cut and paste style fractions of sound, samples, vocals, and melodies to make old parts new again, removing the source material from time and place so it exists only in the now.
Review: Andy Stott excels at exploring the spaces between electronic genres and has gone for many years now, He is known for crafting a unique, ever-evolving sound and after experimenting with minimal techno and dub early on, he defined his style in 2011's Passed Me By, a world of grey tones, static and experimental rhythms. In 2012's Luxury Problems, Alison Skidmore's haunting vocals added a human touch to his artificial landscapes then with the now ten-year-old Faith in Strangers, Stott fused his signature sound with influences like trap and minimalism. Over 54 minutes, the album builds in intensity and is still unmatched in its originality and impact.
Review: In Japanese history Suemori refers to a castle constructed in 1548 by Lord Nobuhide. A short-lived structure, it was abandoned just over a decade later and subsequently- in the many years between then and now - all but vanished from the face of the Earth. A solitary stone stelae now marks the site, but whether impermanence was really a central theme to Suemori forming isn't clear. Nevertheless, their growing, reforming and restructuring sound certainly fits with the idea.
Occupying a strange, jerky and juxtaposed place between art sounds, crunchy electronica and noise, Maebashi represents a real melting pot of ideas and details. 'Yakkosan''s scatty hi hats, 'Kaminari Okoshi' and its strange sense of abstract rhythm, the pared back is-that-breakbeat of 'Bonsai'. Definitely destined for the pile marked less ordinary, if you're diving in prepare for a real experience.
Review: Alan Vega & Marty Rev's career as Suicide spanned an incredible four decades. During those years, they rarely if ever got much credit for their work but as is often the way, once time passed they started to get deserving plaudits and an ever growing status amongst fans and critics. Now said to be one of the most inspirational outfits of the 70s, they influenced everyone from Depeche Mode to Soft Cell. This brand new, remastered collection takes in tunes from all across the band's career and has plenty of big, raw, energetic and eclectic sounds with track from their first album in 1977 and most recent in 2002.
Review: Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones head back into the studio and fire up the Eurorack modular synth for a third adventure into the great unknown of sounds and noises seemingly once heard in another dimension before being brought back to planet Earth with the hope of recreating whatever the rumbling or bleeping was. Electronic Music Improvisations Vol.3 is exactly that, building on the self-imposed musical parameters that guided the preceding two parts. Deep, otherworldly, vast, and unique, the beauty of Miller and Jones' Sunroof project is how it's also the opposite of all those words. Sparse, pared back, familiar, very much born of manmade machines, since these endeavours began we've crossed through the looking glass into a world that often feels like it's spinning out of human control, not least with the advent of music entirely made by AI. Here's proof people can still take complete charge of their creative process.
Review: Ricardo Villalobos and Samuel Rohrer have never failed to cook up real magic in the studio over the years. They have been working together again closely and the fruits of their labours form this new MICROGESTURES album. It is made up of five tracks that are all mind blowing detailed when you listen in close. Each one is constructed from infinitesimally small details that all coalesce into stringing minimal techno rhythms of the sort that will boggle brains at 5am in the club or get you lost in the deepest recesses of your own mind if you listen intently on headphones.
Review: For their new album Lust 1, Voice Actor's Noa Kurzweil joins Welsh producer Squu for a woozy, intimate exploration of ambient sensuality. Following the sprawling Sent From My Telephone, this 45-minute work feels more focused but just as dreamlike with Kurzweil's hushed, often unintelligible vocals hovering over Squu's glowing pads and dubby pulses. With additional glitchy textures, soft hits and melancholic drones, the work forms a world that teeters between erotic hypnosis and emotional exhaustion. Highlights like 'You' and 'Nekk' blend vague ambience with jolting detail while pushing the sung-spoke-whispered words to the brink of abstraction. This is an album rich in fleeting emotions, tactile textures and forgotten memories.
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