Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: A selection of fifteen pieces from the soundtrack of the cult anime Dragon Ball Z, on a limited 2xLP edition, fully licensed, including the main opening track 'CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA'. This soundtrack accompanies the anime's key moment in which Dragon Ball Z resumes five years after Son Goku's wedding. Radditz, a mysterious warrior, arrives on Earth to find Goku, who learns that he comes from a planet of warriors from a planet of warriors, of which only four remain. The plot is based on a succession of increasingly strong opponents to be fought, but there's often a quest or travel motif that adds interest beyond the duels. All this, and more, is bolstered by this electrifying soundtrack edition.

Review: Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard revive the collaboration first aired on the latter's 2016 album Unde The Sun, this time across a full album reportedly four years in the (top secret) making. It's a compelling synthesis of Yorke's atmospheric melancholy and Pritchard's textured production. It expores a range of moods, from the uneasy tension of 'A Fake In A Faker's World' to the hypnotic rhythms of 'Back In The Game', while the eerie, spectral qualities of 'This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice' reveal the pair's ability to intertwine experimental soundscapes with a visceral emotional pull. Standout moments include 'Gangsters,' where Pritchard's intricately layered beats mesh with Yorke's haunting vocal delivery, and 'Wandering Genie,' which closes the journey with a strange sense of release. The music takes unexpected turns, not just as a statement of collaboration, but as a reflection of two artists playing with the unknown, pulling their sonic worlds into unexplored spaces. Each track is a feather in the cap of their combined ingenuity, with Yorke's vocal vulnerability and Pritchard's production wizardry in full synergy.

Review: Up next in the gamut of Coil-adjacent reissued gems is this 3xLP vinyl version of The Threshold Houseboys Choir's Amulet. Having gone down in whispered legend as the ultra-secret limited-quantity direct mail-order (we could go on) holy grail that flaunted Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson's then latest semi-secret solo guise, Amulet was an exemplar of Marshall McLuhan's definitive aphorism, "the medium is the message," coming housed in a hand-assembled 4xCDr mini-set enclosed in an original, circular Thai Amulet case. The second and final release of this short-lived and much coveted moniker, Amulet, now hearing the vinyl reissue it deserves, is a rough collection of obsessive ritualistic diamonds in the rough, stylistically drawing on dub, drone, power electronics and East Asian music, and brought together by Christopherson's trademark digitally generated choir - whose verbalisations are wilfully incomprehensible, with the intent to sound uncanny, dreamlike - and which he often reverses and timestretches to unsettling effect.

Review: Austrian duo Tosca aka Richard Dorfmeister and schoolmate Rupert Huber, are synonymous with downtempo and ambient and have been for over two decades. It's exactly 20 years in fact since their third album, Dehli9, dropped 2003 and offered two quite different sounds. The first half of the record is what you might call traditional downtempo, the second a more sparse affair defined mostly by plaintive, evocative piano pieces based on '12 easy to play piano pieces' by Rupert Huber. It's a sombre but alluring listen in which the space between the minimal notes really comes alive.