Juno Recommends Leftfield June 2021

Review: 
After his surprise drop with music writer and producer Blackdown on the Keysound label last month, the enigmatic Burial is now back with a fresh new EP all of his own. It comes on his longtime home of Hyperdub and features two more of his deft designed, ghostly deep dubstep post-nightbus joints. 'Chemz' is a strict raver filled with rushed up sounds, plenty of dance floor love and big hooks that is many different tracks, moods and vibes all rolled into one. As always, these Burial sounds look back to go forwards and do so in thrilling fashion.

Review: During last year's various lockdowns, Sasha spent plenty of time updating his Luzoscura playlists on streaming services, using them as a vehicle for material he liked that didn't quite fit into regular club sets. Now things are easing, he's decided to deliver a CD version, mixing together a handful of his own unreleased productions with all manner of deep, melodic, atmospheric and smile-inducing treats. While it's musically and rhythmically diverse - within the first handful of tunes you'll hear breakbeat, two-step, deep tech-house and electronica beats - and boasts more bass-weight than you might expect, the focus is on sofa-bound listening, with bright and breezy electronics, warming chords and lilting instrumentation catching the ear. Combine this with Sasha's impeccable track selections and you have a genuinely entertaining mix.

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: 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: Gothenburg-based musician JJ Ulius, who some of you may know from his work as Monokultur or Skiftande Enheter returns here on Mammas Mysteriska Jukebox (the imprint he runs with Loopsel) with Vol. 1. It contains a collection of lo-fi pop ditties from the past Autumn/Winter and all sung in Swedish. We really enjoyed the brooding swagger of 'Folj Inte Efter', the sparse locomotive chug of 'Ooverblicklig Kansla', the depressive blues of 'Langst Bak I Kon Till Falsningen' and the most electronic influenced cut which comes in the form of 'Lugn'.

Review: A well deserved reissue here on Keplar of Arovane's dub-laden IDM masterpiece Atol Scrap, which originally came out on Torsten Proefrock's DIN imprint back in 1999 as a digital release. Much to the delight of Uwe Zahn's followers, we have this vinyl reissue which was fully approved of by the artist himself. Zahn's idiosyncratic style of production is prevalent throughout the album; the digital artifacts and glitch effects that are scattered across the productions, underpinned by warm electronic melodies and skittering beats. The album still sounds amazing to this day, and benefits from remasterering by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering.

Review: Los Angeles-based gothic/industrial label Cleopatra present a cute limited pink 7" vinyl here, featuring Soft Cell's synthpop classic 'Tainted Love' from 1981 - and there's not much else that needs to be said about this golden oldie. But the real jewel here is the lesser known cut on the flip, where Soft Cell's Marc Almond teams up with gothic rock icon Andi Sex Gang on the undergound cult classic 'The Hungry Years', which orginally appeared on The Whip compilation on Kamera Records back in 1983. Hearing this quirky yet seductive low slung groove is worth it for the price alone.

Review: While in the West we can barely comprehend a different way of living, when the contents of this very heads-y collection were produced Poland was completely reliant on that different way of life. And yet every track here, while certainly cut from a cloth that's anything but mainstream, could really have come from just about anywhere.

And that's precisely the point. Or at least it was. Electronic experimentation and musical development behind the Iron Curtain was every bit as vital as those it was on The Other Side, and much was driven by the opportunity to evade heavy censorship many countries in the region were subject to, with no lyrics to anger the powers that be. Hence many pieces here, for example the filtered electro of 'Pamietnik Manekina', can be considered masterpieces well ahead of their time.

Review: Three decades ago, Coil released one of their most arresting an ear-catching albums, Love's Secret Domain. Inspired not by their intense industrial roots but rather the developing dance music culture - think sample-fired hip-hop, the jaunty organs of U.S house, hallucinatory ambient, bleeping electronica, bass-heavy UK techno and leftfield synth-pop - it marked a thrilling new chapter in the band's career. This expanded 30th anniversary tells the full story, stretching out the original album and a wealth of rare and previously unreleased material (extended versions, demos and unheard tracks) across three slabs of gold-coloured wax. The price may raise a few eyebrows, but copies are limited, and it really is the definitive edition of a genuinely brilliant album.

Review: Guy Ritchie's multi-award winning 2015 movie The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was a new take on the hit 1960s television series of the same name. The music is part of what makes it great and it comes from Ivor Novello-winning and multi-BAFTA nominated composer Daniel Pemberton. His music mixes super relaxing lounge instrumentals taking in element sou jazz and swing with some stone cold classics like Roberta Flack's 'Compared To What' and Nina Simone gem 'Take Care Of Business.' This double vinyl package contains a four page booklet and is limited to 1000 copies.

Review: The re-appraisal of early Seefeel has been long overdue. We're not entirely sure why this hasn't happened before, but to put things into context this is the first time Ch-Vox has been available on vinyl since it debuted in 1996, sidling up alongside the band's other outings dating back to 1994, all of which came about through involvement with Sheffield and global electronic music institution, Warp Records.

Ch-Vox actually landed on Rephlex, the imprint founded by Warp regular Richard D James, AKA Aphex Twin, and Grant Wilson-Claridge. Taking us further into the chill-out rooms, Sunday morning comedowns and midweek meditative moods of UK rave, in many ways Ch-Vox is more complex in concept than its predecessor, Succour, helping establish an early framework for what we now know as drone.

Review: Considering she is known for a patient appreciation of space in sonic arrangements, Ana Roxanne works at a remarkable pace. Unveiling her debut album in 2019, last year she gave us the follow up, Because of a Flower, making for two great long forms in as many years. ~~~ preceded both as her first EP, arriving in 2015, but in many ways it remains the deepest dive into her world.

Focusing on rich ambient textures that seem to swirl around the ears before enveloping, or swallowing, the listener whole, ~~~ opens on the highly effective choral moods of 'Immortality', and then moves through a variety of emotive but calm moods, peaking with the track that first turned heads across the world, 'I'm Every Sparkly Woman', a rethink of the Whitney Houston and Chaka Khan anthem 'I'm Every Woman' that has since been Roxanne's ultimate stylistic calling card.

Review: Having spent much of her still developing career working alongside husband James Barnard in Los Angeles-based ambient act Awakened Souls, Cynthia Barnard bas begun to deliver occasional solo and collaborative releases as Marine Eyes. Idyll is her debut solo album under the alias, and tends towards the pastoral, meditative and immersive. Created as a way of exploring "the healing nature of sound", the album's weightless, enveloping soundscapes combine billowing new age synthesizer chords and lapping waves of electronic sound with effects-laden guitar textures, field recordings and layered vocalisations. The results are becalmed, beautiful and calming - perfect for those who need to de-stress or escape through music.

Review: Here is a wonderful collaboration between two longtime friends: Portland-based musician and visual artist Ilyas Ahmed makes a hazy yet intimate form of psychedelic folk music, utilising acoustic and electric guitars, while Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is a multi-instrumentalist who is co-founder of the Root Strata record label based out of San Francisco. Combining Ahmed's expansive guitar/synth-work and Cantu-Ledesma's immaculate style of sound design, the collection of tracks "presents as a book of short stories or vignettes highlighting their individual strengths." This version of the release comes courtesy of Cantu-Ledesm's own Devotion imprint.

Review: Ah Mr. Numan, so pleased you could rejoin us. In an era that feels increasingly void of legendary musicians capable of really living up to the word 'legend', an Instagrammed nightmare inhabited solely by memes, a new record from the Prince of Dark Electronica is always going to make you feel slightly less fatalistic about the future of the planet. Or at least culture. How ironic.

Sinister, at times melancholic and driven as much by emotions as it is instrumentation, Numan's coming of age record (studio album #21, get it?) is a fantastic summary of everywhere he has been and everywhere he might take us next. A benchmark of alternative neo-goth pop, Intruder does exactly what you were hoping for - leaving no prisoners in its search for the most blissful tragedy.