Back catalogue: Classical

Review: Robin Guthrie's Atlas is a four-track EP showcasing new instrumentals that gently reintroduce listeners to his distinctive world. Known for shaping genres with his production and signature guitar sounds, Guthrie famously co-founded and produced for Cocteau Twins. With over four decades of musical influence, he's produced, remixed, and collaborated across various projects, from instrumental albums to movie soundtracks and Atlas serves as a tantalising preview of what's to follow later this year, namely more of Guthrie's evocative sounds that will no doubt continue his legacy of pushing boundaries.

Review: Cocteau Twins' musical mastermind Robin Guthrie has produced some terrific solo records over the course of his career, frequently delivering material that joins the dots between ambient, ethereal soundscapes, shoegaze and the more immersive end of the soundtrack spectrum. 'Astoria' is the latest volume in the Scottish multi-instrumentalist and producer's ongoing EP series (its predecessor, 'Mountain', dropped in September). It's another typically gorgeous and enveloping affair in which effects-laden guitar motifs, gaseous ambient chords, gentle rhythms, ghostly aural textures and slowly shifting melodies combine to create instrumental sound worlds of rare beauty (if not sonic clarity - Guthrie's use of reverb and delay is liberal, which adds to its atmospheric nature but adds extra layers of attractively wide-eyed haziness).

Review: The 1986 sonic pentad by Diamanda Galas, Saint Of The Pit, is the second of two records forming the devised, pestilent occult rite - in her terms, the "plague mass" - known as the Masque Of The Red Death. In clairvoyant dialogue with the first part (The Divine Punishment), both records, in symbiosis, are said to possess an innate correctitude, with saintly playback "possible at maximum volume only." When we oblige by Galas' command, we find ourselves thickly immersed in the kind of sonic esoterics that only the most adept of oneiromancers might be able to swallow and integrate into their mantic: waspish whispers, dulotic dirges, heathen hums. Galas' episcope is a dissenting, idolatrous projection in sound and vision, with 'Artemis' and 'Deliver Me' spanning red-robed, sectarian vocal operatics, not to mention their backing, low-noted, open piano chord strikes. The *eschaton* of the record is, of course, is its quintessential fifth star-point: 'Cris D'aveugle (Blind Man's Cry)', on which Galas, the occult visionary, profanes the lyrical votive candle wax with blasphemous talk of nailed eyes and desecrated caskets.