Back catalogue: Balearic/Downtempo

Review: Don't let the playful, tongue-in-cheek title put you off; this EP does not contain 'Balearic gabba', should such a thing exist, but rather a quartet of largely dancefloor focused remixes of delightful downtempo cuts from the Hell Yeah! Recordings catalogue. SIRS steps up first to deliver a chugging, Italo-disco-goes-Balearic re-make of Carmel 3000's 'Super Rapido', before we're treated to one of Calm's TB-303-laden 'mellow acid' dubs, this time of Sergio Messina & The Four Twenties' gorgeous, soft and sun-soaked 'Sometimes Remember'. Over on side B, Feel Fly delivers a soft-focus Balearic deep house take on Pedro Bertho and Mariana Gehring's 'Tornei', while DJ Spun's revision of My Friend Dario's 'Acid Mosquito in a Summer Night' is a twisted, genuinely psychedelic dub disco excursion.

Review: Jasper Tygner is making moves, and fast, and is now one of the most interesting new names to have emerged in the underground. His Off Season EP is a case in point and is a multi-faceted work. 'Ready' is a standout and features Art School Girlfriend with its lush ambient synth craft and glitchy keys suspending you in a vibe while the vocals activate your heart. Later on this master of deep and downtempo sound worlds hooks up for a second time in 2023 with DJ Boring for the excellent 'So Unknown' which is another irresistible gem.

Review: Given Tornado Wallace's impeccable Balearic credentials, you'd expect his new A.S.O project - a collaboration with Berlin-based singer-songwriter Alisia Seror O'Neill AKA Alias Error - to tend towards the dreamy, immersive and emotive. It does, of course, with the pair conjuring gorgeous slabs of downtempo leftfield pop variously influenced by the layered textures of shoegaze, the wide-eyed bliss of 80s dream pop (Seror O'Neill's vocal delivery is at times reminiscent of Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser), the blazed Bristol beats of Massive Attack, the flat-on-your-back day-break headiness of ambient, the hard-to-pigeonhole brilliance of the Duratti Column and the late-night-on-AM-radio atmosphere of Kelley Polar and Morgan Geist's similarly inspired Ai Suisse project.

Review: Electronic duo Tosca (Richard Dorfmeister and Rupert Huber), based in Vienna, was founded in the fallout of the success of the former's Kruder & Dorfmeister project - albeit during a time when Dorfmeister wanted to explore other sonic worlds. Now, they've come a long way since then; and a testament to this endurance comes in the form of their most recent album Mirage. Named after a tiny cafe in Vienna - halfway between Rupert's home and the Tosca studio - the album also takes its namesake from the alternative word for a fata morgana, i.e. the optical illusion of strange shapes sometimes glimpsed on distant ocean horizons. All that in mind, we're met here with a full-length remix project of the original album, in keeping with a longstanding tradition that every album of theirs hears a remix.

Review: It's been 40 years since Michal Turtle released his seminal, ground-breaking album Music From The Living Room into the world and promptly disappeared back into the aether. An extremely obscure cult classic known only to deep diggers and aficionados of the finest order, it wasn't until Music From Memory reissued some of the tracks from it via retrospective compilations of Turtle's unreleased music almost 30 years later that his name become more widely known and a new generation were able to discover the artist's unique and pioneering style of experimental electronic music production, the majority of it very much ahead of its time, and to this day still timeless. Invisible Inc. contacted Turtle in the summer of 2023 about releasing something else by him, and it was during this exchange of emails that ideas were expressed about releasing not simply a straightforward reissue of Music From The Living Room to mark its 40th anniversary (the album has never been reissued in full), but rather a re-imagined and re-constructed take on the album, bringing contemporary techniques, styles and newly recorded vocal and instrument parts into the mix and breathing new life into these wonderful compositions. Collaborators old and new were brought into the studio and the songs re-created from the ground up. Familiar songs like 'Are You Psychic?' and 'Village Voice' are overhauled and echo remnants of their original counterparts, but simultaneously sound like completely new tracks. The always mesmerising 'Phantoms Of Dreamland' is represented through a live recording at Cafe OTO, featuring original album vocalist Lucianne Lasalle and regular collaborator HOVE on electronics. The remaining tracks, however, will be completely new to the ears of most people, never having been reissued or heard in these new forms ever before.