Review: Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto dropped this one first back in 2006. It was the third collaborative album between the ambient maestros and the third installment of V.I.R.U.S.'s five albums series. It was remastered last year and now gets served up as a reissue alongside three all-new pieces, namely 'City Radieuse', 'Veru 1', and 'Veru 2'. The first of those was written for a short cinematic essay in 2012. The album centres around the pano with padded bass and electronic frequencies adding extra depth and texture. It is another classic in their oeuvre.
Review: An artist so effortlessly apt to reinvent herself such as Laurie Anderson should be more than any other worthy of the reissue treatment. Music On Vinyl here present the legendary New York musician and performance artist's 1989 avant-garde album 'Bright Red', which followed a brief stint in the chart-worthy realm of pop. Co-produced with Brian Eno and informed by her then relationship with Lou Reed, Anderson's musings on love, landscape and death are more than submerged in Eno's proto-ambient pop and reverb techniques. It's also yet another stalwart album in vocal synthesis, with cuts such as 'Puppet Motel' showing off Anderson's longstanding penchant for gender-bending throat mods.
Review: Steve Pittis aka. Band Of Pain shares his latest album, Uncle God's Pag Pag Banquet, though he daren't mention what exactly a Pag Pag Banquet is: you'll have to listen and intuit that one for yourself. Treading new ground not only in sound but in collaborative and material form, the new record hears Pittis cycle through a bevy of brooding post-punk and avant-garde arraignments, all while tabbing collabs with Steven Stapleton and Andrew Liles (Nurse With Wound) and Jean-Herve Peron and Jeanne-Marie Varain (Faust), as well as bringing the record to a cheekily compact 2xCD set, backed up by an unplayable (yes, you read that right) 12" record with exclusive etchings thereupon by Stapleton. A macabre assemblage, this is a cannibalistic sonic banquet for sure, a Burroughsian nightmare of a third album.
Review: Sam Binga has established himself with boundary-pushing club tracks on labels like Critical and Exit and for this one teamed up with Welfare, a junglist and the Rua Sound label boss. Together they were inspired by the rugged beauty of Conamara, County Galway and began the project in a 300-year-old cottage overlooking the sea in a place free of creature comforts but rich in inspiration. Using a handheld recorder, the duo explored tidal caves, ruins and windswept coastlines while recording the ambient sounds they heard on the way and then turned them into these deeply textured dub compositions through live desk mixing at Dubkasm's studio.
Review: Finally, the debut Bochum Welt album Module 2 has been reissued after an initial run on Rephlex. Bochum Welt (Gianluigi Di Costanzo) has just recently celebrated 30 years of releasing music. His brand of IDM, electro and techno has been often copied but never equaled. His futuristic music seems to always be forward thinking and ultimately, timeless sounding. This edition is on matching green vinyl and includes all the classic material of the first release. Fans of AFX, Squarepusher and Cylob are sure to be aware of Bochum Welt. But for those who aren't....
Review: Berlin Atonal returned two years ago from a long hiatus, 23 years to be exact. After three tremendous festivals this decade, they now present us with their first recordings since 1984. These particular ones from the 2014 edition. Cabaret Voltaire (in this incarnation featuring only Richard H Kirk) was a true highlight and contributes "Microscopic Flesh Fragment" and "Universal Energy". One half of Demdike Stare Miles Whitaker went solo, presenting his truly unique take on techno, and the slow burning attitude of "Vagabond No. 7" is evidence of this. New Zealand's Fis also appears; rather uncategorisable as always on "Dist CL (Atonal Version)." On the third disc we have Northern Electronics main man and modern auteur Abdulla Rashim presenting two commissions from his captivating atmospheric set that year. Limited to 700 copies.
Review: Mute and Spoon Records continue in their CAN retrospective bout, following up the first two parts of the long-lost CAN live series ('Brighton' and 'Stuttgart' respectively) with further re-releases of their best known albums. 'Soundtracks' - their 1970 album in which every song was written with the intention of being included in various German films including Deadlock, Cream and Deep End - here gets a limited purple vinyl reissue. Functionally, though, the music could form a standalone conceptual CAN album in its own right. It's also full of the dramas that go hand in hand with your usual LP output; this album marks the point at which the original vocalist for the band, Malcolm Mooney, was replaced by Damo Suzuki.
Review: New CD edition of Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 2, the 2000 studio album from Coil and. As with Part 1, it was described by the band as "moon musick." This contrasts to earlier work which was solar rather than lunar inspired, but either way, it was another classic from Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson and John Balance. Their partnership remains one of electronic music's most magically alchemic and after a quiet start, this album slowly but surely takes its hold on listeners. 'Ether' and 'Paranoid Inlay' are confessional tone in tone while the final two 'Where Are You?' and 'Batwings (A Limnal Hymn)' are brilliantly haunting. Fact fans might know that the latter was actually played at John Balance's funeral service.
Review: Current 93's latest album, Sketches of My Nightmares, is a collection of fractured musical scribblings that evoke a sense of dreamlike wonder and disorientation. The album is a tapestry of skittering sounds, strange tape loops, and other outlandish noises that weave together to create a haunting and evocative atmosphere. One of the highlights of Sketches of My Nightmares is Tibet's haunting vocals. His voice is both ethereal and powerful, conveying a sense of vulnerability and longing. The lyrics, which are often cryptic and enigmatic, add to the album's dreamlike quality. Overall, Sketches of My Nightmares is a masterpiece of avant-garde music. It is a record that is both challenging and rewarding, and one that will leave a lasting impression on the listener.
Review: Some 24 years into his career, we know exactly what to expect from Scott Monteith AKA Deadbeat - namely trippy, off-kilter techno heavily informed by dub, underpinned by rhythms that frequently eschew the obvious. Inspired dually by the "five stages of grief" and "the act of speaking one's thoughts aloud alone by oneself", Kubler-Ross Soliloquies - his first solo set in five years - has a defined structure and purpose, within which Monteith giddily goes in all manner of different but loosely connected directions. Compare and contrast, for example, the moody, twisted steppers-techno of 'With Grand Trepidation (Acceptance I)', the hypnotic, spoken word-sporting deep dub techno of 'Huey Lewis Voters Dub (Negotiation)', the skittish headiness of 'Tough Love (Anger I)', and the polyrhythmic, Livity Sound-esque 'The Double Bong Cloud (Denial I)'.
The Baka Forest People Of South East Cameroon - "Liquindi 2"
Carl Oesterhelt/Johannes Enders - "Divertimento Fur Tenorsaxophon Und Kleines Ensemble" (part 4)
Four Tet - "0181" (excerpt)
Gene Autry - "You're The Only Star" (Nils Frahm '78 recording)
Boards Of Canada - "In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country"
Bibio - "It Was Willow"
Dictaphone - "Peaks"
Vladimir Horowitz - "The Flight Of The Bumble Bee"
Miles Davis - "Concierto De Aranjuez"
Victor Silvester - "It's The Talk Of The Town" (Nils Frahm '78 recording)
System - "SK20"
Rhythm & Sound - "Mango Drive"
Miles Davis - "Generique"
Dinu Lipatti - "O Herr Bleibet Meine Freunde, BWV 147"
Colin Stetson - "The Righteous Wrath Of An Honorable Man"
Penguin Cafe Orchestra - "Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter"
Nina Simone - "Who Knows Where The Time Goes"
Nina Jurisch - "Cleo The Cat" (exclusive track)
Dub Tractor - "Cirkel"
The Gentlemen Losers - "Honey Bunch"
Nils Frahm - "Them" (solo piano edit - exclusive version)
Cillian Murphy - "In The Morning" (exclusive spoken word piece)
Review: Given the evocative, emotion-rich nature of his solo piano compositions, Nils Frahm seems a smart choice to mix the latest installment of the long-running Late Night Tales series. He predictably does a fine job, too, putting together an atmospheric, slowly evolving soundscape that variously takes in Four Tet, Boards of Canada, spooky world music (The Beka Forest People of South East Cameroon), crackly 1930s ballads (Gene Autry, recorded from an old 78rpm disc), hazy downtempo jazz (Dictaphone, Miles Davis), Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and the out-there dub textures of Rhythm & Sound. Throw in a few of his immaculate compositions, and you have an alluring late night treat.
Review: "The foundations of some of these pieces were laid almost a decade ago, others more recently. All of them came into being as sketches intended as Komodo Kolektif tracks to develop but for various reasons this didn't happen. The Seven Heavenly Elements was first presented to the group in 2019 but partly through personal differences in musical taste as well as COVID throwing a spanner in the works it was put aside and never worked on collectively." Gamma Knife calls on the power of instruments including djembe, Berber square drum, Moroccan metal castanets, shaker, tambourine, bongos, maracas, rattle, Javanese gong ageng, Javanese kempul, Javanese saron, Balinese gong ageng, Balinese kempul, Roland R8 Mk II, DSI Mopho, Roland Jupiter-8, Roland SH-101, Sequential Circuits Pro One, Behringer TD-3, Moog Voyager, Moog Minitaur and jaw harp for a staggering journey into ritualistic futurism and space-age ceremony. Very special indeed.
Review: UK noise maverick Russell Haswell has had an impressive, star-studded career, and we're pleased to see that he's sticking close to the underground thanks to his recent friendship with Powell's Diagonal imprint. After a series of appearances for the lo-fi imprint, Haswell comes through with an album, a whopping seventeen tracks of brutal power electronics and quasi techno. This is the sort of shit you can stand back and be thrown backwards by, or exactly the sort of gear you can layer over DJ sets for added damage. There are pieces such as "Wholly Unaware" and "Gas Attack", which do verge onto the 4/4 sphere. In any case, this is some serious stuff and it comes hotly recommended
Review: It would be fair to say that Ernest "Ernie" Hood was ahead of his time. During the early 1970s, he was one of the few musicians in Portland, Oregon to embrace synthesizers. He was also a keen zither player and in his spare time made nostalgic field recordings of suburban neighbourhoods that matched those he grew up in. All of these things came together on his sole solo album, "Neighborhoods", an obscure - but rather brilliant - set that still sounds miles ahead of its time. It has a nostalgic tone, but is as evocative and atmospheric as you'd expect given the sonic ingredients Hood spooned into the mix. This re-mastered edition expands it to two discs, too, allowing louder, clearer reproduction of Hood's far-sighted sounds.
Review: Back in the 1990s, the combination of Mixmaster Morris, Jonah Sharp (he of Spacetime Continuum fame) and Haruomi Hosono was the closest thing you got to an ambient supergroup (the Orb's collaboration with Robert Fripp and Thomas Fehlmann as FFWD not withstanding). The trio only recorded one album together, the sublime Quiet Logic, but it's an absolute doozy - as this timely reissue proves. For one reason or another, it was only ever released in Japan at the time, meaning this is the first time it has been available worldwide. As you'd expect with such masters of the art form at the helm, it is genuinely superb - a slowly evolving opus that moves between unfurling, dub-fired ambient techno ('Waraitake') to ambient jazz eccentricity ('Dr Gauss/Yakan Hiko (Night Flight)'), via deep ambient d&b ('Uchu Yuei (Night Swimming)') and deep space ambient.
Review: Prolific experimental musician Eiko Ishibashi and filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi follow up their for-the-ages 2021 collaboration for the latter's film adaptation of Drive My Car, with a slick and bold proclamation in jazz, electronica and improv: Evil Does Not Exist. Indeed, only the enlightened among us know that the ills of the world largely boil down to misunderstandings - oversights contra insights - thereby rendering any recourse to real malice by bad actors null, even when they themselves think it true. Evil Does Not Exist once more appears as both an album and film; the former artist's soundtrack here is as sublime as the realisation itself, combining dense copses of brass and freeform drumming to produce a euphoric miasma.
Review: France's Mikado duo came to prominence in the mid 1980's, in what was the peak of the neo-romantic wave that swept every corner of the underground music game. Czerkinsky and Pascale Borel, the latter of whom later left the project, were responsible for some truly game-changing sounds that would permeate into popular culture in later years, and this 1998 comp, Forever, was the peak of their popularity. Reissued by Les Disques Du Crepescule, this tidy bit of coldwave manages to offer something sensual and heartfelt while still being experimental in its approach, offering the listener a suave and balanced drum machine approach amid its poppy coating of sounds. Beautiful.
Review: It is now 23 years since Jeff Mills dropped his seminal Metropolis album, which was a shortened version of his electronic soundtrack for Fritz Lang's Metropolis movie from 1927. Mills is a famous futurist but his sounds work perfectly on this project which is a symbiotic mix of compositions that makes for a nuanced representation of the plot and storyline. It's a testament to his skill that his album is utterly timeless and wholly absorbing, and likely always will be.
B-STOCK: Sleeve damaged but otherwise in excellent condition
Four Years & One Day
Blue Train Lines (feat King Krule)
Audition
Marilyn (feat Micachu)
SP12 Beat
You Look Certain (I'm Not So Sure) (feat Andrea Balency)
Poison
We Go Home Together (feat James Blake)
Delta
TAMED
How We Got By (feat James Blake)
Review: ***B-STOCK: Sleeve damaged but otherwise in excellent condition***
Since first emerging on Hotflush at the tail end of the last decade, Mount Kimbie has navigated the post-dubstep landscape better than almost any other act. It says something about their transformation into hard-to-define electronica heavyweights that Love What Survives, their third full-length and second for Warp manages to be both surprising (there are subtle nods towards titans of post-punk pop and rock, for starters) and exactly what you'd expect. They're masters of fusing disparate styles, sounds, textures and beat patterns into beautiful hybrid shapes, and this kind of 21st century fusion is evident throughout. Naturally, there are a few notable guest appearances dotted throughout, with James Blake's two contributions amongst the album's many highlights.
Review: The late British ethnic electronica and experimental musician Bryn Jones is a cult favourite who is best known for his work as Muslimgauze throughout the 90s. Next up in the ongoing reissue series of his work is Hamas Arc. Together, this collection bridges the gap between two significant yet contrasting moments in the artist's discography and blends unrealised concepts with reworked material from past releases. Some are reimagined versions of songs originally intended for the unreleased Shekel of Israeli Occupation, which was shelved due to shifting political dynamics in the Middle East, and some revisit material from the Vote Hezbollah album.
Review: Cult experimental outfit Nurse With Wound has had their Alas The Madonna Does Not Functiion 12" cut to picture disc for this special reissue. It has also been beautifully remastered by Andrew Liles and is one father band's more rhythmic and musical offerings. It joins the dots between their earlier and second phase work and sounds as good now as it did over 30 years ago. This one-off pressing comes in a lovely die-cut sleeve with Babs Santini artwork to make it an extra special collector's edition.
Review: Swiss imprint WRWTFWW continues to do deep dives into the forgotten corners of electronic music history, returning with shining sonic pearls of genuine historic significance. Here they deliver a first ever vinyl pressing of early Japanese electronic music producer (and bona fide experimental hero) Yashio Ojima's 1983 album Club, a set that was originally only released on an exceptionally limited cassette. Given its vintage, the album has held up incredibly well, in part because its unique, unearthly blend of minimalist electro, music concrete-inspired loop experiments, off-kilter ambient soundscapes and picturesque, post new-age soundscapes remains as far-sighted and unusual in 2024 as it did 41 years ago.
Review: It's been a while since we've heard from Acid Test, not least in welcoming two rather prolific producers: Om Unit, the UK footwork-via-dubstep-via-halftime originator; and TM404, the Swedish purveyor vintage sonic machinations and minimalisms. 'In The Afterworld' might sound to explore the theme of life after death, but its track titles reflect on the best aspects of life itself, with the downtempo 'Microdose Mondays' reflecting the joys of casual psychedelics use at the start of the working week, via downtempo refractions and joyous echoes, and 'Meanwhile In The Smoking Area' evoking the various grotesque, humanoid beasts one might encounter during a mid-rave break.
Review: Having firmly established himself as one of the foremost experimental producers of the past decade with albums like Replica, Returnal, and Rifts, Daniel Lopatin here makes the logical move to electronic music bastion Warp Records. On first listen R Plus Seven is quite unlike any of his other records, largely eschewing the arpeggiated drones of his early work and sample-based collages of his last album for something much more vivid. Coming across like a combination of the emotive minimalism of Terry Riley and Steve Reich, and the hyperreality of James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual, R Plus Seven nevertheless stakes its own claim in the world of post-everything electronic music, combining delicate, introspective moods with shocking moments of recognisable sonic signification. Quite possibly Lopatin's best album to date.
Review: The longevity of Alex Patterson's Orb project never ceases to amaze. While the ambient outfit has gone through many changes since making its debut in 1989 - longtime production partner Thomas Fehlmann being the man at the controls these days - Patterson shows little sign of wanting to call it a day. Here the duo delivers their 21st album, returning to the stargazing obsessions that have served them so well over the years. Consisting of four typically epic workouts, Moonbuilding 2703 AD doffs a cap to many of their obsessions of recent years - hypnotic Berlin techno, classic ambience, woozy tech-house and dub, primarily - with the jazz-funk-meets-ambient dub flex of the title track standing out.
Review: Mind-bogglingly prolific and eternally on the mark, Aleksi Perala has travelled a long way from his roots as Ovuca and Astrobotnia since embarking on his Colundi quest. Here we are with another wonderful set, this time presented on Trip which might well break his stellar sound to an even wider audience. There are theories behind Colundi which you would need to investigate yourself, but it might be simplest to just plunge into this immaculate techno creation and test the effects for yourself. Spine-tingling harmonic interplay, impeccably balanced sequences and a direct rhythmic approach make this so easy to latch on to, but there's something mystical bubbling away under the surface which elevates this beyond your average techno record.
Review: Although widely celebrated as a pioneering and influential work, the original Japanese version of Ryuichi Sakamoto's third solo album, Hidari Ude No Yume, has long been hard-to-find. Helpfully We Want Sounds has secured the rights to reissue it in Europe, pairing the Yellow Magic Orchestra man's original set - complete with sung and spoken Japanese vocals - with a partner disc of entirely instrumental versions. Musically, it remains as vibrant and otherworldly as it did at the turn-of-the-80s, with the great Sakamoto combining elements of jazz, traditional Japanese music, new age, ambient and new-wave with rubbery synth-pop and proto-electro sounds. The fact that it still sounds like nothing else is not only proof of Sakamoto's genius, but also why you genuinely need it in your life.
Review: There was much excitement when Pink Eye, Maurice Fulton's first album under the Syclops album for five years, first appeared online last month. In typical fashion, Fulton hadn't let anyone know it was coming. As with some of his other projects, it's now available on physical formats via German titans Running Back. As with previous Syclops albums, it's wonderfully bonkers and hard to pigeonhole, with the Sheffield-based Chicagoan combining mind-altering electronics, skewed drums, riotous analogue grooves and cheery piano and synthesizer motifs in a variety of hugely impressive ways. There are naturally some suitably filthy club workouts present - check the intergalactic madness of "Sarah's E Is Back", the druggy, afro-tech romp that is "Spin Cycle" and the sub-heavy insanity of "Kelly Is On Her C" - alongside loved-up compositions and productions that indulge Fulton's less discussed often overlooked jazz influences.
Review: Four Tet's iconic label, Text Records, rarely releases much beyond the artist's own, less album-based output and collaborations with friends. So it's a revelation that a new artist is coming to release on the imprint too - Hagop Tchaparian's 'Bolts' is a uniquely trans-Armenian take on folktronic dance, blending the found sound house tropes Mr. Tet is all too used to with field recordings from the Mediterranean. An auditory homage to skateboarding, coastal tat shops, and post-punk through the lens of emotive dance music.
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