New releases last two weeks: Experimental/Electronic

Review: On Club Tounsi, Tunisian producer Sofyann Ben Youssef, aka AMMAR 808, brings the raw rhythmic power of Mezoued-the folk music of Tunisia's working class-into a bold electronic future. Fusing pulsating synths, distorted textures and TR-808 beats with traditional instruments like goatskin bagpipes, hand drums, and the ney, he reimagines iconic Mezoued tunes for a new generation. Vocalists from classical, Sufi and Mezoued backgrounds also feature to add human soul and mean the album captures the genre's emotional depth while transforming it into something cinematic and club-ready. This LP is a bridge between past and future, tradition and innovation and one that makes you want to move.

Review: "Random, tense, scary and compulsively fascinating". That's how Chris Connelly describes the period in which the tracks on this album were originally written. As the main man behind some of the most iconic and influential industrial bands in history - Ministry, Revolting Cocks, Murder.Inc... - he's definitely well placed to make this kind of judgment. And it comes across even more understandable if you grasp the fact he's meaning all that in a good way. Throbbing Gristle should need no introduction, having pretty much written the blueprint for industrial musick in the nuclear age. A sound that screamed "get us out". Combine that oeuvre with this guy, then, and you have something which is uncompromisingly explosive and effective. Not to mention fitting, given half the people on the street seem convinced we're rushing headfirst into another atomic standoff, if not something much, much worse.

Review: On a remote, gravel-covered spit along the east coast stand the remains of a Cold War-era government weapons testing and radar facility. In the mid-1960s, this site hosted the creation of an over-the-horizon radar-a groundbreaking system designed to bounce signals off the ionosphere to monitor distant nations. Its success depended on a complex interplay of frequency, solar cycles and atmospheric conditions but yet persistent interference plagued the system and rendered it ineffective. Despite multiple investigations, it was decommissioned and dismantled by the early 1970s. Today, the once-ambitious Cobra installation lies dormant, reclaimed by nature as a quiet, unlikely wildlife refuge and these are sounds inspired by it.

Review: The work of London-based Suffolk lad Dalham (Jon Michaelides) often comes accompanied by textual musings on existential themes, and his latest record And The Sun is no exception, hearing him quip on the mooted tulip that is generative AI: "As humankind strives to create artificial intelligence what will faith, love, or morality look like to a nascent consciousness? Will it be capable of understanding its creators who often hold logic and superstition within themselves?" So do questions of climate, macro-scale recklessness, and internal contradiction abound on this new record; an eight-track sublime that fits in well with the label's retromodernist, sometimes neo-pagan aesthetic sensibility. A weird Western ambient odyssey, where one abstract electronic artist's resident Suffolk surroundings merge with the same piano-led, drum machine-mapped scenes, not also long ago explored in 2024's 'Alive In Wonderland'.

Review: Backdrops of engineered silence and societal distraction inform on this from Fatboi Sharif and Driveby, twin rap verbalisers from the hinterzones of New Jersey. Let Me Out confronts the fractured psyche of a world numbed by noise: a raw, unfiltered dispatch from the underbelly, where six-figure illusions swing pendularly over mirrored truths, and suppressed rage simmers beneath manufactured calm. Tracked at 2ndststudios and shaped by the precision of Steel Tipped Dove, the record is sharpened further by the eerie co-production of DJ Boogaveli on 'We Fought for this Country!?' and haunting backing vocals from Paul Keim on 'Krossroads'. From milk-and-oil confusion to the cracked prayers of trauma survivors, each track on this grittily sculpted noise rap record erodes our psychic Achilles' heels, through emotional debris and soul static.

Review: Multiple Angle Distortions (M.A.D) is the second of two EPs previewing The Future Sound of London's upcoming 2025 album. It dives into darker, more percussive terrain than before and blends acidic 303 textures with brooding orchestral layers as the cult FSOL continue to expand their sonic palette. Grammy-nominated Daniel Pemberton guests on the striking 'Improvisations,' which is a live recording from a London fashion show, while closing track 'Northern Point' showcases FSOL's own custom-built synths. The result is a heady fusion of house, electronica and techno with an experimental edge that is both cerebral and immersive. M.A.D affirms this outfit's legacy while still pushing boundaries decades into their career.

Review: Machine Girl's debut album celebrates its tenth anniversary with a long-awaited reissue, which marks the first time it arrives on CD as well as vinyl. Originally released in 2014, WLFGRL fused footwork, jungle, digital hardcore and rave into a chaotic, euphoric sound that helped launch a global underground movement. The album's packed with raw intensity and plenty of breakcore influence so it introduced a new generation to extreme electronic music and to celebrate its return, a one-off livestreamed show at Brooklyn's Trans-Pecos accompanied the release. As we are reminded listening back now, WLFGRL is a real high-water mark in outsider music culture.

Review: Built as a continuous 55-minute suite split into nine movements, Marconi Union's The Fear Of Never Landing hears the duo recapture a state of exhilarating levity. Their 12th studio album, it finds them in refreshed head and soundspace, having come a heck of a long way since their 2003 debut Under Wires And Searchlights. The record emerged slowly over two years, during which the Manchester duo (Jamie Crossley, Duncan Meadows) grappled with creative uncertainty, reconnecting with their foundations through live experimentation. The catalyst came while scoring the cult 1975 film Downhill Motion, an experience that rekindled their affinity for cinematic composition and set the tone for this surefire introspection aid. From 'Eight Miles High Alone', a hypnotism which finds its inducer in sequencer-driven pulses, evoking isolation, weightlessness and quiet tension.

Review: Madrid duo Pablo Miron and Juan Vacas return with their second album, En Perpetua, which delves deeper into their signature decayed collage and psycho-acoustic soundscape while building on their debut Of No Fixed Abode. This time out they also embrace new creative confidence and the possibilities offered by a fresh Madrid studio and use violin, harmonica, voices, guitars, a looper, FM radio and diverse array of field recordings-from the Spanish countryside to exhibition sounds-to bring it to life. They craft eight re-pitched meditations that explore fractured music and rhythmic patterns which unfold through their distinctive, open-ended and immersive tonal journeys.

Review: Bill Orcutt's approach to the guitar feels less like playing and more like detonating: a flurry of stabbing phrases, mangled blues motifs and broken time signatures that teeter constantly on the edge of collapse. It's a sound he's refined over decades, from his early days in Miami's punk and noise scenes to his present-day experiments in live-coded digital abstraction. This new album, which features two versions of 'Anxiety of Symmetry', finds him at his most feral and funny in years i a twisted tribute to the clunky MIDI guitar presets of the 90s, rendered via his cracked-software experiments with two fifteen-minute compositions built from a single concept: six sung numbers, each mapped precisely to pitches in a major scale. These micro-phrases ('1-2', '1-2-3', and so on) repeat and multiply, creating swirling polymetric harmonies that flicker between gentle hypnosis and algorithmic overload. Female voices loop in cycles of uneven length, forming structures reminiscent of Glass's Einstein on the Beach, but without its theatricalityithis is music of obsession, not spectacle. The emotional register is unusually soft for Orcutt, but behind the surface calm lies a meticulous compulsion. In an essay of the same name, he aligns this method with "Just Right" OCD, proposing a feedback loop between mental fixation and machine logic. What emerges isn't ambient in any passive sense, but a kind of orderly unravelingicomposition as therapeutic ritual, echoing the recursive spirals of Hanne Darboven or the trance-state potential of counting itself.

Review: People Like Us, the long-running project of Vicki Bennett, returns with her first album since 2018's The Mirror. Again via sampling, and stylising in vintage neo-psych-tronic audio collage, Copia here muses on abundance and self-replication, reassembling fragments of sound into something sub-interconnected, rhizomatic. Emerging from her recent AV performance The Library of Babel, the album blends electronic textures with whimsical, often uncanny vocal moments, inlining contributions from Matmos, Ergo Phizmiz, Hearty White, Gwilly Edmondez, and others. Lyrics and melodies by Phizmiz act as a connective spine, while the project as a whole embraces an "exquisite corpse" approach, multitracks traded over oceans and timelines, forming a gaudily grotesque patchwork resistant to linearity. As always with Bennett's work, Copia blurs the borders of past, present and potential, offering a poignant meditation on creativity.

Review: One of the flagship albums by Aaron Funk aka. Venetian Snares (alongside Songs About Cats, Higgins Ultra Low Track Glue Funk Hits 1972-2006, Winnipeg Is A Frozen Shithole and The Chocolate Wheelchair Album), Rossz Csillag Alatt Szuletett marks itself out in his sonography as a breakcore album which, aside from its lobotomising breaks, features mostly classical strings and brass. Gloomy and melancholic, the album's title translates from Hungarian to "Born Under A Bad Star", i.e. "cursed from birth", and the record transmits a superstitious chain of influence, with track 3 covering Budapest composer Rezso Seress' 'Gloomy Sunday', which was said to have inspired the suicide of the original musician's own girlfriend. Renditions of Mahler, Stravinsky, Paganini, Prokofiev and Edward Elgar all follow in morose but energetic fashion, demonstrating the Canadian IDM artist's quirkily sized collection of drill bits.

Review: Adam Winchester and Laurie Osborne (probably still best known as Appleblim) are Wrecked Lightship and they have an inventive approach to dub, breaks and bass. Their work creates an immersive world full of rich, atmospheric textures and the latest example of that is Drained Strands, a new album for Peak Oil full of fragmented, genre-blurring sounds. The six-tracker is full of experimentation and new ideas from the off. 'Delinquent Spirits' for example is a jumble of jungle breaks and vast basslines with minimal percussion, 'Reeling Mist' is warm, blissed out dub and 'Somnium Sands' is an eerie and evocative world of synth designs and industrial decay.

Review: Yeule (Nat Cmiel) is something of a sonic scrapyard varmint, scouring the lost wastes for augmentable audio parts perhaps useable in their madcap experiments. An avant-garde spin doctor of ash-faced, death-ray-desert-bomb glitch-pop, they've kept their place at the knife-edge of innovation, blending genres and non-genres at the violent vanguard where sounds remain in constant, slipped flux. In the lineage of Machine Girl, ecolagbohrsac2021 or Hakushi Hasegawa, 2022's Glitch Princess laid nutritious ground for Cmiel's now evermore fractious work, Evangelic Girl Is A Gun, which hears the somewhat alter-egoic Yeule now delve into the complexity of a fragmented identity, embracing the duality of light and shadow while echoing surreal animes, such as Serial Experiments Lain and Angel Egg. The LP reimagines Yeule as a haunting figure, exploring ego deaths and transformations in partnership with visual artist Vasso Vu.

Review: Non-binary performance artist Nat Cmiel from Singapore, often also known as yeule, continues to push the boundaries of glitch-pop and alt-electronica with their latest release. After solidifying their reputation as a trailblazer with their sophomore album Glitch Princess and its follow-up softscars, Cmiel takes a more daring, raw approach here. It's a cathartic exploration of self-destruction, trapped identities and the dark undercurrents of post-modernity, where Cmiel's ethereal vocals intertwine with dissonant beats, creating a paradox of beauty and tension.The sprawling atmospherics of 'Tequila Coma' and '1967' unfurl into a liquid haze, giving way to the razor-edged urgency of 'VV' and 'Dudu', which channel a palpable, jittery rhythm that commands attention. Collaborating with the likes of A.G. Cook and Mura Masa, the album navigates between haunting introspection and electrifying energy. It's a striking nod to Cmiel's ability to balance vulnerability and sonic experimentation, presenting a portrait of the artist struggling with the very image they've built.