Northern Electronics Vinilo y CD

Review: Rune Bagge's inviting new mini-album, Grab a Star, is a second outing on the Northern Electronics label. It is one steeped in beautiful melancholy with narrative themes and a beautiful back-lit cosmic glow that makes it seem all the more otherworldly. The delicate synth craft defines the entire selection of tracks and brings thoughtfulness and tenderness to a range of rhythms and tempos. Some work for the club, some are more for lost-in-the-moment home listening, and all are essential. This is machine music but with a real heart and soul of its own.

Review: Matti Bye is Between Darkness & White Snow on this deeply absorbing new 12" on Northern Electronics. It comes as four separate pieces that all play out as part of a larger narrative. First up is 'I', a quiet, gloomy landscape on a grey winter's day with the gentle sound of flowing water and muted synth modulations placing you right in the middle of it. 'II' has more presence, a growing sense of melancholy and unease and 'III' allows a little heavenly light into the mix to gently uplift. The final chapter has a feeling of hope with subtle keys radiating from deep inside.

Review: ***B-STOCK: CD case damaged but otherwise in excellent condition***


Seven arresting, original new exercises from E-Saggila aka Canadian producer Rita Mikhael. She wears her love of dub on her sleeve - see the slow motion skank of 'Amnesiac' aming others - but not in the usual reassuring, bubbling echoes of dub techno, aiming for something much more angular and alarming. "Breaks remain staccato hammers," says the blurb, with maximum accuracy, "and kicks are cast to negate cardiac systems," while the rhythms veer from off kilter to nailed down and the sonics vary from the lush to the caustic. This territory to the left(field) of electronica is over saturated with identikit productions, but Mikhael does it like you've never quite heard before.

Review: Seven arresting, original new exercises from E-Saggila aka Canadian producer Rita Mikhael. She wears her love of dub on her sleeve - see the slow motion skank of 'Amnesiac' aming others - but not in the usual reassuring, bubbling echoes of dub techno, aiming for something much more angular and alarming. "Breaks remain staccato hammers," says the blurb, with maximum accuracy, "and kicks are cast to negate cardiac systems," while the rhythms veer from off kilter to nailed down and the sonics vary from the lush to the caustic. This territory to the left(field) of electronica is over saturated with identikit productions, but Mikhael does it like you've never quite heard before.

Review: An experimental techno hexagram in LP form from Stockholm artist Evigt Morker. Without so much as a hint of context, the techno dark-shooter here drops his third LP for resident label Northern Electronics as a surprise, and the result is rather stunning. A bleary set of impressions, some tunes on this record clip the top edge of the mix, chinking our emotive armour. The effect is gastric, dehiscent, exuding bile: 'Hemilga Eldar' leaves us dumbstruck by its ambient eventidal winds and strangely sprawled drum shapes, while 'Sokaren Hittade' combines nyctophile cantos with electric twangs. The closer 'Det Blaser En Vind...' is a headland of humility, letting in much longer gusts of tuned air.

Review: Lundin Oil's latest effort is nothing if not powerful and, at times, intimidating. It's also rooted in an important message. People, by nature, have a habit of deducing things about each other. Or thinking they've deduced, when in reality they've assumed and presumed. Underneath the industrial mechanisms at the centre of these soundscapes, then, there's something vulnerable and human. It's challenging stuff, but also reassuring to be back in this particular experimental fold, with Exploit Divisions the first Lundin Oil album we've had since 2016. While fitting precisely into the back catalogue, you also can't help feel that this is up there with the broadest sonic palette painted by the artist yet. Spanning razor sharp, jagged rhythms and wider, more patient ambient refrains.

Review: ***B-STOCK: Sleeve damaged but otherwise in excellent condition***


The highly anticipated secnd full length album from Polar Inertia is here. It makes absolute sense that 'Environment Control' makes its way to the Swedish label Northern Electronics. For those that know the label and this artist, it seems like the perfect pairing. Formed in 2010, Polar Inertia has been one of the leading new producers of darker techno. The title track is opener and a sign of things to come. Futuristic techno of the upmost. These tracks engulf you with their power and depth. Some tracks are sinister and foreboding while others are atmospheric and cavernous. 'Artic Horizon' shows the deft touch of his producing ability. Sinister techno beats shrouded in a deep haze of ambience give off the impression that you are almost outside a club listening to the techno inside. For fans of techno and ambient, you are hard pressed to find a producer who does it better. These copies are sure to go fast so pick one up as quick as you can.

Review: Fresh from joining forces with fellow Danes Lust For Youth on a decidedly experimental seven-inch single ('Jean Jenet'), Christian Stadsgaard brings his Vanity Productions project to Northern Electronics for the first time. In keeping with his career to date, The Night Has Passed Already fuses Stadsgaard's love of extreme, layered, distorted drone sounds and radical sound design with grandiose ambient chords, distant heavy metal guitar solos (drenched in oodles of reverb and white noise), icy electronic melodies (see the Biosphere-esque 'Way Around The Canvas') and buzzing, mind-altering fragments of effects-laden electronics. It somehow manages to sound intimate, contemplative and utterly colossal all at the same time.

Review: Originally released in 2013 on Periferin, former Mayhem man Varg's debut album, Skaeliptom is a ride and a half. A ride to where is the question. It's dark and mechanical, but at the same time freed of Earthly constraints - the ambient techno equivalent of becoming uncoupled from the mothership during a space walk and calmly residing yourself to enjoying floating away into the eternal darkness. Even if there's a sense nobody comes back. It's not that there's a sinister vibe here, more of an unknown quantity. It's sparse and strangely quiet, patient yet edgy and always moving us onto new, previously unexplored soundscapes. Vast and somehow also very personal, Skaeliptom is a curious experiment in electronics that gives us perspective on just how much there might be out there waiting for us to find.