Northern Electronics Vinilo y CD

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: 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: Swedish duo SHXCXCHCXSH distort club music by using a refined, idiosyncratic palette that challenges functionality. As logophiles, they twist language into fragmented, barely recognisable sequences, reflecting their experimental process. Their new album marks their debut for Northern Electronics and showcases a broader exploration of sound. Spanning 15 tracks in style, it combines drone elements, shredded vocals and chaotic melodies to make for a dark, intense atmosphere. Interspersed with brooding yet effervescent breaks, ......t is their most focused and comprehensive work to date and it also pushes their sound into new territories.

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.