Phantom Limb Vinilo y CD

Review: Northern England has this way of capturing the imagination. Sure, many of its towns feel half-forgotten in unromantic ways, infrastructure is appalling, and you've got the whole low life expectancy thing compared with every other region in the country. Push beyond all that, though, and when you're out exploring these corners the sense of adventure, or breaking out from the world we've created and coming face to face with nature's design can be hard to ignore.
Richard Skelton has never bothered trying - his works have long-since celebrated the unfettered, wild and remote feeling of escaping to somewhere up there, out past that last pub on the right. On Selenodesy, he takes the organic, textured soundscape idea that has defined so much of his work and adds in electronic synthesis to create something human, earthly, but also subtly alien in sound.

Review: If you encountered the 2019 album, Essaka Hoisa, Waqwaq Kingdom's inimitable style will already be familiar. For those who never did, the outfit comprises Shigeru Ishihara aka DJ Scotch Egg and Kiki Hitomi (ex-King Midas Sound), which should give some clues as to where influences are coming from on this, their first outing since the aforementioned obscure masterpiece. Dokkoisho follows a similar line, marrying elements of 8-bit techno, African polyrhythms, contemporary electronica, dancehall, and traditional Japanese folk. Sometimes, although not always, it almost feels like it's happening all at once, like opener 'Positive Sound'. Although that doesn't mean sacrificing coherency or quality. In other moments, things are more focused, for example 'Positive Sound', which opts to strip things back wonderfully to offer a lunging, hypnotic, drum-first workout.