Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: Eagles & Butterflies has had plenty of notable tunes over the years. No doubt that is why he gets the nod from Gerd Jansen's legendary Running back label to offer up Retropolis Vol 01. It is a four-track EP that shows off the producer's well-realised sounds. The title track is the real standout - 'Retropolis' brings electro-styled synth work with brilliantly future retro euro-disco energy. It's packed with hints of Italo and is sure to light up any club scene. Says the producer of the EP, "Retropolis is the past meets the future. I love influences and technology from the past and making music that sounds like it could be from a time yet to arrive." Mission accomplished.

Review: Newly signed to Ninja Tune, Ebbb debuts with a five-track EP that shows great intent. Emerging from the same London avant-garde live scene that birthed black midi and Black Country New Road, the band has quickly developed a unique sound in just a year. Their music blends pulsing rhythms, immersive electronic production, sparkling melodies, layered vocal harmonies, and beats that range from ambient to industrial. Described by the band themself as "Brian Wilson meets Death Grips," the EP is experimental and unpredictable yet deeply considered and precise with an idiosyncratic hybrid of sounds that showcases Ebbb's innovative and tightly crafted music.

Review: Stockholm exports Elfenberg find themselves on Bordello here with four cuts of mind-expanding and life-enriching synth goodness. The skilled duo kick off with the high-speed arps and tight kicks of the retro-future smoother 'Forever Alone' then slow things down to a more Balearic and breezy vibe on 'Conga Coronation' with its finger clicks and lush pads. There is soft acid magic at the heart of 'Sphere Of Missing Out' while 'Cosmic Tribune' lulls you into a nice widescreen cosmic world of tumbling chord sequences and warped bass.

Review: Swiss imprint Phantom Island specialises in the kind of atmospheric, slow-motion Balearica that looks far and wide for inspiration. Their latest EP, a collaboration between live electronic performer Tillman Ostendarp and singer/songwriter Gina Ete, naturally takes a similar approach. Title track 'Le Bouqet', for example, features subtle nods towards the more atmospheric material on Peter Gabriel's 1980s album 'So' with drowsy chords, ethereal electronics, clicking beats and the sweetest of vocals, while 'Tetra' is creepy, dark and atmospheric in the extreme, with live percussion catching the ear. Elsewhere, 'Nonchalant' is like trip-hop after a hit of opiates, 'Customer Care' is a wonky number with distorted vocals, ambient textures and West African percussion, and Fuga Ronto's remix of 'Le Bouquet' is a retro-futurist leftfield synth-pop gem with added dub delay.

Review: Milan duo Eternal Love made their debut last year on local imprint Polifonic's Itria Vol. 2 compilation and follow up here on Sydney's Planet Trip. Comprising of four tracks, the Altar EP features some Balearic rave inspired by the late '80s Ibiza sounds as heard on 'Flotamos', while the following cut 'Terra Trance' is as much a zeitgeist of that magical era with its loved-up vibe. Over on the flip, we really enjoyed the celestial and new-agey groove business of 'Geo Geo'.

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: Appearing on labels as varied as Phonica, Shall Not Fade and Growing Bin, Bartosz Kruczynski has certainly carved his own path as Earth Trax. Now he arrives on Lapsus, the Spanish label which tends towards more introspective electronica and ambient. From the tender folk of 'Closer Now' to the straining neo pop of 'Understand' it's clear we're in for an experience very different to the upfront club bangers we might have enjoyed in the past. Proving himself to be a bold and fearless creator capable of many different sounds, with Closer Now Kruczynski is taking Earth Trax well and truly interstellar.

Review: Jacob Long's fourth full-length LP for Kranky hears the artist otherwise known as Earthen Sea expand his repertoire to an almost full reimagining, taking to the now longstanding Earthen Sea moniker from the fresh incarnation as a "piano trio", rather than a solo production effort. Though we gather this might not genuinely be the case, all it took was a simple shift in self-imagining to fashion a completely different take on a still so far meditative sound. Here elements were chopped and resampled, then layered with bass, drums, percussion and additional keys; the result is a fusion of live band acoustics and downtempo loops, sculpted into nine smoke-and-mirror dubs of fractured jazz, soft-focus noir and trip hop dust.

Review: Echo & The Bunnymen's first ever best-of compilation, first released in 1985, gets a reissue. Accruing all the hits, we begin with the seminal 'Rescue' before careening through 'Never Stop', 'The Killing Moon' and 'Seven Seas', recalling the new wave band's emotive drawl and gushing instrumentals, coinciding with the time in which their contemporaneous album, 'Songs To Learn and Sing', was released.

Review: Bristolian Nick Edwards had an excellent run of things during the 2010s, releasing cuts on Planet Mu, Mordant Music, Punch Drunk, Perc Trax and WNCL, among others. He also established himself as a highlight on the European live electronic circuit. Then things quietened off, making the personal choice to avoid getting caught up in the circus of dance music and club culture at arguably the most perilous point in its history - ethically speaking. After five years in the wilderness, Edwards is back as Eoplekz with an eight-track mini-album for Selvamancer. Straddling acid warbles, dub tech, dirty squelching weirds, subtle hints of reggae and a resolute commitment to futurism, we're not sure exactly how to label Dirtbokz, but that's exactly the point. Lo-fi analogue adventures through the wormhole, and back again.

Review: The brilliant Dark Entries celebrates its 15th anniversary by going back to its roots and offering up a reissue of its inaugural release: New York collective Eleven Pond's 1986 classic, 'Bas Relief'. This mega-rare record has become a stone-cold cult classic album revered by dark pop devotees. It features James Tabbi, Jeff Gallea, Jack Schaeffer, and Dan Brumley on a mix of guitars, synths, vocoders and drum machines and is a sound inspired by seminal labels like 4AD and Factory Records, and moody acts like Joy Division and Fad Gadget. For this reissue, it has been remastered to correct previous reissue flaws and comes in a screen-printed jacket with a lyric sheet, postcards, and a bookmark. Only 500 copies have been pressed so don't sleep on this one.

Review: Last year, Brian Eno served up his latest critically acclaimed album in the form of FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE. Now he follows it up with the much anticipated instrumental version. Despite his advancing years and the sheer scope of what he has already accomplish dint he ambient world - not least devising the genre in the first place - Eno still manages to excite and intrigue here. The artwork alone is beautiful, and the music inside is similarly lush - widescreen cosmic soundscapes with subtle melodies and shifting timbres, pregnant empty space and a knack for sounds designs with meaning few others can match.

Review: A true enigma, an artist that represents all that was fascinating and romantic and alluring and intriguing about 20th Century sounds, Brian Eno was always going to need a feature length documentary, when the time was right. Premiering at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Eno, Gary Hustwit's ode to the man, myth and legend, wowed critics and blew audiences away. Not least because it uses a computer programme which selects footage and edits the movie so a different version is shown at every screening. Innovation befitting Eno, removing the visuals and focusing on the sounds readjusts our vision to bring Eno into greater focus. The breadth of what's on this soundtrack is remarkable, from upfront indie on 'Stiff' and the weird folk-pop of 'Spinning Away', a John Cale collaboration, the ghostly post-rave of 'Cmon' with Fred Again, spectacular pianos of 'Motion In The Field', ethereal ambient vocals on 'There Were Bells', the angular punk dominating 'Third Uncle' - we could go on, and on, and on.

Review: Now here's a rarity for you. Not even many of the most committed megafans know that Brian Eno, Holger Czukay and J.Peter Schwalm, accompanied by Raoul Walton and Jern Atai, performed a secret live music show, outside the esteemed Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, situated in the city of Bonn, in August 1998. Forming a part of the opening party of Eno's Future Light-Lounge Proposal multimedia installation, this furtively-recorded album hears an exclusive slice of incidental "high-altitude food music", of course made during Brian Eno's airborne ambient era. Now reissued via Gronland, this five-piece cut of sophisti-ambi-krauttronica makes for a welcome surprise.

Review: Hauntologic '80s nostalgia-propagandizers Ghost Box return once again with a new one from Eric Zann, 'Ouroborindra'. Ghostly vocals mesh with a wide range of acoustic and electronic instrumentation here to produce an inspired album that draws on early 20th century cosmic horror fiction, resulting in some dastardly thematic combination of Lovecraft, BBC Christmas Horror stories, and Scarfolk. Radio-static noise and cavernous intakes of breath on tracks like 'Threshold' and 'Dols' blend with long ambient progressions and string sequences, recalling mock-'80s film influences such as the latest haunter 'Enys Men'. As ever with Ghost Box, a patented corecore sound is captured.

Review: DJ and live electronic musician Erika is a force of nature, having built an entire alternate universe around her own sound. If you're keen on world-building and conceptronica, then hers is almost entirely built around themes from astronomy, physics and cosmology. A techno album through and through, 'Anevite Void' centres on the idea of "the irregular life cycles created by three suns circling over a planetary organism that presents two major biomes: rocky crystalline desert, and deep layered forest, each of which exists above and/or below ground, depending on what phase the suns are in." The result is a shapeshifting foray through both relaxed and driving soundscapes, seasonal as they are ecstatic.

Review: The Exaltics is always a dab hand at crafting cinematic sci-fi scenes out of his dystopian electro, but even he took it to another level with Das Heise Experiment. Conceived in 2013 as a soundtrack to a graphic novel, it was the perfect outlet for Robert Witschakowski's music beyond the function of a club 12". The atmospheres and moods he elicits from the Exaltics sound bank are brilliantly rendered across the whole release, which gets the ten year treatment on this reissue with striking, all-new full colour artwork which brings the visuals to life alongside the music like never before.

Review: Ensemble Modern and experimental, Berlin-based music composer and sound artist Hainbach come together for Primer, an album sourced from their 2022 Checkpoint concert and reworked in the studio with bassist Paul Cannon. The record transforms their fine live performance into a rich, immersive home listening experience with Hainbach's signature use of nuclear research gear, tape loops and vintage electronics weaving haunting, ever-shifting textures throughout. As such the pieces pulse with a sonic spark that captures the spirit of experimentation and collaboration and is taps into plenty of avant-garde thinking in its approach to drone and ambient.

Review: Troekurovo Recordings is a production team made up of Toki Fuko, Vadim Basov and Evgeny Vorontsov and they have been hidden away deep in some enchanted Russian forests recording music. Now they are putting out the results on this superb double pack. This project started back in 2016 as a live experimental jam and is now an annual tradition made on loads of analogue gear on the banks of a canyon that was formed many years ago by a melting glacier. The locale provides inspiration - from the fresh country air to the meteor showers often visible overhead - for the music making which is strictly "no preparation, no pre-programming - hardware, friends and live improvisation only."