Review: It has been almost two years since the Fatima Al Qadiri's debut LP dropped on Hyperdub, and we're as excited now for her follow-up as when we'd heard the first one. This is because Qadiri provides us with everything to satisfy our need states; through an awry and granular sound, the artist is able to transmit a whole spectrum of moods and feelings. This makes Brute an album for anyone, and it can be enjoyed both by the party-goers and the moody corner-dwellers. The intro is a detached sort of skit that distances itself form any sort of shape, but so we're dropped in a post-futuristic world of pseudo grime, broken, detuned techno and tropical electronica. To be honest, there would be no other place for it than the mighty Hyperdub. Big release.
Review: Andrew CS, a multimedia artist and creative programmer from the American Midwest, delves into recursive time loops through digital memories on this new album which blends recorded spaces with synthesised loops improvised on custom software. After discovering a field recorder as a teen, Andrew began archiving moments of tranquillity, creating a dialogue between present textures and a future self. Caught in Pointers, weaves a non-linear coming-of-age narrative from six years of altered field recordings and collages data from Andrew's rural youth and Chicago's urban oscillations and envisions their past as a navigable, four-dimensional digital space.
Review: It's been a rapid rise over the past few years for Alejandro Ghersi's Arca alias. Following some years spent as Nuuro, his current project launched with aplomb on UNO in 2012 before moving on to Hippos In Tanks, and then last year shored up at Mute with the Xen album in a demonstration of true ascendance through the leftfield ranks. Now Ghersi returns to Mute with a new album Mutant, which sees further exploration of his detailed, unusual style touching on elements of noise, bombastic ambient and neoclassical. "Soichiro" lays down wispy threads of trap in amongst dramatic stop-start dynamics while "En" flirts with lingering piano and static interference in the most artful of ways, just two examples of an album loaded with surprise and intrigue.
Review: Last year, regular collaborators Ian Boddy (a Sunderland-based electronics wizard who founded the ambient-focused DiN imprint years ago) and Erik Wallo (a long-serving Norwegian guitarist primiarly known for his experimental and ambient releases) performed their first joint concert for a decade. It's that performance, where they jammed out extended and much-changed versions of tracks featured on some of their prior studio sets, which forms the basis of their latest full-length, Transmissions. As you'd expect, it's a wonderfully atmospheric and evocative affair that gets the most out of both artists, with highlights including the wonderfully creepy 'Uncharted', the krautrock-style hypnotism of 'Aboena', the icy and ethereal 'Ice Station' and the slow-burn bliss of 'Salvage'.
Review: Some four years after Swims brought the work of Dan Snaith to the attention of a whole new audience, the London-based Canadian artist returns with a sixth Caribou album entitled Our Love. Staunch followers of Caribou will know that Snaith tends to adopt different sonic approaches with every long player (compare the psychedelia of Up In Flames with the more spaced out Andorra) but this latest album feels like a natural development of the club influenced sounds of Swims. City Slang call it Snaith's most soulful set yet, and that's certainly helped by the presence of compatriot Jessy Lanza, and like all Caribou albums there is something new that appeals with every listen.
Review: This compilation has been curated by members of Nomark's online community, The Nomark Club, and it brings together rare and previously unavailable tracks from Amon Tobin's various musical personas, including Two Fingers and the return of his early alias, Cujo. With selections from Tobin's multifaceted discography, the album offers a deep dive into his distinct genre-blending worlds. Tracks like Two Fingers' 'Golden' pulse with gritty bass and frenetic energy, while Cujo's 'Early for Clink Street' and 'Nine Bars Back' provide a moody, jazz-infused atmosphere. Tobin's darker tracks 'In Long Dark Grass' and 'Deep in Time' close the album on a hauntingly hopeful note.
Review: Moony Tunes is one of five new 12" LPs recently unveiled by David Tibet aka. Current 93, mad witch doctor of the post-80s industrial continuum. An ever-morphing project, Current 93 always implies motifs of apocalyptic folk, dream logic, and esoteric revelations, and this volume, subtitled Preparing To Sleep In Menstrual Night, feels like a whispered dispatch from the edge of sleep and symbol. True to C93's nature, it resists easy description, lullabying eerily through hoveringly attentive drones and spellcasting vocals. Each pressing includes a riso print of Tibet's painting Moony Toons, hand-signed in pencil, thus hand-stamping an album best received as a kind of ritual, and shaped by the occult aurae of Tibet's performances in London and Hastings earlier this year.
Review: As we hapless reviewers make our way through these five new experimental LPs by Current 93, we cannot help but feel increasing torment and terror at the figures portrayed on the front covers of each record: hand-painted by David Tibet himself (the artist has increasingly indulged such formal solo trend-buckings through his own Cashen's Gap imprint in recent years) they appear like sleep paralytic demons or the ghosts of cancelled English folk yore. All the records are apparently ritually connected to a recent string of live appearances between London and Hastings, and Tibet's penchant for demonologic peerage titles such as GreenSleeve Drakon and Gnostic Sketch - blurring a sense of self-referentiality and occult otherworldliness - leave us bewildered and slack-jawed.
Review: Electronic music is meant to provide a release from the real world, but Medium, the latest missive by UK producer Emptyset, will bring anyone who hears it crashing back to the earth. Emptyset's approach makes nods to narratives from the past, taking influence from the tortured industrial noise of Throbbing Gristle, the eerie ambience of Regis and minimal techno at its most reductionist. On "Interstice", this latter trait manifests itself as dead paced beats and frost percussion disappear into nothingness only to re-appear a few seconds later. On "Other", Emptyset does more to reintroduce the spirit of industrial to contemporary electronic music than a shelf full of situationist techno releases; murderous sub-bass stabs provide the focus, but on the sidelines eerie sound scapes and textures are unfolding, accompanied by skittish percussion. "Mirror" meanwhile sees waves of white noise and static interference and a rave siren build over doubled-up death pace beats. These are the closest references to structured electronic music. "Divide" delivers a tapestry of detached sounds while on "Medium" itself, Emptyset wallows in menacing bass licks with background noise seething beneath the surface. This is music that matches the unparalleled dark age we are living through, and just this once, the Medium really is the message.
Review: Cult English electronic duo I Monster aka Sheffield based record producers Dean Honer and Jarrod Gosling dropped Neveroddoreven, their second studio album, on 21 July 2003. A little later than first planned, it now gets a special 20th Anniversary re-issue on CD as well as this double gatefold. It incudes the original album plus three new singles and the much loved acoustic version of 'Daydream in Blue' which even if you don't think you know, you will, because ti has been rather ubiquitous in ad campaigns for brands including Ford and Magnum Ice Cream. Also helping to keep this band relevant after all these years was their single 'Who Is She' going viral on TikTok in 2023 and picking up 290M Spotify streams.
Review: While not one of Kraftwerk's most celebrated albums, Techno-Pop (known on its original 1986 release as Electric Cafe) has actually stood the test of time rather well - as this re-mastered, re-packaged clear vinyl reissue proves. The A-side suite of 'Boom-Boom-Tchak', 'Techno-Pop' and 'Musique Non-Stop' provides the perfect mix of clanking, metallic electro percussion, addictive melodies and sassy synth-pop sounds. 'House Phone' - an alternative version of 'The Telephone Call' - is also amongst the German band's heaviest, most club-ready cuts, thanks in no small part to Francois Kevorkian's superb mixing. As with the band's other 2020 reissues, this edition also comes packaged with a glossy booklet containing rare and iconic images of the group.
Review: Techno scholars have long believed that the release of Porter Ricks' 1996 album Biokinetics was something of a watershed moment. Not quite deep techno, dub techno, ambient techno or abstract experimentalism, but something in between, the album set new standards for sound design, minimalistic percussion programming (Ricardo Villaobos being one who learned much from its use of off-kilter approach) and dancefloor experimentalism. As this remastered 25th anniversary edition proves, Biokentics still sounds fresh, inspired and wonderfully unusual. If anything, it sounds more current now than it did way back in the late 1990s - a sure sign of its timeless, ground-breaking nature.
Review: As one of the key outposts in the LA beat scene, broadcaster and studio space Dublab is in a strong position to put together an authoritative selection of forward-thinking rhythms that reflect the sound of the city, and what better label to put it out than Stones Throw? There's a few celebrated heads such as Carlos NiNo, Teebs and Ras G, and fresher faces such as ESP and Sun Araw representing the rich diversity and active imagination still prevalent in the home of true beat science. From tender downtempo pop to rugged and ragged bug-outs, there's a lot to take in but that's half the fun right?
Winds Over The Neo-tokyo (Makoto Kubota remix) (3:45)
Dolls' Polyphony (Makoto Kubota remix) (4:01)
Exodus From The Underground Fortress (Makoto Kubota remix) (3:25)
Illusion (Makoto Kubota remix) (2:55)
Mutation (Makoto Kubota remix) (4:18)
Requiem (part 1 - Makoto Kubota remix) (5:59)
Tetsuo (Makoto Kubota remix) (3:21)
Shohmyoh (Makoto Kubota remix) (2:38)
Requiem (part 2 - Makoto Kubota remix) (4:05)
Winds Over The Neo-Tokyo (Yasuharu Konishi remix) (5:02)
Dolls' Polyphony (Yasuharu Konishi remix) (6:36)
Requiem (Yasuharu Konishi remix) (7:48)
Kaneda (Kuniaki Haishima remix) (3:43)
Shohmyoh (Kuniaki Haishima remix) (8:49)
Illusion (Kuniaki Haishima remix) (3:48)
Review: Re-rendered in a stunning full-length form, the groundbreaking soundtrack to the 1988 anime film Akira is here remixed in full by individual members of Geinoh Yamashirogumi, the elusive Japanese music collective behind the original Akira OST. Founded in 1974 by musician and agricultural scientist Tsutomu Ohashi, Geinoh Yamashirogumi still to this day adhere to a loose ecology, comprising hundreds of people with different occupations. Recreating folk music along modern dance musical and electronic lines - terraformed folktronica, if you will - the original Akira soundtrack was innovative, drawing on such Japanese folk musics as gamelan and noh while merging them into. Spawning many later remixes across electronica and dance music, this fresh remix record is fully overseen by director Katsuhiro Otomo and tracks larger-than-life remixes from Makoto Kubota, Kuniaki Haishima and Yasuharu Konishi, ragtag but chosen members of Geinoh Yamashirogumi.
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