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Underground provocateur and beat maverick triggers 33 sawn-off rave-refractions, 'With Love'. After maintaining an unusually low profile for the 2 years since 'Dedication', Zomby is set to convince more heads with this ambitious double album of gloomy electronics and UK soul. And that's not soul of the Beverley Knight type: it's a poignant, more relevant sorta soul; a metaphysical essence that percolates its dilated pulsewidth and comes laden with a very particular emotional and cultural baggage. On 'With Love' the glowing perspiration of '92 has long gone cold, its aura only just phosphorescing in the… Read more
SEAWORTHY + TAYLOR DEUPREE
12K
CD // £8.99
HOME LISTENING / MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT
Cat. Number: 12K1075
"The cold had a certain warmth to it. Worlds, life, among the layers of ice. Complex sounds, alive, found in the darkest rocks, wet with winter’s water. These hollows, rough with age, nature’s hideouts, were the source of inspiration and sounds for the first full-length collaborative effort from Seaworthy (Cameron Webb) and Taylor Deupree. Webb was plucked from a bushfire and flood-ridden east coast of an Australian summer and deposited via a 20h flight into a New York covered in snow. From wetlands abuzz with wildlife in the Australia to winter’s wooded trails through Pound… Read more
"Start with a room, a cleanish one, not too rustic, not too slick, and then fill it with tools, fill it with anything that can be used to make other things. Put the room in the forest, but not too deeply in, let’s have the city on the distant horizon. Then, let’s have two craftsman, artists, explorers. Tell them a bit about where the room is, but not exactly. Make them find it, together. When they finally do they will embark on their creations, but it won’t be the immerse-and-shut-yourself-off-from-the-world type of creation. To them, creation involves talking, travelling, experiencing, not just wor… Read more
**Special Edition CD housed in three-colour letter-pressed kraft cover with 13 vintage animal coloured prints (sugar paper), heavy card stock letter pressed insert and hand-picked red leaf plus download code redeemable from the label. Edition of 200.** Fluid Audio present the first collaboration between Maps & Diagrams producer Tim Martin and Macedonian vocalist Genoveva Kachurkova. 'In The Vale Of Tears' revolves twelve sombre, widescreen yet private pieces merging neo-classical compositional techniques with ambient pop song structures in the lushest style - no lo-fi noise here - everything's rendered for clarity and emotional impact.
BOARDS OF CANADA
Tomorrow's Harvest (Standard CD Version)
Warp Records
CD // £9.49
Cat. Number: WARPCD257
Seven years since their last transmission, the brothers BoC yield the darkly infected crop of 'Tomorrow's Harvest'. They've seemingly burned for fuel the guitars used to icky effect on 'The Campfire Headphase' and bunkered down to watch John Carpenter movies and 'Threads' on repeat, now returning to the sublime dystopia of 'Music Has The Right To Children' but filtered with a sort of entropic nuclear soul depletion. If we take the artwork and promotional cock-teases literally, they're now stationed in the deserted dust belt of a near lifeless metropolis, decoding… Read more
Superb sci-fi sound designs from a shadowy collective inspired by William Gibson's prophetic 'Neuromancer' novel. Borrowing its title from the book's opening chapter, 'Tuned To A Dead Channel' presents us with nine pieces of fear-inducing cybernetic simulation bowing to '80s and '90s sci-fi atmospheres meshing gloomy pads, hyperreal electro pings, perilous bass detonations and distant clanks, all rendered as code on luminous green grids in glossy black surfaces in tessellating, 3D-sculpted spatialisations. Fans of everything from Ike Yard to the Autonomic lot, Bitstream, Synth Sense and Ital's tripper album moments need to make themselves acquainted.
"Kveikur’ is Sigur Ros’ first album since signing to XL, self-produced by the three members of the band: Jón Þór Birgisson (guitar, vocals), Georg Hólm (bass guitar) and Orri Páll Dýrason (drums).
Numero present a sincerely wide-eyed and wondrous collection of new age synth music prototypes imagined and created between 1975-1985 by Iasos. As the story goes, Iasos was inspired by "…the infinitely numbered harmonies transmitted by Vista, a benevolent being from a distant dimension…" to experiment with the earliest commercially available synthesisers and tape FX, creating a breathtakingly lush and blessed form of electronic music that was subsequently deemed new age. Interpreting Vista's transmissions from his studio on a houseboat in Sausalito, San Francisco, Iasos closely mirrored t… Read more
James Holden finally drops the second album of his career, some seven years after his accomplished debut 'The Idiots Are Winning'. The Inheritors finds him showing off his newly developed mastery of MAX/MSP and modular synthesis, and across its whopping fifteen track duration there's space for him to indulge his love of far more than techno: witness the very British prog-jazz stomp of 'The Caterpillar's Intervention', the krautrock mannerisms of 'Rannoch Dawn' and 'Circle Of Fifths', the almost freeform noise of 'Sky Burial'. And while of course the album has a backbone of classic Holden, 'Sky Wa… Read more
RAUELSSON
SONIC PIECES
CD // £14.99
HOME LISTENING / MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT
Cat. Number: SONICPIECES017CD
*Limited Edition of 450 copies in handmade & numbered book packaging" Typically lush ambient, neo-classical, chamber pop and quasi-film-score music from Berlin's Sonic Pieces label, this time from Spain's Rauelsson. The album was recorded by the sea, and it really comes across in the music, which is self-consciously grand in scale and oscillates between the calm and the tempestuous. Piano is Rauelsson's main weapon of expression, and like so many artists in this sphere, Harold Budd and Philip Glass are his gods, his playing ranging from the digressive and heavy-reverbed to the driving and cyclical. It's… Read more
Terror Bird is the songs of Vancouver artist Nikki Never. Beginning with naive but affecting songs hammered into primitive recording apparatus and released on handdubbed cassette releases, Terror Bird soon attracted the attention of intrepid independent labels such as Night People, La Station Radar and Adagio830. Each release has documented a growing maturity in songwriting and emotional scope. "All This Time" is Terror Bird's 3rd full length and is by far the most personal, emotionally affecting and musically developed. Recorded at home over a period of 3 months, the 10 songs on "All This Ti… Read more
Review to follow shortly…
Two of techno's most influential architects reprise a long-running relationship at 'Borderland'. Whilst officially their debut album collaboration, Detroit visionary Juan Atkins and his Berlin-based counterpart Moritz Von Oswald previously worked together on a string of foundational, early '90s techno tracks - from their 3MB trio alongside Thomas Fehlmann thru Von Oswald's engineering work on Model 500's classic 'Starlight', among others. Twenty years on they pick up a very similar flow or dialogue here with eight "sequences" of stripped-down, signature rhythms and 313 melodies… Read more
Released as the second instalment of Darla's Bliss Out series back in 1997, this album has aged unbelievably well. Antarctica could be a how-to guide for fashioning timeless, organic drone music, and the first lesson here is that you really don't need much in the way of electronics or fancy equipment to make a statement. The opening piece sprawls across 22-minutes of shimmering, horizontal guitar, while crunching loops - sounding like trodden-on snow - carve out a rhythmic element, ultimately resembling the kind of approach Biosphere has been known to adopt for his own frozen ambien… Read more
**Dynamic, radiant, full frequency-range electro-acoustic renders of location recordings. RIYL Emptyset. Edition of 200 copies** "Sleeper Line is a five-track EP constructed from the original components of a live set performed in December 2012. These components — manipulated found sounds — were recorded at various times and in various environments: Dungeness Power Station (2012), street recordings post-Notting Hill Carnival (2007), a prior live performance at the White Building in London (2012), and a cassette recording made in the cloakroom of the Metalheadz Sunday Sessions club night (… Read more
VARIOUS / KEYSOUND
Keysound Recordings Present... This Is How We Roll
Keysound
CD // £12.99
Cat. Number: LDN036CD
Where a lot of labels that came up around the same time (no need to name names) have lost sight of their roots in pursuit of bigger sales and fees, Keysound has remained admirably pure-hearted and steadfast, keeping one eye firmly on road and the other deep underground; Martin Clark's track record for unearthing new talent has been, and continues to be, spotless. Even in its regular forays into new territories - house tempo, the album format, etc - the imprint has remained valiantly true to the UKG/grime/dubstep bloodline that birthed it in the first pla… Read more
Maudlin beatscapes and angst-ridden electro-pop from Baths on 'Obsidian', the follow-up to 2010's 'Cerulean'. As seems to be entirely commonplace for Anticon artists these days, Will Wiesenfeld seems in thrall to the plaintive chamber-folk of people like Sufjan Stevens and Peter Broderick, working with an aspirational toolbox of strings, guitars and vocal harmonies, favouring hushed, clos-mic'd production, and trying to put his own stamp on the formula with some dusty drum loops, erratic electronic squiggles and stuttering, disruptive edits. Elsewhere, as on 'Miasma Sky', the touchstone seem to be Hot C… Read more
VARIOUS / DUST TO DIGITAL
Greek Rhapsody: Instrumental Music from Greece 1905-1956
Dust to Digital
2CD / Book // £29.99
Cat. Number: DTD27
**152-page hardcover book including extensive liner notes, annotations, and photographs, plus two CDs featuring 42 instrumental recordings** Dust-to-Digital offer another unparalleled insight to the near-mystical, often sorrowful, yet life-affirming world of popular Greek folk in the early 20th century, or Rebetika as it's best known. Like many others, we were first seduced to the pleasures of this epoch by the book's researcher and compiler, Tony Klein's previous incursion, 'Mortika - Rare Vintage Recordings from a Greek Underworld', comp… Read more
The master of sleek melodic techno gives up a frictionless 2nd album of piquant groove primed for home listening and headphone mooches alike. Since the mid '00s the Wagon Repair and Cobblestone Jazz helmsman has been responsible for some of techno/house music's biggest tunes, from the 'Typerope EP' thru his 'Marionette' and Speicher classics, and while the formula hasn't changed much in recent years, his feathered arpeggios and svelte rhythm programming still prod the dance in all the right places. 'Her Blurry Pictures' showcases a producer operating within his means, refining what he… Read more
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There's been a huge buzz doing the rounds about this release over the last few weeks, and judging by the volume of queries we've had about it we can only assume that you lot are already aware of the sheer brilliance of the latest and most anticipated album from Andreas Tilliander yet. 'Persona' is an intense and multi-layered exploration of reduced dub, drone and hauntological elements realised on a truly epic scale, referencing everyone from William Basinski to Thomas Koner, Mika Vainio, Vladislav Delay, Tim Hecker, even Akira Rabelais along the way. Opening track "About last step and scale" edges int… Read more
*Re-press at long last available again* Beguiling, unsettling and deeply mysterious, The Haxan Cloak's eponymous debut album is a riveting experience. In case Demdike Stare hadn't inspired you to read up on the pre-1900 occult, the term "Häxan" is an old German word for witchcraft, a theme shared by the two artists besides their northern English latitude (which would technically intersect with northern Germany, geography geeks!). But for that, and the monotone artwork aside, The Haxan Cloak takes a very different approach to his craft, one rooted in his studies in sound art and more con… Read more
The precious bloodline of British dread music circulates through Raime's riveting debut album. Two years since their eponymous 12" - Blackest Ever Black's first release - sounded a mandate-like synthesis of late '70s industrial gloom, palsied techno and burned-out breakbeats with a gothic elan, they've come to epitomise the label's aesthetic whilst remaining its most elusive, enigmatic operators, flitting from surround sound installations to chastening mixtapes and now this monolithic LP. In that time, their ambitions have remained steadfast yet progressed in parallel with BEB's:… Read more
Bobby Krlic returns with his hugely anticipated second album as The Haxan Cloak, and his first for Tri Angle. It's an unrelentingly bleak offering that will satisfy fans of his terrific Aurora Borealis debut, but it also has a more electronic, rhythmic feel befitting of his new label and which will potentially appeal to an even wider audience. Though it was supposedly conceived to soundtrack a soul's journey beyond this mortal coil, don't come at it expecting some blissed-out amble through Elysium; Krlic's vision of the afterlife is a decidedly gloomy and abyssal, an all-out descent into the… Read more
Hype Williams instigator and now solo raconteur, Dean Blunt, sidesteps preconceptions with a quietly psychedelic, sparse and sensual third album. In 'The Redeemer' he tends to a wipe-clean soundworld of lite jazz fusion motifs, bluesy guitar wisps and new age synth gelled together with dreamy sound FX and distressed ansafone messages whilst nonchalant, confessional vocals dictate a drowsy internal narrative. It's a sort of surreal soul scape simulacra, an adult contemporary fantasy as seen and heard from a detached perspective, a fact accentuated by the intangible, voice-in-your-head mixing and… Read more
Amazing return from Alex Zhang Hungtai's Dirty Beaches; a sprawling double header opus of labyrinthine darkwave pop, knackered electronics and chamber experiments. We're usually impressed by his work but this one is really something else, feeding forward the traces of dilapidated rockabilly, blues and garage that informed his brilliant 'Badlands' into a deeply captivating new sound more akin to Suicide, Andy Stott or Loren Connors. Crafted over the course of winter 2012 while living between Montreal and Berlin, it's leaden with heartbreaking gravity and existential self-reflect… Read more
*Compiling the series of EP's on Sullen Tone into a continuous mix* "Old Apparatus started life on Mala’s Deep Medi record label 2 or so years ago, releasing two highly praised singles. In 2012, Old Apparatus launched a bid for independence with their own ‘Sullen Tone’ imprint to release their own projects and others. The first of these releases on the label were EPs that spanned the second half of the year, opening with the Derren EP before releasing a series of EPs from three separate members of the group. Compendium draws together the highlights of those EPs into a sequenced mix that draws … Read more
Ostgut Ton present their 2nd suite of music scored for ballet - featuring exclusive works commissioned from Henrik Schwarz, Dettmann | Wiedemann (Âme), and DIN aka Marcel Fengler and Phillip Sollmann (Efdemin). In comparison with the label's first Staatsballet excursion - 2007's 'Shut Up And Dance! - this is a more expansive and ambitious affair: each production unit contributes a whole movement in collaboration with a different choreographer. Henrik Schwarz yields a six-song cycle sweeping flamenco-style guitars, pizzicato strings and keys in elegant, effervescent rhythms underlined by plush bass and gi… Read more
"The Pastels return after 16 years, their first album proper since 1997s ‘Illuminations’; their collaborative works, ‘The Last Great Wilderness’ soundtrack / theatre commissions and the ‘Two Sunsets’ album with Tenniscoats keeping the band busy since then. ‘Slow Summits’ gathers on all these works but moves off in newer and older ways too, with its flowing montage of autumn instrumentals, pop songs, slowmotion build ups and suddenly optimistic melody lines. Recorded in Glasgow by John McEntire and Bal Cooke, 'Slow Summits’ features the core Pastels line-up of Stephen McRobbie, Katrina Mitchell… Read more
VARIOUS / SOUL JAZZ
Country Soul Sisters 2: Women in Country Music 1956-79
Soul Jazz Records
CD // £13.99
Cat. Number: SJRCD267
*Includes 36-page booklet of liner notes and archival photos* "Country Soul Sisters is a second guide to the great female country singers who helped define a musical genre as artists such as Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette attained staggering commercial success in the previously male-dominated musical world of country music. As well as extensive sleeve-notes the accompanying large outsize booklet also includes stunning photography from the Getty picture archive. The album features a stunning line-up of classic female country artists … Read more
VARIOUS / SUB ROSA
An Anthology Of Noise & Electronic Music Vol 7
Sub Rosa
3CD // £13.99
SOUNDTRACKS / LIBRARY / EARLY ELECTRONIC
Cat. Number: SR300
Sub Rosa's essential compilation series culminates with this cherry-picked, 38-track triple disc gatefold and 84-page booklet of critical and biographic notes. For many sonic explorers this series has provided an invaluable gateway to the outer limits of recorded electronic music, delving deep into the wormholes of musique concrète, electro-acoustic, modern composition and computer music beyond common knowledge to document a worldwide rhizome of experimentation, research and mutation following the development from national radio facilities to home studios a… Read more
The most notable thing about this new album from Jon Hopkins is how dancefloor-friendly it strives to be, the fluffly ambient electronica we’ve come to expect from the sometime Eno collaborator bolstered for the first time by firmly foregrounded, repetitive drum patterns. They certainly give Hopkins’ dewy compositions some welcome momentum and forward-propulsion: ‘Disappear’’s Penguin Cafe-style pastoralism is powered by a genteel, Burial-aping 2-step sequence; the airy prog-trance of ‘Breathe This Air’ and ‘Open Eye Signal’ suggest Hopkins has been OD’ing on early Border Community 12”s. His custo… Read more
*Initial copies come with a free 10-track Nowton CD sampler* Mellow house and ornate, shimmering techno from Gold Panda on his sophomore LP. Fans of Caribou and Four Tet will find much to love in the generously melodic, intricately constructed 4/4 grooves the London-based producer puts on display, embroidered with samples and imbued with an organic, everything-is-alright essence that seems to make sense with summer (supposedly) on the way. We run the gamut from the supple minimal of 'Brazil' and more jaggedly programmed house swing of 'An English House' through to the chiming, circadi… Read more
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Planet Mu bossman Mike P delivers a hypercoloured splash of recalibrated techno, hip hop and electronica on his first album in over six years. 'Chewed Corners' is the sound of an inarguably talented producer reconnecting with his artform, re-energised by both classic recordings from Japan, Orbital and AFX, and the thrill of fresh, accelerated culture from Kuedo to the Chicago Footwork scene his label has provided staunch support for in recent years. However, most of all, 'Chewed Corners' illuminates Mike's instinctive and advanced knack for emotive melody and harmonic arrangements with neon poten… Read more
Poland's intrepid Bocian label helms this shocking collaboration between combustible Norwegian vocalist Maja S.K. Ratkje and legendary DNA drummer, Ikue Mori. Despite working together in a number of live constellations over the years, until now the two boundary-pushing artistes haven't performed as a duo. The eight tracks of 'Scrumptious Sabotage' are Maja's augmented documents of their reactive improvisations recorded in Belfast and Ulverston at end of March 2012; an instinctive entanglement of free, avant-minded expression aware of the history of contemporary music and … Read more
*Now available again*
*Seminal 1998 showcase from Rhythm & Sound feat Tikiman, aka Paul St Hilaire, finally available again!* Amazing just how good the material on this compilation still sounds, featuring the first five Burial Mix 10"s plus a 'Version' for each and including the mighty "Why?", "Ruff Way", "Never Tell You", "Spend Some TIme" and "What A Mistry" - all featuring the vocals of Paul St Hilaire, better known as Tikiman. So damn good...
*Now available again* Oh my, where to begin? It's unlikely that any of you will need any sort of introduction to this legendary lost album, or need telling about just how much money copies have been changing hands for on ebay, blah di blah di blah.. The short of it is, however, that this has long been our favourite Boards album, darker and stranger in tone to any of its counterparts and ludicrously evocative..breathtakingly so. Just listen to the lullaby space beats of 'Oirectine' or the detuned nostalgic childhood giggle of 'Twoism', or any of the blinding 8 tracks on offer, for that matter, an… Read more
*Now available again*
Back in stock! Basic Channel heads Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald keep the burial mix series going with its most ambitious release to date - a collection of seven 7" singles featuring vocal contributions from Basic Channel collaborators old and new. "See Mi Yah" is a classic collection of one rhythm tracks, typical format and production approach in Reggae, featuring ten vocal versions and one instrumental of the See Mi Yah rhythm (an additional 3 are only available on the 7" collection), strictly roots! After Paul St. Hilaire (formerly known as Tikiman) had lent his voice to quite a few Rh… Read more
Well this is just a bit special....we've managed to get our hands on a small amount of these ultra-limited edition tour cd's from the incredible Keith Fullerton Whitman - a single track EP (over 20 mins long) that comes in a run of 200 copies only. Taking cues from Whitman's unmatched Playthroughs album with deep harmonic drones and bubbling bass pulses, this EP adds layers of decomposing digital interference for a masterclass in effervecent, warm ambience. This is the sort of track that made Whitman so well known in the first place, and showcases his incredible talent fo… Read more
*Now available again*
Secret Name' was Low's full-length debut on Kranky, recorded by the Godlike Steve Albini, it slipped out after the glorious 'Songs for a Dead Pilot EP' and continues many of the themes they would later make their trademark. They tell me Low invented slowcore... well I can handle that, certainly on this 1999 album they were slower than any other band I can remember at the time, the thing is that they make it so damn inviting. I don't think there's another band who can make such obscenely depressing songs sound so beautiful, so damaged and so addictive. There's a bit of a fad at the moment fo… Read more
THE DURUTTI COLUMN
Treatise On The Steppenwolf Soundtrack
LTM Recordings
CD // £9.99
SOUNDTRACKS / LIBRARY / EARLY ELECTRONIC
Cat. Number: FBN63CD
"Factory Benelux presents the very first soundtrack album by The Durutti Column, the legendary ensemble fronted by virtuoso guitarist and composer Vini Reilly. Treatise on the Steppenwolf is a soundtrack to the performance piece of the same name by experimental theatre group 12 Stars, written and directed by Gerard McInulty, first staged in Glasgow in May 2003. Freely adapted from the celebrated counter-culture novel by Hermann Hesse, the performance is a portrait a divided character in an ongoing state of conflict. The soundtrack album combines the studio reco… Read more
*2013 Reissue* Described by Brian Eno as "a brilliant contribution to the archaeology of electronic music", Twenty Systems is a truly impressive catalogue of innovations in synthesizer technology, chronologically ordered between 1968 and 1987. Each of the twenty pieces on the disc showcase the particular sonorities of a synthesizer, beginning with the Moog Modular and concluding with the Kawai K5M. This really is nerd heaven. As far as composition is concerned, Benge (aka Ben Edwards) has tried to leave his own personal voice out of the equation, permitting as much room for the machines to funct… Read more
Ritornell is the duo of Richard Eigner and Roman Gerold, two Austrian composers from specialising in different yet wholly complimentary disciplines. Gerold is a trained jazz pianist whereas Eigner has established himself as a sound artist, having also contributed some drums to Patrick Wolf's last album, Magic Position. Golden Solitude - the duo's debut album - arrives with a following that includes avant-techno maven Cristian Vogel and underground Canadian director Bruce LaBruce, who used a track from the album on his latest film Otto, or, Up With Dead People. The music that makes up Golde… Read more
