**Edition of 500 copies housed in hand-numbered fold-out poster - a killer set from Morphosis, a must for fans of Sun Ra, Dariush Dolat-Shahi, Alice Coltrane** Exploratory Lebanese imprint Annihaya presents a stunning debut album opus by Rabih Beaini (aka Morphosis) under his birth name. As Rabih was born in Lebanon (but now based in Berlin and with strong ties to Venice, Italy) it is fitting he shares 'Albidaya' - meaning "The Beginning" in Arabic - with a label from his home country, who provide acute context for its mixture of electronics, psych rock, folk and jazz with their previou… Read more

Terrific haul this - a sprawling album of impish electronics, song-sketches and soundscapes home-recorded by Ariel Pink back in the late '90s when he was still plain ol' Ariel Rosenberg. Thrash & Burn was originally released in 2006 as a cassette box set by Human Ear Music, and the same label has remastered the audio for this important 2013 reissue. They make much of billing this album as "musique concrete", which is perhaps overstating their formality; these tracks are simply foreshadowings of the fractured pop experimentalism that blossomed on the early Haunted Graffiti albums. Hiss-laden pos… Read more

Mount Kimbie look likely to expand their audience greatly with this, the follow-up to their 2011 debut Crooks & Lovers, and their first for Warp. Unlike its home-spun predecessor, 'Cold Spring Fault Less Youth' was recorded at a proper studio, and as such there's a thicker, creamier production than before, not to mention a much greater emphasis on live instrumentation, particularly drums and percussion. While ordinarily this wouldn't bode well, in reality it gives the album an earthiness and character that certainly the duo's legion descendants (naming no names) lack. The pres… Read more

Another gem by the Tangerine Dream and Kluster founder member gets the Bureau B reissue treatment, now packaged with nine - count 'em! - bonus tracks on this CD issue (eight on the vinyl). 'Contempora' was one of seven LPs privately issued by Schnitzler in '81 and also his fifth solo album proper, part of a remarkably creative fallow patch that also included the incredible 'Conrad & Sohn' LP with his offspring, Gregor. Utilising EMS Synthi A and Korg MS-10 for rhythms and sequencing he supposes 22 primitive yet futuristic and abstract star charts for mental travel, following oblique vector… Read more

Another dose of outernational rhythm science from Burnt Friedman and Can sticksman Jaki Liebezeit. This is the fifth volume of Secret Rhythms and by now the interplay between the duo has grown near-telepathic, the serpentine grooves they generate - from drums, metal percussion and synthesizers - complex yet thrillingly reduced, free of any superfluous phrasing. Guest contributors’ guitar, bass and woodwind add some nice tonal colour to proceedings, but rhythm, always rhythm, is the focal point. Mark Ernestus remixed Friedman & Liebezeit jam a couple of years in the past a… Read more

*2013 Reissue from Domino Records - Quite honestly one of the best albums of any description in recent years, now out on CD* Julia Holter is one of the most singular female artists we've encountered from the current groundswell of American indies. Leaving Records is possibly an unusual home for her latest, but then again, what's "usual" about Sun Araw, Matthewdavid or Dem Hunger? Her high concept fifth release, 'Tragedy' is based on the Ancient Greek play 'Hippolytus', and mixes elements of synth work with droning neo-classical strings, cloud-like ambience and dreamily surreal vocals,… Read more

Conrad Schnitzler's one and only album with his sohn, Gregor, is a truly remarkable blip on the history of electronic music. Created and originally released as a private pressing in 1981, it touches down from the austere space music of Conrad's '70s period, making concession to both the NDW and Industrial waves crashing in from his own country and the rest of the world. This is almost certainly due to the influence of his son, Gregor, who is credited with creating at least half the album and all of the bonus tracks (which aren't on the cheeky Creel Pone bootleg I own!), but you get the se… Read more

Aleksi Perala, aka the talented Finn behind Ovuca, sheds another brilliant load of certified braindance on 'Mental Union 3'. With a knack for naif alien melody, spherical sound design and the punchiest drums this side of AFX, his sound is a perfect distillation of IDM memes done with humour and skill, hence his close relationship with Rephlex over the years. These 17 tracks are a controlled mind-burst of colourful harmony and supple groove, jackin' ideas from house, techno, jungle and classic European electronics into his own strange soundworld. And it's sequenced for a proper, immersive listen, cycling f… Read more

John Roberts made a big impression with his last album for Dial, Glass Eights, and he's done himself proud on this refined, impressionistic follow-up, resisting as he has the deep house soft option in favour of weirder rhythmic arrangements and a well-defined, evidently very personal palette of post-modern chamber instrumentation and field recordings. Unlike, say, Pantha Du Prince, JR mostly favours subtlety and interiority over grandiloquence; there are no explosions of melody, the prettiness of each track is only gradually, almost shyly, disclosed - not least on gleaming highlight 'Mussels', a cu… Read more

Review to follow shortly…

4Hero's Marc Mac indulges his funkiest boogie side as Nu Era. Tooled up with classic analogue arsenal and a laptop, the legendary producer projects 15 futurist funk instrumentals synthesising elements of Detroit techno, classic Reinforced hyper-funk and broken beat in a loose but rude fusion of ideas.

Hard-nosed yet playful experiments with dancefloor rhythm from Japan's Aoki Takamasa, recommended if you like Mark Fell, NHK, etc. Despite its forbidding exterior and opaque, joyless track titles ('Rhythm Variarion 01', 'Rhythm Variation 02', etc), Takamasa's computer constructions are very lush indeed, with luminous, melodically advanced synth patterns and skippy, club-ready rhythms that variously invoke Skam's North-West b-boy roll, Sensate Focus's juddering Chi-house-derivations and, on the awesome 'Rhythm Variation 04', a space somewhere between hip-hop, techno and 2step garage. 'Rhythm Variation… Read more

*Featuring 23 tracks, including 4 new exclusives and vinyl only tracks* In the space of three years and some 25 releases, Eglo Records has established one of the UK's finest future funk-and-soul-based catalogues. 'Vol.1' collects highlights from their tight-knit roster, starring the best bits by bossman, Floating Points alongside straight aces from Funkineven, Arp101, Fatima, GB: The Abstract Eye, Mizz Beats, and Shuanise. You could hardly ask for a better introduction than CD1s heavy-hitters such as Floating Points' still-anthemic 'Vacuum Boogie' or the rugged bounce of Funkineven's 'She's… Read more

August post-punk survivor Gordon Sharp aka Cindytalk returns with A Life Is Everywhere, surely his most volatile, lyrical and consuming work since his creative re-birth on Editions Mego a couple years back; here he gravitates away from the dawn-treading digital ambience of his recent sides and towards a noisier, more expansive destination, whilst also exploring some of the most beautiful, accessible harmonic themes of his entire career. 'On A Pure Plane' is the purest, plainest example of this fusion: it collages elegiac string pads with curdled, corrosive power electronics, staking out … Read more

Raster-Noton/Mego veteran Ivan Pavlov returns to the latter with "a work of profound playfulness", one that explores the interzone between terse electronic minimalism and whimsical electronic pop with aplomb. Putting most modern-day synth records to shame, COH's arpeggiated constructions are three-dimensional, pinsharp and thoroughly progressive - think early Human League or Yellow Magic Orchestra dubbed-out and processed by Mark Fell using technology that hasn't yet been invented. Other references that come to mind are Dopplereffekt's Calabai Yau Space or Squarepusher's wildest Tron-ic imaginings, but … Read more

*10th Anniversary Edition now with a bonus CD featuring a full live performance from 2004*

Warp's quietest operator grows his sound with organic effortlessness on his seventh album in nearly as many years. From humble beginnings as purveyor of washed-out, BoC-style folk-tronics, Steven James Wilkinson has pruned and tended to the Bibio sound with increasing aptitude, arriving at a fully fledged sort of pastoral pop referencing Canterbury classics as much as the elusive Scots, and presenting the sweetest, semi-real analogue to others such as Four Tet or Gold Panda who've also circled around this sound. Taking concrète location recordings from his back garden and weaving them with tendr… Read more

Berlin's brilliant M=minimal label give credence to the largely unsung German "Grandmaster" composer, Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, with a collection of his works spanning 45 years. After studies in the late '50s at Musikhochschule Hamburg, Stiebler had more important lessons at Darmstadt between 1958 and 1961, including studies with Karlheinz Stockhausen which no doubt influenced his first reductionist work 'Extension 1', manifesting a clear departure from the Serialist trends of that era and towards a purer tonal minimalism. Two recent pieces included here, 'Ton in Ton' (2011), a 22 minut… Read more

Dan Lopatin and Joel Ford's Software Recording Co. present a full-length album from Matt Papich, the follow up to his noted 2011 NNA Tapes side Daydream Repeater. Made in the kitchen of his Baltimore home, with assistance from Joe Williams on programming and synths, it builds on the bubblegum psychedelia of its predecessor to arrive at a dense, sample-happy and expressionistic electronic sound that is 2013 to a tee, yet resists easy pigeonholing. It's also largely beat-driven, whether it's plasmic dancehall ('Melter's Delight'), colliding the bamboo ambience of Ryuichi Sakamoto with clucking footwork … Read more

Hot on the heels of his debut drop for the Rob Booth-helmed Houndstooth label, Dylan Richards delivers his full-length album as House of Black Lanterns. Now based in Berlin, he’s ditched the frenetic breakcore shredding of his King Cannibal project and has turned his hand to moody post-dubstep electro and slamming 4/4, prone to flashes of melodrama. The first half of the album is all big-room tech-house business - Disclosure would happily claim ‘Shot You Down’, with its fine diva turn from Leni Ward, for their own - and though sometimes it feels like nothing you didn’t hear some… 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

Dalhous deliver an engrossing debut for Blackest Ever Black. 'An Ambassador For Laing' is the Edinburgh-based duo, Marc Dall and Alex Ander's 2nd LP together - they've previously recorded one as Young Hunting - and continues to exchange their more melodramatic inclinations for richly filmic atmospheres and intricate, rhythm-driven and song-like arrangements hinting at a dreamy jazz noir and IDM-esque feel. Employing a rigorously refined palette of keys, harp, vibraphone, guitar, woodwind, strings and synthesizer, processed in layers of frictional harmony with heavily treated vocals, the… Read more

Review to follow shortly…

**Disquieting textural abstraction, ghostly avant-pop, repressed industrialism and blown-out folk from Alter's uncategorised, unheimlich duo. A perfectly uncomfortable experience housed in gatefold slipcase** "Sane Men Surround is the second album to emerge from Southend-on-Sea's Liberez. Following on from their 2011 debut, The Letter, the 9 tracks here continue the groups penchant for savagely EQ percussion, guitar, violin and electronics into abstraction. Tracks like A Warning and My Madness Offends still bear the industrial, almost ritualistic, atmospherics of its predecessor, whilst Nema … Read more

Featuring Aus remixes of Tujiko Noriko, The Declining Winter, Cokiyu and more.

**Gatefold card slipcase** Crafty, melodic IDM taking in layered ambient composition ('Forum'), alongside complex techno abstraction ('Serialiser'), intricate drumfunk epics ('At sixes' and '…And Sevens'), and pirouetting electro ('Kirly's Dreamband').

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

**Individually numbered edition of 50 hand-stamped CDr in 7" wraparound sleeve and poly jacket with bespoke art print** Ghostly, longform electro-acoustic invocation from Sub Loam, the character also known as Thomas Shrubsole and Jesus On Mars. Via soprano saxophone fed through multi-cassette, twin-reel-to-reel set up, 'Ruderal Memory' manifests 45 minutes of seancé-like atmosphere with patiently unfolding arrangement informed by yoga breathing techniques and conducted from an anti-anthropocentric stance in key with Sub Loam's themes of elemental interplay and chlorophyllic consciousness. Aesth… Read more

"Time Was marks a new stage in the evolution of Zomes. The album marks the first recordings of Zomes as a duo and the first time an album was recorded in a studio and not on a cassette deck. It all began when Asa Osborne was performing at the Perspectives Festival in Sweden, where he met Hanna through a mutual friend in the Skull Defekts. During Osborne’s performance, Hanna, a vocalist, ended up improvising along with the music with stunning results. Realizing the complimentary aspects of their musical personalities and their natural musical affinity, Hanna joined Asa on stage for an improvised performa… Read more

Ireland's proggy electronic pop heroes return two years since their widely-acclaimed debut album brimming with ideas on 'Supermigration'. Concisely flowing between knowing homages to classic French soundtrack music, German krautrock, and the kind of evocative radiophonica purveyed by the Ghost Box crew and Stereolab, it's a flawlessly cinematic and involving listening experience, refreshing vintage ideas with youthful guile and broadly eschewing cheese in favour of a life-affirming honesty rendered to the finest degree thanks to recording sessions in a hi-tech studio in the mountains of Wic… Read more