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*THE ADVISORY CIRCLE'S HAUNTOLOGICAL CLASSIC - NOW EXPANDED WITH BONUS TRACKS AND RE-WORKINGS* In addition to the seven tracks from the original 3"CD we get nearly a whole side's worth of exclusive compositions including remixes from Belbury Poly (aka label head Jim Jupp) and Seeland (aka ex-Broadcast and Plone band members) housed in a proper full colour sleeve and printed inner. The Advisory Circle is marked in the register as Jon Brooks. His Ghost Box sound falls somewhere between the frothy fractals of The Focus Group and Belbury Poly's synth-lush imagineering, executed with the same… Read more

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For any electronic music enthusiast, this has to be one of the year's most feverishly anticipated new releases. Reconvening for the first time on record since 2002's The Return Of Fenn O'Berg, Christian Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke and Peter Rehberg return as one of the avant-garde's foremost supergroups; a Travelling Wilburys of extreme computer music, if you will. Though perhaps you won't. Forgive the giddiness, readers, but a new Fenn O'Berg album is enough to discombobulate the best of us. In Stereo has the distinction of being the trio's first entirely studio-bound enterprise (the group… Read more

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This time last year James Blake hadn't even released a record yet. Right about now, he's considered one of the most talented and imaginative members of dubstep's second wave. Blake, along with other figures like Untold (also broken by Hessle Audio) and Mount Kimbie, have spun the dubstep style out with new electronic colours and an electro-acoustic attention to detail that simply wasn't there. The radiophonic dub-soul of 'The Bells Sketch' is an extraordinary meeting of styles, finding a tender pressure point between crackly, Oramic melodic naivety and dynamically enhanced dubstep weight … Read more

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Blunted Robots pair off Brackles & Shortstuff with Bok Bok for the 3rd drop on the label. Bok Bok's stellar A-side is the one to draw for, stirring discordant synthline descent/ascenscions with a fruit cocktail assortment of tropical drums and supple sub pressure to keep MC Bubbz sounding lively. On the flip, two of the Blunted Robots heads - Brackles & Shortstuff - reunite following their 'Broken Harp' trek for Pollen, serving clipped breaks arranged with a swirling Funky sensibility and daubs of juicy neon synths for maximum freshness. It's probably most true to say that on all of the B… Read more

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Bonobo does his jazzed-out thing with Andreya Triana backed with remixes from Floating Points, Appleblim & Komanazmuk and Warrior 1. 'Eyesdown' is a melancholy nod towards the swing garage sound with live drums swung into a swirling atmosphere of Ra-esque synths and keys, and it's honestly the best thing we've ever heard from him. It's only appropriate then, that they rope in the man whose sound they are taking a large cue from. Floating Points does his stealth-euphoria treatment on 'Eyesdown', adding gorgeous Vangelis style synths and muting the rhythm to a lithe shuffle. His arrangement… Read more

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Improbable as it may seem, 'Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated)' is Sylvain Chauveau's first album of new material in five years, and if you've ever found yourself marvelling at the music of David Sylvian, or indeed the solo work of Martin Gore - this album will blow your mind, referencing both artists combined with a stripped Piano/Electronic arrangement reminiscent of Alva Noto's work with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Since 2005's 'Down To The Bone' was released we do seem to have been drip-fed a steady supply of Sylvain's work thanks to Type's reissue policy, culminating last year with the reappe… Read more

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YESSSS! That's what we're talking about mate!!! Rush Hour have done the world a huge favour, reissuing Virgo's seminal self-titled album as a double vinyl, CD and digital set newly mastered and sounding better than ever. 'Virgo' is a revered artefect of Afrofuturism that doesn't sound quite like anything that came before or after it. The duo comprised of Merwyn Sanders and Eric Lewis, also known as Ace & The Sandman or M.E, and not to be confused with the other Virgo of Vince Lawrence and co. For any original house heads this reissue is a dream come true, providing another chance to re-en… Read more

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Preceding his self titled debut album, Marcel Dettmann offers four tracks to Norman Nodge and Wincent Kunth for killer remix treatments. Nodge tackles 'Unrest' and 'Shift' with typical reserve and tact, giving a cold party groove on 'Shift' with ghostly crowd sounds fading into dusty dry surface textures while stoic kickdrums pound away and shredded hi-hats firmly insist that you don't stray from the groove. His mix of 'Unrest' is a far meaner beast, revolving around industrial-strength metallic square bassline and flying 909 hi-hats to programme your muscles for the rigours of relentless… Read more

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Review to follow shortly…

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Second single to be lifted from Pantha Du Prince's highly acclaimed 'Black Noise' album, featuring remixes from Efdemin, Four Tet, Lawrence and Carsten Jost plus bonus tracks. Famously, 'Stick To My Side' features an invaluable contribution from Noah Lennox aka Panda Bear who lends his hypnotic Beach Boy charms to a lush pulse of supremely hi-end tech-house music. Efdemin folds the track inwards, concentrating on spherical bell tones and supple deep house rhythms, reserving Noah's distinct chants until the ripest moment. Four Tet meanwhile finds himself revolving in a a phasing channel of… Read more

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Review to follow shortly…

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A reintroduction to one of America's finest ever alternative rock bands, Quarantine The Past coincides with Pavement's long-overdue reunion. Although (somewhat disappointingly) there are no exclusives on this 23-track collection, as Domino so rightly state: "it definitely goes deeper than the "hits"." For such a beloved band, a single disc Best Of was always going to present a tricky editing job, and sure there are omissions - no 'Zurich Is Stained', no 'Carrot Rope', for instance. In fact, the band's last LP, Terror Twilight is sorely under-represented given that it's the one Pavement… Read more

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All City's LA Series calls at Take aka Sweatson Klank and matthewdavid for their latest split installment. Take/Sweatson has been creating beats for the best part of the last 10 years, but really came to our attentions with his remixes of Architeq's 'Sleeping Bear Lament' and the Fly Lo joint 'Parisian Goldfish'. Over three tracks he makes his presence felt with a blend of slouchy psyche-hop beats and cosmic leaning synth arcs that wouldn't be out of place on a Beat Dimensions comp. However, our ear has been snagged by the four kaleidoscopic productions on the matthewdavid side, unpredict… Read more

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Another Root Strata edition that's destined to vanish almost immediately, this imperious analogue synth album from Portland's Golden Retriever has been released in a run of just 100 copies, so do act fast to secure yourself one. This duo consists of synthesizer wrangler Matt Carlson and bass clarinetist Jonathan Sielaff, whose intelligent and subtly melodious drones are bound to win favourable comparisons to like-minded contemporaries Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never. Over these five pieces the meeting point between clarinet and synthesizer is incredibly fluid, and often the timbral f… Read more

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All City deliver a steaming hot plate displaying the vocal excellence of Muhsinah atop beats from 00Genesis and the mighty Flying Lotus. If you do the whole beats thing you're no doubt familiar with the warm soul breeze of her vocal cords. They've graced tunes for everyone from Mike Slott to Common and many more still. With 'Always (Smile)' she sends out a message of positivity set to reconfigured bossa grooves in stumbling nu-skool style before really killing it on 'Lose My Fuse'. Fly lo beautifully highlights her vocals with a bluesy astrosoul beat which eventually dissipates only to co… Read more

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Review to follow shortly…

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The second of three Pacou collections released this week, 'Agent Cooper Legacies' collects twelve tracks originally released under his Agent Cooper alias for labels like Minifunk and the Sender offshoot, unGleich. The five 'Minifunk' tracks originally came out in 2000, covering variations on a crafty shakers techno sound with classic samples and a proper Rob Hood-style sense of the funk. His LL tracks from 1999 roll with a more deadly charge, comparable to the Birmingham sound of Surgeon/Regis/Female through to proper Berlin techniques while the two track for unGleich cover energetic polyrhythms and Millsian bangers.

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Berlin's Pacou gathers his rugged acid experiments for Djax-Up-Beats on one album for Cache. 'Acid Tracks' collects 16 tracky grooves of purest 303, 909 and 808 abuse fashioned with Tresor's basement in mind. The Binary Code' set features an assortment of distorted pounders, while the 'Radar' series covers nautical acid experimentation, 'Gravity' 1-4 jacks on a dryly insistent Chicago style and 'Replicant' fluctuates between distorted and wonky bouncing acid. Pacou more than proves his worth as a minimalist aesthete in the style of Robert Hood but with the kicking weight of Robert Armani, hewing heavyweight DJ groove tools from the barest of ingredients.

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*Killer soundtrack from the super-rare 1974 Ozploitation Biker-Psych Cult Classic!* The Cock Diesel chapter of the Finders Keepers gang presents a lovingly compiled and executed reissue of the hugely sought-after soundtrack to Sandy Harbutt's Ozploitation Biker flick 'Stone' by Billy Green. This is some real top-shelf material, a (monu)mental prog-rocking psyche-funked and avant-pop megalith originally imagined in synchronicity with director Harbutt's Aussie cult take on the B-movie sub-sect of Biker movies inspired by the likes of Marlon Brando's 'The Wild One' and 'The Cycle Savages'. G… Read more

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House connoisseurs rejoice! After it's initial release and subsequent waves of rapturous response, House Of House's 'Rushing To Paradise' has been repressed, backed with a muscular remix from the jock who reputedly first broke it, DJ Harvey. Initial copies appeared on the über-trendy Whatever We Want records back in early '09, and disappeared with days of release, dispersed around the globe to infiltrate the collective nighttime consciousness. 'Rushing To Paradise' is a perfectly poised 13-minutes of housing ecstacies built from slow-burning piano chords and a terrific subbass driven kick… Read more

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For Fabriclive 50, the London superclub calls up the vanguard of modern D&B in D-Bridge and Instra:mental to provide over an hours worth of cutting edge steppers science. As to be expected after listening to their stupendous Autonomic podcasts, the selection and execution of the mix is impeccable, including more exclusives than you can shake a stylus at, while traversing a wide range of tempos, from hip hop to dubstep and D&B all finished with a gleaming electronic edge. Their aforementioned podcasts have been largely responsible for dragging D&B out of a seriously knuckle-headed rut by c… Read more

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Overproof techno tracks from Aberrant aka Decimal for the Rekids clan. The heaving hulk of 'Kirkbride's Dungeon' starts the dance in scary style, coming off like the bastard cousin of Matthew Dear's Audion project who's just been let out on day release and decided to spend it gobbling geebers in an unnamed all day techno party. This is strong, affecting gear that should only be tried by those who know what they're getting into. 'Heartbeams' follows into the later hours, when the crowd is fully attuned for arpeggiated synth strobes and slowly surging bass prowls the periphery taking out th… Read more

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The handiwork of solo German musician Ellen Evers, The Puddle Parade's Origami is a homespun collection off lo-fi folk and minimal pop songs. In terms of the quickly recorded, very rough-cut presentation Origami brings to mind the music of artists like Diane Cluck and her Morc labelmate Annelies Monsere. These intimately spun recordings come housed in swathes of tape hiss and ramshackle arrangements built upon children's toy instruments, zithers, music boxes and melodicas (in addition to the usual array of guitars and piano). The outcome of all this is a wonderfully absorbing slowcore ramble through Evers' psyche, full of charm and plaintive, impromptu melodies.

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Brownswood head-honcho Gilles Peterson curates the latest in his annual 'Brownswood Bubblers' series, featuring tracks from Dâm-Funk, Shafiq Husayn and more. The series is intended to "provide a platform for unsung heroes and emerging talent from the Worldwide underground" and without the obvious characters named above, many of these artists won't be hugely recongised outside of Gilles' radio show listeners. We can certainly thank him then for pulling up the delicate electronic soul of Ragen Fykes' 'Love Life', the slow and hazy jazz-house of Ron Basejam's 'Into My Life' and the shy, fractured pop of Samuel & The Dragon's 'Rising Up'...

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Masquerading as The National Jazz Trio of Scotland, Bill Wells contributes to this latest installment of Loaf's Explorer's series with the delightful 'Frozen Vaults', a piece of music that brings together glistening glockenspiel melodies, muffled, jazzy guitar chords and beautifully languid strings. Backing up this wonderful effort from the Scottish veteran is a lengthy avant-pop workout from Canadian electronic experimentalists Oen Sujet, who are at their quirksome best on 'Circled.Centred'.

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Drekka is the moniker for Michael Anderson's solo work, which falls somewhere between experimental, avant-garde ambience and dark, doomy folk. This rather enormous volume harbours over two hours of Anderson's output from his almost decade-and-a-half under the Drekka name. To give you an idea of the kind of company Anderson keeps, his Bluesanct imprint has been responsible for releases by Black Forest/Black Sea, Boduff Songs, Cindytalk, Low and Pantaleimon, although Drekka's musical persona represents a rather more difficult prospect than just about anything from his peers. Punishing lo… Read more

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More out-there song sculptures from Oakland resident Eva Saelens, this time with a little added clarity and decipherability: tracks like 'Shine On' really underline the strong compositional instincts lurking beneath the cassette recorder fizz. 'Always Have You' opens the set in stripped down, phantasmagorical, lo-fi lullaby fashion, but the album soon accumulates grit with moments like 'Ruff Ridin' and the distorted, spiralling keys on 'Adventure Of Light', beckoning you down all manner of confusing pysch-fuzz avenues. After the economical, perfectly judged calm of the ghostly, Grouper-li… Read more

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More good new stuff from Not Not Fun, this time not a split, but a solo LP from Inca Ore, who opens this strange, foggy album with a Merle Haggard cover - at least the lyrics are by Merle Haggard. As with so much of this Portlander's music, 'Silver Wings' sounds like a ghostly, ethereal presence - well, maybe more of an absence than a presence, only taking up echoes rather than decipherable, tangible sounds. Amongst the haze you can make out muffled melodies and cloaked utterances, but as with the nebulous sound masses of Pocahaunted and Grouper, the Inca Ore sound is evasive and all-but … Read more

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Awake, ye black metal fiends, your god has returned. Following some 16 years of incarceration for the murder of Mayhem bandmate Euronymous and the burning of three churches in Bergen, Varg Vikernes resurrects himself as a solo force, playing all instruments and performing all vocals on the his "comeback" album 'Belus'. The set clocks in at 50 minutes, including seven metal tracks and an ambient intro, all commonly dedicated to Belus, the White God in North European pagan mythology. Racist connotations aside, the album is intended to be a progression or evolution from the original Black Me… Read more

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The Brown Acid prove they've got great taste, when it comes to remixes at least, with a heavy Ikonika version of 'Bastard Kids'. This should be noted as Ikonika's first foray into the Funky tempo, laying down offset 130bpm kick/snare syncopations mirroring Roska's tougher tracks before deploying a brilliant techno synth arc that cruises us through to the end. She seems to have put the 8-Bit sound behind her and makes a bold step forward showing much potential. Ace.