recommendations 
Thursday, 28 May 2009
12" // £5.99New peaktime Benga joint - the title track making use of one of those hooky bleep riffs that made "Night" so instantly imprinted on your memory, complete with some nice Casio style noises and a clever Art of Noise style vocal edit. "One Million" on the flip is more heaving and battered, a downcast roller with viscous sub-bass stabs topped and brittle drums with an industrial edge.
CD // £10.99Boy Better Know head Skepta unloads his latest long player for 2009 with a prime set of incisive lyricism and road ready riddims from a quality pack of producers. Through serious hard graft and a near unrivalled talent Skepta has risen to the top of his game, holding hands with Wiley and Dizzee to cross the busy dual carriageway dividing the worlds of underground Grime and the mainstream with some of the finest dance-pop tracks of recent years on 'Sunglasses At Night', 'Rolex Sweep' and 'Too Many Man' all included here. His elevated status allows him to pull in the UK's finest with guest ver… Read more
"Hell And Destruction Are never Filled; So The Eyes Of Men Are Never Satisfied" (Proverbs Ch 27 Vs 20.) is a heavy statement to include on the front cover of your album, but is quite apt for this set of mystical riddims from the usually soulful Cornell Campbell. Largely recorded during the mid-70's in his Gorgon period, this is Campbell on a religious tip under the influence of his Rasta Roots and a time when he called himself the Ruler (or Gorgon in JA parlance) of Dis Ya Dance. Mostly utilising the skills of the legendary Aggrovators and produced by Bunny Lee, 'The Gorgon Dubwise'… Read more
The enigmatic Blank Dogs arrives at In The Red, surely an ideal venue for this Brooklynite's brand of fizzy, beleaguered pop music. Previous Blank Dogs releases (and there have been many over a relatively short period of time) have immersed listeners in a distorted electronic landscape held together by chugging new wave guitars and rasping vocals buried deeply within. Under And Under brings a heightened sense of coherence to Blank Dogs' music, as exemplified by soaring pop gems like 'Night Night' and 'Open Shut'. Where previously it's been hard to tell whether Blank Dogs has been worthy o… Read more
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
MORDANT MUSIC / SHACKLETON
Mordant Music
MP3 Download // £5.99
FLAC Download // £6.99
Cat. Number: MM030
We can barely contain ourselves over this compilation album from the eccentric bunch behind the Mordant and Skull Disco imprints. Over the past few years both labels have kept us highly entertained with their intertwined paths creating some of the weirdest and most brilliant music out there from a cast including Shackleton, Admiral Greyscale, Vindicatrix and artist Zeke Clough. You're all probably very aware of Shackleton's Arabesque bass movements by now, but only the sharpest of heads picked up on his debut 7" 'Stalker' released through Mordant Music in 2004 and … Read more
PETER BRODERICK
ERASED TAPES
MP3 Download // £3.95FLAC Download // £4.95
HOME LISTENING / MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT
Cat. Number: ERATP015
By now, Peter Broderick's credentials need no repeating; his solo albums have quickly become among the most respected in the recent modern classical canon, but his talents stretch far beyond that, venturing into singer-songwriter genres for his Type/Bella Union outing Home, and stretching further beyond that for his contributions to the output of Danish post-rock band Efterklang. This latest set of recordings comes from Broderick's score for a modern dance piece, commissioned by London-based choreographer Adrienne Hart of Neon Productions. The brief demanded a piano… Read more
Hailing from the intensely fertile LA beat scene, Nosaj Thing aka Jason Chung is the latest in a line spanning from Flylo to the MF Gaslamp Killer to spin a new angle on sun drenched hiphop electronics. He shares a fascination for hiphop tempos and electronic production methods with many of his peers, but what sets Nosaj out on his own is the filigree attention to detail paid to his work, combining a level of intricate melodic and harmonic complexity generally associated with UK artists like Aphex, whom Nosaj cites as a major influence. Indeed, you'd be very quickly forgiven for mistaking opene… Read more
Monday, 25 May 2009
ALVA NOTO AND RYUICHI SAKAMOTO
raster-noton
MP3 Download // £6.99
FLAC Download // £8.99
Cat. Number: nameless653656
A most welcome return for one of the most successful creative partnerships in contemporary experimental music, UTP_ reunites Carsten Nicolai with Ryuichi Sakamoto for a special audio-visual performance in conjunction with Ensemble Modern, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the city of Mannheim. The title is derived from the notion of 'utopia', referencing the town's design background - Mannheim was conceptualised as the ideal 17th century city. The music devised by Noto and Sakamoto for their audio-visual tribute deviates considerably from the formulae set out by their pr… Read more
GRISCHA LICHTENBERGER
raster-noton
MP3 Download // £3.50FLAC Download // £4.95
Cat. Number: nameless653657
The inimitable Raster Noton label picks up it's Unun series with five tracks of utterly sick digital spasms and oblique hi-end processing from Grischa Lichtenberger following on from the devastating NHK 12" last year. Via various methods and processes Lichtenberger manipulates field recordings and musique concrete sampled from the world around him such as a sliding tabletop, the noise of a radiator or the humming of a broken device before transforming them into sound-giving instruments. The resultant sound swerves from a cacophany of autistic rhythms and unfathomably complex textur… Read more
New MONOLAKE! This is the first new material released since 2006's 'Polygon Cities' album and quite frankly, it's class. Since '06 recordings have been sidelined in favour of time spent on live shows and devloping the Monodeck II, but these new tracks should assure anyone that it was time well spent. 'Atlas' is a truly epic opener, setting out on a 138bpm flex with techno-skippin' rhythm fluctuations inheriting a lot of swing from T++'s recent material and mind blowing bass dynamics coaxed into being by Robert Henke's next-level programming skills. The inclusion of an almost-organic sounding… Read more
Tense and tracky jams from Dubstep-dude-of-the-minute, Untold. Hessle Audio push the boat out with their latest release, pressing up two of their most experimental and tool-like cuts onto translucent blue vinyl to get the wax fiends hot. 'I Can't Stop This Feeling' is Untold's second drop for the label, improving on his previous 12" with a sharper palette of sounds and a dedicated dancefloor vibe stripping back to pure bass, tension raising strings and clattering drum machine samples. Ther's barely any trace of melody to this track, allowing for streamlined mixing potential with c… Read more
FALTYDL
Human Meadow (Boxcutter / Luke Vibert Mixes)
Planet Mu
MP3 Download // £1.95FLAC Download // £2.95
Cat. Number: ZIQ231
Drew Lustman aka FaltyDL is given remix treatments by Luke Vibert, Boxcutter and Mike Paradinas on the latest Planet Mu rave excursion. Both Boxcutter and Mike P centre their mixes around the brilliant Burial styled vocal motif and melodic strikes of the original, kitting the riddim out with hip-hop influenced dubstep and slow junglism respectively. Luke Vibert's mix is nowhere near as respectful though, reworking his version as some kind of 1989 meets 2009 ragga-raving house winner with liberal samples and pure party vibes aplenty.
"Fred Thomas, for the unacquainted, is one of the most underrated musicians of the last decade, if not all time". Alas, not our words, but those of FACT magazine who were as excited as we were by the prospect of a new project and album from a musician and producer who's been involved with a tonne of different projects and guises over the last decade without really having ever gained the respect and attention he's so clearly deserved. This album is, in our humble opinion, the most well-realised and heart-stopping of all his productions to date, sounding like a cross between Animal Collecti… Read more
The enigmatic Blank Dogs arrives at In The Red, surely an ideal venue for this Brooklynite's brand of fizzy, beleaguered pop music. Previous Blank Dogs releases (and there have been many over a relatively short period of time) have immersed listeners in a distorted electronic landscape held together by chugging new wave guitars and rasping vocals buried deeply within. Under And Under brings a heightened sense of coherence to Blank Dogs' music, as exemplified by soaring pop gems like 'Night Night' and 'Open Shut'. Where previously it's been hard to tell whether Blank Dogs has been wo… Read more
Thursday, 21 May 2009
CD // £8.99We can barely contain ourselves over this compilation album from the eccentric bunch behind the Mordant and Skull Disco imprints. Over the past few years both labels have kept us highly entertained with their intertwined paths creating some of the weirdest and most brilliant music out there from a cast including Shackleton, Admiral Greyscale, Vindicatrix and artist Zeke Clough. You're all probably very aware of Shackleton's Arabesque bass movements by now, but only the sharpest of heads picked up on his debut 7" 'Stalker' released through Mordant Music in 2004 and includ… Read more
"Fred Thomas, for the unacquainted, is one of the most underrated musicians of the last decade, if not all time". Alas, not our words, but those of FACT magazine who were as excited as we were by the prospect of a new project and album from a musician and producer who's been involved with a tonne of different projects and guises over the last decade without really having ever gained the respect and attention he's so clearly deserved. This album is, in our humble opinion, the most well-realised and heart-stopping of all his productions to date, sounding like a cross between Animal Collective / P… Read more
Purist amen manglements from junglist soldier Equinox. All respect is due to Planet Mu for still pushing the tuff and less than fashionable sound of hardcore junglist futurism with cuts like these. On the A-side 'Vivid Dreams' is an intensely filtered DJ tool for the Junglist rinsers with amens stretched and compressed to shattering point, but our pick is 'Make You Flex' on the flip, combining old skool samples and structures with nu-skool production techniques and powerful rhythm processing to crack the dance in half. Smashing.
For D'n'B in 2009 we can't imagine it getting much tighter, heavier or effective than this plate from Instra:mental. Launched from D-Bridge's Exit Recordings imprint, the latest twelve features two versions of 'Thugtronik', one bristling with a concentrated tech-steppers energy coming from twisting drums edits and an almighty muthafu**er of a bassline giving some concession to the less hardy with slight moody melodic arrangements. But flip over for the properly ruff version, allowing ghoulish synthlines to roam free over a rebooted riddim making the bassline even more intense and generally c… Read more
The second release on The Last Record Company (Rune Grammofon's new limited edition vinyl label) comes from Norwegian progressive jazz-sludge merchants Ultralyd, a band made up of those upstanding figures from the Nordic improv scene Kjetil Møster, Anders Hana, Kjetil Brandsdal and Morten J. Olsen. As proven by their 2007 LP Conditions For A Piece Of Music, this is a group of musicians who have a magical rapport between them, and Renditions confirms that all over again. It's a wonderful LP, chiefly made up of tangled sustains and multi-timbral interplay that's halfway between the more extreme r… Read more
*Deluxe Edition - Includes 2 Bonus Tracks, a Shackleton Remix, and a bonus DVD with 10 killer video films!* A project that began life in 2002, Moderat was born when Apparat's Sascha RIng hooked up with Modeselektor's Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary for an EP on Bpitch. So strenuous was the recording and production of this EP the trio felt moved to title it Auf Kosten Der Gesundheit (meaning "At The Cost Of Health") and soon went separate ways after its release. Immediately afterwards Modeselektor went on to release their debut long-player Hello Mom! while Appar… Read more
Iowa City guitarist Evan Miller first released this album as a handmade tour edition, but now Preservation give it the airing it deserves, complete with a new Pete Swanson mastering job. There's a genuine embrace of the spirit of blues guitar on tracks like 'I Will Turn Your Money Green', which owes a debt to a variety of sources, from the Furry Lewis original to contemporary triumphs like Jim O'Rourke's Bad Timing, Six Organs Of Admittance or even Voice Of The Seven Woods (who springs to mind during the electrified wah-wah passages towards the end). Further to that, as Takoma-styled rag… Read more
Tuesday, 19 May 2009
BVDUB
A Chance To Start Over (Intrusion Mix)
Echospace
MP3 Download // £1.95
FLAC Download // £2.95
Cat. Number: EchospaceDetroitD6
BVDub is brought into the Echospace fold with a gorgeous 15 min ambient excursion for the label backed with a dub driven version from the mighty Intrusion. We love it when Brock Van Wey explores sprawling beatless terrain and once again it's a sublime experience following his inhale/exhale string sweeps and powdered chords through 15 mins of reclined beauty. it's left to Intrusion aka Steve Hitchell to add a slow heaving dub house riddim and feed BVDub's cloud-like structures though his famed filters on the 'Under The Starlit Sky Mix' to keep all the dubbass addicts fro… Read more
Monday, 18 May 2009
In addition to re-establishing links with regular co-conspirators like Attila Csihar and Earth's Dylan Carson, this seventh SunnO))) album finds Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson greatly expanding their sound with personnel from beyond their usual circle of doom-dealing metallurgists. Julian Priester (a veteran of Sun Ra, John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock recordings) joins composer Eyving Kang alongside brass, reed and string ensembles and a Viennese female choir in embellishing the usual idiom of low frequency drones and glacial guitar motions, adding a whole other dimension to … Read more
Delsin Records should really require little introduction to techno and house fans. For well over 10 years they've been established as Holland's premier outlet for all things deep and Detroit orientated with a roll call now including Redshape, Newworldaquarium and Shed. This is their second label round up, usefully collecting their best cuts from the last half of this decade. Spread over 2 discs, the selections run knee deep with future classics and hidden gems galore. Redshape's 'Misc Usage' is a notable highlight, culled from his 2006 EP of the same name which is long out o… Read more
ES
Fonal Records
MP3 Download // £4.99FLAC Download // £5.99
HOME LISTENING / MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT
Cat. Number: FR64DD
Four years on from the release of his monumental Sateenkaarisuudelma double-album, Fonal boss Sami Sanpakkila returns with a new collection of songs and soundscapes, covering an incredible range of instruments and compositional approaches. Before delving into lengthier, more involved pieces, 'Ennen Oli Huonommin' opens the set with a flourish of flamboyant analog designs. The piece is assembled from heavily modulated tones that gleam with a dazzling irridescence oveer a four minute period. It's all very bright and major key, far away from the lo-fi forest folk preconceptions that people ten… Read more
Drawing for more premier cuts from the increasingly blurred parameters of hiphop, future funk and electronica, the impeccably curated Producer series from Fat City offers up two wicked nuggets from Dabrye and Mike Slott. This one takes cues from swinging electro soul and post-Dilla slump-funk, with Mike Slott's 'Home' shuffling in on some smartly broken drums somehow connecting the rattling 2-step syncopations with a slow-mo electro-soul swing and a droning haze of electro synthlines. Dabrye's 'Walk' cut on the flip makes the electro influence even more overt with a slow and sticky r… Read more
I'll be the first to admit I wasn't the biggest fan of Axel Willner's debut Field album from a couple of years back. It managed to set the indie scene alight with its clever blend of glitchy minimal techno and thick, reverberating shoegaze-lite melodies, yet for me something never really gelled. 'Yesterday And Today', Willner's sophomore effort, however is a far more refined affair and reaches parts its predecessor just couldn't dream of. I think in part this is due to the new and expanded studio setup the producer has been gifted - not only does he now have a veritable museum of an… Read more
VARIOUS / LO RECORDINGS
Milky Disco II: Let's Go Freak Out
Lo Recordings
MP3 Download // £6.99FLAC Download // £8.99
Cat. Number: LO75
Lo recordings return with a reet Bobby Dazzler of nu-disco heaven on the second installment in the influential 'Milky Disco' compilation series. The first comp was hailed as a landmak for the nu-disco and cosmic crowds who have since gone on to take over dancefloors across the country with sleazy electronics and arpeggiated emotions. The second "quintessentially cosmic compendium" expands like a galactic glitterball into a double disc affair herding the worlds finest nu-disco players and freaks onto one packed floor. The tracklist includes future hits from … Read more
BIOSPHERE
Wireless - Live At The Arnolfini, Bristol
Touch
MP3 Download // £6.99FLAC Download // £8.99
HOME LISTENING / MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT
Cat. Number: TONE38
The very first live album by that giant of ambient music Geir Jenssen, Wireless was recorded in Bristol's Arnolfini during the Touch 25 live event of 2007. Jenssen's set takes the form of a single hour-long continuous stream, indexed into eleven tracks. Wireless incorporates fresh material alongside retakes on a variety of sounds that'll already carry some familiarity with followers of Biosphere studio albums: early on we're treated to some of the exquisite Debussy sampling of Shenzou, and later on excerpts from Dropsonde and the classic Substrata crop up. Alth… Read more
For our money, the best so far in the Urban Ridims series comes from Dark Knight with the much touted 'Reasons' b/w 'Broken Beats'. The A-side is a big track for the lovers of the smoother side of Funky with mellow blue piano and sax vibes over a smart post garage rhythm, but flip it to get the full effect of 'Broken Beats' with rattling drum breaks slinking around sneaky G-funk synthlines and blazing midi horns with a subbass drop giving it a rude bashment flavour that won't fail in the dance. A cheeky winner that all Roska, HHB, Marcus Nasty or Cooly G heads should be peeking. Big!
