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Review: Having taken time out to travel the world and experience new things (including psychedelic substances in California), John Hopkins planned to make Singularity, his ninth album, "a sonic ecosystem that starts and ends on the same note". He soon got frustrated by these limitations, so instead just laid down a fluid and hazy album that combines his usual luscious, ambient electronics with a variety of sparse, heavy and off-kilter rhythms. While undeniably laidback in parts, the album also boasts a number of foreboding techno workouts and uses a wider palette of instrumental sounds than we've come to expect (including some fine strings and his own intricate piano playing). The resultant set is rather impressive, all told, and while not quite a "sonic ecosystem", it's certainly an enjoyable journey.

Review: Experimental musician Leyland Kirby has been skirting round the edges of electronic music since the tail end of the '90s, delivering curious concept albums under a dizzying variety of pseudonyms (The Caretaker, The Stranger, Billy Ray Cyrix, Butcher Claws and Bored in Columbia, amongst many others). Here he dons his familiar V/VM alias for a discordant trip into drone territory supposedly inspired by fading memories of the last throes of early '90s outdoor raves. In truth, there's little in the music - a typically hissing, dystopian fusion of murky textures and becalmed electronic tones - to justify the concept, but it matters little. Kirby is a master at creating vaguely spooky, industrial-influenced soundscapes, and The Death of a Rave (A Partial Flashback) only enhances his reputation.