Juno Recommends Experimental October 2020

Review: Ole Mic Odd aka Michael Padgett is a hardware operator and DJ from Los Angeles and runs the wonderfully named label The New U.S. Government. Here he sweeps to power with four tracks across four sides of vinyl for the Zement label, two following a slower, punishing pulse that's like P-funk remade in a robot factory, only with tons of added bubbling acid, Drexciya-style filtering and Juan Arkins-like synthetic strings. The other two are way faster, Ice So Bright sounding like someone secretly spiked Kraftwerk's cocoa with something extremely sinister, sending them racing off on their bikes at treble speed. Echo Park has an even more distinct flanging acid flavour and hyper, hooligan electro foundations, again with those Model 500 misty clouds of synthesiser floating overhead. Absolutely cracking stuff.

Review: Vancouver has long been a hotbed for electronic talent, a city with a score that's as sharp as it is deep, noises that feel submerged in the post-rave, post-techno, post-ambient and post-whatever else underground we've now grown accustomed to as the melting pot of modern dance culture. Khotin isn't letting his hometown down here, nor Ghostly International, the label carrying this release.

The downtempo, space-y 'Heavyball' comes with a particularly pleasing sort of crunch to the beat. Its running mate, 'Groove 32', follows up with a low-stepping groove. 'Ivory Tower' briefly resurfaces into jazz-inflected, dusty house-influenced downbeat. 'Outside Light' takes us into complex, melodic ambient places perhaps most definitive of what this record sounds like overall, and certainly in keeping with its predecessor, Beautiful You.

Review: It would be fair to say that the West Yorkshire city of Bradford is not known as a hotbed of drowsy post-rock-meets-trippy-ambient experimentation. Yet it was in the former textiles powerhouse (and sometime home of British bass music pioneers Unique 3) that Gavin Millar and Thomas Ragsdale recorded their latest album as Worriedaboutsatan, 'Europa'. As you'd expect given their track record, it's a wonderfully atmospheric, sonically detailed and ultimately ear-pleasing affair, with the duo offering up an inspired mixture of hypnotic, textured, groove-driven workouts (see the shoegaze techno haziness of 'Who Is A Hunter' and the near-Balearic bliss of 'Cloaking'), poignant and bittersweet electronic soundscapes (the bubbly and melancholic 'Vex' and deliciously layered ambient epics (sublime opener 'Sunk' and slow-motion closer 'Shift').

Review: Given how prolific Detlef Weinrich was earlier in his career, we were rather surprised to learn that Jumping Dead Leafs? is his first solo album as Tolouse Low Tracks for almost six years. In keeping with his work to date, much of the gently mind-altering material on show blurs the boundaries between styles, with Weinrich variously offering up trippy, post hip-hop hypnotism ('Berrytone Souvenir'), sludgy dystopian beat-scapes ('The Incomprehensible Image', the jaunty and unusual title track), slow-burn ambient dub ('Inverted Sea'), exceedingly spaced-out dub-tronica ('Milk in Water'), and pedal-steel laden early morning eccentricity ('Sales Pitch'). While hard to pigeonhole, it's an excellent album, with Weinrich striking a perfect balance between challenging sounds, heady grooves and wavy, ear-pleasing instrumentation.

Review: Nicolas Jaar has been one of electronic music's most consistently hard to predict and innovative artists for a decade. The Chilean-American now offers up a full length on his own Other People label that he says is for inner battles. It is a work of masterful atmosphere that can be at times dense and gloomy, at others ethereal, and was written in isolation away from any form of stimulation-inducing drink and drugs. A constantly shifting sound means listeners are slipped in and out of reality as it plays out, making it tense, sombre and at times furious. This is yet another audacious record from the unrestrained mind of Nicolas Jaar.

Review: Those with extensive knowledge of Nurse With Wound's gargantuan back catalogue will happily tell you that Merzbild Schwet is one of the industrial outfit's greatest albums of all time. It was recorded in 1980, when Stephen Singleton dispatched with his then bandmates to make Nurse With Wound a solo project - as it has been ever since. It remains an alluring and intoxicating affair: a kind of 50-minute sound collage in two parts crafted from a mixture of tape loops, borrowed spoken word snippets, discordant jazz horns, dystopian post-industrial field recordings, outer-space electronics and tons of special effects. If you're interested in experimental music, then you need it in your life.

Review: You wait three years for a new Arca album and then two come along at once. The Barcelona-based, Venezuelan artist has already dropped 'Kick I' and 'Kick II' on his standard XL stomping ground this month, and has now decided to remind us why we fell in love in the first place. &&&&&& is the producer's seminal debut album, and it still sounds fresh today.

Occupying a space somewhere between techno, the proto-footwork and juke popularised by the likes of Addison Groove at the turn of the last decade, IDM and ambient, it's a difficult thing to get your head around, from the strange piano discordance of 'Mother' to 'Feminine''s suggestion of intense 140s and the submerged liquid downtempo of 'Anaesthetic'. A seminal moment in recent dance history.

Review: Kashual Plastik have offered little clues to the concept behind their latest compilation of experimental electronica and hazy ambient soundscapes. What we can tell you is that the limited-edition release comprises a single vinyl album and bonus CD housed in a screen-printed sleeve. More importantly, the music contained within is largely superb. There are nods to creepy horror soundtracks, '90s ambient, the Radiophonic workshop, the Buchla works of Suzanne CIani, mid-70s German kosmiche, sludgy post-industrial beats, discordant noise artists, bleeding edge electronica, sound collage and much, much more, all presented with love in the most pleasingly DIY of ways. It's a trip, and one you'll want to take time and time again.

Review: Recently, Steve Pittis' long-running Dirter Promotions label has offered up a number of vital vinyl reissues of early albums by veteran industrial music experimentalists Nurse With Wound. It would be fair to say that 1980's To the Quiet Men from a Tiny Girl is another. For starters, only 500 copies were pressed first time around, making it one of the band's most hard-to-find releases. It' historically significant, too -it was the final set recorded by all three founding members (NWW quickly became a Stephen Singleton solo project) - but more importantly it's a fascinating, immersive and otherworldly listen, with each of the side-long compositions combining strange noises, odd field recordings, spoken word snippets, electrical interference, weirdo electronics and tipsy, solo free-jazz horns.

Review: All three tracks here have a quality to them that suggests things could easily boot off at any moment, tension that rises and evolves and plays with intensity levels in very pleasing but never obvious ways. 'Psychedelic Frogs' is perhaps the best case in point, sending us spinning out into various cosmic realms that feel several planes above us. It's funk-disco-synth-leftfield business and we spent about an hour trying to come up with a more accurate, definitive description. We couldn't, which is indicative of what this sounds like.

Similarly label-defying is 'Gallium', a tune that seems to have been cut from the same cloth as 1960s spy themes and King of Woolworths productions. Closing out on the rumbling keyboard stabs of staccato builder 'Einstieg', it's not that they don't make them like this anymore, more that they have never really made much like this, period.

Review: When Kassem Mosse first donned the Seltene Erden pseudonym nine years ago, the result was an overlooked EP on Mule Muisiq packed to the rafters with fractured dancefloor minimalism, unsettling experimental electronica and shape-shifting ambient oddities. Scorched Eden, his surprise debut album under the alias, dispatches with any pretence of servicing dancefloors, instead offering up an almost entirely beatless collection of cuts that should satisfy both committed experimentalists and those looking for more meditative ambient fare. Its' blend of melodious excursions, Namlook-style deep space ambience, unnerving modular experiments, processed and layered experimental sounds, deconstructed IDM and weightless soundscapes is not only hugely enticing, but also impressively atmospheric.

Review: The long running Late Night Tales mix series could have almost been invented for times like these, when the nights are drawing in and we're all being encouraged to stay home. What better way to pass an evening than in the company of one of pop and electronic music's most charismatic bands as they take us on a personal trip through their record collection. Next to tracks from the band themselves. there are retro-future lullabies, jangling synth disco cuts and passages of new age ambience that are all tender and inviting.

Review: Amsterdam label Music from Memory started their 12" series in order to present music that "was never available in this format but might just feel more at home there". The debut in the series from obscure San Francisco artist Joel Graham set the bar high, and we are happy to report this latest 12" featuring the work of UK artist Michal Turtle is just as good! A precursor to a wider retrospective planned on MFM, Are You Psychic? features two tracks from the early 80s Turtle improvised in his parents living room using various bits of gear and will delight anyone with a taste for discovering obscure electronic music from days gone by. B side track "Astral Decoy" is a particularly delightful production!

Review: In case you somehow missed it. Leo Generator is the new alias from Calvin Harris. It's a project he has said was inspired by underground artist Paul Woolford's Special Request moniker - a place Woolford cut loose and served up a dizzying array of old school sounds but with a modern twist. On this new one, The Internet's Steve Lacy features and the results are soaring, powerful vocal dance music for festival main stages and mainstream radio play. Mark Broom offers a more soulful and throwback house version, Solardo bring the acid on their remix and MK layers in some of his trademark New York drums and dubby undercurrents.

Review: This time last year, cult Munich label Public Possession showcased their more horizontal side on Chill Pill, a collection of immersive, enveloping downtempo tracks tailor made for sofa-bound after-hours listening. 12 months on they're at it again on Chill Pill II, a welcome sequel that's arguably even stronger than its predecessor. Ther are countless high points amongst the 19 uniformly excellent outings on show, with our picks including the weightless ambient warmth of Vanessa Worm's 'Onion Number 3', the sparkling, sunrise-ready joy of Occupanther's '4D Lemmings', the jaunty dubtronica of Secret Circuit's 'Under Mi Yard', the trippy spaciousness of JD Twitch's 'Jimi', and the sweeping, evolving electronic movement that is Apiento's fittingly titled '5AM Swim'.