Back catalogue: Experimental/Electronic

Review: Three years after making her debut on Sounds of Beaubien West with the deep and dreamy Agua Congas EP, Paula Tape returns with her first vinyl outing since. This time round she's in collaboration with Italo-disco/Italo-house revivalist - and Alzaya Records co-founder - Volantis. 'Octava Dimension' is pleasingly thrusting and druggy affair, with the Chilean's breathy vocals and an ear-catching lead line working in perfect unison with a tough, Italo-disco style bassline and jacking machine drums. Over on the flip, Elias Mazian re-imagines the track as a tactile, early '90s deep house treat, while Tornado Wallace lays down an even deeper, dreamier revision built around a lovely bassline, heady stabs and off-kilter, post-electro beats.

Review: Towa Tei is best known for his membership of the influential house music troupe Deee-Lite, the legacy of which has helped sustain a prolific solo career. Now comes the two fresh bits 'Ear Candy' and 'Muse'. Channelling the aesthetic spirit of Tei's many collaborators and influenecs - that of singer and drummer Yukihiro Takahashi, once a member of the legendary techno-pop band Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the artist Yayoi Kusama - we get something between broken beat, electro-funk, and downtempo dadaist electronica as the result, as we are implored to "bring that funky music", an impulse almost certainly as addictive as the sugary highs elicited from actual candy.

Review: Music For Dreams label head Kenneth Badger was so inspired by the Tangerine Dream soundtrack to the classic Michael Mann film The Thief that he and Tolga Bo0.95yu0.95k from the Turkish band islandman decided to write their own soundtrack to an imaginary movie. They managed to write 10 tracks within 24 hours while imagining a film that told a story about two people stuck on the arctic ice cap where one tries to fool the other. Influences from Vangelis, John Carpenter, and Tangerine Dream all feature in what is a superb and escapist listen.

Review: Tanya Tagaq is an experimental and improvisational artist who trusts inner own instincts, and that has served her well. She does so again on this new album which was produced by Saul Williams and mixed by Gonjasufi. It finds her at her most complex, dark and involving and featuring poetic passages from Split Tooth, her bestselling, award winning mythobiography, all against a backdrop of "industrial, electronic exoskeleton." Both working the album and listening to it makes for a psychic journey to a place of healing.

Review: Cult German electronic outfit Tangerine Dream made an indelible impression with Electronic Meditation, their first big release and first grand studio project. It was rebased in 1970 and is a thrilling fusion of Krautrock, experimental rock, psychedelia and electronic rock that utterly belies the times in which it was made. It is also the only LP to feature the line up of Edgar Froese, Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler and was recorded using just a two-track Revox tape recorder. At times haunting and tense, at others more dreamlike and contemplative, it is a uniquely freeform style of music.

Review: It's amazing to think how close this record was made to its predecessor, Tiblsc's critically acclaimed (and rightly so) debut album, Delusive Tongue Shifts. Which isn't to suggest for a moment that the two are particularly different, more just the first outing was so close to perfection it's hard to imagine anyone having found the time to have other material ready to go almost immediately after the initial batch.

Hypertranslucent picks up where its older sibling left off, and runs with similar themes and sounds. It glides and floats its way through eight tracks of stunning ambience, quiet but impactful, opiate but clearly formed and coherent. The musical equivalent to a lucid dream - producers fully in control of every moment, but with the sense of reality and rules drifting into the ether.

Review: Club scene doyen, dance music veteran, and rave culture hero Johannes Auvinen opts to depart from the dance floor, at least for the time being, and deliver Arles - an ode to the other side of the electronic-acid scene, those sounds that make most sense after the chaos and carnage of a party have subsided and you're safely home on the couch with you and yours and all dearest.
And it works as well as it should, with the experience both of living in that world and making anthems for it clearly evident in the overall production quality and ideas. Arles is a warm blanket, that friendly therapist, an album that understands where you've been because it was there too. Remarkably, despite what that may suggest, this is not ambient or particularly leftfield stuff. Instead, it's rhythmic, pop-infused electronica goodness, for want of a more succinct, less awkward turn of phrase.

Review: RECOMMENDED
With sounds that might remind some of the USS Discovery's spore hub jump drive in Star Trek: Discovery, it should go without saying Tobias' Hall Ov Fame sits in the futurist end of ambient and drone music. But that's not to suggest there isn't also plenty of humanism happening here, too. The lush, perhaps ironically warm tones of 'Abandoned' come with added, inaudible vocals, albeit even these sound like they might be reeling off departure times for the day's starship flights.

Geeking out aside (blame the producer's clear knack for realising the kinds of noises that transport you directly into the cosmos), this is a record of deep layers, texture upon texture seeming to move in tandem, moments of harmony dissipating into simple refrains, before the next movement begins. Stunning.

Review: Nine tracks of 'life-affirming downer music' by Swedish duo Charlott Malmenholt and Joakim Karlsson aka Treasury Of Puppies. Mitt Stora Nu is the Gothenburg-based duo's second album, following last year's titled Lollos Dagbok and their eponymous debut back in 2020. A collection of lo-fi and quirky indie-pop ditties, all said to have been influenced by Edgar Allan Poe as much as Britney Spears. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and pressed in an edition of 1000 copies. Comes with insert.

Review: Troekurovo Recordings is a production team made up of Toki Fuko, Vadim Basov and Evgeny Vorontsov and they have been hidden away deep in some enchanted Russian forests recording music. Now they are putting out the results on this superb double pack. This project started back in 2016 as a live experimental jam and is now an annual tradition made on loads of analogue gear on the banks of a canyon that was formed many years ago by a melting glacier. The locale provides inspiration - from the fresh country air to the meteor showers often visible overhead - for the music making which is strictly "no preparation, no pre-programming - hardware, friends and live improvisation only."

Review: It's been 40 years since Michal Turtle released his seminal, ground-breaking album Music From The Living Room into the world and promptly disappeared back into the aether. An extremely obscure cult classic known only to deep diggers and aficionados of the finest order, it wasn't until Music From Memory reissued some of the tracks from it via retrospective compilations of Turtle's unreleased music almost 30 years later that his name become more widely known and a new generation were able to discover the artist's unique and pioneering style of experimental electronic music production, the majority of it very much ahead of its time, and to this day still timeless. Invisible Inc. contacted Turtle in the summer of 2023 about releasing something else by him, and it was during this exchange of emails that ideas were expressed about releasing not simply a straightforward reissue of Music From The Living Room to mark its 40th anniversary (the album has never been reissued in full), but rather a re-imagined and re-constructed take on the album, bringing contemporary techniques, styles and newly recorded vocal and instrument parts into the mix and breathing new life into these wonderful compositions. Collaborators old and new were brought into the studio and the songs re-created from the ground up. Familiar songs like 'Are You Psychic?' and 'Village Voice' are overhauled and echo remnants of their original counterparts, but simultaneously sound like completely new tracks. The always mesmerising 'Phantoms Of Dreamland' is represented through a live recording at Cafe OTO, featuring original album vocalist Lucianne Lasalle and regular collaborator HOVE on electronics. The remaining tracks, however, will be completely new to the ears of most people, never having been reissued or heard in these new forms ever before.

Review: French label Macadam Mambo has always operated at the fringes of electronic music. Whether doing disco, world music or experimental sounds it has always had its own odd but alluring musical identity. For this one Tutu Ta goes deep the world of dub and electronics across 12 dark yet nuanced cuts on the Lonely Eyes album. It's a world of wonder with warped synths and ghostly vocal fragments, DIY rhythms and smeared pads that bend space and time. Lighter dubs like 'Talk Of Da Town' sit next to menacing shanks such as 'Krunk (Woody Flute mix)' while the percussive swagger of 'Kilburn Market Dub' is one to get you moving.

Review: Twinkle3 are a trio made up of accomplished flautist Clive Bell and electronic experimenters David Ross and Richard Scott. Their latest project welcomes the legendary David Sylvian into the mix alongside Kazuko Hohki, who was in 80s synth pop oddity Frank Chickens amongst other projects. Their collective venture for Cortizona treads predictably unpredictable territory, where minimalism, sound design and free improvisation merge into a meditative, distinctive whole. The woodwind and electronics intertwine in sublime fashion, resulting in a compelling trip for anyone who appreciates delicacy and risk in their leftfield electronica.

Review: Hailing from Brescia, Italy, brothers Michele and Simone Bornati are Twoonky, and in 2023 return to the fabulously varied and always on-point Macadam Mambo imprint for another immersive journey through electronica, alt-synthesised pop, chill out, downtempo and exotic, seductive sounds. Following on from 2019's Dezzo, which landed on the same label and achieved widespread acclaim, it's safe to say this second opus lives up to expectations. At once organic in feeling but high tech in production process, distorted vocals, analogue guitars, strange electronic effects, sax samples and more combine to create mutant rhythms and harmonies, avant-garde tones that pull us in further as things bore into the mind's ear, capturing the unique spirit of the production pair responsible, themselves highly influenced by the noises that have found a home at Spettro, a local club in their hometown known for exploratory bookings.