New releases last eight weeks: Experimental/Electronic

Review: An'archives introduce the debut from Tete de Chou, the quietly adventurous trio of Mark Anderson (Greymouth, Suishou No Fune), Kurumi Kido, and Arlo Wynks. Emerging organically from informal sessions and shared yakitori nights, their music developed in intimate settings; home shows in tatami rooms, improvised studio jams, long-distance collaborations. Sessions between Japan and New Zealand carried over the album's dialectic of place and movement, described by Anderson as "almost a travel diary." Dulcimer, ichigenkin, glockenspiel, reeds, and homemade electronics interlace like a five-ply plait, causing an unfixed yet deeply affecting effect.

Review: This eight-track release plunges listeners into a world of sci-fi techno, where melodic interludes meet deep, atmospheric edges. Side-1 opens with 'Fukaeri', a track defined by its broken deep beats and ambient drift, evoking a sense of floating through a distant galaxy. 'The Increasing Past' follows with gentle IDM beats, rich colo, and masterful productioniperfect for deep, immersive listening.'Tela' delivers a serene ambient experience, holding the quiet beauty of a rising sun with its delicate textures and evolving warmth. 'Gyeon' shifts into a slow breakbeat with a gentler, deeper approach that feels both introspective and expansive. 'We Are Not Alone' closes the side with cloud-like ambient soundscapes, hazy and airy, as rising vocal arcs add to its otherworldly aura. Lush, cosmic soundscapes and intricate beats create a masterful blend of ambient and techno elements, perfect for those seeking both depth and escapism.

Review: Shopping-as-hallucination was the idea behind Omega Mart, an immersive exhibition created by Meow Wolf in the capital of capitalistic pomp and OTT living, Las Vegas. A comment and scathing critique of a world that has convinced us of autonomy and individual agency but in feels more militant in its demand for consumption than the 1980s and 1990s ever were. Which is saying A LOT. One of the true auteurs of electronic music, Amon Tobin, was drafted for the score. A Living Room is an excerpt from that vast, blissful yet dystopian soundtrack. Calling on influences such as Jean Michel-Jarre, Vangelis and Brian Eno, this is an homage to synthetics in every possible way - its very beautiful and captivating existence reliant on the kind of inhuman instruments that are part and parcel of a society that no longer understands what is and isn't natural.

Review: This sophomore album from Istanbul-born, Berlin-based electronic composer and sound artist Huma Utku explores psychological phenomena through a series of sonic essays. Drawing on her background in Psychology, Utku combines her academic and artistic practices in this ambitious release and includes recordings from her Elektronmusikstudion residency in 2020. The album also features synth intrigue, electroacoustic, experimental techno, industrial and spoken word all brought to life with piano, strings and vocals. Utku creates a dramatic, unsettling soundworld here while exploring themes of grief, consciousness, dream analysis and psychological symbolism. It's a truly intimate exploration of the human condition.

Review: Originally released in 2013 on Periferin, former Mayhem man Varg's debut album, Skaeliptom is a ride and a half. A ride to where is the question. It's dark and mechanical, but at the same time freed of Earthly constraints - the ambient techno equivalent of becoming uncoupled from the mothership during a space walk and calmly residing yourself to enjoying floating away into the eternal darkness. Even if there's a sense nobody comes back. It's not that there's a sinister vibe here, more of an unknown quantity. It's sparse and strangely quiet, patient yet edgy and always moving us onto new, previously unexplored soundscapes. Vast and somehow also very personal, Skaeliptom is a curious experiment in electronics that gives us perspective on just how much there might be out there waiting for us to find.

Review: There are basically two types of anniversary compilations: the humble retrospective, packed with classics and significant musical moments from the past, and collections of all-new music that showcase where an imprint is at right now. Predictably, Planet My founder Mike Paradinas AKA U-Ziq has chosen the latter option to mark the occasion of his legendary experimental label's 30th birthday. There's naturally plenty to get the blood pumping and the synapses snapping across the 25 tracks on show, from the skittish IDM of Jlin ('B12'), mutant future-boogie of Venetian Snares ('Drums') and hard-to-pigeonhole excellence of Falty DL ('Usually I'm Cautious'), to the chopped-and-screwed r&b of Bae Bae ('Living In The Memory'), Nik Colk Void's industrial gunk ('A Tough Design (demo)'), the glassy-eyed D&B/ambient techno of Xylitol ('Nevada') and the sample-rich instrumental hip-hop hedonism of Luke Vibert ('Bullet Drop').

Review: The good folks at Discreet Music celebrate its five-year anniversary with a special compilation featuring new and unreleased tracks from an eclectic lineup of artists. As highlighted in the extensive liner notes, this release covers plenty of ground, all of it part of the essence of Discreet Music but with an eye on evolution into new territories. It's a carefully curated collection with endless highlights - Eftergift's 'Demotiv' captures the sombreness of a dark winter night, Shadow Pattern's 'One Of These' is flickering, candle-lit space with distant synth tension and Livskraft's 'Lat Mig Tro' is a new age ceremonial ritual

Review: The incredible post-coldwave label Light Sounds Dark are *rara aves* of the experimental music underworld. Here they again do what they do best, procuring a (literally) incredible full-length compilation record: these tracks are credited to no one. The titular Salt Line Continuum is an invented metonym; together with the cartographic front cover, it suggests 19th Century geopolitical boundaries, delimitations of national and international territories, potentially alluding to everything from Middle Passage slavery to freemasonry. LSD transmigrate to Eurasia and Africa here, apparently tracing the invention of whiteness alongside masonry; chivalric orders like the Knights Templar are known to have crusaded across the featured locations on the sleeve. Red tracer lines on a paleo-geographical front cover help us cognitively map roots of both of hatred and shadowy dominance, as uncannily cold, schismogenetic sound wafts from a minimal source-set, as we hear the sounds of bells tolling; kalimbas plucking; patinated metal screeching.

Review: For their new album Lust 1, Voice Actor's Noa Kurzweil joins Welsh producer Squu for a woozy, intimate exploration of ambient sensuality. Following the sprawling Sent From My Telephone, this 45-minute work feels more focused but just as dreamlike with Kurzweil's hushed, often unintelligible vocals hovering over Squu's glowing pads and dubby pulses. With additional glitchy textures, soft hits and melancholic drones, the work forms a world that teeters between erotic hypnosis and emotional exhaustion. Highlights like 'You' and 'Nekk' blend vague ambience with jolting detail while pushing the sung-spoke-whispered words to the brink of abstraction. This is an album rich in fleeting emotions, tactile textures and forgotten memories.

Review: London's Loraine James has built her signature sound through a mix of refined composition, gritty experimentation and intricate electronic programming. Under her Ghostly International alias Whatever The Weather, she explores emotional temperature and environment. Her second full-length offers a warmer tone compared to its predecessor by moving from an arctic cover photo to a desert scene. Mastered by Josh Eustis, the album blends hypnotic atmospheres and rhythmic textures with diaristic field recordings. The lead single, '12-C,' weaves melody and texture into a soul-stirring groove and is exemplary of James' imaginative and genre-defying approach.

Review: "One might thus regard the Welsh rarebit as a Machine in which a process is applied to the conditioning and perception of the world of bread and cheese." Suffice to say, John White might not have had the same ideas about what constitutes Machine Music back in 1976 as you do today. This is also the first time we've ever managed to get a reference to Welsh rarebit into the first line of writing about a record, so everyone is learning something today. "The Machines" White refers to are the individual tracks themselves, all recorded between 1967 and 1972 and all comprising different combinations of a thing. Six pairs of "bass melody instruments" made 'Autumn Countdown Machine', different permutations of "the articulations 'ging, gang, gong, gung, ho!'" comprise 'Jews Harp Machine'. And 'Son of Gothic Chord' is crafted from the sequential chord progression of four keyboard players, spanning an octave. Conceptual experimental and wildly imaginative stuff on the borderline of electronica, abstract, mathematical and something otherworldly.

Review: BertBert's boundary-free TOPO imprint returns with a fascinating body of work from one of his nearest and dearest influences; Windu. A collection honed from hundreds of sketches, grooves and soundscapes written over the last eight years, Juxtapose is a beguiling blend of ambient textures, gritty technoid grooves and thunderous showers of breaks. At points bubbling with aggy rave energy ('Deck 16'), at others entirely disarming and likely to knock you horizontal ('Ti Si Isceljenje'), Windu (which stands for wave is not defined) has a refreshing ability to completely negate DJ formula, arrangement and genre trappings. A debut dispatch built up over years before unleashed into the wild on vinyl, this is a truly unique album.