New releases today: Experimental/Electronic

Review: A fresh and exciting new concept record from ambient master Jan Jelinek; the new LP Social Engineering is made of nothing more than the text-to-speech renderings of the content of phishing emails received in the musician’s inbox over an undisclosed period. Over the course of thirteen tracks, Jelinek reworks, timestretches, juggles and expands these robotic narrations into speech-synthetic soundscapes, making for a weird and well-paced foray into a certain greyscale sonic unheimlich. Beginning with a Microsoft impersonator and ending on a ‘polite threat’, Jelinek’s latest record presents an ironic conundrum; indeed, Social Engineering presents the only kind of decision under pressure - whether or not to buy ingenious new experimental ambient music - that we can’t refuse.

Review: Contemporary tastemakers Geilgling return with a set of remixes of material from Leafier Legiv's recent album, Mirror. First up it is German minimal maestro Isolee who flips 'Fade' into some of his signature sounds - smeared synths and abstract designs all weave together over a minimal beat to make for something seductive and late night. Polish loop master Jan Jelinek then flips 'Fade' into a slow motion shuffle with bright, celestial shards of melodic light and downbeat, melancholic vocals over a chugging beat. Last of all is a mix of 'Jing' that is all broken loops, chopped vocal fragments and hallucinogenic synths.

Review: South African Warrick Sony is a ground breaking composer who was behind the Kalahari Surfers project which now gets a vital spotlight courtesy of Emotional Rescue. This compilation shows how effortlessly eclectic his sound was - from jive rhythms to jazz, tabla to political speeches and much more in between. A Hindu pacifist who was once conscripted into the South African Defense Force, he founded this group as a way out getting his ides out there, calling on other musicians as and when he needed them. It was the first radical white anti-apartheid pop in South Africa and as this vital collection shows it explored polyrhythms, slow motorik, dub sound collage and even a goofy cover of Nancy Sinatra.

Review: Eleven miasmic, brooding tape meditations from the legendary Bryn Jones, reissued and packaged by Ukrainian label I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free. Recorded in the immediate wake of the Oslo I accords, the album both bares Jones' stance on the peace pact and eerily predicts its aftermath, with humming, resonant drones, tinny vocal fragments and reversed percussion colliding in aural analogues of political tension, distrust and cyclicality. Overall it is an equally meditative and ominous listen, peppered with many of the hallmarks of mid-nineties Muzlimgauze productions, from swung, steppy, proto-DMZ ride cymbals, to plucked FM synth MIDI earworms, to his ever-present swathes of darkly churning string drones. Essential!

Review: Reissued via French label Rotorelief on its 35th Anniversary year, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella is the debut album of trailblazing noise and avant-garde musician Steven Stapleton. Catapulting Stapleton's macabre alias to success in the thin breath of just three through-composed drone pieces, this sonic statement was unparalleled at the time (1979), with its unusual mix of prepared tinkerings, feedback drones and cog-jams famously causing Sounds magazine to momentarily abandon their five-star rating system to specially award the album five full question marks. Absurdly sadistic, the album is also known for its original publication of the infamous Nurse With Wound List in the liner notes, which listed the entirety of Stapleton's influences going into the album's making - some acts named therein were so obscure that many fans speculate as to whether they were invented. An exemplary work of outsider music - or at least, one that is infamous by proxy to the more baneful works of the outsider music archetype - get ready to hear all things spectral over the more sustained tones: chains rattling, chairs squeaking, shakers shaking, even monologues in French.