ESP Institute Schallplatten & CDs

Review: You wait ages for a Lord of the Isles album, and two come along at once! 'Night of the Endless Beyond', the Scottish producer's second full-length excursion for ESP Institute, follows hot on the heels of the inspired (if shorter) 'Subtle Thoughts' on Lapsus. While that was almost entirely made up of typically atmospheric ambient sketches, this epic goes further, complimenting his usual beat-free brilliance with forays into dubbed-out, deep space ambient techno ('Endless Beyond'), analogue-rich emotive techno (the star-fall brilliance of 'Strato'), ambient house ('Together' and the wonderfully trippy 'Quadralogue'), crackly IDM ('Truth') and picturesque, soft-focus dancefloor hypnotism ('Wonder').

Review: From a cover image wonderfully displaying the proportional difference between humans and the world we call home, to the expansive pedal steel guitar chords that weep their way through the musical destinations here, Raymond Richards encapsulates the vast openness of the US in sound, offering aural interpretations of the beauty and desolation, hope and devastation this wildly rich but painfully unequal country is home to. Track titles are inspired by real pins on the map, although it's unlikely you'll recognise many - we're talking 'Paradise, California' (a swooning, sun-kissed closing overture), 'Astoria, Oregon' (a lilting, vast but quiet slice of ambient) and 'Roslyn, Washington' (which sounds like psychedelic country) rather than more obvious places like Los Angeles, where Richards stomped about with the likes of DJ Lovefingers and Slowdive affiliates Mojave 3 in the late-1990s.