Vibraphone Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Vibraphone Records kicks off its New Year with a mighty first release that pays great tribute to the city of Detroit. Basic Realities is the artist behind the originals and the first is 'B-9', a percussive, loopy tech roller with vocal sounds and dreamy pads drifting in and out of focus. Motor City icon Kevin Sanderson then steps up to remix and does so with more warm and surging basslines and thudding drum funk. 'Viento Lunar' then cuts loose on some inventive melodies and cosmic rays of energy that unfold over tinny beats and 'Endles Clouds' rounds out with some more dusty drums and nice spangled synths that surge through the cosmos.

Review: Don't be confused; Silicon Minds aren't channelling hate into their music, even though a title like 'IHY' would almost certainly suggest as much to netizens well-clued in on their acronyms. Rather, here 'IHY' stands for 'Interstellar Hypnotic Yama-Biko', and given our coincidental encyclopaedic knowledge of Japanese folklore (a Yamabiko is an elusive mountain or canyon deity), we now know everything we need to know about this new EP from one of the many spiritual alias-essences of the house music collective Vibraphone. With a legit original version as well as a stellar remix from Derrick May, which fleshes out that legitness twofold, prepare to join the Yamabeko on a melodic-analogous house journey; through music, its Cheshire smile evinces deep concern for the sublime forests, mountainscapes and other natural formations we've neglected.