Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: Jacob Long's third full length LP under Earthen Sea sees the New Yorker weave together a slew of downtempo tracks, pulling from dub-techno and chillhop sensibilities, in a tracklist that feels like you are in the center of a steel sphere, as tracks like the Lo-Fi 'Stolen Time' and 'Rough Air' reverberate around you. Ochre Sky is a real highlight off the records back half, the mellow timbre and interspersed organic percussion (including a sample of a sink splashing) evokes a slow paced walk through a luscious garden. The material quality of Ghost Poems is what makes it so special, with each of the 10 tracks constituting a different biome to an expansive diorama. From the warm sunbeams of 'Fossil Painting', to the underground lakes of 'Felt Absence' each track has something refreshing to offer.

Review: Back in 2011, Liz Harris - better known under her artistic alias Grouper - released a pair of albums under the "AIA" banner. The first, "Dream Loss", has already been reissued; here, they offer up the second, "Alien Observer". It partly explores similar sonic territory, where distant-sounding recordings of Harris' voice, synths and evocative guitars are smothered in reverb, field recordings and noise, but also includes a few sharper, more defined moments. Amongst these, we'd suggest checking the sublime title track, a beautifully becalmed and spaced-out fusion of Harris' vocals and delay-laden guitar arpeggio scales, and closer "Come Softly", an even more beautiful and minimalist piece that's nothing less than stunning.

Review: Noted as a "beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue" (we're looking at you, Spotify) Tim Hecker's No Highs is a righteous paean for what ambient music should be. And that certainly isn't mindful background music for turning you, the listener, into the best and most productive capitalist you can possibly be. Instead, Hecker's latest invites considered and focused listening; an alternative to the mediated, telescreeny musical SSRIs that impose on us today. A world turned upside down, the album presents highlights such as 'Lotus Light', 'Pulse Depression' ad 'Winter Cop', which suggest anarchic themes, while also fastening a sense of jaggedness and tumult, in a style of music that is so incorrectly expected to be neither of those things.

Review: Since joining the label at the turn of the millennium, Scott Morgan AKA Loscil has become one of the admirably experimental imprint's most prolific artists. "Equivalents" is Morgan's ninth album for the label and sees him offer up eight meditations on a hazy, spaced-out theme. It's a slow-burn affair, where processed melodic elements, held-note chords and drone style aural textures slowly move across the sound space. It's a formula that guarantees goodness from start to finish, with the pulsing "Equivalent 3", ghostly "Equivalent 6", Mr Cloudy-esque "Equivalent 2" and the becalmed and poignant "Equivalent 8" standing out.

Review: Lawrence English's album Colours of Air on Kranky finds him hooking up with fellow composer loscil aka Scott Morgan. The pair find a perfect sweet spot between their respective backgrounds as they work up absorbing ambient sounds from a collection of recordings of a century-old pipe organ that lives in the Old Museum in Brisbane, Australia. The source recordings were then processed, transformed, and elevated into these absorbing soundscapes where timbre, spatial fluctuation and swelling drones all sweep you off your feet. It is a truly original and captivating piece of work.

Review: A fresh, atmospheric sound is proferred by South Carolina singer and producer Nancy Blues in the form of her latest vinyl LP Exit Simulation, in which she cuts through the intertwined hazes of childhood memory and personal psychogeography to produce a veritably ultra-ambient dust cloud of sound in 13 tracks. At its core, the album trickles faintly forth from the watershed that is neo-soul - multi-layering her voice; harmonizing; pitting honest, raw rimshots-n'-crackles against contemporary stylistic cornerstones like lo-fi and night-bussy ambient electronica - all to evoke, convincingly, the mood of stasis in which she finds current solace in her current home of Charleston. Evocative of having found a newfound time and place to reflect, Blues conjures up the weekends of her youth, spent mesmerized at the ambient music of the slow-paced devotionals performed by the local Oklahoman church band.

Review: Ana Roxanne is no stranger to gender discourse. 'I'm Every Sparkly Woman', which appeared on her 2015 debut EP, was a re-reading of the iconic Whitney Houston - Chaka Khan cover, and a celebration of modern femininity and empowerment which later became about loving yourself irrespective of gender as Roxane came out as intersex. Now ready with her second full-length album, identity is never far from the table.

Opening with a spectacular spoken word piece told through multi-tracked voices, we're given an introduction of layers, shades and connected musical phrases that's at once abstract but coherent - the complexity of life on record, perhaps? From there we explore everything from Gothic choral to ambient, New Age and dream pop. The result is highly affecting, sublime stuff you sink into slowly and never want to get back out of.

Review: Husband-and-wife team Carl Hultgren and Windy Weber have been successfully fusing elements of ambient, dream pop and shoe gaze since the early 1990s, keeping up a steady release schedule that has so far resulted in no less than 11 studio albums and a string of inspired collaborative sets. Their latest album, "Allegiance & Conviction", is their first for three years and sees them drowsily drift through a selection of opaque, otherworldly tunes rich in densely layered guitars, hazy aural textures, barely audible vocals and dreamy, delay-laden sounds. It's a hugely enticing set all told, with our favourites including the glistening head trip of "Moth To The Flame", the Labradford style post-rock drones of "Alone" and the slow-burn bliss of "Crossing Over".