Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: Robin Guthrie's Atlas is a four-track EP showcasing new instrumentals that gently reintroduce listeners to his distinctive world. Known for shaping genres with his production and signature guitar sounds, Guthrie famously co-founded and produced for Cocteau Twins. With over four decades of musical influence, he's produced, remixed, and collaborated across various projects, from instrumental albums to movie soundtracks and Atlas serves as a tantalising preview of what's to follow later this year, namely more of Guthrie's evocative sounds that will no doubt continue his legacy of pushing boundaries.

Review: Cocteau Twins' musical mastermind Robin Guthrie has produced some terrific solo records over the course of his career, frequently delivering material that joins the dots between ambient, ethereal soundscapes, shoegaze and the more immersive end of the soundtrack spectrum. 'Astoria' is the latest volume in the Scottish multi-instrumentalist and producer's ongoing EP series (its predecessor, 'Mountain', dropped in September). It's another typically gorgeous and enveloping affair in which effects-laden guitar motifs, gaseous ambient chords, gentle rhythms, ghostly aural textures and slowly shifting melodies combine to create instrumental sound worlds of rare beauty (if not sonic clarity - Guthrie's use of reverb and delay is liberal, which adds to its atmospheric nature but adds extra layers of attractively wide-eyed haziness).

Review: The 1986 sonic pentad by Diamanda Galas, Saint Of The Pit, is the second of two records forming the devised, pestilent occult rite - in her terms, the "plague mass" - known as the Masque Of The Red Death. In clairvoyant dialogue with the first part (The Divine Punishment), both records, in symbiosis, are said to possess an innate correctitude, with saintly playback "possible at maximum volume only." When we oblige by Galas' command, we find ourselves thickly immersed in the kind of sonic esoterics that only the most adept of oneiromancers might be able to swallow and integrate into their mantic: waspish whispers, dulotic dirges, heathen hums. Galas' episcope is a dissenting, idolatrous projection in sound and vision, with 'Artemis' and 'Deliver Me' spanning red-robed, sectarian vocal operatics, not to mention their backing, low-noted, open piano chord strikes. The *eschaton* of the record is, of course, is its quintessential fifth star-point: 'Cris D'aveugle (Blind Man's Cry)', on which Galas, the occult visionary, profanes the lyrical votive candle wax with blasphemous talk of nailed eyes and desecrated caskets.

Review: Lee Gamble is an artist who excels in delivering post-modern music with a strong sense of sentiment and history. Just look at his breakthrough Diversions 1994-1996, in which the ambient threads in first wave jungle were blown out into grandiose chasms of sound. On this latest album, he's taking a similar approach to source material, but this time the focus is on pop earworms in which all kinds of emotive, catchy sonics get dissolved and reformed into vast, unpredictable shapes. Vitally, the emotional dimension is maintained no matter how unrecognisable the original samples are, as Gamble continues his fascinating path forwards and backwards through time.

Review: Canadian composer, arranger, songwriter, and electronic music pioneer Mort Garson just keeps on giving, even now, 15 years after his death. Archival releases since have come not-so-thick-and-fast, but occasional and well thought through, with Journey to the Moon & Beyond the latest example of this. Not, as the cover and title might suggest, the score to some forgotten 1970s animated classic, but instead a collection of stuff very few will have heard before, let alone had opportunity to buy, it's really something special. On the track list, then, you'll find the soundtrack to 1974 Blaxploitation movie Black Eye, or at least part of it. Similarly splendid, but in a very different way, are the grand tones of 'Zoos of the World', originally made to accompany a 1970 National Geographic special of the same name. Then there's the music he wrote for the 1969 moon landings, as used by CBS News at the time. History bottled, or rather pressed, get it while it's fresh (and in stock).

Review: Dead Can Dance's Lisa Gerrard and Jules Maxwell have reimagined their much loved 2021 collaboration Burn in an all new live arena. One Night in Porto was recorded whilst on tour in Portugal towards the end of 2022 and found the pair doing a fine job of recreating the Burn album in a live setting. Rather than try to simply serve it up in recognisable form, they instead used its melodic themes and sonic textures as a starting point to head off into new worlds. After four days of rehearsals they took it on the road and as this recording on the third of the four dates shows, it was a great success.

Review: "So so beautiful" is apparently the phrase contemporary classical hero Ryuichi Sakamoto used to describe the work of Keith Kenniff, AKA Goldmund. The latter's latest, The Time It Takes, certainly fits that bill. A stunning, serene and quietly powerful collection of sonic stories that seem to tell tales of hope, heartbreak, love and loss without resorting to words.

Largely centred on Kenniff's deft piano skills, the keys act as focal points on which bigger and more ethereal arrangements hang. Tracks like 'Of No Other' and 'Day In Day Out' take the producer's minimalist spirit to heart, limiting the scale of background sounds to distant echoed refrains, while 'Memory Itself' and several others embrace the principles of drone ambient with arrangements that seem to develop without us ever noticing. A hushed epic, to say the least.

Review: The Tele Music archival reissues series continues with this rather cosmic LP from Michael Gonet, one of the many esteemed library musicians to have graced the label and library's many halls in the early 1970s. Phasing News Volume 1 captures his approach well; slow-burning synthesizers, electric pianos and percussion, coalescing into neat motifs for cosmic alien arrivals, depraved montages, and awestruck final scenes. Those harbouring soft spots for Tangerine Dream's soundtracks are likely be impressed by the likes of the 'Soul Cathedral' and 'Moon To Light' tracks, but a complete jazz-prog curveball is thrown come 'Light In The Rains', after which the album is never the same.

Review: Earnest, atmospheric, romantic-gothic guitar pieces from Alain Goraguer, whose Rare Soundtracks & Lost Tapes hears a collection never heard before on vinyl. Goraguer is best known as a collaborator and ghostwriter of Serge Gainsbourg, as well as the scoring composer for the surrealist sci-fi animation film Fantastic Planet. At around the same time of the making of these two indelible compositions, Goraguer also wrote two similar, but less publicly-oriented scores, both of which appear on this record in a back-to-back fashion. An array of breathy flutes, eerie backing synth counterpoints, and shaky percussions all combine to cloud the glasses on this beautifully bittersweet album-length hypnosis.