Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: They say that a picture paints a thousand words. Well that is certainly true of this Picture whose music is hugely evocative and emotive deepest being stripped down to its bare essentials. 'Banana' kicks things off with a murky dub sound that sways back and forth with hefty drum rumbles and liquid metal pads. 'Bring' is then a painterly synth-laced ambient piece that suspends you in a murky and misty sky while 'Sea' offers the most direct vibe of the lot. It's flabby but dynamic dub techno that leans into the groove and will have you doing the same.

Review: Belgian label nacht and The Pilotwings (Louis & Guillaume) present a compilation of works created in the STELPLAATS venue in Leuven, early 2022. In November 2021, right before the second Covid lockdown. Guillaume and Louis were invited by the nacht crew in Leuven to play their first dj-set together since the start of the pandemic. At the time, the nacht crew had just received the first physical release on their brand new imprint, and the team was eager to get the record out into the world. For the second release, however, everything was possible. Before the show, somewhere between the obligatory nasal swab and the third drink, the idea of an unusual collaboration sprouted. Leuven Works compiles five tracks that flowed out of the sessions in STELPLAATS and is a testament to the week that Louis and Guillaume had under the STELPLAATS roof. During their stay, the blood brothers got looked after with love by the nacht team, who provided homemade pizzas and a well-stocked fridge full of Duvels, allowing The Pilotwings to truly root into the Leuven soil and enrich the local landscape with their colourful presence.

Review: LILA mainstay Ayaavaaki and ambient veteran Purl speak different languages but used a translator to convey ideas to one another as they made this record. And they very much foment their own unique musical language on Ancient Skies, an album that blends ambient, drone and space music into richly layered soundscapes that are constantly on the move. Each piece is meticulously crafted and suspense you up amongst the clouds, hazing on at the smeared pads and swirling solar winds that prop you up. It's a record that would work as well in the depths of winter as a bright spring day such is the cathartic effect of the sounds. Beautiful, thought-provoking and innovative, this is as good an ambient record as we have heard all year.

Review: Released to acclaim in 1985, The Falcon and the Snowman recounts the extraordinary true story of Christopher Boyce (Timothy Hutton) and Andrew Daulton Lee (Sean Penn), childhood friends who betrayed their country by selling U.S. satellite secrets to the Soviets in the 70s. The film's score, crafted by jazz virtuoso Pat Metheny alongside pianist Lyle Mays, is a masterful blend of tension and melancholy, enriched by orchestral arrangements from the National Philharmonic Orchestra. The standout track, 'This Is Not America,' features lyrics by David Bowie and became one of his notable hits of the decade, reaching No. 14 in the UK. All in all, an exclusive collector's box set.

Review: Never heard of Zoroastrianism? Nothing to do with Zorro, this ancient religion is still practiced by a comparatively small number of people today, and has its roots on the Iranian plateau. Hugely overlooked in the modern world, not least given its incredible influence over may of the tropes we associate with recognisable creeds - heaven, hell, good, evil - here M Geddes Gengras and Psychic Reality pay homage to the history of what might be Western Asia's most mythologised and yet misunderstood nation, while also introducing modern sonic elements and effects.

The result is something that's unarguably original. Ambient work that is vivid and transportive, it's highly rhythmic stuff from start to finish, with tracks like 'The Incremental Spirit' taking that format to the nth degree, while the likes of 'Wilde Pastures' break with a more abstract idea of what these sounds can be.

Review: Estonia's capital, Tallinn, is close enough to Finland to have received FM radio waves, even when the city and state were trapped behind the Iron Curtain, meaning kids of the 1970s and 1980s grew up exposed to Western decadence, and more significantly in this context, pop music, while also being immersed in Communist culture. This might explain why Estonia is such a hotbed for unique talent - it's a place and people very much unto themselves. Misha Panfilov fits into that description nicely. Across Frutaria Electronica she deftly weaves these beautiful post rock melodic tapestries, at once lo-fi and yet subtly complex. Warm, inviting, life affirming and utterly absorbing. Chances are you won't hear much like this for the rest of the week, month, year.... Point made, grab a copy while you can.

Review: Gerd Jansen's faultless Running Back is back with another of its hard-to-define but essential albums, Keep Looking Where The Light Comes From, this time from Panoram. It is a record that blurs the line between chaos and beauty, with fuzzy synths and improvised rhythms offering up some intriguing sound designs and unusual textures. There is a psychedelic feel to many of those, but so too a dream-like quality where barely-there melodies and half-remembered vocals drift in and out of earshot. Both maximal and minimal compositions feature with nods to ASMR pleasures and a mix of synthetic and acoustic sounds.

Review: Like its recent predecessor, List I, this all-instrumental affair is a collage style affair that sees its creator, Bartosz Krucyznski AKA Pejzaz, craft an immersive and atmospheric listening journey out a mixture of beats, electronics, and literally hundreds of samples from 1990s and early 2000s Eastern European CD releases. The Very Polish Cut Outs label describes it as 'an apt soundtrack for winter in Eastern Europe', and it's hard to disagree. Full of warming loops, dreamy pads and chords, gentle melodies and even more gentle hip-hop beats (albeit with sporadic bursts of percussive energy), it delivers a suitably Balearic, saucer-eyed voyage through instrumental trip-hop and dub-flecked downtempo flavours.

Review: Mute Records expand their indie major empire with the announcement of yet another album by Stefan Betke aka. Pole, 'Tempus'. The title of the album refers to the Latin word for time, which was later co-opted into the German language to refer to grammatical tense - thus, Pole's seven-suite album is literally a meditation on linguistic time. In comparison to his earlier albums, Pole's sound is unusually urgent on 'Tempus' - implicitly urging us to reconsider our warped notion of time through effects like dub delay - and incorporates more motifs from jazz than ever before.

Review: French tropical house duo Polo & Pan return with another playful, transportive record, their third album, fusing their love of storytelling with a finely tuned sense of groove. Having cut their teeth as residents at Paris' Le Baron, the duoiPaul Armand-Delille and Alexandre Grynszpanihave built a world where fantasy meets the dancefloor, balancing carefree melodies with precise, spellbinding cadences. Their latest offering moves between daydream and dance, from the delicate charm of 'The Piano and The Violin' to the low-slung pulse of 'Disco Nap' featuring Metronomy. 'Petite Etoile' with Beth Ditto introduces a bold, cinematic energy, while 'A Different Side of Us' featuring PawPaw Rod leans into hazy, after-hours territory. 'Bluetopia' with Kids Return and 'La Nuit' featuring Arthur Teboul close things out with a reflective, late-night glow. It's another confident stride forward from a duo whose music feels both effortless and meticulously crafted.

Review: Two of life's great escape artists, Polo & Pan, or Paul Armand-Delille and Alexandre Grynszpan, first bonded in the chronological hinterland of nightlife's operating hours, at the iconic Parisian nightclub, Le Baron. We weren't there, but in our minds they talked about quantum theories, and maybe came up with the phrase "everything everywhere all at once". But nobody can be sure. Apart from the artists. Since then, they've committed themselves to creating beautiful, weird, tropical house-synth-pop-electronica stuff which they say transcends moments and places, people and cultures. 22:22 is their triumphant return after four years without a full length, and it's every bit as good as fans were hoping for. Dive in, the water is lovely - wherever in the time-space continuum it is.

Review: Peter Power invites listeners deep into his unique world of rich soundscapes and potent grooves, hypnotic vocals and glitchy beats topped with fine melodies on his new album New Dance Energy. The innovative downtempo talent has a truly global musical perspective and finds inspiration in "organic motion and the alchemical forces of nature." He plays many instruments on the record and for this first dancefloor orientated sound in five years he also brings ecstatic dance forms and the spirit of cacao dance ceremonies to his work.

Review: Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard revive the collaboration first aired on the latter's 2016 album Unde The Sun, this time across a full album reportedly four years in the (top secret) making. It's a compelling synthesis of Yorke's atmospheric melancholy and Pritchard's textured production. It expores a range of moods, from the uneasy tension of 'A Fake In A Faker's World' to the hypnotic rhythms of 'Back In The Game', while the eerie, spectral qualities of 'This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice' reveal the pair's ability to intertwine experimental soundscapes with a visceral emotional pull. Standout moments include 'Gangsters,' where Pritchard's intricately layered beats mesh with Yorke's haunting vocal delivery, and 'Wandering Genie,' which closes the journey with a strange sense of release. The music takes unexpected turns, not just as a statement of collaboration, but as a reflection of two artists playing with the unknown, pulling their sonic worlds into unexplored spaces. Each track is a feather in the cap of their combined ingenuity, with Yorke's vocal vulnerability and Pritchard's production wizardry in full synergy.

Review: Begun in earnest during the COVID-19 pandemic, after the former had remixed the latter's new Radiohead material, Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke exchanged much of the for their new record Tall Tales remotely. Forerun by new single 'Back In The Game' then 'This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice', the album takes shape as a surreal mythopoesis, warping back in time to 2020's plague, where the former track's hyperreal music video (dir. by Jonathan Zawada) sees a rooftop figure defenestrating art itself amid grotesque figures bearing the worst of a mutant contortionist slice-of-life. Yorke has said that the album was crucial to him, describing the music-making process as "mental."

Review: Since Radiohead went on hiatus a few years back, Thom Yorke has thrown himself into all sorts of solo and collaborative projects. His latest sees him join forces with Sydney-based British electronic music stalwart Mark Pritchard for an album that expands on their previous collaboration (the superb 'Beautiful People' from Pritchard's 2018 album Under The Sun). It's a breathtakingly brilliant concoction all told, with the pair conjuring ethereal, oddball and immersive songs in which Yorke's distinctive vocals - sometimes delivered as you'd expect, other times layered-up, mutilated or utilised as textures - rise above backing tracks made with unusual synths and drum machines, and variously indebted to ambient, IDM, ghostly electronica, lo-fi beat-scapes and the gripping intensity of horror soundtracks. A modern electronic classic in the making.

Review: Bureau B present the very latest full-length LP from art-synth auteurs Propaganda, aka. Ralf Dorper and Michael Mertens. Emerging almost two decades on from their last release, this record is nonetheless remarkable as it is their first and only self-titled record, suggesting a sense of culmination and timeliness - in Bureau B's words, Propaganda (the LP) explores "fresh sounds and styles, and (reflects) personal and societal changes since their last outing". The excesses and lacks of boom-bust capital exhaustion and planetary-systemic fatigue are heard in full sway here; both themes alloy themselves starkly against the understated EBM and dark synth influence that permeates the record, a sound otherwise distinctly connoted as 80s and retroistic. Through their crystal-clear productions - their techno-Arcadian visions in composition, and passionate lyrical musings on machinic desire by way of collaborators Thunder Bae and Hauschka - Propaganda synthesise a yet new subliminal message, one that charts a line out of the past and into the present.

Review: We're not sure any of us would have predicted that there would be a new Propaganda album in 2024 - after all, it has been 40 years since they made their debut, and almost 20 years since 'principle song writers' Ralf Dorper and Michael Mertens last got together to record an album. Simply titled Propaganda, the album is undoubtedly a triumphant return - a set that recalls the ground-breaking brilliance of their earliest work. Sure, some of the synthesisers and sonics have been updated - it's not quite as cold and icy as their earliest explorations - and there are subtle rhythmic nods to more contemporaneous dance rhythms, but the results are uniformly excellent. For proof, check the throbbing headiness of 'Purveyor of Pleasure', the alt synth-pop bubble of 'Tipping Point', and the atmospheric excellence of 'Love:Craft'.

Review: Belgian singer and producer Bolis Pupul releases his first solo debut album 'Letter to Yu' following his smash success with fellow DEEWEE artist Charlotte Adigery 'Topical Dancer', a satirical, yet hard-hitting, exploration of spirituality, racism and identity that the two experienced in Ghent as children of immigrant families. If you're a fan of the production of songs like 'Mantra', then this project is for you. Still keeping the witty elements from 'Topical Dancer' the LP, a reference to a great emperor of Chinese history, 'Completely Half' opens up with Pupuls hallmark 80s synthpop style, partnered with the typically Belgian cerebral approach to music and allusions to his mixed-race heritage. Pupul's beats feel pensive, yet danceable and the more deep-in-thought cuts like 'Goodnight Mr Yi' benefit from they dynamic contrast with more in-your-face cuts like the blaring 'Kowloon' and its siren-like supersaws.

Review: Ace Records continue their series of compilations from Saint Etienne's Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, tapping into unique niches of British music culture under titles like English Weather and The Tears Of Technology to arrive at this latest joint, Fell From The Sun. This is a specific trip into the downtempo, after hours sounds prevalent in 1990-1991, as the acid house wave broke and Balearic selector ethics seeped into studio practice. The selections are absolutely on point, from The Orb's majestic remix of Primal Scream's 'Higher Than The Sun' to Saint Etienne's own moody roller, 'Speedwell'. It's bouncy and boundlessly optimistic as well as being supremely chill, absolutely of its time but still ringing with an eternal charm that feels ready for a revival. Let this compilation be your guide.