Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: American composer and sound engineer Adam Wiltzie, may not yet be a household name in electronic music yet but it's a safe bet you have heard projects that he has been involved in. Adam is one half of the highly regarded ambient and drone project Stars Of The Lid for the past 30 years and also worked with many popular rock and indie bands as an engineer as well as done composing for film and TV. Eleven Fugues For Sodium Pentathol is the name for his first all original material for a full album. Last year in 2023 brought the untimely death of Stars Of The Lid partner Brian Mcbride. However, Adam's relationship with Kranky records is as strong as ever and that's where his first solo album finds a home. The music is inspired by a recurring dream Adam had where the music he composes makes people die. The music blends heavy emotions from ruin to absolute beauty. A powerful album that has extreme depth and cinematic expansiveness. We hope this will be the start to a very productive solo career that will continue his excellent work that was done with Stars Of The Lid.

Review: Brothers in sounds (and lineage) Mark and Clive Ives deal with two of the biggest issues impacting music right now on one incredible record.WOO have a reputation for taking parts of archived sounds and formulating new things from those segments, and in this case the work is born from excerpts of four-track tape recordings made in the late-1980s. They then began reflecting on the "imminent nature of humanoid robots", and starting to create Xylophonics/Robot X. From artificial intelligence to reuse and sample politics and economics, these themes seem to guide the sounds themselves, which feel strangely nostalgic and futuristic, a vision of tomorrow that is inseprtable from the humans that made it - their understanding of the unfolding machine age through weird distorted jazz tech, deconstructed dub and psychedelic electronica. So, remembering all this is a reconfigured version of stuff made almost 35 years ago is truly mind-blowing.