Review: Bridging the gap between guitar-driven rock and ambient techno - they would later become the first artist to bring guitars to Warp Records - Seefeel skillfully blended electronic loops with post-psychedelic basslines, mermaid-like vocals from Sarah Peacock and intelligent percussion. Their debut album for Too Pure in 1993 was both ahead of its time and timeless, offering a quiet revolution of repetition and downtempo somnolent soundscape, a record that remains beautifully undated. Tracks like 'Imperial'. 'Industrious' and 'Charlotte's Mouth' demonstrate Seefeel's knack for using guitars as electronic complements, layering hypnotic smears of feedback with Peacock's intimate whispers. The eight-minute opener, 'Climatic Phase No. 3', floats with barely-there percussion and a lazy, dreamy melody, while 'Filter Dub' delivers a sublime, drowsy bass line perfect for slipping into sleep. The album's structure leans into drone and quirky ambience, creating an experience more akin to a dream state than a traditional rock record. Quique feels proto-IDM, a precursor to the ambient-motorik noise-pop aesthetic that artists like Tim Hecker and Mouse on Mars would explore. Seefeel's early work remains a blueprint for electronic experimentation, demonstrating that the band's forward-thinking approach helped define a genre that continues to defy easy categorisation. Quique is not just a product of the 90s - it's a sonic vision that still feels fresh and boundary-pushing today.
Review: Wherever You Are is the sonic result, expressed through solo piano, of a bright burst of introspection experienced at home by John Foxx of Ultravox fame. Made up of compositions he created in the quiet hours following a rare performance at Kings Place, London, during the BBC Radio 3 Night Tracks event in October 2023, the majority of Wherever You Are was recorded at home, with Foxx noting that the matutinal hours are the best for minimising self-criticism, and letting creative freedom flow. Morning, on Foxx's watch, is the ideal time to play: and in stark contrast to his oblique solo LP Metamatic, Foxx's latest is a mono-instrumental monument to personal tranquility and contentment. It reiterates the importance of quietude and temperance as crucial start-points for navigating the complex world we face today.
Review: In line with the timely reappraisal of all things R&S related, the resurgent Apollo have seen the opportunity to bring one of their most celebrated records back for another round. Aphex Twin's ambient recordings mature magnificently with age, sounding ever richer and more emotive as the rest of electronic music continues to play catch up all around. From the gentle breakbeats of "Xtal" to the aquatic techno lure of "Tha", the airy rave of "Pulsewidth" to the heartwrenching composition of "Ageispolis", every track is a perennial example of how far ambient techno could reach even back then. It's just that no-one quite had the arm-span of Richard D. James.
Hands, No More Mosquitos, Calamine, Tangle (live in Copenhagen)
Review: Released back in 2003, Rounds was the third LP from Kieran Hebden as Four Tet and perhaps the first long player that widely established him as a pioneering voice within electronic music. Though it doesn't feel like a decade since it was released, Domino celebrate the album's tenth anniversary in requisite fashion here, reissuing it in double LP format and slipping in a CD of Four Tet performing live in Copenhagen in 2004. Listening back now, it's easy to understand why Rounds is viewed as an early classic in the Four Tet canon, transferring his love for free jazz records to a beat template that's more palatable on the ear (Fact pickers might want to know that Hebden recently revealed to Pitchfork the LP was made entirely from samples) "She Moves She" still sounds absolutely haunting too!
Review: Lorenzo Masotto is an Italian pianist and composer from a village near Verona who studied at the Conservatory F.E. Dall'Abaco and the Hochschule fur Musik Franz Liszt in Weimar. His music now returns to Whitelabrecs with his new album Earde which is inspired by the landscapes surrounding his hometown in Northern Italy and reflects the beauty of local nature and Masotto's travels through Iceland and the Dolomites. Recorded in a deconsecrated church to capture its natural acoustics, the album explores the deep connection between place, memory and creativity which gives rise to a meditative, harmonic experience.
Cipriani One Man Band - "From Peru To China" (2:01)
Review: Perhaps the most captivating moment here is OVA's 'Rainforest,' opening with lush textures and shimmering rhythms that transport you to its titular environment. Jean-Michel Bertrand's 'Engines' shifts gears, its mechanical pulses intertwining with atmospheric layers. On the flip side, Four Drummers Drumming bring intensity with 'Wok,' a tightly constructed piece driven by cascading percussion. This collection thrives on contrastsimeditative in one moment, invigorating in the nextidelivering a rhythmic journey through European percussion that feels both timeless and innovative
Review: To say that The Future Sound Of London are legendary would be an understatement. Brian Dougans and Garry Cobain continue to stupefy and amaze with this fifth chapter in the Environments series, this time allegedly exploring the space and dimensions after death. That might sound a little gloomy, but the music itself is actually surprisingly funky and upbeat. The opener itself, "Point Of Departure", is a gorgeous slap-bass beat track backed with some stupendous female vocal chops. There's a bit of everything across the thirteen tracks, such as the eerie soundscapes of "Beings Of Light", or the break-ridden lo-fi jam that is "Somatosensory". These guys have never stopped and they still mean business. Recommended.
Review: Hype Williams may now be relegated to an amusing/puzzling yet prolific chapter in the respective solo careers of its two founding members Inga Copeland and Dean Blunt, but the mystique and obliqueness that surrounded the project remains a weapon both continue to employ. Blunt's latest solo album Black Metal is perhaps his most high profile to date, seeing him pitch up on long running UK indie Rough Trade for a 13 track journey through his singular craft. If you touched on either of the albums Blunt released last year you should have an idea of what to expect, though of course there are still plenty of surprises within.
Review: "It's like painting with button and sliders... Melting and dripping, seeping yourself liquid into the machinery." So said Darren Cunningham when discussing the creation of R.I.P, his long awaited follow up to Splazsh. It's a compelling image that works in practice too. R.I.P creates microcosmic sound worlds within each track: "Holy Water" for instance tumbles in on itself in a melange of shimmering sine wave droplets, while the pitch shifted waves of "Tree Of Knowledge" seem to inhale and exhale like a living being, crumpling inwards on itself to repeat the same motion ad infinitum. And although it uses much the same, occasionally abrasive sonic building blocks as Cunningham's been developing for many years, the pastoral tones of "Uriel's Black Harp" and the Alva Noto styles of "Jardin" make R.I.P a surprisingly graceful album. It may not be techno as many will know it, but Cunningham has never made techno in the traditional sense anyway - and it's clear on listening to R.I.P that he's only just beginning to realise the musical forms that have been swarming inside his brain for years.
Review: It's been a rapid rise over the past few years for Alejandro Ghersi's Arca alias. Following some years spent as Nuuro, his current project launched with aplomb on UNO in 2012 before moving on to Hippos In Tanks, and then last year shored up at Mute with the Xen album in a demonstration of true ascendance through the leftfield ranks. Now Ghersi returns to Mute with a new album Mutant, which sees further exploration of his detailed, unusual style touching on elements of noise, bombastic ambient and neoclassical. "Soichiro" lays down wispy threads of trap in amongst dramatic stop-start dynamics while "En" flirts with lingering piano and static interference in the most artful of ways, just two examples of an album loaded with surprise and intrigue.
Review: My Neighbour Totoro is a 1988 critically acclaimed Japanese animated fantasy film, written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli and Tokuma Shoten. The soundtrack, which has stood the test of time, is one of the contributing factors which makes the film so magical. Created by longtime Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi who is one of Japan's most prolific and celebrated composers, this soundtrack is one of the lightest in mood with the 20 tracks running in chronological order. Stunning, raw and powerful.
Review: Planet Mu usher in the return of Ital Tek and a new sonic approach for the long-term label associate, as Hollowed finds Alan Myson switching up his approach. The chance to immerse himself in a new studio set up was the impetus for Myson to engage in laying down countless hours' worth of loops, drones and textures. It is apparently a method he used as a teenager, but armed with years of recording experience he was now able to make the record he had then envisaged. Fans of the crisp style of dubstep Ital Tek made his name on might be a bit taken aback by this new direction, but there is plenty of fine music to explore here for those that like their sounds abstract and impressionistic.
Review: Having previously impressed with their reissue of Patrick Cowley's brilliant, all-synthesizer soundtrack to obscure '70s gay porn flick School Daze, Dark Entries and Honey Sound System once again join forces to shine a light on the high energy disco pioneer's work for San Francisco's Fox Studios. Unsurprisingly, it's another impressive collection, and features material recorded for a number of different pornographic films. There are naturally more up-tempo moments - see "Somebody To Love Tonight", which would later be re-recorded with Sylvester, and the synth-weirdness-meets-jazz-funk brilliance of "5oz of Funk" - but it's the impressively cosmic and exotic ambient moments, such as the stand-out "Timelink" and "Jungle Magic", that really stand out.
Review: The best thing since Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful", Denmark and Norway's Aqua, to '90s R&B, Trance and '00s Dubstep combined is Sophie's Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides. With more meta-references than you can poke a brain at, the album and its hyper-array of sounds is set to light up the couture cosmo of New York City as much as it is a teenager's bedroom south of the border. In effect, Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides is one of the most colourful excursions through music you can have, striking off a plethora of pop music iterations, to rave, deep ambient and the most experimental of dance music. A seriously defining album by one of modern day music's greatest minds. Roll out the red carpet.
Review: It's hard not to be impressed by everything Grimes touches. From the moment this album's trippy downtempo titular opener emerges from submerged depths of sound you know the latest from the Canadian is going to be a special moment in pop. As if to accentuate our point, "Delete Forever", two tracks later, introduces acoustic guitar tips while still retaining deep timbre and utilising effects to hypnotic ends on those hummed vocal loops. "IDORU", which closes out the record, feels far more playful, simple keyboard and whispered choral lyricism introduced with a backing track of bird song, before broken club beats fall in. It might be most fitting to finish a write up on the aptly-titled "You'll Miss Me When I'm Not Around", its guttural bass guitars and EDM-leaning vocal stabs not the only things reminding us the world would be weaker without this one.
Review: Trailed as a direct sequel to his previous solo album, 2017's "Avanti", "Volume Massimo" sees Nine Inch Nails member Alessandro Cortini offer up another immersive trip through droning guitar textures, repetitive synthesizer motifs, exotic sitar parts and fuzzy electronics. It's effectively a series of "maximal" instrumental soundscapes with sounds so large and layered they rise above the "meditative" tag pushed by Mute's PR team. This is no criticism, though, just a reflection that while contemplative at times, one of the most joyous things about the album is Cortini's ability to build thrilling walls of sound.
Review: Since slipping out in 1983, Midori Takada's debut album, Through The Looking Glass, has become something of a sought-after item amongst ambient enthusiasts (with hugely inflated online prices to match). Happily, Palto Flats has decided to reissue it, allowing those without overblown record buying budgets to wallow in its gentle, humid majesty. Remarkably, Takada not only composed and produced it, but also played every instrument, including marimbas, recorder, vibraphone, harmonium, and all manner of things you can hit and shake. The resulting tracks remain hugely beguiling, sitting somewhere between a dreamy take on traditional Japanese music, the classic ambient albums of Brian Eno, and the gentle, sweat-soaked explorations of The Chi Factory.
Review: It has taken five years for FKA Twigs to follow up her astonishing first album, "LP1". With that kind of timeframe, you can't help but have high expectations for the finished product, expectations "Magdalene" more than meets from the off. An artist in the truest sense - with every step and stage in the recording process controlled by her - it's an accomplished comeback for a woman who in the last half decade has experienced both personal loss and major physical challenges. Don't expect more of the same, then, but instead a talent finding new purpose and new confidence following difficult times. With the ever-impressive Nicolas Jaar giving a helping hand, the result is a raw, honest record that's deeply personal, full of self-reflection and, ultimately, accepting and positive. Not to mention destined to be on repeat. Her position as one of the UK's most vital and compelling acts re-confirmed.
Review: John Beltran's label debut sees the maestro flexing and showcasing the full spectrum of his composing and production skills over four diverse tracks.
Nude Love (long version - previously unreleased - bonus track) (3:20)
Review: Codice d'amore orientale may not be Piero Vivarelli's best film according to those who know, but its fantastically groovy soundtrack is a standout feature. Composed by Alberto Baldan Bembo under the alias Blue Marvin, the nine tracks blend Italian pop, orchestral arrangements, Asian influences, breakbeat, funk and experimental sounds. The soundtrack captures the essence of the era and offers a unique mix of genres that perfectly complements the film's vibe. Its eclectic style makes it a must-have for any self-respecting DJ's collection while showcasing Baldan Bembo's versatility.
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