Back catalogue: Library/Archive

Review: People Like Us, the long-running project of Vicki Bennett, returns with her first album since 2018's The Mirror. Again via sampling, and stylising in vintage neo-psych-tronic audio collage, Copia here muses on abundance and self-replication, reassembling fragments of sound into something sub-interconnected, rhizomatic. Emerging from her recent AV performance The Library of Babel, the album blends electronic textures with whimsical, often uncanny vocal moments, inlining contributions from Matmos, Ergo Phizmiz, Hearty White, Gwilly Edmondez, and others. Lyrics and melodies by Phizmiz act as a connective spine, while the project as a whole embraces an "exquisite corpse" approach, multitracks traded over oceans and timelines, forming a gaudily grotesque patchwork resistant to linearity. As always with Bennett's work, Copia blurs the borders of past, present and potential, offering a poignant meditation on creativity.

Review: Some 25 killer library music cuts by the German film music maestro Peter Thomas, on audiophile pressing, in a deluxe 2×10? set. Uber-rare, never-before-released material spanning 1968-1976 - and sourced from Thomas' personal reel-to-reel tape archive - this bombastic instrumental set spans a whole range of quirky overseen by the composer himself, documenting an approach to composition that essentially augurs electronic music production as we know it today. Prolific in scope, the 25 pieces here rival the sheerly industrious proliferations of many of today's artists, and even outstrips them in quantitative ambition; but then again, what less might one expect from a soundtrack artist by trade, whose work spanned over 600 films? Best of this bunch have to be 'Meeting Palermo', whose brushes revel in a beaucoup frisson, and 'Astral Snow' - a whacked-out absurdist electro-disco frazzler for the most frenetic out there. This one also comes with four recently unearthed 'lost' tracks from Warner Chappell's CPM Archive series, which have never been released on vinyl before. We'll hazard a quip: the word 'timeless' often doesn't come to mind, yet it has done here.