Joey Anderson came to house music first as a dancer: Not your average weekend clubber, but a devoted student of a vernacular form, house dancing, that thrived in New York and New Jersey nightclubs in the 1990s — expressive, fluid, acrobatic, and competitive. You can hear that influence in the sparse, wiry productions that he has been recording since the beginning of this decade.
They’re not made for fist-pumping, and they don’t follow neat verse/chorus structures. They ripple and writhe unpredictably, marked by an improvisational sense of movement. They seem to move of their own accord.
Anderson comes from the same corner of the house and techno universe that has given us artists like Levon Vincent, Anthony Parasole, and DJ Qu,…

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…a fellow dancer. Like them, he favors analog drum machines, hardware synthesizers, and what sounds, above all, like a lot of playing of keys and twisting of knobs in real time. Much contemporary electronic music is composed visually, assembled brick by brick on a computer screen, but Anderson’s snake-in-the-grass meanderings suggest live takes stacked one on top of another, thanks to the magic of multi-tracking.

“18 Arms” goes straight to the heart of his approach. True to its name (leave it to a dancer to come up with a title like that), it opens with a synthesizer pattern that squirms like an octopus’ tentacles, and as the track accrues its fistfuls of counterpoints and layers, it becomes easy to imagine the producer as a one-man band. At any given point on the album, three or more synthesizer parts are being woven together; drum hits are flaring up and being muted again; a hi-hat’s pitch seesaws up and down. The cumulative effect of all these techniques is at once chaotic and elegant, and fluid above all.

But how the music is put together is ultimately less important than how it feels, and Anderson’s music is all about feel. It’s hard to put your finger on the emotions they evoke, but you’re moved all the same. (“‘Deep’ to me is like the human condition that you don’t talk about, that you hold in forever until you are in front of that right person” Anderson told Resident Advisor, which might go some way towards explaining the slipperiness of his music’s emotional register.) A song might be calm and meditative: the spacious “Organ to Dust” is a study in stillness in which quietly accelerating figures move like quarters spinning to a halt on the floor. “Nabta Playa”, named for a drained basin in the Egyptian desert, is fleet and mysterious; in both sound and mood, it’s reminiscent of Drexciya’s Afro-futurist fantasies, and the Detroit icons’ fizzy textures and frantic movements also inform “Amarna”, whose title refers to the tomb of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. It’s the album’s most unhinged track, with wildly filtered drums that thrash desperately about. It sounds like music for punching mirrors; it moves like someone trying to escape his own shadow. True to the corporeal bent of Anderson’s album, it locates emotion not in the mind but in the muscles.

If there’s a freewheeling, hard-to-pin-down quality to Congo Square, Music Komite‘s follow-up to 2013’s Sweet Bombs, there’s a good reason for it: the album pays tribute to an actual square in New Orleans where during slave times members of the African community would gather to dance and make music, assemblies that in turn influenced the development of American jazz. Like the goings-on in that square, the album’s music draws upon different musics and styles, with everything from glitchy electronica and hip-hop to jazz and dub woven into its vibrant tapestry. Music Komite itself is the brainchild of founding member Francisco Calderón, who’s credited with electronics, guitar, keyboards, and xylophone and is joined by guitarist Jaime Fernández, trumpeter Rafa Esquivel,…

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…upright bassist Alex Ahumada, and drummer Esteban Perles on the thirty-six-minute outing.

It takes a little while for the project to come into focus, but as the album advances it begins to suggest a strong Project Mooncircle-like vibe, the kind of material where it’s not unusual to find a crisp funk groove smothered in piano sprinkles and vinyl crackle and speckled with fractured vocal edits. Acoustic instruments and electronic treatments regularly collide, making for a detail-rich brew of dusty beats, samples, and stitched-together melodies. Some cuts emphasize a live feel and acoustic instrumentation, though even in these cases some degree of digital sleight-of-hand is more than likely in play. In the case of “Black Ark,” for instance, the addition of synthesizers to a percussion-heavy arrangement points in the direction of someone like Sun Ra more than any contemporary electronic producer, whereas “Diplomatic Phantom” sees Calderón and company digging into a Spaghetti Western take on dub. More representative of the release is something like “Wrong Virtuoso,” an infectiously swinging dazzle of cooing vocal accents, glitch-funk, and pulsating bass science, or perhaps “Herriko Girls,” which receives a strong boost from its vibes-trumpet combination. There’s a quietly celebratory spirit to such material that enhances the album’s appeal and strengthens its impact.

No Fans Compendium is a deluxe, limited-edition seven-disc set of Richard Youngs’s recordings for his long-running private No Fans label.
Five CDs are the artist’s personal selection from his No Fans releases, all of which were issued in tiny editions (20-50 copies) and only available for sale at his rare shows or at Glasgow’s now-defunct Volcanic Tongue shop.
In addition, Youngs has included two full discs of material previously unavailable in any form: a recording from 1989 predating his earliest widely known work, and a new recording from late 2014.
Unbeatable as a survey of Youngs’s career, everything here is of equal quality to his over-the-counter releases. In keeping with his penchant for unpredictable stylistic mashups and reinventions,…

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…there are folky laments, achingly beautiful “songs,” tape collage, rude prog noise, minimalist experiments, multi-tracked vocals, etc.

Disc 1: 20th Century Jams
1. 19 Used Postage Stamps
2. Inner Sky Part II
3. May Verses
4. Live in My Head

Disc 2: 21st Century Jams
1. Live in Glasgow 2000
2. Easter 2001
3. This Life Gives Force
4. Sun Lay Lay

Disc 3: Multi-Tracked Shakuhachi/Live in Salford
1. Multi-Tracked Shakuhachi 1
2. Multi-Tracked Shakuhachi 2
3. Multi-Tracked Shakuhachi 3
4. Live in Salford

Disc 4: Somerled/No Home Like Place
1. Glasgow Device
2. Mixolydian Sea Tone
3. Revolution, Again
4. Alarms I
5. Alarms II
6. No Home Like Place

Disc 5: Three Handed Star/Garden of Stones
1. Three Handed Star
2. Garden of Stones 1
3. Garden of Stones 2
4. Garden of Stones 3
5. Garden of Stones 4
6. Garden of Stones 5

Disc 6: Harpenden!
1. Green Ink
2. To the Hill
3. The Dead Fly
4. Setting for Voices

Disc 7: Thought Plane
1. Thought Plane

Beset by mysterious delays, Beatrice Dillon & Rupert Clervaux’s Studies I-XVII for Samplers and Percussion has finally arrived.
Written over ten months in 2013 and now released by Snow Dog Records, it accompanies the duo’s Sequence 1 and experimental work for the Lissom Gallery with a disciplined but playful discourse between manipulated percussion in a tradition spanning ’60s avant-garde thru 2000s minimal techno and the post-dubstep hybrids of Untold.
Drawing on shared, personalised backgrounds in jazz, ethnomusicology, electronic music and field recordings, the LP’s 27 short pieces were written quickly and with a deliberate paucity of effects or computer input, avoiding looping or other short- cuts in order to capture the unstable fidelities…

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…which arise from repetitive, improvised performance between live percussions and electronics.

Using the sampler as “a digital mirror of the instrument being manually played” – which is neatly reflected in Anne Tetzlaff’s cover image of a finger reaching to its own reflection – the LP’s magic could be said to lie in the space we perceive between textureality and abstract representation.

Muffled kicks from the studio next door bleed into the recordings, as do a malfunctioning fire alarm in the corridor and the 2nd hand buzz of a snare drum, adding unpredictable dimensions to the duo’s playing much int he same way that road noise would strafe classic Moondog pieces or be detectable in the background of Folkways field recordings.

And, much in the same vein as Folkways records, they may be rooted in academia but, the fluidity and charm of their one-take performances leaves them open to a range of emotional responses and tactile application; try playing along with pots ’n pans while making your tea, or segueing with Skull Disco and AFX’s computer controlled instruments for the craic?!

Random occurrences. Sunlight bursting through treetops. Accidental beauty. These things are not just confined to nature and landscape. Le Berger is Montreal native Samuel Landry. Deeply moved and inspired by Ithaca Trio’s Music for Piano & Patience, he sought out to make new material, choosing to work with methods that he felt were similar.
Unused guitar samples from fifteen years ago became the sole source material, providing the album with a wistful, folky kind of ambience. While ambient textures provide a blissfully drowsy background, the guitars evokes and mirrors the calm feeling of leaves rustling in the breeze, or light on the ocean exploding into millions of individual flecks as the waves come in to shore. As random as they may be, it never…

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…startles the listener. It is music mirroring life. A work born from a marriage of chance, randomness and composed elements, it results in Le Berger’s most evocative and poetic work to date.

1. sfojg=owfE [29:32]
2. fgaow-∏wrg [14:21]
3. sgfoj;dfsgoj;bdgafe [17:55]

Swedish “cinematic pop” pair Maasai originally emerged when members Dominique Teymouri and Zackarias Ekekind encountered each other in between different endeavours.
After deciding to team up, they chose to identify themselves with a title taken from a Kenyan Nilotic ethnic group’s word for “my people”, which also acts as a metaphor for solidarity and inner strength.
Together, the duo have composed a compilation called Feeling Blue, Seeing Orange.
“Nairobi” introduces the album with an ominous electronic build-up, before “Forgive Me” comes in with a cool harmony. Percussion stomps subtly through the background, keeping things characterful on the way to a calm and compelling chorus. It’s an easy and accessible opener, ahead…

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…of the spirited serenade of “Collide”. This enticing tune thrills through its vibrant vocals and intense instrumentation, ending up as quite a powerful piece.

“Memories” skips in upon playful percussion, before blasting into a captivating chorus that bears a tropical trait. It’s an airy anthem that’s succeeded by the affecting ambience of “Haunted”. From here, the music grows gradually, while the refrain becomes especially resonant and arresting in the canorous chorus, leaving a lasting impression.

“I.D.S.H.” is a rapid and rousing addition that flies along frantically and excites, until “Grow” steps forth to set a solemn tone. Things stay serious and stirring as it sails across a sea of urgent instrumentation and sombre singing. “The Healer” mesmerises in its aftermath, with a hard-hitting harmony and forceful music motifs.

“Devil’s Due” goes in a lighter direction then, feeling fun via vivid vocals and delicate drums. It stays sanguine as it adds in an assortment of idiosyncratic instrumental elements, which enthral through to the emotional atmosphere of “Lighthouse”. This insightful offering brings the proceedings to an engrossing end.

Maasai have put together a carefully constructed collection of compositions that feel consistently deep and meaningful. Their theatrical techniques ensure that the tracks never become mundane or monotonous, while the simple yet exciting sound allows each entry to absorb absolutely. The outcome is an album that should appeal to an expansive audience.

With New Lines, the Los Angeles based M. Geddes Gengras strays from his well-worn, new age, Tangerine drones and alights on a path he last visited on 2012’s Spontaneous Generation.
Opening track “Bushi” puts it all out there in one focused, 11-minute stream of flashing melodies and steady, four-on-the-floor beats: this is music inspired by Detroit techno, modeled on the example of Juan Atkins and Jeff Mills and reworked in the light of a modular synthesizer.
The only clues that Gengras is behind this release show up in the album’s middle section, on “New Bounce” and “Cris Rose.” Though not unmistakable, these tracks have the same verb-in-search-of-a- noun dynamism as 2012’s Beyond the Curtain, consisting of just a few up and down patterns…

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…altered to create a sense of movement and variation. What feels like endless propulsion is actually stasis in four dimensions, a form carved in marble and spiced up with a smattering of noise. Some uncharacteristically active rhythms and a few more fluid effects à la Basic Channel open the Personable sound up, stretching what would be a blocky, lo-fi vocabulary into the further reaches of space. The depth gained makes all the difference, generating shades of color and degrees of intensity not present in the more uniform, harder edged music he releases under his own name.

Both “Bushi” and “New Lines” live on different, but connected branches of the electronic music family tree. Responsible for over half the record’s total duration, they develop slowly, relying more on texture than the other two tracks. “Bushi” revels in interlocking phrases that mimic each other and echo off the hard metal shuffle of the hi-hats. It’s dub blended with a touch of dystopian science fiction, rising and falling through a series of open plateaus and dark valleys.

“New Lines” is steadier and cleaner, more straightforward, at least at the start. A simple melodic sequence plays over a thumping bass drum and a thin film of harmonic ambience, the latter of which cycles and slowly takes over until it explodes in distorted form and completely subsumes the beat. Ironically, the sense of stasis at the end transforms into a feeling of movement, upending Gengras’s usual hierarchy. At the place where he might sound most like himself, the music pivots down an unexpected avenue. The difference between new age and techno aesthetics accounts for only part of that, the rest is the product of attention to detail and the easy to miss leap from two- to three-dimensional composing.

Pekka Airaksinen is best known as the founding member of The Sperm, a batshit ’60s Finnish ensemble that combined garbled improv, zoned minimalism, and Artaudian theatrical hijinks in a fashion that one could only pull off back in those halcyon days. They only made one LP, the painfully rare Shh!, but it seems as though the music was never really the thing: neither rock band, jazz band, nor academic avant-garde group, The Sperm were more a precursor to what would become the noise underground, albeit with more of a high-concept performance art bent than many of their offspring. Theirs was a flame which burned white-hot and quick as they traversed the Finnish countryside, violating taboos and obscenity laws, courting legal action, and even managing…

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…(as legend has it) to land one of its members in a psychiatric ward for having sex onstage during one of their performances.

Where does one go from there? Apparently, it took Airaksinen a few years to figure out the answer to that (either that, or his doings throughout the 1970s are just sorely under-documented). When he returned to recording in earnest with 1984’s Buddhas of Golden Light, available again courtesy of the blessed souls at Arc Light Editions, the approach was perhaps not as barn-burningly punkish as The Sperm, but it nonetheless showcases an eccentricity not softened by time.

Buddhas of Golden Light was Airaksinen’s first in a series of recordings dedicated to each of the 999 Buddhas (to date, he’s covered just over 100). The technology used to make the record, a Roland 808 drum machine and a Yamaha DX7 synthesiser alongside his trusty saxophone, was fairly state of the art for its time, but the resulting sound is a far cry from the hip hop and synthpop for which such gear was already standard. What appears instead are four twisting, sideways churners which sound salvaged from the black box of a Jupiterian shuttle, imposingly dense and strange even in their most goofy moments. Comparisons to contemporaries like The Residents, Smegma, Space Negros, and Caroliner Rainbow would not fall entirely off target, and some moments even recall the outer edges of contemporary jazz fusion, but the combination of shoestring recording techniques and focused solitude lend the album a greater intimacy than most of its ostensible peers, a feeling of loner frenzy which likely would have been diluted by outside input.

Its extremity notwithstanding, if ever there was a time to unleash this album upon an unsuspecting populace, it is now. Its absurd synth tones sound fresh again; its clangorous skronk sounds as much like 2015 as it does its actual vintage. Astute listeners might glom onto bits which seem to predict techniques and sounds utilised by modern astral travellers like Blues Control and Sun Araw, but Airaksinen goes even deeper and weirder. Rarely do his descendents deign to sound so willfully grotty, so smilingly damaged. Though debatably not as doggedly senses-bending as his earlier work (which, by the way, is also overdue for reissue), Buddhas of Golden Light may be even more individual, and it’s great news that it’s accessible again.

Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor’s industrial rock outfit, released a vinyl box set entitled Halo I-IV for Record Store Day Black Friday.
Three of the collection’s four 12-inch vinyl records are dedicated to the album’s singles: “Down In It” (from September 15th, 1989), “Head Like a Hole” (March 22nd, 1990), and “Sin” (October 10th, 1990). Each slab of wax contains alternate takes and different mixes of the tracks. The fourth piece of vinyl features Pretty Hate Machine in the configuration that it was originally released back in October of 1989.
Halo I-IV refers to Trent Reznor’s personal numbering system (Halo numbers are the numbers assigned to pieces of the Nine Inch Nails discography in the order that they are released).

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Halo I

Side A:
01 Down In It (Skin)
02 Down In It (Shred)

Side B:
01 Down In It (Singe)

Halo II

Side A:
01 Head Like a Hole
02 Terrible Lie
03 Down In It
04 Sanctified
05 Something I Can Never Have

Side B:
01 Kinda I Want To
02 Sin
03 That’s What I Get
04 The Only Time
05 Ringfinger

Halo III

Side A:
01 Head Like a Hole (Slate)
02 Terrible Lie (Sympathetic Mix)
03 Head Like a Hole (Clay)

Side B:
01 Head Like a Hole (Copper)
02 You Know Who You Are
03 Head Like a Hole (Soil)
04 Terrible Lie (Empathetic Mix)

Halo IV

Side A:
01 Sin (Long)
02 Sin (Dub)

Side B:
03 Get Down, Make Love
04 Sin (Short)

Pennsylvania producer Alec Koone meshes disembodied vocals with fragmented pop and R&B under the alias of Balam Acab.
Koone was introduced to the world with the release of his See Birds EP on Tri Angle Records in 2010. He followed that up with his debut album the following year, but has remained quiet since then.
New album Child Death is the first Balam Acab release since his 2011 album Wander/Wonder and features vocal assistance from Morgan Laubach, Kylyn Swann, Liz Yordy and Josie Hendry.
Koone hinted at the existence of the project earlier this year when he took to Facebook, offering fans a chance to submit vocals for potential sample use.
Child Death features five new songs, including some “acid/rave synth jams at 160 BPM” and…

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…“double kick in 4/5 tracks… but it’s still plenty euphoric and pretty and all.”

01. Glory Sickness (5:09)
02. Spent Lives (6:51)
03. Andiwiltellyou (8:45)
04. Do Death (3:52)
05. Underwater Forever (7:39)

The Meridian Brothers’ Salvadora Robot was one of 2014’s quirkiest and most musically compelling recordings. The Colombian ensemble was founded by composer, multi-instrumentalist, and strategist Eblis Álvarez, who is also a member of Los Pirañas, Frente Cumbiero, and Chúpame el Dedo, with Pedro Ojeda of Romperayo. Álvarez composes, produces, arranges, and often plays everything on the studio records himself. Los Suicidas, the first album in a projected trilogy, is even loopier than its predecessor. Alvarez has always been intrigued by organ music. To that end, the inspiration here is the music of Hammond wizard Jaime Llano Gonzalez, a Colombian music legend whose command of traditional national styles such as pasillos, bambucos, and cumbias was equalled only by his…

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…innovation of juxtaposing against foreign rhythms — foxtrots, waltzes, boogaloos, etc. — often presenting them in an easy listening style. He is regarded by some as Colombia’s Raymond Scott. Álvarez pays him great tribute by using a variety of chap synths to emulate the mighty organ’s many sounds. Most of the album comes off sounding like chiptunes played by Walter Wanderley at the wrong speed. Highlights include the single “Vertigo,” with its samba bassline, 8-bit staggered poly-melodies, and looped budget drum machines. Though it’s in 4/4, there are polyrhythms stacked off the main one with echo-plexed chords and single lines that create a spaced-out, exotic, tropical feel. “Delirio” sounds exactly like its title, with vocals even more whacked-out than the keyboards; the speed of the rhythms increases throughout the piece until it blurs and has to find some track to get back on. “Conteinda,” with its cinematic vocal — a cowboy growl during a cattle drive — and a popping cumbia rhythm accented by vallenato handclaps, has two counterpoint melodies erupting from the center. The tune would have made Frank Zappa and Les Baxter proud. The cut-time cumbia bassline in “Idilio” is offset by pumping, simulated B-3 chords and a swirling melody that sounds like a tape of a circus organ stretched beyond repair. Closer “Amargura” sounds like two demos stitched together for a minute, then lo-fi rhythm tracks meet a furious organ, swooping analog synth lines, and an upright bassline covering the chord changes. Its title translates as “grief” although it sounds like anything but.

Throughout Los Suicidas, Alvarez’s humor is ever present; that said, the music is provocative, strange, and mysterious. While a first aural helping may involve some head scratching, further encounters with this set will only result in delight.

Last year, Consumer Electronics, the power electronics duo of ex-Whitehouse member Philip Best and his wife Sarah Froelich, bolstered by producer Russell Haswell, released one of the most brutal, uncompromising and violent noise records this country has seen for quite some time.
Estuary English was, at under 30 minutes, a mercifully short (not because it’s a bad album – quite the opposite – but because it would be hard to take more of its abrasive sonic punishment) tirade against the Britain of David Cameron, George Osborne and UKIP. On Dollhouse Songs, Best, Froelich and Haswell broaden the scope of their sonic broadsides, directing a wall of fury towards the ills of the world at large that rivals, and possibly even surpasses, the one on Estuary English.

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Those for whom the above paragraph might suffice to convince of Dollhouse Songs‘ merit might therefore be a tad surprised by the album’s opening salvo, as Best whispers quietly over a carpet of fizzy, but hardly explosive, electronic drone at the start of ‘History of Sleepwalking’. Rest assured, noiseniks, this is a case of Consumer Electronics getting more expansive, not less abrasive, and it’s mere moments before Haswell kicks in with some blistering martial beats and Best leaps from murmur to his characteristic howl with the line “How the fuck did I get here?”. Consumer Electronics’ tendency to hurl oaths and revel in shocking imagery on stage somewhat obscures the sheer poetry of their lyrics, and Dollhouse Songs contains some of their most evocative imagery. “Save yourself/From this pain this hedonism/Shaped by adult hand/Good solid hand/Occult bankers/Ministers of state/Roped around your feet,” Best shrieks a bit later on ‘History of Sleepwalking’, his politics clear even as he flounders in the despair of what our leaders are doing to us (“Learn your fucking place!” he also barks in Cameron-mode), even as we sleepwalk towards letting them go further and further with their corruption, lies and manipulation. The track ends with a brutal, emphatic exhortation: “Reject obligation and fear/Become a fucking insult/And kill them in their beds”. This may sound like typical noise fare, but in the hands of Consumer Electronics comes over more like a revolutionary mantra.

‘Knives Cut’ picks up where ‘History oIf Sleepwalking’ let off, with a whirlwind of feedback, gristle and Best’s snarled vocals as the singer plunges to new depths despair and anger with lines like “Tear your mind into parts” and “Not the slightest hope of ever fucking making it”. This is noise at its most misanthropic, yes, but also its most cathartic and liberating. On ‘Condition Of A Hole’, Best hands vocal duties over to Froelich. Her voice is if anything even more challenging than Best’s, given even more edge by a backing that sounds like guns going off as buildings collapse into dust and a distortion effect that at one point makes her sound like a deranged android. She also takes singing duties on ‘Murder Your Masters’ (another call to arms!) which features more nihilistic poetry (“Here is what we know/Fictitious capital, hopeless heat, rainforest depletion/North American drought, nuclear Pakistan […] You need to make amends!”) that reads like a checklist of the world’s escalation into an apocalypse of war, poverty and environmental catastrophe. Here, alongside the crunching beats and whigged out noise, an icy, drifting synth drone turns the track from vicious tirade to mournful elegy for a dying species, a reminder that there is so much more to Consumer Electronics than bile and vitriol.

Best reprises the mic for ‘The Push’, a typical broadside directed at London’s social divides that see the poor priced out to make way for rich oligarchs and corrupt financiers (“Woe to bloody city full of lies and robbery!” is the wonderful opening line, whilst the concluding lament of men’s murderous ways is equally powerful). Alongside these stirring, almost histrionic non-songs dominated by stop-start rhythms, grueling noise, moments of silence and powerful percussion sits the instrumental ‘Nothing Natural’ and, at the album’s conclusion, the elaborate, partly wordless ‘Colour Climax’. Best reprises the whispered vocal style of the opening part of ‘History Of Sleepwalking’, delivering broken musings on life’s inevitable disappointment and decay, sounding both defeated and defiant in equal measure. The closing lines are heavy with poignancy: “This is it/the bare life/it feels like love/doesn’t it?”, revealing the breadth of Best, Froelich and Haswell’s worldview and the sadness that underlies their anger.

Dollhouse Songs is both longer and broader than Estuary English and the fruits of the trio’s ambitions are manifold. Again, this is no easy ride, but if you follow Consumer Electronics as they strip bare the caustic facade of modern living, you will find power and, yes, beauty in the dark recesses they reveal.

B12 ended a five-year silence earlier this year, resurfacing with a four-track EP called Bokide 325.
The project is now solely the work of original member Steve Rutter, and he’s followed up Bokide with another EP, Orbiting Souls.
Rutter doesn’t stray far from the modus operandi he’s used over the last two decades on this record.
In fact, Orbiting Souls almost feels like a period piece, so effectively does it recreate the feel of ’90s ambient techno and IDM. Ghostly pads pursuing minor-key chord progressions form the foundation of most of the music, with mechanical 909 drum patterns moving things forward and, occasionally, bass lines that take their cue from the funk inflections of early Detroit techno.
Like much early techno music, B12’s work…

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…continues to conjure images of sci-fi inspired techno-futures like the one that adorned the cover of their 1996 album, Time Tourist. But one development in Rutter’s more recent work is a drop in energy and pace, so that it no longer feels like the soundtrack to a seething space metropolis but the hinterlands of a future universe.

In someone else’s hands, a record like this might be written off as a genre exercise, but that charge falls flat considering Rutter helped to invent the genre in the first place, and his strong execution makes this a rewarding listen.

No More are a band from Kiel, Germany, founded in the summer of 1979. Hardly a sunny record, A Rose is a Rose compiles the band’s early discographic output, the EPs A Rose is a Rose, Too Late and the Suicide Commando 7’’, into a tightly-packed, luscious whole. 50 minutes of succulent, protean, and paranoid goth-synth-post punk guaranteed to add spikes to any kind of glossy early summer fantasy you might be having. The period chronicled here covers the very early 1980s, when the German trio (Andy A. Schwarz, Tina Sanudakura, Christian Darc) developed a rough, jittery sound equally at home with the post-Kraftwerkian minimalists and with the most infernal, angst-ridden, youthful goth- punk. It was in this period that the group spawned its most well-known track, “Suicide Commando”…

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…– a bleepy, tinny anthem for the disaffected – which quite brilliantly conjugates a very German minimalist sensibility with a Lou Reed-ish taste for storytelling. Here they self-consciously describe the urban fauna of a certain scene (‘she was my dark haired Lydia of my suburban German dreams. And he was the boy called James. And it will all end up like the New York scene. Too much drugs, and too much pills, too much lies.’). For those of you who never let their curiosity stretch very far beyond “Suicide Commando” or its environs Dark Entries reveal that a whole lot more was going on in No More, sonically but also emotionally, aesthetically.

The record opens on the quasi-tribal “Drums of Algir”, drums reminiscent of Pornography-era Cure but with a wonderful goth synth-line, which leads into a dense, metallic valley of angst, in which the hardness of a post-punk heart is always brilliantly tempered by interesting choices of electronic sounds. The deeply paranoid “Caged Heat” (‘I’m afraid of white suits’) opens onto “Something Grows Up”, which would be a rather ten-a-penny post-punk ballad were it not for Tina Sanudakura’s synthesis, glistening in the back like an aspirin in a glass of sparkling water, and onto “Hypnotized” and “Dim the Lights”, both tense, angry pieces, with the latter sounding almost like a more-aware-of-modernity Christian Death. The most interesting aspect of the first part of the LP is the production, which does nothing to hide the records’ original 4-track-TEAC-in-a-laundry-room set-up and as such reveals the band’s jaggedness and also their energy. You can almost ‘hear the room’, and there’s a particular kind of emotional force to it.

The record evolves attesting to the band’s gradual transformation (although studios, Dark Entries assures, were still never used). The belly of the LP, containing some of the more synth-oriented 1981 tracks (including “Suicide Commando”), carries a certain wit which, though perfectly organic to the band’s sound, shows us yet another side of No More’s work. The angst gets more elegant, more self-assured, the lyrics less self-centred and more filmic. “In a White Room” is a particulalrly gorgeous description of a certain kind of generational bewilderment, an existential poem told over tinny, extremely minimal drum machines, almost stripping back the glamour of a certain synth-pop against itself. The track includes what sounds a wonderfully absurd lyrical dig at John Foxx in the shape of ‘is it a new system of romance? What about the people that die?’.

From here on the record gets more haunting, much colder, more synthetic as the urban becomes metropolitan, everything gets slower, more measured, more serious, and a whole series of highlights begin to emerge. “Ice Cold Waves” is an evocative, intelligent weave of hushed voices, drum machines, freezing electronics and bursts of saxophones, “So Unreal” a metallic, heady spy-story, and the title-track “A Rose is a Rose” is a quiet, stark piece whose pulse will follow its listener around for days.

While much of the material here is effectively very classic, much of it is interestingly performed and recorded, with strange pauses and patterns, interesting layerings of instruments, unplaceable bangs and clangs. The tracks start like something you know and develop into rewarding, consuming little pieces. A Rose is a Rose ends up being quite a consuming record, testament to a rawness and opaqueness worth repeatedly returning to.

All songs have been remastered by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley.

Restored and re-mastered from the original tapes comes Gigi Masin’s much sought after first album Wind. Never commercially released the LP was in fact only given away at a number of small concerts, with many of the remaining copies destroyed during floods in the Venice based musician’s house.
Quickly becoming seen as something of a landmark ambient album in recent years, Wind is now lovingly presented again in it’s entirety. True to it’s original private issue it is once again being made available through Masin’s The Bear On the Moon Records.
Masin came to prominence after Amsterdam’s Music from Memory issued a retrospective of his music titled Talk to the Sea in 2014. Since then he’s collaborated with Jonny Nash and Young Marco as Gaussian Curve, appeared on PAN alongside…

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… Max D and issued a joint LP with Tempelhof.

His debut album Wind is an understated gem that falls somewhere between Balearic ambient music and secular new age, with echoes of Harold Budd, Jon Hassell, and Arthur Russell’s World of Echo.

Even if you haven’t heard of Alessandro Alessandroni, you’ve probably heard at least one of his contributions to musical culture – he was responsible for the guitar riff at the heart of Ennio Morricone’s theme for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and was the iconic whistler on several more of Morricone’s spaghetti western soundtracks.
While Alessandroni never achieved the same level of notoriety as Morricone, his intriguing library music has made him a cult figure among crate diggers – most notably Andy Votel and Demdike Stare, who have coaxed some commercially unreleased material out of Alessandroni for this fascinating archival compilation on their Dead-Cert label.
The title Industrial is perhaps a little misleading, despite the fact these recordings were made in…

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…1976, the same year Throbbing Gristle started the Industrial Records label that gave rise to the genre. As such it’s unclear exactly what the name references; while there’s a loopy, motorik quality to some of the tracks that suggest the sound of industry, as heard on the EMS Synthi VCS3-assisted “Stozzatrice” and carbonated sound of “Highway”, it’s the acoustic textures that give the record its flavour. Somewhere between the iron filing hum of Morricone’s spaghetti western soundtracks and a strange proto-version of Einstürzende Neubauten are tracks like “Compressione” and “Avvicendamento”, which sound like a wheelbarrow of instruments bumping down a long flight of stairs. Rarely does library music come with a signature as distinct as this.

Miss Kittin and The Hacker themselves had cemented their affiliation to the more mainstream shores of new wave in their own “1982” a few years before then – it’s not the ‘80s, but it’s a cocaine-tinged, MTV-gorged, EU-disillusioned and much more cynical approopriation of the era, which might just retain some of its magnetism.
The world of the Hervé-Amato duo was one of trashy, inky European paranoia which recited pointless mantras in auto pilot. A world which pushed buttons on a synthesizer not in search of interesting sounds but as the most authentic form of fakeness one could possibly hark back to.
This EP of ‘lost tracks recorded between 1997 and 1999’ reminds the listener of all of that, and it’s rather illuminating. For one thing, because that…

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…time is over, but also because the rawness of these demo tracks. They feel like demos too, as yet lacking that last coat of rubber-red varnish, and shows them to us in a certain innocence, gets us into the plastic without the mask.  “Leather Forever”, for example, belongs in a kind of dreamy electroclash rather dissimilar to anything they actually released at the time. There’s an intensely heard-before drum machine, starry whirling disco synths, but unlike any of the finished products, there’s something languidly idle about it. A strange mixture of two moods, the duo’s classic nocturama with a lazy diurnal pinkish feel which makes the whole thing much odder, and actually more fun-lovingly perverse (‘screaming I love you with a belt around my neck’).

“Nightlife” however proves to be more mysterious than the S&M anthem that precedes it, more unsettling and almost unnervingly subdued. Caroline Hervé displays her signature style for delivery, what might or might not be proto-political reflections (‘sexy nightlife in Berlin: East? Or West? Or in between? ) in a cheeky playground tone. As an added bonus, she sounds like she’s talking from underneath a car seat, a whole range of impressions which nobody’s quite been able to match.

On “Miss Crazy Bullshit” she’s so filtered she sounds gagged in a stream of ribbons of synth staircases and dirty, squelchy pulses reminiscent of I-f’s Space Invaders are Smoking Grass or of the slower shores of Dopplereffekt’s early, odder pieces. “Loving the Alien” closes the show, updating a sci-fi dream with great allure, marrying an alien to escape the horrors of human behaviour. Michel Amato gives into his most Italo-tinged, cosmic dreams, alternating obsessive rhythms with squeaking eerie modulations. It might be naive, but it’s a song about transgression and bewilderment, and hammers home how these two were up to some sumptuous stuff in a dance scene which, after all, they weren’t completely in line with.

They were maintaining strange balances of old and new, elegant and vulgar, vain and introspective and as much have they might have crashed into the mirror of their own consciously-performed superficiality (especially Miss Kittin, whose later stuff really didn’t rise to the challange), they were making music about difference, about fucked-upness, and that’s worth defending. Unlike some of their peers, the glistening Miss Kittin and The Hacker duo might just avoid aging badly, and end up brilliantly crystallised, frozen in time.

Quite what these two Everything But the Girl records would have sounded like had Todd Terry’s sleeping giant remix of ‘Missing’ not gradually conquered the world in the mid-’80s is anybody’s guess. In the accompanying sleevenote with the remastered and expanded edition of Walking Wounded, Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn recall “we were of a mind to make a follow-up to Amplified Heart that expanded on its folk-breakbeat template.” The record was to involve Brad Wood, an engineer known for his work with Tortoise and The Sea and Cake. However intriguing that sounds twenty years on, the influence of the electronic scene into which the duo were thrust still had a positive and enduring impact.
Bolstered at the time by further frothy house remixes by the afore-mentioned American DJ, but…

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…launched with the drum ’n’ bass tinged title track, their folk-pop safety net was cast aside for the nine songs that made up the first of these two records. Despite the shifting textures, which seem a lot less out there in 2015 than they did in 1996, their knack for insistent melodies and Thorn’s wonderfully understated vocals remained. ‘The Heart Remains a Child’ is a truly beautiful bit of mid-paced pop: a rustling percussive loop paired with keening acoustic guitar and an aching lyric. ‘Flipside’ features a fabulously misaligned double-tracked vocal atop a woozy, stuttering beat, while ‘Mirrorball’ feels like a logical evolution of their older sound.

Three years later and it no longer feels like the pair are keeping a foot in their past. Temperamental didn’t have the same commercial heft as its predecessor and failed to leave its mark, despite containing several of the band’s finest songs. ‘No Difference’ is a wonderful late-night walk in the rain, mid-paced brooder crying out for a dimly lit movie scene to keep company, while ‘The Future of the Future (Stay Gold)’, in collaboration with Deep Dish, feels like the logical successor to the remixed magic of ‘Missing’. A euphoric house track with a glorious melody and some neat electronic burbling, it concluded the original album and, in so doing, concluded Everything But the Girl’s career.

These sensitively remastered reissues, the final pair in a campaign covering their entire catalogue, augment the original records with an assortment of remixes, live performances and unreleased material. Most of the latter take the form of demos, but the previously unheard ‘Above the Law’ is appended to Walking Wounded and sounds like a curious blend of all of the album’s different sounds in one. However, Temperamental off-cut ‘Come In’ seems like it’s still missing its main vocal and is insubstantial. The assortment of remixes are of a wildly varying pedigree, as anyone who spent the Nineties buying multi-formatted singles will convincingly attest.

These beautifully presented packages are a fine way to rediscover two rather forgotten Nineties treasures that still have plenty to offer. Walking Wounded is the superior set, but both show how the band had hit upon a sound that truly suited them only to call it a day.

Whether they realise it or not, millions of people know the music of Soichi Terada. After all, the Tokyo producer’s childlike melodies have bleeped out of consoles across the world as the soundtrack to the Ape Escape games. Until then, Terada seemed to be playing a game of his own, one that could be called Deep House Simulator. From the early ’90s onwards, Terada’s Far East Recordings has specialised in Eastern impressions of Western deep house.
On Sounds from the Far East, Hunee compiles the best of Terada’s tracks for Rush Hour, alongside a few from his compatriot Shinichiro Yokota.
Parts of Sounds from the Far East are like the aural equivalent of Amerikamura, the Osaka district with a model Statue of Liberty and the stars and stripes strewn in every window. But whereas that…

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…neighbourhood retains a sense of Japanese character beneath all the Americana, Terada’s take on US house and garage isn’t just indistinguishable from its original source — it’s just as good as the real deal. With its pounding piano and diva vocal, “CPM” is a house cut Masters At Work would be proud of. “Shake Yours,” too, is loaded with New York flavour. Terada’s love for that city was reciprocated when Larry Levan remixed “Sun Shower,” a track he produced in 1989 for the Japanese singer Nami Shimada. That one appears here as a reworked instrumental with beefed-up disco stabs, crisper drum fills and a faint echo of Madonna’s “Vogue.” But these guys weren’t only looking to the US for inspiration: Yokota rips Gaznevada’s Italo classic “I.C Love Affair” for “Shake Yours,” and “Purple Haze,” “Low Tension” and “Binary Rondo” all have a breezy ’80s Balearic vibe.

Some tracks hint at Terada’s future career: “Hohai Beats,” “Rising Sun Up” and “Voices From Beyond” are as cute and bouncy as a Japanese video game character. You might also say they’ve got about as many dimensions, at least in emotional terms—although Terada can do chilled, upbeat, jazzy, deep and soulful sounds with equal aplomb, the mood of each track is normally just a variation on “deliriously happy.” But that makes them fun to jump between, and Sounds From The Far East will have many house heads grinning for a full hour.

Charles Murdoch’s world is made of humid slo-mo sex and dreams of bathing in neon lights.
The Brisbane producer, who signed to the Australian label through a remix competition, dropped his first release on Future Classic back in 2013 and has since remixed the likes of Hayden James and Bodhi. Point compiles eight tracks of laid-back pop and sees Murdoch collaborating with a handful of domestic artists including Oscar Key Sung, Ta-Ku, Wafia, Hak and Banoffee.
“Just a touch, just a taste,” Banoffee begs in Back to It, which Point tantalisingly delivers. None of its woozy electronica is in yer face — less is certainly more, with Murdoch keeping the edges soft and the beats even softer — but the visual side of this album (the three videos culminating with…

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…Oscar Key Sung dripping his soul-boy lyrics through Privacy) packs a hell of an uncomfortable punch.

The Album starts out with Nothing or You (Ft. KUČKA) kicking it off to a classic smooth deep house/ electric vibe, this is followed by Frogs (Ft. Ta-Ku, Wafia and Hak) which starts to pick up the usually house vibes and starts the record on its way, this is kept up with Fray (Ft. Chloe Kaul) and finally hitting home with Privacy (ft. Oscar Key Sung).