Managing to encapsulate in an album that fleeting period of transition between day and night is no easy feat, but it’s something Federico Albanese has managed spectacularly. With The Blue Hour, the Milan-born, Berlin based ‘piano poet’ has crafted an album as elegant as it is melancholy, in which the lasting impact is only matched by each track’s transience. That might sound paradoxical, but the delicate compositions, made up of little more than piano, synth and cello, are as fragile as the period of time from which they take their inspiration. At least when taken on an individual level. As such The Blue Hour is a record best taken in in its entirety, allowing its icy textures, glacial pacing and stark sobriety to ease their way in to the listener’s conscious, resonating long after the final notes.

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Despite being completely instrumental in its delivery, The Blue Hour‘s narrative is evident; a testament to Albanese’s ability as a composer, the rich swells of string and synth envelop listeners, much like the approaching night it mirrors. And though ambivalence and melancholy are indeed the prevailing moods, it’s a record punctuated with occasional moments of hopeful exhilaration.

‘Migrants’ and (to a lesser extent) ‘Time Has Changed’ both bristle with an inherent optimism that’s difficult to ignore. The former floats on an airy bed of electronics and major key piano, the latter pulses with an understated intensity, adorned by delicate trills. For the most part however, the pervading sense of darkness isn’t just in the periphery. Tracks such as ‘Shadow Land Pt 1’ are back-boned by an ominous cello, whilst the title track ‘The Blue Hour’ throbs with mournful resignation, the cello once again serving to magnify the melancholy.

Given track titles such as these, coupled with the dichotomy of hope and hopelessness, optimism and resignation, one might also take a secondary reading from the record’s narrative. One interested not just with the transitory period between light and day, but that transitory period between one destination and the next, the grey area between what was once considered safe, and what will represent safety in the future. In other words, the ‘migrant crisis’ that’s facing Europe currently.

With Albanese’s location in Berlin, as well as his Italian background, it goes without saying that he would feel affected by such events. And even though such a narrative might only be a secondary reading, an undercurrent of sorts, track titles such as ‘And We Follow The Night’ or ‘The Boat And Cove’ suggest that not only such are such narrative strands present, but they’re told in chronological order as well.

Of course, with the record’s sombre tone, the presumed ending is somewhat bitter-sweet. ‘Stellify’, whilst strikingly simple in its beauty, means to literally turn to stars, and whilst this is the perfect bookend to opening track ‘Nel Buio’ (meaning ‘In Dark’) one might also presume that the metaphorical journey of the migrants wasn’t a complete success.

Ephemeral though the record’s inspiration may be, the haunting beauty, fragile melancholy and instrumentation that speaks volumes all makes for an album that reaches far beyond its three quarters of an hour run-time. One of the most hauntingly beautiful records you’ll ever hear.

…Los Angeles’s Not Not Fun label has always taken an ambivalent stance on how the internet has influenced cultural exchange. Starting as a resolutely DIY label for homemade lo-fi crud before eventually evolving towards a sleeker retro-futurism, their aesthetic has nonetheless been consistent from Day One in its longing for more mysterious times, when a catalog insert was the closest a music fan had to a Twitter feed.
The music of X.Y.R. (Xram Yedinennogo Razmuwlenuja, aka Russia’s Vladimir Karpov), then, is a perfect match for NNF’s nostalgic approach, and for the cassette medium in particular: wielding a vintage Formanta mini keytar and claiming to make music that facilitates imaginary voyages to different lands and times, Mental Journey to B.C. does its…

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…damnedest to earn a place next to any reputable collection of thrifted Jean Michel Jarre and Steve Roach tapes, or at least some time on Hearts of Space. It is an album chockablock with soft focus synth washes and tinkling melodies, with machine rhythms that are insistent but gentle.

It all goes down pretty easy and, aside from some trip-hop insinuations hither and yon, clings pretty steadfastly to the conventions of its forebears. Said clinging didn’t sit well with me at first: whether stationed at my computer or walking around with headphones, I just couldn’t seem to connect with Mental Journey To B.C.. I’ve long been fond of music like this, but have mostly leaned towards albums created at a time when doing so involved a great deal more challenge and imagination. One tries to accept each thing on its own level, but how to deny that this sort of sound had probably been done to death by the time Karpov was in diapers?

Clearly, one needn’t deny this, because a) it’s demonstrably true, but b) it doesn’t matter. While it’s hard not to fall victim to such linear, capitalism-driven perceptions of musical production, Karpov is still making this music now, he should feel free to do so, and he does it pretty well. What, then, is really the problem?

The answer, naturally, is context. I was trying to appreciate Mental Journey To B.C. without meeting it on its own level. While walking around my house listening to it again and trying to take it in, I noticed I’d left a lava lamp on earlier in the day, and it was doing its gloopy thing at full bore. Leaving the lava lamp going, I plugged the music into bigger speakers, which I then connected to a sound-sensitive LED light a friend had built me for my own musical performances. I turned off all the other lights in the house, sat down, and took in the album that way. Finally, it all made sense, more that that, it felt good. As I dropped my filters one by one, concerns of originality and the like became moot. Mental Journey To B.C. isn’t the only place to get these kinda kicks, but it does the trick. Sometimes that’s enough.

Producer and guitarist Leo Abrahams has always been hard to pin down. There can’t be many people who have collaborated with both Paolo Nutini and Leafcutter John, while his 4 previous albums have run the gamut from folk (Grape and the Grain, 2008) to art-rock (The Unrest Cure, 2007), ambient electronica (‘Scene Memory’, 2006) and songs (Zero Sum, 2013). Daylight is similarly uncategorisable, its 13 tracks existing right at the edge of song form. There are long instrumental passages; vocals, when they do arrive, are a blend of words and mangled textures. ‘It is,’ says Abrahams, ‘an album of deconstructed songs, although some are more deconstructed than others.’
Daylight combines live contributions – Stella Mozgawa from Warpaint plays drums throughout,…

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…and Abrahams’ guitar is much in evidence – with a significant dose of electronics. Brian Eno sings on one track. Abrahams has worked with Eno before, as well as with Pulp, Roxy Music and Anthony and the Johnsons among numerous others.

Roman DJ/producer Giorgio Gigli has been releasing sparse yet subtly detailed hypnotic techno tracks since the mid-2000s, but his debut full-length, The Right Place Where Not to Be, departs from steady techno rhythms, crawling into a sort of murky dark ambient/industrial hybrid. The throbbing midtempo beats here keep pretty low to the ground, and the gaseous atmospheres are so heavy that sometimes the beats are more felt than heard. It often feels like roaming around an alien landscape where the surface is just barely solid, and it’s difficult to make out anything beyond a few inches from your space helmet, but you get the sensation that something’s moving in the distance. “Surrounded” adds a slight bit of acid tension to its swirling, creeping ambience, and “Nocturne” seems to have more of…

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…a crunch to its rhythm and growling bass synths. Titles such as “Eve of Destruction” hint toward impending doom, but there’s more of a sense of wonder and excitement than terror.

Japan’s Koki Emura (EM Records bossman) is an incorrigible reissuer, putting out obscure and hard- to-find gems from all corners of the globe and with a distinctly elegant presentation every time.
Roland P. Young has been at the centre of the EM catalogue, boasting a whopping three LPs for the label already and he’s back on the map this time with a stunning new full-length of improv, experimentation and that usual charm.
Created in 2014 after a move to Tel Aviv, Confluences marks a new phase in Young’s oeuvre, with a title both signifying the cultural blend of his new home region, and his ability to naturally comprovise disparate musical influence and textures – clarinet, bass clarinet, kalimba, NAF flute, keyboard, voice and electronic accoutrements.

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Blending properly rugged but smartly reduced rhythms with pensile synthlines and minimal acoustic phrasing, it’s possible to draw a clear line between this sound and the meld of early machine funk and new age memes in his 1980 LP, Isophonic Boogie Woogie or 1987’s Hearsay Evidence. But what’s really getting us is how fresh, yet out-of-time-and-place, this record sounds: opening pair ‘Clutch’ and ‘Estimationism’ feels like a synthesis of alien Afro-Jazz and ‘Cichli Suite’-era Æ, while the dubbed-out industro drums and marimbas and celestial flutes of ‘Late Afternoon Light’ recall lysergic Finnish folk music, and ‘The Light of Night’ could almost be a premonition of the forthcoming Jamal Moss and Arkestra collaboration.

If you’re familiar with Tristan Perich as a music composer, you are aware of his affair with 1-bit music, or a sound that allows only one bit of music to be played at any given time. Minimalism, purism, discipline are the three components that make up his music, and this album in particular.
Commissioned and performed by the Meehan/ Perkins Duo, Parallels is part of a series which will continue in the spring with another composition (Telescope), then one in the summer (Dual Synthesis) to end in grandiose fashion with Active Field , or the love marriage between ten violins and 10-channel 1-bit electronics, together with the Ensemble Signal conducted by Brad Lubman, one of the most brilliant young conductors around.
Commissioned by Todd Meehan & Doug Perkins,…

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…Parallels is a piece for hi-hats, 4-channel 1-bit electronics and tuned triangles, and it is the exploration of the virtually infinite possibilities of percussive sound. Considering Tristan Perich’s renowned talent for the visual arts – some of you may already know his most famous work, The Microtonal Wall , or 1,500 speakers, each playing a single microtonal frequency – his music is obviously closely related to a quasi-cinematographic feel.

One could easily see the obvious similarities with Steve Reich’s work – with Music for 18 Musicians being an understandable influence – but what Perich manages to do is enhance the magnitude of the interaction between man and machine, with one completely intertwined with the other.  “With this series, I’m experimenting with presenting my compositional work as a collection of singles rather than curated albums”, says Perich on the press release. “I want to connect the listening experience back to the original composition, as well as highlight the separate roles of composer and performer. It is the performer who translates score into sound, a live event that is captured and becomes the recording.” And one can’t help but feel the live element; a component which becomes apparent, probably due to the album’s precarious balance (or “parallel”) between tone and noise, accent and cacophony, on some sort of poetry of oppositions. It is precarious, delicate, but not demure, implicit, frail.

We can easily expect Parallels to be the perfect departure point laying the foundation of the future releases with its mixture of pulses (both mechanic and organically-induced) and discipline, and we might be fascinated by the cleanliness of 1-bit music, but what is certain is that this is music that can be enjoyed and examined at various levels. The mesmerizing facet or the mechanical approach? The purity of the bit or the mellifluent stream of music as a whole?

Both are by-products of 46 minutes’ worth of a trance-like descent into the realm of simple and yet tremendously effective music. One way or another, Perich manages to construct a postmodern, rich piece of art by deconstructing his craft. One way or another, the listener is drawn to this piece from the first minute to the last because the listener is themselves part of the experience. Or simply because this is, indeed, something else and it needs to be experienced.

In late 2013, Roly Porter released Life Cycle of a Massive Star, a mammoth LP of deep, celestial movement. The former Vex’d member was ambling away from his dubstep roots and toward a form of near-beatless electronic ooze. Just over two years later, Porter has returned with his third solo LP and Tri Angle debut, the dramatic Third Law.
Just as deep and cosmic in scope as its predecessor, this album eschews traditional beats in favour of a primordial throb, a rhythm that seems to originate deep within the planet’s core. Enrobed in a thick coat of static and flanked by darkness, these eight lengthy pieces are full of all manner of uncanny spirits. The quiet strings of “In System” are supplanted by the gauzy ping-pong of “Mass” and a crescendo of white noise invades “High Places”…

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…before dropping off into a chasm of emptiness. On “Departure Stage,” a glimmer of hope shines through, proving that Porter hasn’t yet given himself over to the dark side completely. A lesser mind would have dissolved inside the sinister haze that is Third Law.

Sydney alternative dance band RÜFÜS return with their sublime sophomore album, Bloom. The record is a self-proclaimed product of isolation and saturation, inspired in part by the terminally chill group’s immersion in the throbbing nightlife of Berlin, and influenced further by their time spent writing in the sunny surrounds of Suffolk. Brighter, Daylight, and Until the Sun Needs to Rise all continue singer Tyrone Lindqvist’s obsession with natural imagery and sunshine, as the band switch between celebrating the sunlight and missing its presence. After an excellent sequence of tracks beginning the album, You Were Right dives straight into the deep sea. “I’m sinking further down,” Lindqvist sings, disappearing further from both the love and light he adores. The two ideas are…

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…intrinsically linked in the group’s music, their songs working best when these concepts are brought into full synergy. The ocean separates them once again on Like An Animal, while a threatening storm looms over the horizon of Brighter.

It’s when the band loses this sense of tension that the songs on Bloom lapse into the indistinguishable background. Daylight‘s literal treatment of their addiction to sunshine fails to transcend its own solipsism, and Be With You features a sample from the Sydney gospel choir that feels like a bridge to a chorus or greater idea that never arrives. It is however only a minor detraction from the song, and the boys deserve credit for experimenting within their genre. Stretching themselves thematically may never be their priority, but the Melbourne group are increasingly becoming the masters of their stylish sound.

Akase is the new collaborative project by UK house and techno mainstay Midland and vocalist Robbie Redway. The duo take their cues equally from brooding electronic rock and R&B, and Graspers, their first LP, has the makings of a crossover; it combines dense electronics with emotional vocals and presents both via accessible song structures.
The record’s strengths are the beats and instrumentals that underlie Redway’s singing. Cleverly subtle polyrhythms and hook-driven synth work make the record a worthwhile listen, but unfortunately, Redway’s vocals get in the way of these elements more often than they accentuate them. Unsurprisingly, the tracks that feature Redway’s voice chopped and sampled and without straight lyrics, “Beseech” and “Extract,” are…

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…the most satisfying ones on the album. These two tracks point to the duo’s real potential.

Akase is in the process of developing a live show, and while Redway’s slightly affected delivery holds this record back, his bombast and passion might be exactly what’s needed to energize a crowd.

Following on from a near two-year break which has been free of outings on R&S Records, Alex Smoke AKA Alex Menzies has since revived his relationship with the esteemed Belgian imprint in time for his next LP venture. A self-professed purveyor of music that’s never been short of labels such as ‘moody’ and ‘minimal’, the Scottish veteran producer’s latest outing in Love Over Will, continues to crystallise on these descriptors. Topping up his discography with a further thirteen brooding productions that draw on influences spanning The Law of Thelema to his own unique interest in installation art; Menzies focuses his efforts into honing in this thought-provoking, signature sound, characterised by its use of intermittent vocal snatches and wistful sonic accompaniments to great effect.

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Upon listening to the nascent LP in its entirety, the words of Menzies himself from a 2013 interview are called to mind; “I never really thought of myself as part of this whole party scene anyway, as for me electronic music is so much more than just music to get wasted to”. Nowhere is this credo more evident in Love Over Will than in its leading track ‘Fair Is Foul’, where Smoke’s trademark, enigmatic vocals breeze their way in throughout the duration of the track to serve as a focal point against a glistening backdrop of slow-rising synths – the weight of emotion plain for all to see with lyrics like “there’s nothing left for us to know”.

As fans of the Glaswegian producer will know only too well, the solemnity of Menzies’ work as Alex Smoke has always proved itself to be multi-faceted; transcending the sphere of electronic music to incorporate the multi-instrumentalist’s penchant for classical instruments. Fast forward to 2016 and this truth remains intact, as Smoke dexterously employs a duo of cellos on ‘Galdr’ – creating something of a funereal presence along the way, before it boils over into a disorientating flurry of clicks and stabs. In addition to this, reminders of Menzies’ choirboy past are littered across the LP wherever traces of his vocals lie, but it’s with ‘Astar Mara’ in which something of a celestial dimension is taken on as a result of the producer-cum-vocalist’s reverberating tones that guide us for the one minute and 55 seconds that follow.

Those who may want to approach Love Over Will with the club in mind ought to turn their attention elsewhere, as the seasoned producer once again opts for intensely personal, more leftfield compositions – each one a clear labour of love. Exceptions to the rule are to be had though, and calls for the dancefloor can undeniably be heard within the instrumentals behind tracks such as ‘Manacles’ and ‘All My Atoms’; but, once again, Smoke rejects this pressure in favour of simply doing what he wants to do. Long may he continue to do so.

Ulver has been on one long and hypnotic journey since it crawled from the depths of black metal two decades ago. The group’s fixation with blending progressive rock, the avant garde, electronic music and, to some degree, world music in a rich cauldron of inventiveness has yielded more positive results than negative ones and so it should be the case that this collection arrives in 2016 to persuade us that Ulver has once more created something memorable, something that will appeal to several audiences but compromises none of the group’s initial darkness for the sake of acceptance.
The basis of this new double LP, ATGCLVLSSCAP, comes from a dozen shows the band performed in early 2014, not long after the unit had issued its postmodern requiem mass Messe I.X-VI.X.

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The material here is the result of the group improvising in the live setting, blending the dark electronic elements that it has become known for with traces of the psychedelic, dashes of minimalism and rhythms that sway somewhere between Scandinavian primacy and ornate Latin temples to movement and time. Now placed side-by-side the pieces form two possible interpretations: the first of which is an album that evolves with a tension and release strategy in its sequence or a composition with 12 chambers that take the listener through all the same movements and emotions of a well-wrought symphony.

The opening “England’s Hidden” is a nearly eight-minute invocation of the muse that calls to mind the meditative spiritual ecstasy achieved by the Norweigan collective’s sometime collaborators in Sunn 0))); it gives way to the Latin-inflected groove of “Glammer Hammer” which imagines a meeting of, say, Portishead and some sort of sinister dance collective that has met up to score a film that probes the core of human ferocity. The simple melodic figures hypnotize the listener but also open a path toward something akin to musical enlightenment, another plane of existence, of being, of artistic ecstasy that is then enhanced by the psychedelic-cum-soul-cum-blackened electronica of “Moody Stix” and the highly imaginative and completely unforgettable “Cromagnosis”, which carves an exit for the band from the record’s first act.

From there, we take a turn into the atmospheric, the ethereal with “The Spirits That Lend Strength Are Invisible” and “Om Hanumate Namah”, a darkened meditation that calls to mind a more coherent and sophisticated Meddle-era Pink Floyd and, like the rest of the album, provides a glimpse of the possibilities of musical improvisation and the promise of a collective musical mind that can’t be bothered with self-consciousness. (You know, the kind of thing King Crimson could have done better in the past when it wasn’t so caught up in being King Crimson.) From there, we leap to a more esoteric, minimalistic turn via “Desert Dawn” and the aptly titled “D-Day Drone”. These are not lesser tunes, of course, just shifts in the album’s psyche and a righteous counterpoint to the record’s first act and the perfect preview of what is yet to come in tracks such as “Ecclesiastes (A Vernal Cat Nap)” and the closing poem “Solaris”.

As always, Ulver creates its own world with this album, exists on its own terms and asks us to consider embracing something that is outside the norm but well within the human experience and worth the journey of transformation it takes us on. Ulver has once more created a record that will live far beyond this time and will be spoken of in the most reverent of tones and that’s as it should be.

The city of Warsaw has two (equally dour) associations in rock history. It was the original name of a certain morose Mancunian post-punk band before they got all inside-baseball with their World War II references, and it was the inspiration for “Warszawa,” the haunting ambient symphony that heralds the foreboding second act of David Bowie’s Low. As the first Warsaw-based musician in years to plug into the North American indie industrial complex, Tobiasz Biliński doesn’t do much to dispel those grim allusions. He may possess the gentle voice of a sensitive folksinger and the byzantine mind of a composer, but at the core of his music beats the blackened heart of a goth.
The Provider is Biliński’s third album as Coldair, but the first to land in the U.S. (through a publishing…

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…and digital distribution deal with Sub Pop). And from an aesthetic standpoint, it may as well be his proper debut, because it’s less a full realization of what he’s been working toward than a wholesale reformulation of it. Coldair’s previous efforts were more like warm gusts: gentle Nick Drakean serenades guided by winsome, wandering melodies and buttressed by brass fanfares. But 2013’s Whose Blood suggested a creeping unease, with digital jolts and foreboding, Swans-like percussion that poked black holes in the scenery. On The Provider, Biliński reaches into those fissures and tears them wide open, allowing that darkness to become all-consuming. Listen close and you can still hear the acoustic strums and trombone trills that underpinned his earlier work, but here they’re subservient to frosty synth drones, icy 808s, and synthetic handclaps that sting like smacks to the face on a winter’s night. As the arresting opener “Endear” emerges from a misty haze into an urgent, industrial-grade throb, Biliński is transformed from humble troubadour to the high priest at black mass, complete with an ominous church-organ hum that powers the song’s intense finale.

But there’s a bit of a Wizard of Oz effect at play on The Provider—the songs may project a majestic ultraviolet glow, but the dry ice eventually clears to reveal the lonely, wounded soul pulling the levers behind the curtain. Biliński’s language has become brutally direct: “My whole life is falling apart so fast,” he sings at one point, and The Provider can be heard as his attempt to put the pieces back together, resulting in songs that seem both fragile and imposing in their construction, all jagged edges and exposed wires. The overwhelming mood of distress is reflected in the unsettled arrangements—electro-shocked beats clash with militaristic drum fills, pianos and shoegaze guitar drizzle rub up against anxious tick-tock rhythms, meditative melodies hover above dirty dancefloor grinds. But that internal tension dissipates when the songs start to sprawl out, as on the synth-smeared title track or the sputtering bombast of “Suit Yourself.”

The Provider is most compelling when its textural expanse induces claustrophobia. Beneath the clatter, The Provider elicits the discomfiting sensation of eavesdropping on Biliński’s private conversations—with family members, with ex-lovers, with himself—about his feelings of inadequacy in the face of parental and societal pressures. But his voice remains as light as the subject matter is heavy, and is often double-tracked into angelic harmonies that help smooth over the songs’ corrosive surfaces. And even when working with electro-sonics and brittle beats, Biliński’s classically-trained approach to songcraft prevails—on strobe-lit standouts like “Perfect Son” and “Denounce,” he builds big hooks out of scraps and shards, skilfully layering and arranging his minimal elements to maximize their dramatic impact. Ironically, the more oppressive environs of The Provider prove to be a more effective showcase for Biliński’s emotionally charged songcraft than his heart-on-sleeve folkie phase. Because that’s the funny thing about cold air—when the weather turns so frigid that your exhalation produces visible vapors, it feels like you’re breathing fire.

Vancouver record label 1080p put themselves on the digital map in 2015 thanks to a slew of often stimulating, always engaging records by fresh-faced producers like Co La, Journeyman Trax and Project Pablo. With Maligne Range, 1080p’s first physical release of 2016, Laura Sparrow (aka LNS) serves up a platter of dreamy, spaced-out comfort food.
Released digitally and as a 27-minute cassette, the six tracks that make up Maligne Range find Sparrow crafting electronic pieces that demonstrate the young producer’s knack for creating moody synth waves that juxtapose nicely with her skeletal drum beats. Although there’s true aural beauty to tracks like the motorik “Sh,” the capacious “Heart Mountain” and the cascading “Coasting,” LNS never seems to stray far from her established colour…

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…field, making LNS’s debut sometimes feel like more of a primer than a bold accent. Still, it’s a very nice hue.

Seattle’s Christopher DeLaurenti on an urban excursion in deterratorialized space. To the Cooling Tower, Satsop is the second offering from GD Stereo’s Improvisational Architecture series, housed in a niftily tactile, oversize letter press edition. Satsop was supposed to be one of twin nuclear power plants intended to bookend Washington state.
Cooling towers and a network of tunnels were completed but the project failed twenty-five years ago and the area was fenced off. DeLaurenti entered these forgotten figments of progress, and in its passageways discovered an environment “that altered my sense of depth, space and presence.” Slogging through the bilge water of this decrepit flagship, he heads for the cooling tower.

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Within, there is the splash of each step and crazy acoustics only a big, cement tube can produce, and without, there is melody – it could be the song of huge machinery heard from some distance, but it is an insidiously pleasing overture nonetheless. When it falls silent, the undeafening roar of air passing by him scores DeLaurenti´s quest, which was completed, entrance to exit, in exactly the amount of time recorded, forty-four minutes and five seconds.

Oddly enough, this rubber booted, cemented and probably filthy trek is romantically nostalgic, for who as a kid exploring local ravines didn´t discover some unknown tunnel or culvert that just had to be spelunked?

Over the past 11 years, Leif Knowles has produced 25 EPs and two full-lengths, most of which are excellent, and yet he’s far from well-known.
A product of the Welsh scene that peaks each year with the Freerotation festival, Knowles and his peers are low-key personalities who emphasize craft, eschewing trends in favor of classic, if opaque, house music principles like “deepness.”
Taraxacum is the culmination of years of work rather than a breakthrough moment.
Only Taraxacum‘s opening title track uses a typical 4/4 drum pattern. It’s the sound of Knowles dropping breadcrumbs, leading us into a forest of more novel patterns after setting a dubby tone.
“Painted Cakes Do Not Satisfy Hunger” follows with a beautiful, polyrhythmic mess of shaker, flute,…

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…hand drums and stuttering kicks, which snaps into focus around a deft bass guitar performance. “Untitled” does away with all but a hint of percussion, and yet it’s utterly rhythmic. It’s the clearest example of the casual streak that runs through Taraxacum, many of whose tracks unfold, pull you in and then end abruptly, like a friend who never overstays their welcome.

Even if he’s not one for dramatic statements, Knowles creates complex worlds here. Take “Air, Light, Time, Space”—its rhythmic constants are a two-note piano line and a choppy two-step kick, with a dizzying array of wheezing, plucked chords springing up around those simple elements. “An Elephant Madness” is even more impressive: Morr Music-style melodic optimism mixes with bin-rattling low-end, before the mix is overwhelmed with an unsettling percussive chord that evokes Steve Reich’s phased repetition.

Leif is a rare triple-threat, adept with hopeful melody, dub atmosphere and twitchy UK rhythms. His approach so clearly lets the music shine that it’s tough to find a critical angle. This gimmick-free production style is refreshing, and has given us enduring cuts like 2013’s “Circumstance 4” and 2015’s “Life Through Analogies.”

Though largely ignored during his lifetime, H.P. Lovecraft is a writer whose worldview and ideas have subsequently gone on to be profoundly influential.
Like J.G.Ballard and Philip K. Dick, one of his primary themes is that the ordered world we think we know is but a hair’s breadth away from chaos and reality is not to be trusted. However, while Ballard and Dick have gone on to be embraced by both the literary establishment and Hollywood, Lovecraft has remained in the sepulchral shadows, his so-called Cthulhu Mythos inspiring legions of horror writers and B-movie makers, as well as a long line of bands and musicians, from Metallica to Ghost Box.
The latest group to take on Lovecraft’s legacy are spooktronica duo The Duke St Workshop, in collaboration with cult horror actor Laurence…

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…R. Harvey. But rather than use Lovecraft’s characters as just stage dressing for their own music, they’ve actually built an album around readings by Harvey of two of Lovecraft’s stories From Beyond and The Hound. Now, you’re probably thinking that this way madness lies (not to mention Rick Wakeman’s King Arthur On Ice), but Tales Of H.P. Lovecraft is an excellent marriage of spoken word and music that creates a compelling and genuinely disturbing listening experience.

From Beyond is based around one of Lovecraft’s recurring conceits, that the world we perceive is not all there is and that we unknowingly share it with trans-dimensional entities hostile to our existence if aroused. Beginning with a surge of bitter winds and Harvey intoning the ominous line, “He had something to show me,” The Duke St Workshop skilfully create an atmosphere of impending dread using simple piano arpeggios shadowed by cold radiophonic synths. On ‘Tillinghast’, the primordial throb of electronics and lonely cascading melody recalls The Advisory Circle, but while the sonic aesthetic of Ghost Box is an obvious comparison, The Duke St Workshop’s sound is steelier and less allusive.

‘The Machine’ starts with the thudding and whooshing of a malevolent mechanism before transforming into the type of arcane disco that Pye Corner Audio specialises in. Similarly, a fat electro bassline underpins menacing but graceful keys on ‘Negative Forces’ as the hidden universe is revealed. Then comes the tolling of an awful bell, as Harvey whispers with relish of “horrible chaos from beyond” and “great inky black jellyish monstrosities.” A final cry of “they are coming!” and then the concluding piano coda of ‘Lament’, which sounds like a riff on Erik Satie’s famous ‘Gymnopédies’.

Andrew Weatherall, one of the UK’s foremost musical innovators, will return with his first proper solo album since 2009, Convenanza.
The musician, who began his musical exploits on the decks at Danny Rampling’s Shoom club, went on to shape the sound of the leftfield with remixes and production work for the likes of Happy Mondays, New Order, My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream and released tracks with his Warp outfit, Sabres of Paradise, has also spent the past few years curating festivals (including the now annual Convenanza festival in Carcassonne) and creating artwork and photography, while inadvertently inspiring a generation of hipsters with his tattoo-adorned, rockabilly aesthetic. The album, co-written by the Sabrettes’ Nina Walsh…

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…is out on 26 February 2016 via Rotters Golf Club.

01. Intro (00:26)
02. Frankfurt Advice (05:13)
03. The Confidence Man (07:30)
04. The Last Week (05:59)
05. Kicking The River (06:04)
06. Disappear (03:43)
07. We Count The Stars (07:25)
08. Thirteenth Night (03:40)
09. Ghosts Again (06:00)

Bonus Tracks – Japan

10. All That’s Left (07:11)
11. Youth Ozone Machine (04:41)

A Través Del Espejo is another highly accomplished album from composer Federico Durand, his first on 12k. Whilst employing a similar palette of instruments and techniques to previous (excellent) albums like El libro de los árboles mágicos, this collection seems to look less to the forest, hills and skies, instead radiating a warmer domesticity.
Bell-like sounds and scrapes feel close to the ear, close to the hand – you can almost imagine (and at times, hear) Durand reaching for small sounding objects, using microphones as instruments, pushing looping pedals, coaxing gentle collages out of his chosen ingredients.
Grain (whether sound or film), music boxes, glockenspiels, are sometimes associated with a particular strand of uncritical nostalgia, the same…

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…one that gives us ‘retro’ filters for smartphone pictures (perhaps an argument for another day) but there is none of that here; instead Durand gives us ten loose but perfectly formed miniatures that frame a sense of home as both domestic and dream-like.

Highlights could be the crystal clear high end chiming loop at the centre of Diorama, or the burbles and clicks of Canción de la Vía Láctea (Milky Way Song). Indeed, the whole second half of the album is particularly strong, seeming to swell outwards and upwards in a way that confirms Durand as a quiet talent, making the best music of his career so far. A Través Del Espejo is a thing of restrained wonder, a love song to home, hearth and the warmth of magnetic tape.

Following a steady stream of singles and EPs over the last couple of years, Toronto trio Keys N Krates hit the ground running in 2016 with another short- form release on Steve Aoki’s bells-and-whistles label Dim Mak. Though the imprint itself deals mostly with hyper-commercial dance releases, KNK have always managed to keep a big toe underground, while still drawing in the masses. Thankfully, Midnite Mass maintains that same practice. “U Already Know,” for instance, boasts a jungle rhythm beneath squeaky vocals and big wonky horns, while “Nothing But Space” nudges Aqui’s soulful vocals into the fray before dropping its mammoth bass. Leading the pack, however, is the massive “Save Me,” a track that was constructed from some spare a cappellas that UK singer…

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…Katy B contributed.

Midnite Mass is another example of KNK’s ability to craft songs that sound so vast on your headphones that they basically ensure your attendance at their next show, just to hear them fleshed out on stage. The EP also serves a gentle reminder that this kind of arena-EDM doesn’t have to be all substance-less womp.

Quantum Key will be the vanguard of the coming Quantum Gate album which Thorsten, Ulrich and Hoshiko are currently working on. Edgar Froese, the head and founder of Tangerine Dream, had the wonderful idea of translating the current knowledge of the quantum physics – which he was very much interested in – into sound and already started this project before his sad death in January 2015.
The cupdisc Mala Kunia was the first music out of “The Quantum Years” series which was published in November 2014 on the occasion of the MMW Festival concert in Melbourne. It was a great fortune that Edgar still had the chance to discuss his vision with the remaining band members and that Bianca, Edgar’s wife, decided to continue with Tangerine Dream. She knew that Thorsten, Ulrich…

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…and Hoshiko could face this huge challenge with their beautiful talents. At the same time this task would be a unique chance for the music coming into life. So the band continued developing these musical ideas after Edgar’s sudden “change of his cosmic address”.

1. Genesis Of Precious Thoughts (9:13)
2. Electron Bonfire (5:05)
3. Drowning In Universes (11:07)
4. Mirage Of Reality (7:25)