Calibre returns with his enigmatic dub influenced drum and bass sound, smooth piano stabs with silky rolling beats. His sixth studio album does nothing to dispel this belief and signals a return to his early noughties heyday when he knocked out sublime and understated but fully formed musical gems for fun. Standout tracks “Who’s Singing” and “Mirage” are both haunting lessons in liquid and the tougher edged “Garbage Man” and “Schlager” are built for maximum impact.
Sushitech presents the new Delano Smith album, An Odyssey. Delano shows us the musical world he is living in today. Taking all of his experiences from the past years, all the various styles of records he has played and all of the inspiration that has soaked into his soul from playing in major clubs and cities around the globe, the album comes together as a single entity and represents the sound of Delano Smith and his work with Sushitech. The album sound is deep, lush and dry just as you would expect from a true Detroit legend. Moving all the way from Deep House to Techno, Delano and Sushitech have collected his best works during the last 2 years and compiled an album of new tracks and unreleased rare mixes.
The second Knowone album 3x12Inch with a slightly change of sound that moves away from the smokey dubby tracks to more melodic Detroit influenced tracks.
New Rick Wade album on his own Harmonie Park label! This album is a soundtrack for the graphic novel; ”Neverending Reflections.” The story is a joint collaboration created by Abdul Haqq, Shinichiro Watanabe and Dai Sato, and features Rick Wade as the main character.
Erupting from the seamy neon-lit wasteland of Los Angeles, California – Frank Alpine’s self-titled debut offers a darker, sleazier view of the current cold-wave resurgence. In fact this disc might have more in common with the shuddersome compositions of Chris & Cosey than it does with the contemporary Brooklyn indie set. There’s a no-wave grit to Alpine’s pained squeals, and over double-time electrical beats he eulogizes a city in decline. It’s hardly even ‘cold’ at all – the sound of Frank Alpine is soaked in sweat, booze and the remnants of a night out you’d rather forget.
”On a quest for his ancestral roots our hero suffers a CPU arrest. Unable to recover, certain death is only a matter of time.” On the fifth release of the Astro Chicken Records from Germany, it’s no more ”Mr-Cosmic-nice-guy”, but psychedelic electro all the way! 7 track, mini-LP with custom made fold-out funeral card.
One of the UK’s most endearing electro stalwarts presents his debut solo album after nearly ten years of operations. All that experience has been funnelled into his eponymous LP, a sexy, melancholic crush of Italo, Electro, Synth-pop and disco bearing vocals from none other than Fred “The Voice Of Italo” Ventura and Marika Gauci of Hotel Motel. Marika opens the account on a Freestylin’ Electro ace ‘Snowdrift’, while ‘Mont Chaberton’ is pure Euro-synth romance, and the likes of ‘Zombie Raffle’ and ‘Pagan Run’ put his sleazy spin on fat-bottomed slow disco. ‘Fade Away’ features a typically cool vocal from Fred Ventura on some kinda savant-electro-boogie rhythm, but we’d have to say our favourite is the humid Italo/EBM throbber ‘Flies a Kungan’. Lovers of phat, raw, analog electro need to check this album instantly.
Ukrainian producer Gendroid has managed to travel to the past. He projected his body (and his soul as well) in the early 80s, for capture what happened in the Hip Hop/Electro scene, when Roland TR-808 and Oberheim DMX were the “hearts” of syncopated rhythms of breakdance. Gendroid is walking on the streets of LA, with a big radio on the shoulder, and he is starting acrobatic dance on the tracks of his EP. Vocoder, scratches, break rhythms and a lot of basses are the main ingredients. When the show is at the end, the time machine is turn on again to push the time traveler until the age of dinosaurs.
Re-press of a secret masterpiece by Peter Baumann (under the alias Hacoon Mail) and Hans Brandeis. Music that lies somewhere between Space Disco and Minimal Wave. Beautiful synth structures with Leda’s mesmerizing vocals on top.
Nite Vision is a project from Nigel Rogers aka Perseus Traxx and Mantra that moves around early US midwestern’s house music sounds with a dim twist – which results in analog drum machine patterns melting over moody floaty pads and obscure synth leads. Rogers returs to Ben Boe’s label with a solid 9-track LP named ‘The Time Is Now’.
Part 2 of the black box… containing mental afro-american post-apocalyptic industrial tribal techno for your average sunday afternoon.
Elektro Guzzi deliver one of the most thrilling live performance models for techno and an innovative leap in the art of band performance at the very same time. Parquet, their second studio album sees them in an unprecedented monomaniacal techno mode. Throughout the 9 tracks the distinctions between instruments and roles are totally vaporized. While their instrumental approach is at the core of their aesthetics, it really doesn’t matter anymore if one sound comes from a guitar or bass or drum – it has all been merged into one sonic unit and all there is, is the music as a unified entity. While all the qualities of live performance are at hand – real time interaction, visual plausibility, instant miniscule adaptations – it is a radical break with what group performances have been about so far. The rhythms are stripped down to the core and structured for affecting longer stretches of perception. Every track comes with a distinctive, almost “branding” feature – like the hypnotic meter-shifting line of Affumicato, the gated chords of Pentagonia or the abridged rhythm of Absorber.
‘Light Box’ is the first artist album to bear fruit from the recent studio partnership of James Ruskin and Mark Broom – aka The Fear Ratio. As The Fear Ratio, Broom and Ruskin delve into the hinterland of contemporary music. A space where cold atmospheres meet lush melody and tough, yet clipped pulsating beats. From the warm polyrhythmic funk of ‘Ax’ to the deep spatial reverb of ‘Guv 1’, the dub induced strains of ‘Pinhead’ and melancholic refrain of ‘Morning Blues’ Ruskin and Broom deliver their new artistic agenda.
300 Degrees is a side project by IJO, dedicated to live electronic music made with vintage drum machines, synths and other analog gear. Recorded live as a part of a performance / improvisation between 2008 and 2010. Some of the tracks on this album have been previously released on “Napalm Enema Records” and “Cactus Island Recordings”.
Composing an entire electronic album around the notorious 15th Century Cult Of Assassins, New Jersey based producer Jorge Velez, better known as Professor Genius, has created a unique and ambitious piece of work, under the guise of “Hassan”. Largely based around layered atmospheric Arabic-styled synth work and sparse percussion throughout, Hassan employs an entirely electronic palette to bring listeners into a secret world filled with darkness, drama, triumph and chaotic dissonance. The release includes also remixes by Steve Moore, Marcos Cabral and Steve Summers.
After several releases on Creme and M>O>S, Nation as well as collaborations as 2AMFM, Saturn V, X2 etc, here is D’Marc Cantu’s debut Album on Creme JAK.
The duo of Travis Stewart (Machinedrum) and Praveen Sharma (Braille), utilize the broader canvas of the album format to develop their collaborative process and incorporate the diverse influences present in their solo work to their sonic mixture. But both artists add a crucial sense of emotional sensibility and melodic sensuality that defines the Sepalcure sound.
Tropic Of Cancer wrap up their time on Downwards (before their full time move to Blackest Ever Black) with a retrospective of their Downwards EPs and a collection of early demos. ‘The End Of All Things’ is Tropic Of Cancer’s tender farewell note to Downwards, collecting their two 10″s for the label together with a cover of Soft Cell’s ‘L.O.V.E. Feelings’ and new, unreleased material – seven tracks in total.
Astounding new material beamed via Shemale’s Atomic Allotment, concealed in an outermost shadowy recess of darkest Hyperborea. The musical paintbrush creates a harsh, barren landscape for ‘Hell Transformation Screens’, as deeply brooding electro and dramatic synthesisers propel each musical journey in its own unique style.
Wt Records takes another expected turn by releasing a mini LP of new wave tracks from Momentform. The first track, ‘Momentform is Fake,’ spans the gap between new wave and house with 707 rhythmic patterns and raw, unedited bass lines. ‘Selected Works’ with its melancholic vocals and juno arpeggio has a way of finding its way into your brain and staying there. 6 tracks of excellent melodies and melancholy angst make this a great record for listening from start to finish.
The Hipodrome Of Music 