‘Permanent Rain’ is introspective listening. Lean back and let your ears catch a source that moves, breaths, resonates and rises, until a quiet truth swells upon us. XIII captures truth in all its honesty. Sometimes it feels so physical, it’s as if time and elements of nature are peeled of layer after layer. This record combines songwriting with sonic hypnosis. A rhythmic, esoteric oasis, containing currents of mysticism, yet accompanied by contemporary electronics. Its elements translate to a brew of mutant raga, neofolk and tripped out celtic fantasies.
Following up his anthemic late-summer burner, Hope, Credit 00 returns to Pinkman to deliver the album Midnightlife Crisis. Hopping between genres whilst remaining resolutely coherent, the twelve-track LP is a showcase of the Rat Life boss’ many influences. From the driving, mesmeric techno of Music Is A Spiritual Thing to the sci-fi electro on Bouncing Bell and Love Warrior’s downtempo, half-time shuffle, the collection of tracks is broad and varied yet simultaneously unified by belonging to the club. Whether it’s warm-up material, peaktime rollers or afterhours sludge for tired legs and scrambled heads, there’s something for every scenario on Midnightlife Crisis. And with recurring themes of melancholy and anxiety throughout, the album perhaps reflects that all too familiar period for every club enthusiast when the years are ticking by and the lights are coming on.
‘Rule The Streets’ is Timothy “J” Fairplay’s latest album on his label Dungeon Module. After 2021’s ‘A Snowstorm In The Tropics’, 2023 has been a busy year for the label. In February Timothy released ‘Dungeon Module Volume 1’ followed by ‘I Lay Awake At Night Scheming’ in August. This album was recorded in Timothy’s current studio, with his Casio RZ-1 central to the set up. 8 raw jack tracks inspired by the early days of house music, and catches Timothy at his most minimal. The early days of the Chicago and Detroit and how they drew influence from Europe in their stripped back sound is an endless influence on Timothy’s work. The bumpy opener ‘Rule The Streets’ has a vocal refrain which sounds like something from a 70’s gang movie. ‘Insufficient Funds’ is a playful jam based around a junk shop delay unit. ‘Pleasure Beach’ an 8 bit house/funk beat track. ‘Back To The Stone Age’ with its flanger heavy percussion and a booming Adonis style vocal. Side B starts with ‘Instant Replay’ with its rolling 808 toms and white noise intro. ‘Safety Patrol’ has a deeper Mr Fingers feel, followed by the stalker-ish ‘Gang Bass’ with its sampled live bass and strings. Last of all is ‘Livin’ It Up’ made entirely with the sampler on the RZ-1 sounding like a Lil Louie demo.
New Scene was a project created in the late 80’s by Arno Müller and Markus Barth. They were part of the roaster of the German label BOY Records together with acts like Time Modem, Cybex Factor and “O”. New Scene released in 1989/90 two singles/mega-mixes under the title of “Out of Control”, becoming both classics in the German Techno scene. Their third single “Tonight” also turned to a big success in the clubs and pushed New Scene to release their debut and only full-length album “Waves” in 1992.
A brittle metronome in a delirious tension landscape, Women’s Hour are a Glasgow based experimental post-punk duo featuring Contort Yourself head honcho Murray CY and artist Jenny Wicks. Creating noise, harmony and disquiet washed in synth and repetitive guitar, rough beats and distorted vocals, Women’s Hour are constantly trying to embrace the shouting in their heads. LIES presents their debut release, a 12 track LP, a true to form jagged 80s post-punk affair, the two piece bring to life the day to day in the grim North through their music.
T4T LUV NRG presents “Call Me G”, the new album by Brooklyn’s Russell E.L. Butler. In the intervening years, Russell has experienced an accumulation of personal subjective experiences which are explored through captivating musical modalities and expressions on this sprawling, gorgeous, and deeply emotional album. Russell’s work on “Call Me G” can be described as a unique amalgam of early NY house music, dub techno and poetry. The album’s title track, as well as its instrumentals, are a kind of storytelling for histories that continue to exist without observation as well as for secrets and the power they hold in spite of their truth being obscured and sometimes lost.
Debut album from UK jazz saxophonist and composer Miles Spilsbury, featuring Carlos Niño. ‘Light Manoeuvres’ is about warmth, generosity and openness. The music which would become Light Manoeuvres was sketched in fragments, but began to take shape in earnest during a period of living under the Marseille haze in the South of France. The specific character and opacity of the light in Marseille inspired the album title which imagines the movement of light passing over different subjects and spaces in intricate motion. Sand blows over from the Sahara on the Sirocco wind and is whipped up by the Mistral, the Marseille sky becomes golden and vapoured, then intermittently pastel blue. That image stuck while shaping this body of work, and became integral to the function of the compositions – which act as jumping off points for the players and myself, vehicles for improvisation and gateways to something else entirely.
For more than thirty years, Ruud Lekx has been corrupting hearts and minds with his unmistakable brand of synthesizer music. Under his Rude 66 mask, this titan of electronics returns to Bordello A Parigi with twelve darkened tracks for ‘Conditioning Consciousness’. Tempos glide low in the opening incantations. From the breathy murmurings of “Magick Angels’ Invocations”, the listener is brought into Rude’s world. Shauna Lekx’s signature vocoder lyrics and blackened subject matter are central tenets, as are hauntingly delicate melodies. “The Riddler In Me” is a deep psychological journey through cable and circuit, an unsettling monologue accompanied by liquid analogue lines. BPMs are allowed to rise for the shimmering warmth of “In Exile” and in the reverb soaked “The Chariot”. But these are the outliers. Across the collection, percussion drives without ever being a central force. Instead, the focus is the bewitching and brooding compositions. Take the drugged low slung groove of “The Talisman of Algol” or the loose modulations of “Le Sagittaire”, here the listener is brought into the heart of the machines and the musician. The curtain close, “The Five Swords Of Venus In Aquarius” gathers a spread of influences, bringing them together into one piece. Synth. Soundtrack. Strings. All culminate in this superb climax, a climax to an album that broaches the boundaries between terrifying and terrific.
Gifted & Blessed returns with ‘Heard and Unheard’, an album that distills years of making music in a variety of styles and under different names into a singular statement. In addition to producing electronic music as Gifted & Blessed since the early 2000s, Gabriel Reyes-Whittaker has dabbled with many other aliases over the years: as Frankie Reyes, he explores his Puerto Rican heritage by playing Latin standards and originals on vintage keyboard instruments; as The Abstract Eye and The Reflektor, he creates dancefloor anthems with electronic hardware; and as GB and Julian Abelar, he’s released sample-based productions and techno adjacent dance music.
Frankfurt am Main producer Electrodefender is back with his signature West Coast influenced electro. 15 tracks on his new release “Music Is Worth It”, serving up electro-funk and ambient journeys.
‘Dimension Intrusion’ was the first full-length studio album by Richie Hawtin, who was 22 years old at the time and living in Windsor, Canada. It was first released in June 1993 under the F.U.S.E. name on Hawtin’s own Plus 8 Records imprint and again as the second release of Warp Records seminal ‘Artificial Intelligence’ series. The album compiled previously released F.U.S.E. EPs from Plus 8 complemented with new music specially recorded for this release. It would be a fundamental album for the young producer, who was experimenting with different themes and techniques to find his very own sound. Largely inspired by sci-fi movies he used a collection of synthesizers and drum machines, playing with their electronic yet warm sound effects and in turn discovering some of his favorite instruments.
Third album from Rouen cold & arty band Love In Cage, between some cold synth electronic tracks, some post-punk anthems and a deep lynchian dark rock on the second half of the record. Perfect marriage of 80’s sound & contemporary music. A must have for wave & cold lovers.
Jonathan Fitoussi & Julie Freyri are Model Alpha. 8 years on after their first album Dimensions, Perceptions is the duo’s second album and was entirely composed on analog synthesizers. Model Alpha is inspired by electronic artists such as Kraftwerk, Laurie Spiegel, Manuel Göttsching or early Detroit techno productions. An elegant blend of synthesizers and drum machines including remix by Chloé (Thévenin).
‘Teachings In Stone’ is a self released album by Greek producer Aggelos Baltas AKA Anatolian Weapons. It is available for download only on his bandcamp page. All tracks produced 2019 and remixed 2020.
What are the differences and similarities between human and artificial sound, between oscillations generated by vocal cords and synthesizer voices, voltage amplified by speakers? On ‘Silencio’, his latest album for Tresor Records, Moritz von Oswald works with a 16-voice choir to explore this concept. Drawing from the ensemble works of long-standing inspirations Edgard Varèse, György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis, von Oswald and Vocalconsort Berlin delve into the space between sounds, creating a deeply textured collection that shifts between light & ethereal and dark & dissonant. The vast dynamism of the human voice adds to the profound weight of electronics while offering up a rhythmic source and sonic noise palette unexplored in von Oswald’s repertoire. In Silencio, von Oswald dredges a dank murk, pulling clouds over a distant pulse. It hangs, ready to take on new forms.
‘LXXXVIII’ is the ninth Actress album to be created by Actress (Darren Cunningham) and the very first presentation of Actress’ voyage into luxury sonics. A lifetime in the making, ‘LXXXVIII’ is the culmination of 25 years’ honing mind-shorting, soul-igniting audio infusions for dance floors, rave dens, festivals, and concert halls. ‘LXXXVIII’ pays dividends to meditate on an instrumental facet of its creation: game theory. Indeed, deep strategic thinking – more readily associated with economics and chess than artistic practice – was fundamental to Actress’ process as ‘LXXXVIII’ was channelled into existence.
Obliques and Atmospheric present their new album “Golden Apples of the Sun”. It is the result of close cooperation between Suzanne Ciani and Jonathan Fitoussi. The American electronic music pioneer has joined the French composer to sign a four-hand album around mythical synthesizers like Buchla, Moog and Ems. Mainly recorded in California, facing the Pacific Ocean, the white sound of synthesizers mixes constantly with the sound of the waves and wind. The music generated is directly blended with the surrounding elements of nature. It is both organic and live, hypnotic and rhythmical, powerful and dreamlike.
Felipe Gordon presents ‘Psychedelic Melancholia.’ With his new album, the praised Bogotá phenomenon producer shares the melancholy of a period of his life and the emotions that come with it. Through eleven tracks punctuated by collaborations with the finest artists on today’s lo-fi scene, including Saib and Made In M, among others, Felipe Gordon introduces a new sound while maintaining jazz as the primary influence. Drawing from hip-hop, boom bap history, and the transcendental energy of Indian music, ‘Psychedelic Melancholia’ showcases his eagerness to explore diverse genres. Creating its own hypnotic, infectious sound, enter the colorful world of ‘Psychedelic Melancholia.’
Cosmica Bandida’s debut studio album “Lagrimas Saladas” is an amalgam of sounds influenced by the diverse backgrounds of the members, who find themselves in Munich a city where the leftovers of cosmic music and 70s disco meet cumbia and tropical vampirism. Dark cumbia and psychedelic music collide with the moods of space disco in an album that engages the body. On the flip side, a group of eight remixers has united to deliver remixes for all the Club enthusiasts out there. Lipelis sets vinyl lovers on fire with his Dubby Disco Remix of “Salsa Bandida”, while MaSpaventi, Volta Cab, Los Pulpitos, and Hektisch Sprengen DJs bring their soulful and dubby trip-hop torch songs to the release. Prepare yourself for Grischerr & Heap’s glitchy and deconstructed industrial reggaeton remix of “Pájaro del desierto”, along with a powerful deconstructed club beatdown by Kobermann. Jacques Satre’s psychedelic stupdep remix adds the perfect finishing touch to the package.
The Hipodrome Of Music 