New releases last four weeks: All genres

Review: Well Curated is a series of releases and parties that - in its own words - "reflects the ethnomusicology of the last 50 years of music" - and aims to reach into all genres, merging classic styles and breaking down barriers. Steve Spacek occupies the A-side with the breezy broken beat and soul-in-space of 'Alone In Da Sun', while Lukid's 'Hair Of The Dog' is a more intense counterpart, with wobbling sub-bass and swirling, surging atmospherics hovering above.

Review: Originally released in 2005, Silenced captures the essence of The Black Dog's enigmatic allure, transporting listeners to otherworldly realms with its lush, tuneful compositions and angular genius. Each track on the album is a testament to the group's unparalleled ability to surprise and entrance, evoking a sense of both unease and beauty. For fans of The Black Dog, Silenced serves as a welcome treat, while also serving as an entry point for those new to the group's mesmerising soundscapes. Definitelt one of their best full length albums yet to date.

Review: Finally, the debut Bochum Welt album Module 2 has been reissued after an initial run on Rephlex. Bochum Welt (Gianluigi Di Costanzo) has just recently celebrated 30 years of releasing music. His brand of IDM, electro and techno has been often copied but never equaled. His futuristic music seems to always be forward thinking and ultimately, timeless sounding. This edition is on matching green vinyl and includes all the classic material of the first release. Fans of AFX, Squarepusher and Cylob are sure to be aware of Bochum Welt. But for those who aren't....

Review: French outfit Chateau Flight have spent two years in the studio making music, playing around and experimenting and now the fruits of that work are presented on this new album La Folie Studio. It is full of the sound of analogue machines conversing and the artists themselves speaking through their darkened basslines or eerie pads. Occult worlds are crafted, ambient soundscapes are cooked up and leftfield cosmic explorations occur throughout a journeying album full of a wide range of emotions. This lovely record features guests on the odd track such as Johnny Nash on guitar, Cosmic Neman mumbling on 'Mange', John Cravache playing 'his special organ" and Bony Bikaye singing on 'Esika Molimo Ezali'. It's an occult world of left of centre sound that will keep you coming back for more.

Review: The legendary experimental German band Einsturzende Neubauten is back with their first album since 2020, Rampen (apm: alien pop music). Since their formation in 1980, the band his sought out to blaze their own trail in making what others would assume is noise into their own brand music. Their own music language was created and brought with them legions of followers that have added a bit of Einsturzende Neubauten's influence to their own sounds. The band has once again pushed their sound even further - alien pop music. This edition comes on yellow vinyl.

Review: Industrial music formed amidst the concrete decay of post-war Berlin, Einsturzende Neubauten emerged as pioneers of genre. Their sonic alchemy fuses unconventional instruments crafted from scrap metal and construction tools with traditional ones, creating a raw and unsettling symphony. Their new double album "Rampen (APM: Alien Pop Music)" showcases their sonic prowess. Despite the abrasiveness of their sound, the group's music is imbued with a sense of theatricality. Blixa Bargeld's stoic vocals narrate surreal tales of urban decay and existential unease, while the band's live performances evoke industrial rituals. Over the years, the band's music has evolved, incorporating elements of ambient and even pop into their sound. Yet, their core ethos remains intact: to challenge musical boundaries and create a sonic tapestry that reflects the harsh realities of the modern world. This album still helps cement the band moving forward but still respecting their past.

Review: Einsturzende Neubauten's description by label Potomoak - as a band that constantly evolves - is accurate enough. Over forty years on from their debut album Kollaps in 1981, Rampen appears as the latest and most unruly incarnation of their sound yet. Here, Blixa Bargeld, N. U. Unruh, Alexander Hacke, Jochen Arbeit, Rudolph Moser and Felix Gebhard present their least predictable and conventional sides: APM is described as alien pop music; the songs therein have been specially crafted not only for our universe but for every adjacent parallel universe to ours, with every slight multiversal variation in humanity's collective tastes held firmly in mind. The album fully lives up to its billing as anti-pop as alien pop, its challenging twists and turns fully sating the difficult whims of society's outcasts and cosmic punks.

Review: Japanese industrial noise duo The Grogerigegege are something of an urban legend within the underground music scene. Apparently meeting at a sex club where a shared appreciation for envelope pushing sex acts, punishing aural sonics and a bizarre avant-garde perspective on art would lock them together for ensuing decades of musical mayhem. Known for incorporating nudity, violence, broken glass and hoovers into their live set, the pair would even take a lengthy respite while one of the members simply disappeared for years on end before reconnecting with his counterpart. As If It Had Always Been Determined Since This Day Was Born transports listeners back to the pair's earliest forays into calculated extremity with blown out, overdriven remixes taken directly from the master tapes of their first 7" single released back in 1988. This includes the long sought after remaster of 'Mistress' originally used in the legendary Enoshima Beach Flexi Burning Live (which the pair opted to burn all original pressings of rather than make readily available). You do have to remember these are the same lads who sold dried out octopus tentacles in cassette cases during one tour as a limited release, and smashed up the master recording of another work and put the broken pieces in a metallic box that the listener shook to hear the album, hence the title You Are The Music Maker. If the utter lunacy of The Grogerigegege isn't detailed enough here, well this pressing comes complete with 5500 word essay-style liner notes penned by 55 year old Gero himself (Juntaro Yamanouchi).

Review: Cult English electronic duo I Monster aka Sheffield based record producers Dean Honer and Jarrod Gosling dropped Neveroddoreven, their second studio album, on 21 July 2003. A little later than first planned, it now gets a special 20th Anniversary re-issue on CD as well as this double gatefold. It incudes the original album plus three new singles and the much loved acoustic version of 'Daydream in Blue' which even if you don't think you know, you will, because ti has been rather ubiquitous in ad campaigns for brands including Ford and Magnum Ice Cream. Also helping to keep this band relevant after all these years was their single 'Who Is She' going viral on TikTok in 2023 and picking up 290M Spotify streams.

Review: The second solo releases from Edward Ka-Spel to appear on the Lumberton Trading Company label offers eight spectacularly original compositions from the outsider artist. These are tracks that bore their way into the heart and mind through startlingly personal moods and meanings. The atmosphere is often tense, and, when it's not, 'surreal' is the word that springs to mind - albeit more unusual hallucination than comical experiment. 'Platform 5' might be the best example of how unnerving things can get, the low, rumbling synth bassline underpinning spoken word, distant, almost inaudible harmonic refrain and eerie chorus. 'No Show Tomorrow' asks "what if they had a war and nobody showed up' to seemingly disconnected tones, notes and noises. 'They Seek Her Here' ups the tempo with a synth-wave-breaks trip through dystopian spaces.

Review: South African Warrick Sony is a ground breaking composer who was behind the Kalahari Surfers project which now gets a vital spotlight courtesy of Emotional Rescue. This compilation shows how effortlessly eclectic his sound was - from jive rhythms to jazz, tabla to political speeches and much more in between. A Hindu pacifist who was once conscripted into the South African Defense Force, he founded this group as a way out getting his ides out there, calling on other musicians as and when he needed them. It was the first radical white anti-apartheid pop in South Africa and as this vital collection shows it explored polyrhythms, slow motorik, dub sound collage and even a goofy cover of Nancy Sinatra.

Review: Tape Reworks Vol. 2 is the new 12" remix edition of the 2021 album Tape Works Vol. 1 (2021), by the UK's leading musique concrete ensemble Langham Research Centre. With the latter album following up the introductory Tape Works Vol. 1 (2017), which recollected the group's earliest experiments, the second album focused entirely on more recent, original splicings, cuttings and respoolings of the former modernist statement. Now, in turn, come two new remixes of the project by Kara Lis Coverdale and Beatriz Ferreyra, the former of 'Movable Fields' and the latter of 'Nachholbedurfnis'. Coverdale's version is an arresting, looming abstraction, capturing a sense of cosmic loneliness through exoplanetary whistles and deep subs gleaned from the original album's pickups of brutalist buildings; Ferreyra's is jerkier and stranger in palate, utilising glassy transitional sound effects and rapid, sped-up-slowed-down warbles.

Review: Contemporary tastemakers Geilgling return with a set of remixes of material from Leafier Legiv's recent album, Mirror. First up it is German minimal maestro Isolee who flips 'Fade' into some of his signature sounds - smeared synths and abstract designs all weave together over a minimal beat to make for something seductive and late night. Polish loop master Jan Jelinek then flips 'Fade' into a slow motion shuffle with bright, celestial shards of melodic light and downbeat, melancholic vocals over a chugging beat. Last of all is a mix of 'Jing' that is all broken loops, chopped vocal fragments and hallucinogenic synths.

Review: Mount Kimbie demonstrate their expansive ability to metamorphose over time, with the Sunset Violent being their first record (the follow up to 2022's MK 3.5: Die Cuts I City Planning) to document their efforts as a quartet, as opposed to the simple duo project of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos. Now with composer Andrea Balency-Bearn and Marc Pell (Good Sad Happy Bad), the project brings an ever-so-slightly more conceptual slant to the mix, with the album centring thematically on the UFO sightings of the Yucca Valley, California, and the interplay between the literal desert in that part of the world, and the figurative desert of London (where the album was completed). As ever, the likes of 'Fishbrain' and 'Boxing' deliver indie-electronic buildups, as driving as they are infectious, mixed with the distinctly sepia-textured moods and performative tastes of London's finest (King Krule among them).

Review: Few bands have sidestepped expectations as cannily as Mount Kimbie. Initially a duo but now expanded into a quartet, the British band has previously excelled in mixing, matching and fusing a wide range of experimental and left of centre electronic music influences. On The Sunset Violet, their first full-length as a quartet, they've shifted sonically once more, leaning into their indie-rock influences on a set recorded in California. The latter aspect - and the impact of being surrounded by sunshine and desert - is reflected in the warmth and haziness of the sound, which draws on the layered vocals and guitars of vintage shoegaze while also reaching for more familiar aspects of the band's previous experimental electronic sounds (for proof, check the ghostly musical vision that is King Krule collaboration 'Boxing').

Review: Ilian Tape's ITX Series provides another opportunity to sink into some deeply escapist ambient and drone soundscapes from the usually dance floor-focused breakbeat and techno label. MPU101 has served up a few of these EPs before and they always find them coax plenty of magic out of their analogue machines. 'TEAM 700_76' is a nice and bleary-eyed post-Blade Runner soundtrack, 'BLOCK-1_2AREA666' has a darker undercurrent of menace, 'TrailerparkBeauty' brings some twinkling celestial keys and 'Sunset Memories' closes on frazzled chords that speak of heat damage from a scorching sun.

Review: Eleven miasmic, brooding tape meditations from the legendary Bryn Jones, reissued and packaged by Ukrainian label I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free. Recorded in the immediate wake of the Oslo I accords, the album both bares Jones' stance on the peace pact and eerily predicts its aftermath, with humming, resonant drones, tinny vocal fragments and reversed percussion colliding in aural analogues of political tension, distrust and cyclicality. Overall it is an equally meditative and ominous listen, peppered with many of the hallmarks of mid-nineties Muzlimgauze productions, from swung, steppy, proto-DMZ ride cymbals, to plucked FM synth MIDI earworms, to his ever-present swathes of darkly churning string drones. Essential!

Review: Horror of the Hexham Heads by The Night Monitor is a haunting and immersive journey into the realms of the unexplained. Inspired by the eerie electronic experimentation of the 1970s and the enigmatic lore of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, The Night Monitor skillfully weaves layers of analog synthesis and spectral ambience to create a spine-tingling sonic landscape. Listeners are invited to explore the murky depths of the paranormal saga surrounding the Hexham Heads, a pair of stone heads that mysteriously appeared in the town in 1971, with dissonant whispers and pulsating rhythms guiding them through the unknown. The result is a genuinely chilling experience that resonates with mystery and intrigue, capturing the essence of one of the weirdest supernatural news stories of the 1970s. Bob Fischer of Fortean Times aptly describes it as a "glorious celebration" of the unexplained.

Review: Reissued via French label Rotorelief on its 35th Anniversary year, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella is the debut album of trailblazing noise and avant-garde musician Steven Stapleton. Catapulting Stapleton's macabre alias to success in the thin breath of just three through-composed drone pieces, this sonic statement was unparalleled at the time (1979), with its unusual mix of prepared tinkerings, feedback drones and cog-jams famously causing Sounds magazine to momentarily abandon their five-star rating system to specially award the album five full question marks. Absurdly sadistic, the album is also known for its original publication of the infamous Nurse With Wound List in the liner notes, which listed the entirety of Stapleton's influences going into the album's making - some acts named therein were so obscure that many fans speculate as to whether they were invented. An exemplary work of outsider music - or at least, one that is infamous by proxy to the more baneful works of the outsider music archetype - get ready to hear all things spectral over the more sustained tones: chains rattling, chairs squeaking, shakers shaking, even monologues in French.

Review: Steven Stapleton is Nurse With Wound. Originally a band, sometimes abbreviated to NWW, since 1978 the English act has explored a range of dark and brooding styles, including industrial, dark ambient, drone, and noise. Well known for sound collages - usually pretty intense in nature - influences come from the dada and surrealist art schools, cabaret music, John Cage, The Beach Boys, Krautrock, and Musique Concrete. She & Me Fall Together In Free Death is, in this instance at least, the highly anticipated reissue of the landmark album which proved just how good NWW is at all forms of song craft. Work here edges into the eerier end of Liars collaborating with Tom Waits' at his most experimental and that's really clutching for reference points. Quite unlike anything else you'll buy today, we promise.

Review: Prince Istari's earliest memories are of his mother playing the tranquil melodies of Erik Satie's pieces on the piano. Skipping school, he'd bask in the sun, absorbed by the serene tunes and years later in 2024, rediscovering his mother's sheet music sparked a creative resurgence. He transformed them into dub versions, crafting a tapestry of sound, and each piece's form dictated its direction, evolving from heavy dub to delicate piano and synthesiser blends. The finale, a relic from his past as Istari Lasterfahrer, features a distorted recording of his mother playing Satie to complete the circle. This special record comes in limited quantities of just 200 copies.

Review: Analogue synth spooks rejoice, Pye Corner Audio is back with further explorations of the sweet spot between nostalgic fuzz and circuit-borne futurism. Ghost Box is a spiritual home for Martin Jenkins' flagship project, and he continues to edge out the scope of the Pye Corner sound without derailing the fundamental atmosphere. On The Endless Echo, warm, pulsing melodics set to eerie keys abound, and there's a fine balance between gorgeous ambient atmospheric pieces and sinewy, danceable rhythms, but Jenkins manages to sound fresh and inspired even while reliably holding true to the overall project aesthetic.

Review: Four years after his acclaimed Brame long player, Julien Chastagnol aka Ruby My Dear returns with his fourth album, A dada. It is another experimental sound world that is a joyous yet intricate fusion of drill 'n' bass and IDM, akin to what the artist himself says is "a breakcore lullaby." Across all four sides of wax, he goes in hard on the breakbeats and tightly programmed drums, with layers of scuzzy heavy metal sounds, looped and warped vocals and mind-melting synths that fizz and spin, explode and impulse on a constant basis to leave you feeling exhausted mentally and physically.

Review: At least one person has described Scythe's work as "expertly modulated space blues and isolationist architectures." First emerging from the ether (or at least that's how we like to think of it) through a series of clandestine cassette releases on Low Company in 2019 and 2020, Head X'Change almost feels like the culmination of all that has come before. A weird and truly wonderful place to spend time. A collaborative project between David West and R.A. Jones, elements of kosmische intermingle with a kind of earthy ambience, DIY electronics leading into white noise moments or new age melodies. At times it's so joyfully opiate you wonder if there's any way of getting back up off the pillow. In other moments, there's tension, eeriness, and uncertainty. Once you're in, it's a wild ride indeed.

Review: Brothers in sounds (and lineage) Mark and Clive Ives deal with two of the biggest issues impacting music right now on one incredible record.WOO have a reputation for taking parts of archived sounds and formulating new things from those segments, and in this case the work is born from excerpts of four-track tape recordings made in the late-1980s. They then began reflecting on the "imminent nature of humanoid robots", and starting to create Xylophonics/Robot X. From artificial intelligence to reuse and sample politics and economics, these themes seem to guide the sounds themselves, which feel strangely nostalgic and futuristic, a vision of tomorrow that is inseprtable from the humans that made it - their understanding of the unfolding machine age through weird distorted jazz tech, deconstructed dub and psychedelic electronica. So, remembering all this is a reconfigured version of stuff made almost 35 years ago is truly mind-blowing.