Juno Recommends Leftfield: July 2022

Review: As part of the 2016 Ghent Film Festival, the first ever 'greatest hits' album for Ryuichi Sakamoto's soundtrack work was released. This retrospective LP compiles the best selections from the entirety of his career, from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence to The Revenant. Now reissued 5 years later by Silva Screen, the album sees a wider, exclusive blue vinyl edition, capturing the swelling pangs endemic to Sakamoto's music for screen.

Review: Ever since the release of his first solo album more than 20 years ago, German musician and producer Christian Kleine has experimented with blending and contrasting the varying textures and approaches of post-rave IDM, breakbeats, shoegaze and punk. His latest album offering, Touch & Fuse, shows he's continued to refine and perfect that combination, which is less a conscious concoction and more of a natural outcome of the music he likes. From the edgy Aphex-isms of 'Val 2' and the heavily filtered breaks of 'Reverse Angle' to the slowed down grunge meets pure electronics of 'Return of the Underground', this is unique, accomplished stuff.

Review: Korean-American house DJ Yaeji has been a force to be reckoned with in the House scene for half a decade now, working with the likes of Charli XCX on 'February 2017' and remixing 'Dont Start Now' for Dua Lipa's 'Club Future Nostalgia'. She blends all of the subtle elements in the growing K-House scene with the tropes we all love from New York's scene. Celebrating the 5-year anniversary of her acclaimed EPs, this limited double-pressing is a thankyou to fans who have stuck around since the beginning. 'Yaeji' and 'EP2' feature high-class production that will make you instantly fall in love (The bass on 'After That' is killer) From fan favourite 'raingurl' to 'New York 93', this record is filled from start to finish with house perfection, married with Yaeji's subtle vocal stylings in a mixture of Korean and English.

Review: Houses Are Silent - to use the English language translation of Belarusian post-punk and cold wavers Molchat Doma - have managed to buck the trend of nobody in the West really paying much attention to the Belarusian music scene by rising to underground prominence since they formed in 2017. Helped in no small part by finding a way into the record bags of tastemakers on radio stations like NTS, one listen to their work and you'll wonder why you're not moving to their homeland to find more bands to love, clear issues with oppressive politics aside.

Taking big influences from 1980s Russian rock music - another scene that's criminally under-explored by many people in our corner of the world - nostalgic hues cover every inch of this record, and yet it's also forward thinking. Like a sci-fi movie from the past. It's harmonious, dark, moody, uplifting, heart-wrenching and eerie. Basically, buy it.

Review: French director Jean Luc Godard - a founding father of the French New Wave cinema movement - once quipped that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Incredibly active throughout the 1960s and 70s (arguably his heyday albeit he's still making great flicks today), his message was clearly heard around that time by Mario Monicelli over the border in Italy, who made The Girl with the Pistol, a 1968 comedy that tackles some meaty themes head on (bride kidnapping, honour killing).

An Oscar-nominee (Best Foreign Language Film), leading lady Monica Vitti walked away with a David di Donatello for Best Actress (the Academy of Italian Cinema awards) and rightly so. The movie is great and well worth digging out, partly because the soundtrack is so mesmerising. Just three tracks are here, but three great ones. Mixing swinging rock R&B, strange Frontierland scores and trippy, acid rock, it's a surreal ride everyone should take.

Review: Megastar siblings Billie and Finnean Eilish are known for their original music that by and large appeals to the TikTok and Instagram generation, but occasionally, they set their sights on composing for movie franchises (James Bond, etc). They do the same again here; UMC throw a rather odd yet charming curveball and release their whippersnapping original songs made for Pixar's Turning Red on translucent 7" vinyl.

Review: Given the atmospheric, hallucinatory and pleasingly otherworldly nature of Vasily Stepanov and Vlad Dobrovolski's work as S A D - which so far has resulted in a handful of limited LPs and ultra-limited cassettes - it's little surprise to see the pair pop up on 12th Isle with an album of solo tracks (some credited to alternative aliases) and collaborations. Musically, what's on offer draws much from the kosmiche world of 1970s Krautrock, dub, the intergalactic end of ambient and John Hassell's 'fourth world' music, but also doffs a cap towards music concrete, mystical percussion music and experimental electronica. It's inventive, enjoyable, odd and utterly brilliant. It's well worth checking.

Review: This is the debut album by Jack Wyllie, JQ and Richard Pike under Forgiveness (the former of which may be noted for their mercury-nominated work under Portico Quartet). With two singles released earlier this year 'Rainbird' and 'Mushroom Umbrella', being whimsical, Japanese-influenced pieces of new age, jazz and electronic instrumentals. The compositions are natural, light and spacious, with 'Rainbird' being a culmination of John Surman's 'Edges of Illusion' and Hiroshi Yoshimura's 'FEEL', both of which listed in the group's inspiration playlist 'Communiques from the Ocean Floor' which spans over eight hours. The beauty of the collaborative project is how it blends from the natural to the synthetic seamlessly, like on title track 'Next Time Could be Your Last Time' where flute passages give way to frantic synth patches that wouldn't feel out of place in a Royksopp song. It's the perfect blend of 3 incredibly talented artists.

Review: Sometimes, artists are able to reconcile collaborating and facing off at the same time. Now, we're pleased to announce that Electro-arena experts (and by proxy, label) Kitten Robot have provided ample opportunity for such a spectacle to take place. like the musical equivalent of a souped-up boxing ring, they present 'Dark' Mark Lanegan in the red corner and 'Skeleton' Joe Cardamone in the blue. Zombified electroclash beats blend with gushing male vocals as one throws a swift right hook, while the other goes straight for the gullet with Waits-style croons over electronic ambience. Turning In Reverse', 'Sunday Night' and 'No Justice' are our match highlights - we'll be playing them on repeat.

Review: Not named after the notorious-famous Berlin techno institution Tresor, but instead taking its name from 'treasure' in Cornish, Gwenno presents her third full-length studio album, largely written in St. Ives, with most of the words Cornish, too. If that sounds pretty adventurous, then wait until you hear the tracks themselves, which benefit from handiwork by collaborator and friend Rhys Edwards, who is also credited with production of the record.

Introduction over, this is a wildly diverse and spectacularly different album. At times things feel haunting, almost choral. In other moments, we're in a 1960s-hued pop-y place, while work like 'Ardamm' seems born amid the dark room chug of underground goth post punk disco. Overall, it's certainly the artist's most spectacularly idea-filled outing, ensuring nobody is going to forget about it in a hurry.

Review: Jacob Long's third full length LP under Earthen Sea sees the New Yorker weave together a slew of downtempo tracks, pulling from dub-techno and chillhop sensibilities, in a tracklist that feels like you are in the center of a steel sphere, as tracks like the Lo-Fi 'Stolen Time' and 'Rough Air' reverberate around you. Ochre Sky is a real highlight off the records back half, the mellow timbre and interspersed organic percussion (including a sample of a sink splashing) evokes a slow paced walk through a luscious garden. The material quality of Ghost Poems is what makes it so special, with each of the 10 tracks constituting a different biome to an expansive diorama. From the warm sunbeams of 'Fossil Painting', to the underground lakes of 'Felt Absence' each track has something refreshing to offer.

Review: Following the wonderful sound path they established with the Luke Sanger and Hoavi LPs, Balmat continue apace with this stunning ambient excursion from Patricia Wolf. Previously spotted in Portland, Oregon outfit Soft Metals, Wolf strikes out this year as a solo artist with this and an adjacent album on Past Inside The Present. Her approach is slow and refined, capturing a certain organic mystery in her simple, patient arrangements. The palette is clear and open, but it's the arrangement rather than the sound design which truly captivates on this flawless ambient album.

Review: Spring has sprung, and for many, Vivaldi's original 'Spring' composition might have just as quickly sprung into the minds of most classical heads. But perhaps most of y'all didn't see this one coming. We were bowled over on hearing news of Max Richter's electronic recompositions of Vivaldi's 'Seasons' 10 years ago; there hadn't been a proper vogue for electronic resources of classical music since Wendy Carlos did 'Switched-On Bach'. Now it gets another 'alternative rendering' (keyword: rendering); performed by an ensemble that almost entirely consists of Black, Asian and ethnically diverse musicians, we hear yet another futuristic take on a stone cold classic, with Richter himself playing a vintage '70s Moog.

Review: There's a healthy stream of Nurse With Wound reissues occurring at the moment - check the stunning Salt Marie Celeste double CD drop on Dirter. But now here comes something contemporary from the minds of Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter, fittingly maintaining the nautical theme. Shipwreck n' Roll did sneak out in 2021 as a limited art edition but now it gets a wider release, reportedly assembled from "flotsam, jetsam and driftwood gathered in the Lofoten Islands in 2004, reassembled at IC Studio, London 2021." It's a Nurse With Wound release through and through - an arcane 7" of strange, artfully assembled sounds with a challenging but curiously compelling quality.

Review: With hindsight, Cabaret Voltaire's move towards synth pop and electro on Micro-Phonies feels entirely logical. They would arc further with the development of electronic music into the 90s, and Richard H Kirk was also pushing this sound in some of his solo works. Prior album The Crackdown had already hinted at the direction, and now Cabs were stepping out of the post-punk murk to deliver hooks, floor-friendly rhythm sections and plenty of machine funk. Industrial die hards at the time might have been outraged, but on balance this is still the edgy end of the synth pop spectrum, and even at their poppiest they were never a banal concern. From 'Do Right' and 'James Brown' to 'Sensoria' and 'Spies In The Wires', Micro-Phonies is jam packed full of incredible tracks, and ranks amongst Kirk and Mallinder's finest work.

Review: Kelly Lee Owens's third album, LP 8, is another masterclass in building ambient layers into alluring noise. She herself calls the album "an outlier" as it makes a move towards more caustic and abrasive sonic textures and industrial sounds. It was written like many recent albums during lockdown after her tour of 2022 was cancelled. The Welsh singer, producer and songwriter hooked up in the studio with Norwegian avant-noise artist Lasse Marhaug and took cues from both Throbbing Gristle and Enya and the resulting record is intricate and emotive, with stone deco-messages in the final three tunes.

Review: 'An Orchestral Suite For Tape' is a compilation specifically curated for playback on the noble cassette tape format, featuring orchestral arrangements by Texas-Indiana duo zake & City of Dawn. Including songs from four albums and one compilation, the first time these tracks have been available on tape, the mood is deep and meditative, the billowing clouds of synthesisers providing ample space for thought and relaxation alike.

Review: German record label Bureau B have compiled 70s and 80s German electro-punk, trance, breakbeat and more into the first volume of their Silberland series, a self-contained post-war world of counter-culture German underground that was on the bleeding-edge of sound. The avant-garde and floor-fillers collide in a showcase of collaborative spirit from the country at the time, trying to fill a cultural void that the war left. Expect cosmic synth passages, ritualistic electronic grooves in this delve into psychedelia expressed only in the metallic beeps and bumping bass of the Komische scene. It's cerebral and slightly uncanny in its thought-provoking approach that is crucially German, if not that of a Sega Mega Drive soundtrack.

Review: As part of the 2016 Ghent Film Festival, the first ever 'greatest hits' album for Ryuichi Sakamoto's soundtrack work was released. This retrospective LP compiles the best selections from the entirety of his career, from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence to The Revenant. Now reissued 5 years later by Silva Screen, the album sees a wider, exclusive white vinyl edition, capturing the swelling pangs endemic to Sakamoto's music for screen.

Review: A rigorous recollection of all the music that went into last year's Netflix smash The Queen's Gambit. You were probably too busy trying to keep up with actress Anya Taylor-Joy's timer-stopping and piece-placing chops to notice the ingenuity of the soundtrack; packed with contemporaneous music to the time in which the series is set, from Donovan to The Monkees to The Vogues, we're duly thrown back by this new 2xLP edition (which comes to a special black and white colour vinyl). Check it, mate.

Review: Hydeout Productions have been carrying Haruka Nakamura's work since 2013's Melodica, and now they're back in partnership for the gorgeous contemporary classical lilt of Nujabes Pray Reflection. The album is a tribute to the late Japanese beat producer Nujabes, considered a godfather of hip-hop in the vein of J Dilla until his untimely passing. Nakamura's work centres around classically-trained piano composition reinterpreting some of Nujabes' beats, but it happily takes in a broad tapestry of instrumentation to create vivid, expansive pieces rich with sentimentality. The entire 12-track run is beautiful and elegant without fail, shining some of these treasured beats in a whole new, previously unimaginable light.