Juno Recommends Leftfield: June 2023

Review: Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan is the musical project of Gordon Chapman-Fox, who creates electronic music inspired by the history and architecture of the New Town (capital N, capital T) he grew up in, Warrington-Runcorn. The Nation's Most Central Location is his fourth album, and explores the theme of the north-south divide in the UK and the broken promises of regional town development - brutal concrete expressed in musical form. Its eight tracks mix ambient, synthpop and industrial, with samples from documentaries, speeches and adverts making up its vocal parts. The album is a nostalgic and critical reflection on the past and present of his hometown, exclusively reflecting on its place in the nation.

Review: If you don't know the backstory then Fred Again and Brian Eno being on the same record might seem rather unlikely. One is an ambient innovator and long-time musical wizard who has worked with the like of David Bowie on his most seminal albums, and the other is a dance music powerhouse who has turned out plenty of pop hits under his own name and worked on even bigger ones with stars like Ed Sheehan. But as a youth, Fred was mentored by Eno, so there you go. Together they fuse their respective sounds perfectly - Fred's diary-like vocal musings over Eno's painterly synth sequences, the whole thing an immersive and escapist masterclass.

Review: Several new reissues of Current 93's music come via Cashen's Gap, the home imprint of said industrial supergroup - which infamously includes musical iconoclast David Tibet among its ranks. Night At The Four Winds Bar Maldoror is one of their albums, released in 2023 - it's a complete reworking of their 1986 album Live At Bar Maldoror, with the original album playing forwards in the right-hand channel and backwards in the left-hand channel. Its 15 tracks explore themes of death, apocalypse and transcendence, using a mix of industrial, folk and ambient sounds. Don't miss it, as it's one of the band's many curiosities, and is a star example of what made the band so lauded as among Britain's weirdest acts in the 80s and 90s.

Review: Anyone who has watched the documentary 'The Sound Of Progress' will know how truly bonkers Current 93 were, and presumably still are. The British experimental group are currently in the process of either reissuing or reinterpreting several of their former LPs and live shows - one of these being Great Aleph Lies Dreaming. This LP is a so-called "ReDreaming" of their 2009 album Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain, and by and large contains an increasingly weird and effected sound compared to the more straightforward original - in turn drew on tropes ranging from the apocalypse to doom metal and stoner rock.

Review: The product of an extended residency in the Swiss mountains, 'On Giacometti' is the Hania Rani's latest album, which focuses on the life and art of Swiss national treasure and sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Moving piano suites tempered by synth backings and ruinous ambiences are the names of Rani's game, all conveying the sense of peace exuded by the same Swiss mountains that struck Giacometti with divine inspiration. This is a black vinyl version with clear also available.

Review: Recorded in 1981, Turning Japanese captures Kraftwerk at the absolute height of their creative dominance, but sometime before their true induction into the household name superstar category of artists. Still representing a very forward thinking, boundary pushing and - as a result - specialist sound, this nine-track live recording feels like yesterday's tomorrow.
Opening with a stunning neo-classical synth overture, we're then taken on a journey through the mind of the man machine, an industrial yet somehow strangely human proto-electro world that is defined by order and structure, while still allowing for enough funk and groove to make sure feet, hips and more move seemingly of their own volition. Perhaps not the most insightful take on the pioneering German band - nothing here that hasn't been said before - nevertheless we hope it goes someway to describing how precise, refined and overwhelmingly infectious they can be on stage.

Review: Oga For Oga is the second solo album by Swedish musician Elin Engstrom, who records as Loopsel, and is also one half of Monokultur. The album is a collection of atmospheric and experimental songs that blend guitar, vocals, synths and field recordings, owing something to the recently popularised sensibility of "gothic folk", with the lines between acoustic and synthetic heard on standout pieces like 'Svart' and 'Hjarta' thoroughly blurred. A formerly DIY-centric project from Engstrom, she's now turned the tide to worldwide distribution, coming to New York's finest DFA Records for the first time.

Review: Three years ago, Dutch multi-instrumentalist and producer Noam Offir unveiled his debut album as Soul Supreme, a vividly realised fusion of jazz-funk, jazz-fusion, hip-hop, soul and electrofunk flavours that boasted impeccable musicianship. Poetic Justice, the rising star's hotly anticipated follow-up, continues in a similar vein whilst aiming higher. The musicianship is, if anything, even better, with liberal use of horns, P-funk synth sounds, Clavinet, warming electric piano motifs, loose limbed drums (blessed with the swing of live drums, but - we think - MPC-powered). It's basically the same old super Soul Supreme sound, taken to the next level. As a result, Poetic Justice is even better than its lauded predecessor. Don't sleep on this one!

Review: Back in February, the prolific Past Inside The Present label boss Zake hooked up with Marc Ertel, James Bernard, and From Overseas at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis for a very intimate live show in a historic Gothic Chapel. A vast array of instruments were used including a Fender Telecaster, Meris Mercury 7, Eurorack modular synthesizer, Stingray bass guitar and literally tens more tools and toys and the resulting eight tunes of absorbing ambient are all presented here. It is another mystic and mystifying release from this label that reaches sublime new emotional highs.

Review: Carsten Nicolai returns to his NOTON label with a new album of Alva Noto work, exercising his trademark minimalist glitch through the prism of a soundtrack to a theatre piece developed in 2021 for Swiss writer Simon Stone's Komplizen. As well as his usual fusion of stark, clinical soundscapes and pointillist digital impulses, Nicolai folds in delicate piano and compositional elements which invoke more tangible emotions than you might often associate with his solo work, perhaps taking some cues from his collaborations with the late, great Ryuicihi Sakamoto. Presented as a double LP release, this is a freshly romantic slant on the Alva Noto story encased within his unmistakable soundworld.

Review: Heads will know Suicide as the pioneering duo of electronic music and proto-punk from New York City, consisting of vocalist Alan Vega and instrumentalist Martin Rev. Fewer will know anything more beyond the pale of their debut album, though. 'A Way of Life', their third studio album released in 1988 via Wax Trax!, heard them escape the noise - exploring a more hypnotic, minimalistic synthpop sound. That being said, stonkers like 'Surrender', 'Jukebox Baby 96', and 'Dominic Christ' all still captured the doomy New York zeitgeist. This remastered edition contains a full remaster from its original tapes, as well as a brand new, never-heard-before live Bruce Springseen cover no less.

Review: If postmodernity is what really rivets the minds and hearts of music listeners today, then longtime music-maker Eluvium (Matthew Robert Cooper) certainly has his finger firmly on the pulse. His latest album is a musical weigh-up of the concept of ontological relativism, a way of thinking that has seen an uptick in recent years thanks to the oncoming tide of new intelligence-mimicking (or, shall we say, cloning?) technologies such as AI and psyche-predictive algorithms. Through dour string movements, rattling soundscapes and neoclassical tropes, a sense of inevitability is put forth by the likes of 'Swift Automations' and 'Scatterbrains'. Whether the overarching conclusion of '(Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality' means we'll be overtaken by robots is really up to you.

Review: The ever inventive and always prolific zake is back on his own label Past Inside The Present with yet another new album. Deep Into The Unknown We Shall Endlessly Roam has already arrived with us on cassette tape and now it comes as a limited edition album on white and brown vinyl with just 200 copies pressed. It has been made from archaic tape machines such as a Sony M-570V microcassette voice recorder and obsolete VSC Soundpacer and then recorded to analogue tape for that levelly lo-fi and misty aesthetic. The artist himself says this record is "is dedicated to those who continue to yearn for greater understanding" and it is another sublime listen.

Review: Alison Goldfrapp has infamously broken away from her involvement with the longtime synth duo Goldfrapp to explore new solo outings. Finally, we hear the extent of her efforts in this arena: The Love Invention, her newest album, is a dazzling dance-centric vision of electropop in technicolour, aiming to put across Goldfrapp's vocal range and stylistic versatility (not least through various collaborations across the dance music spectrum, from Richard X to Claptone and Paul Woolford). Love, lust, desire, amour... just about every variation on the feeling is conveyed on this stonker of an LP.

Review: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Nope by Micael Abels accompanied the Oscarr winner Jordan Peele's famously expansive horror epic and helped take it to the next level. This is their third project together and maybe the most ambitious score of the lot. It draws influence from sci-fi, horror, action and westerns and there is a real blend between original score and source music. It is at times a terrifying listen and at others full of grand adventure, awe and wonder. The sounds scale up when needed to match the pictures and totters they make for a superb experience, but the soundtrack alone is one hell of a ride.

Review: As Jeff Mills returns to his third deepest obsession after 909s and UFOs, he presents an addendum to his renewed Metropolis Metropolis soundtrack which doubles down on three of the themes and gives them a different framework through the lens of a 12". This is still the more cinematic end of the Millsian spectrum, but there's some intensity which may well be of use to the more dramatic or daring techno DJ. 'The Dance Rebellion Starts' is plenty loopy and disorienting, full of interwoven, clangorous patterns which should stay nicely in time if you get them locked in the mix. 'The Other Maria' might well be the star of the show though, a nightmarish, ever-building drone piece with some half-time percussion stalking around the edges for guidance. 'Freder's Reality Switch' completes the picture with a slightly more stable synths n' strings piece, but there's still that innate sense of otherness Mills always threads into his work.