Leftfield / Experimental / Electronic Recommendations Best Of 2016

Review: Some 25 years after delivering his debut 12", Richard D James hasn't lost the ability to thrill or inspire. By his obtuse standards, the material that makes up the surprise Cheetah EP is actually rather laidback and melodious. "Cheetah2 (LD Spectrum)", for example, sounds like a slow house jam written by robots, while the even deeper "Cheetah7B" shuffles along in a metronomic fashion, seemingly oblivious to the increasingly aggressive World at large. Of course, those trademark skittish IDM rhythms are present - see the B-side's lead cut - and the Cornishman has thrown in a couple of hazy ambient cuts for good measure.

Review: Patrick Keel started his career as a drummer with various unsuccessful bands, before buying a synthesizer in 1980 and forming "one-man-band" The Pool. While he released numerous albums and singles over a five-year period, it's 1983 single "Dance It Down" that has stood the test of time. This Dark Entries reissue features the punchy, electro-influenced new-wave original and spacey Dub from the U.S 12", plus the lesser-known European Mix (closer in style to Italo-disco, though actually made by a Belgian). Arguably even better is flipside "Jamaica Running", where glistening melodies cluster themselves around a proto-dancehall rhythm, and its' stoned, pitched-down alternative mix, "Jamaica Resting".

Review: If you were one of the lucky few to pick up the illicit compilation A Few More Things From Ivan Smagghe (And Friends) the dapper French selector put out a few years ago you should be familiar with this one. "Civil Defense" by Danny Alias first emerged in 1984, a strange proto-everything-that-has-come-since track which was spun by the great Ron Hardy and has been a long term favourite of Smagghe and his KTDJ cohorts. It gets another lease of life thanks to Smagghe and Leon Oakey's always entertaining Les Disques De La Mort label with no less than five different versions to choose from, including a re-edit from the aforementioned Ron Hardy.

Review: You'll probably already be acquainted with the name Manuel Gottsching - and you should be - but just in case you aren't, he was a pillar of Ash Ra Tempel's golden years and, among other of his contemporaries, was a pioneer of the genre that is often dubbed 'new age'. E2-E4 was a 1984 solo album from the man, and is certainly up there with the likes of Steve Reich's best minimal material, although it has often gone relatively unnoticed. MG Art from Germany have done us the favour of reissuing this monumental release, and we're utterly awestruck by how contemporary and fresh this album still is. In fact, one could say that a tune like "31'38" is the basis for the sound championed by new labels like Mood Hut, where a significantly danceable beat is laid above placid, warm harmonics. Similarly, "23'00" is just as balearic and phased out but, once again, we just can't believe how great this music still sounds more than thirty years later. Warmly recommended.

Review: Reissue specialists Be With have a reputation for unearthing slept-on or hard-to-find gems. Their latest 'find' is Anna's Systems Breaking Down, a fairly obscure, left-of-centre synth-pop cut that's long been a favourite with Italo-disco DJs. This 12" reissue includes both versions from the 1982 RCA 7". The A-side boasts the skewed original, where Anna O'Malley's stylish vocal and frustrated screams intermingle with sustained chords, chiming melodies and fuzzy, downtempo drum machine beats. The real killer, though, is the stripped-back flipside "Dance Remix". Boasting less vocal, delay-laden drum hits and woozier chords, it's this version that has long been a favourite amongst collectors.

Review: Given the underground acclaim heaped on Marie Davidson's previous albums - ultra-stylish affairs that blend elements of minimal wave, dark Italo-disco, off-kilter electro and moody ambient - it's little surprise to see her popping up on Minimal Wave offshoot Cititrax. The album's nine tracks are largely sharp, rough and fuzzy, with sparse-but-dense drum machines rhythms underpinning bouncy, delay-laden synth lines, thrusting electronics and Davidson's sleazy, spoken word vocals. It's an attractive combination that guarantees thrills throughout, from the almost claustrophobic throb of "Denial", to the mutant electrofunk bounce of "Good Vibes".

Review: The Chilean producer based in New York City Nicolas Jaar presents his new album entitled Sirens. This is his first solo album since 2011's Space Is Only Noise LP and released on his own Other People imprint. Jaar has been involved in various projects over the years, such as Darkside (with multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington), while last year he released Pomegranates, a collection of ambient tracks provided as an alternative soundtrack to the 1969 film The Colour of Pomegranates. The LP is six tracks that "flow seamlessly" between each other. According to a press release, the album is "Jaar's most topically cohesive and politically-minded record to date."

Review: Ever wonder where Music From Memory founders Abel Nagengast, Jamie Tiller & Tako Reyenga got the name of their label from? The answer is obscure New York musician Vito Ricci, whose diverse and quite stunning discography of private press releases is compiled on this wonderful retrospective I Was Crossing A Bridge. Active during the '80s musical heyday of New York, Ricci description as "one of the unsung heroes of New York's downtown music scene" is fully qualified on this 18 track double LP release, which contains such a dizzying array of musical styles it's tempting to call him a musical genius. The three strong suite of "Inferno" tracks in particular could easily be mistaken for the work of Container, and that Ricci was capable of that as well as some tongue in cheek coke boogie like "I'm At That Party Right Now" means Music From Memory should be applauded once more.

Review: Producing and playing under Chymera for more than 15 years, Brendan Gregoriy's distinctive take on house and techno has seen him play at iconic venues like Panorama Bar, Womb, Output, and Rex Club, and release music on respected labels including Ovum, NRK, Delsin and Cocoon. 2016 sees Brendan take on a new alias, Merrin Karras. Inspired by the sounds of artists like Klaus Schulze, Biosphere and Abul Mogard, and finding renewed focus in creating without external pressures or deadlines, Gregoriy's ambient experimentation emerged, fully-formed, as Merrin Karras. His debut album under this moniker, Apex, was written and recorded in two Berlin winters, it's a record driven by a widescreen contrast between celestial beauty and engulfing black hole intent. Flawlessly produced, Vangelis panorama and vintage sci-fi exist in a space where drums and rhythmic elements have been willfully stripped out - and where the synths can truly breathe.

Review: Given the length of his career, it's rather surprising to find that Under The Sun is Mark Pritchard's first under his given name. As critics have pointed out, it's an overwhelmingly beautiful and poignant set, built around an intoxicating fusion of ambient electronics, soft touch instrumentation, bubbling beats, grandiose chords, and on-point collaborations (check the vocal contributions of Beans, Thom Yorke, and Linda Perhacs). In some ways, it recalls Pritchard's pioneering work with Tom Middleton as Global Communication, while feeling altogether more grown up and musically complex. Regardless, it's an undeniably brilliant album.

Review: The latest volume in the hyped - and, let's face it, uniformly excellent - Snaker series sees L.I.E.S and Public Possession regular Samo DJ join forces with the lesser-known Maxxxbass (AKA Born Free Records affiliate Max Stenerudh). The Swedish duo's take on Snaker's library music-inspired brief is naturally atmospheric and otherworldly, with drowsy and quietly beautiful compositions (think spacey ambient, quirky jazz, wobbly IDM and soft-touch instrumental synth-pop) rubbing shoulders with darker, more horror-influenced fare. Thanks to the pair's extensive use of vintage synthesizers and drum machines, there's a pleasing dustiness and lo-fi crackle throughout, which only adds to the mind-altering nature of the music.

Review: REPRESS ALERT: Contort Yourself has once again gathered the best and boldest from past and present for its fourth EP. To begin with we have the grimacing visage of Volition Immanent, an intense live act made up of Parrish Smith and Mark Van de Maat (Knekelhuis). Behind rawkish distortion, splintered beats and acrid bars screams a boiled anger; a track spitting on the divides of punk and electronics. Nastiness is taken up a notch as noise ne'er-do-wells Zombies Under Stress take over. Static is bent and doubled across thick chords and collapsed clap in the 1986 "Maan Zal Zijn" before the raw and raging battery of "In Onze Tijd." L.I.E.S. regular Svengalisghost grapples with "Maan Zal Zijn, channelling the original's rage into a mechanical monster. The 12" is bookended with bite as Mark Forshaw (Tabernacle/Berceuse Heroique) closes with the tortured and torrential thump of "Submission." A callous, caustic and fervently cruel EP.

Review: As Autechre set out on an extensive live tour, Warp has decided the time is right to reissue their 1994 classic, Amber, on vinyl. Given that it's been unavailable on wax since then, and second hand prices have shot through the roof, this is undoubtedly a good thing. It remains one of the legendary duo's standout albums: a peerless collection of brilliant IDM tunes offering a perfect balance between the glistening, atmospheric melodiousness of their early work, and the crunchy, mathematical rhythms of their later releases. There are moments of eyes-closed calm ("Silverside"), bubbly, melody-led workouts ("Montreal", "Slip"), far-out electro missives ("Glitch"), and the odd icy epic (the brilliant "Further").

Review: Emotional Rescue pulls deep from the esoteric well with the first of several avant albums over the coming year. The self-styled 'Ethno-Industrial' Vox Populi! present their 1989 Aither album, remastered and repackaged with love nearly 30 years later. Initiated by artist Axel Kyrou in 1982, Vox Populi! was soon joined by long term collaborator Pacific 231 on a series of coldwave/industrial cassette only recordings. Things changed considerably, however, with the meeting of the siblings, Mitra and Arach in 1984.The consequential use of 'traditional' instruments and, especially, his wife Mitra's Persian folklore vocals gave a specific tonality, incorporating the band's expanding passion for oriental sounds, electronics and psychedelic music. Involving numerous musicians and friends in often-spontaneous studio sessions, the melting pot of varied cultural backgrounds added ethnic, electronic, concrete music, funk, dub and experimental flavours.This feeling of the subjective absence of the artist was achieved via a communal way for making music, but still with an aim to entertain while leading the listener to experience something unique - mind elevating, non-egotistical, ethereal music - all pushing the intellect towards a more artistic transparency. Welcome to Aither.

Review: REPRESS ALERT: Having worked with the likes of Don Cherry and Laurie Anderson, there's little doubting the credentials of Ramuntcho Matta. Emotional Rescue have tapped him up for some truly outernational jams that sport African percussion, skronky jazz tones and an engaging minimalism that's hard to resist. The fretless bass and exotic animal cries of "Ecoute" are especially appealing, while the squelchy sound design in "O Clapo" may well do funny things to all who hear it. It's a startlingly original record that serves as a perfect introduction to a lesser known figure in leftfield music with a great heritage behind him.

Review: Gone beyond. That's what they say when an (astro) pilot crashes to earth and takes the journey into the big sky. When Juan Trippe took that last flight little did he know that his re-incarnated self would be an electronic pioneer. In tandem with his co-pilot Guido Zen (his own father also a pilot) and Kyle Martin (from the Land Of Light) they formed Brain Machine and scaled the highest Peaks to bring back music both unearthly and intensely human. Are we all not stardust anyway? This music proves it, takes you out flips you over and rolls you in stardust. Don't try and think it through, make sense of it, grasp it - just wander in wonder and bask in beauty.
Get lost again.

Review: Continuing their uncompromising fusions of artists new and old, Contort Yourself return with a punishing array of industrial thuggery from hardware manipulators you wouldn't take home to your mother. Novacom were last seen on Slumdiscs back in 2014 and here bring a fast and gnarly rhythmic tryst to bear before JK Flesh do their own snagging dance with oppressive synths and drums twirling into a heavyweight whole. French brutalists Le Syndicat then dominate the B-side with their confrontational bastardisation of techno and industrial, making the perfect source material for Ekman to get nasty with on his remix of "Maximalist".

Review: Dark Entries has always been rather canny when it comes to their Italo-disco reissues, often unearthing obscurities from one-shot artists who disappeared just as quickly as they arrived. Ghibli was one such artist. He only ever released one single, I'm Looking For You, back in 1985. That it still sounds fresh, despite its' obvious period features - bubbling, Bobby Orlando style synthesizer sequences, bold chords and a heavily accented Italian vocals - is testament to the skill of the record's original producer, Alfredo Baraldi. As with the original pressing, this Dark Entries edition comes back with the superior Instrumental version.

Review: Singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Carla Dal Forno was once a member of a number of legendary Australian outfits. These days, the Melbournian resides in Berlin, which is presumably where she met Blackest Ever Black boss Kiran Sande. He loved her clandestine, atmospheric take on pop - think minimal wave, cold-wave and early Joy Division mixed with contemporary ambience, and leftfield synth-pop - and has decided to put out this debut album. Comprised of four songs and four instrumentals, You Know What It's Like has a timeless feel; the folksy, Scott Walker-influenced "Dry In The Rain", for example, sounds like it could have been recorded at any point over the last 40 years, while "Dragon Breath" has a genuine Radiophonic Workshop feel.

Review: Prins Thomas doesn't do things by halves. Having recently released another triple-disc mix album - the rather fine Paradise Ghoulash - he's decided to make his latest album a quadruple-vinyl set. Intriguingly, it also sees him set aside "all conventional drums and drum machines" in order to create a series of epic, evocative, slowly evolving ambient pieces. These were seemingly equally as inspired by classic ambient house - think the Orb/Robert Fripp collaboration FFWD, early System 7, and so on - as IDM tracks of the 1990s. Whatever the exact inspiration, each of the 9 tracks is utterly beguiling, and hugely suited to horizontal home listening.

Review: Originally released in 1994, Biosphere's second album Patashnik, as we would later find out, was only the beginning. Geir Jenssen's Biosphere project has since become a name that rolls off the tongue alongside Brian Eno when talk of ambient comes to the table, and the use of vocals in tracks like "Phantasm" and "Startoucher" are as memory jogging as Marshall Jefferson's "Mushrooms". The music here provides a snapshot of Biosphere's sound before he committed a decade's worth of albums to UK label Touch. For a '90s take on things, you could day "SETI Project" has aged better than "Mestigoth", while the nebulous to deep classical tones and bluey-hues of productions like "Decryption", "Patashnik" and "Mir" remain timeless.

Review: Well it seems that Vladimir Ivkovic's Offen Music will prove to be every bit as far reaching and unpredictable as his legendary sets at Dusseldorf's Salon Des Amateurs. To recap, the debut Offen offering was a rare sojourn through the unreleased archives of Rex Illusivii, aka cult Serbian musician Mitar Suboti?. This second release introduces Toresch, a new project featuring Detlef Weinrich, Viktoria Wehrmeister and Jan Wagner. Weinrich is of course Salon icon Tolouse Low Trax, and if you were a fan of his recent Themes For Great Citites 12" you will want to spend some time acquainting yourself with the six tracks on this Essen Fur Alle mini LP. Musically, this is largely an affair between the vocals of Wehrmeister and Weinrich's snapping, fluctuating production hand. Wagner's involvement is largely an aesthetic one. Regardless this is a fine collection of music that will appeal to fans of the Salon sound and posits Toresch as a modern day CH BB. Quite wonderful.

Review: KM Editions and Pleasure Unit are proud to anounce the launch of Pleasure Wave. A new imprint to release special projects.Our first release "Tarnished Idol comes from the multi faceted g-Marie a friend of ours for over 20 years. This mini LP was concieved over the first few months of 2015 after various travels around Europe and Asia and then recorded at his home studio in South London.

Review: Dario Dell'aere cut his teeth in obscure Italian synth-pop outfits Ice Eyes and Fockewulf 90, before attempting to launch a solo career in 1985. While that didn't go all that swimmingly, his lone solo single, Eagles In The Night, has long been considered a hard-to-find Italo-disco classic. Here, it gets the re-issue treatment from Dark Entries, who as usual replicate the original track listing and artwork. Slower and more atmospheric than many Italo-disco tracks of the time, Eagles In The Night draws influence from eyeliner-clad new wave pop of the period, with Dell'aere's unusual English vocals stretching out over chiming melodies, bubbling synth lines and dreamy chords. The potency of the original production is confirmed by the superior Instrumental version lurking on the flip.

Review: Since 2012, Russia's Udacha label has been providing us with consistently excellent levels of grainy deep house, a particular strand of the genre that easily moulds into something altogether more ethereal and abstract. Newcomer P-SH constructs a beatless sway of placid harmonics on "Wee See The Island", followed by the minimal tribal rattle of percussion called "Mappa Mundi" by Fitz Ellarald. On the flip, "Zsyamono's Odo Message From Flaming Trixx" is hard to describe because of its constantly shifting bundle of sounds and sonics, and "Sumlacre Uno" by Ellarald ties thigns off with a beatless, spaced-out sway powered by a subtle collection of field recordings. Weird and wonderful - TIP!

Review: Described as a "pact between Sweden's Northern Electronics and Denmark's Posh Isolation," and formed of Varg and Loke Rahbek (one half of Damien Dubrovnik) Frederikke Hoffmeier (aka Puce Mary), Erik Enocksson and Vit Fana's Ossian Ohlsson, Body Sculptures are the closest we have to a modern day noise supergroup. Body Sculptures first formed on record last year on Posh Isolation with a 7" and cassette but now return with a more comprehensive offering in the shape of a debut LP entitled A Body Turns To Eden for the same label. Posh Isolation are one of our favourite labels right now and this nine track LP is a powerful statement, fizzing with ambient energy and willing the ears to listen over and over to uncover all that sonic detail.

Review: By Italo-disco standards, where artists often got one-shot at glory, Some Bizarre was relatively successful. The studio duo released three 12" singles, with 1983 debut Don't Be Afraid being most coveted by Italo-disco collectors. Here it gets a timely reissue from Dark Entries. The original vocal version actually still stands up well, sounding a little like a quirky European tribute to early Depeche Mode, with a little Visage thrown in. The drum machine handclap-heavy percussion and Yazzoo-style synth riffs make it more potent than some Italo-disco of the period, and the vocal is much stronger - and less heavily accented - than many Italian records of the period. As usual, it's accompanied by a dub-style Instrumental on the flip.