Juno Recommends Leftfield October 2020

Review: Long-serving Swedish producer Joel Mull, previously best-known for his club-focused techno sets, first started work on Nautical Dawn, his first album under his occasional Damm alias, over a decade ago. Inspired by the natural phenomenon of 'nautical dawn' - that point when the sun is not yet above the horizon, but bathes the sky in vivid colours - he wanted to make music for the break of dawn that combined home-made field recordings with suitably drowsy, opaque electronic motifs, slow-burn ambient chords, tactile aural textures and, when the mood took him, horizontal and hypnotic beats. It may have taken him a while, but the resultant set is little less than inspired: an evocative set of enveloping compositions that tease and tingle the senses.

Review: Detroit's Jay Daniel can no longer be referred to as a protegee. The Watusi High boss is very much a talent unto his own after forming a small but superb discography in the last few years. His latest outing is another exquisite mixture of his very real drum playing skills and an ability to coax real feeling out of his lush synths. After the ambiance of 'Muse,' 'Solo' sinks into a late night vibe with glowing pads and wooden hits making for a perfectly reflective mood. 'Dew' cuts more loose into ticketing drum work that is raw and off-grid, but again soften but those gaze-inducing pads, and 'Cherry' closes out with crunchy, dance floor ready grooves.

Review: Since debuting on his own Simulacra Records imprint back in 2014, Todd Gautreau has released some seriously good ambient music as Tapes & Topographies. We attribute much of his success to a trademark style that blends fractured, heavily processed field recordings with opaque, comforting chords and melodies that are capable of winding their way into your subconscious. This trademark style once again comes to the fore on A Pulse of Durations, his first album for Past Inside The Present. Furnishing his usual fuzzy soundscapes with occasional melancholic piano motifs (see the gorgeous 'You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima'), swelling drone tones ('The Seashell & The Clergyman') and plucked strings ('The Modern Equivalent'), Gautreau delivers one of his most meditative and emotion-stirring sets to date.

Review: In eleven years of deep digging, Dark Entries has uncovered many curiosities, lone exemplars of the scarsest breeds. They are lurking in Croatia, on the streets of New York, maybe in the back of your own dusty closet - these odd-ball Italo and synth-wave monsters are too rare to live, too divine to die. Once-lost creatures now have a home with Dark Entries' new Endangered Species series. The inaugural edition features five specimens previously deemed extinct, only mentioned passingly in lore and speculation, but now safely preserved on vinyl.

Review: Ole Mic Odd aka Michael Padgett is a hardware operator and DJ from Los Angeles and runs the wonderfully named label The New U.S. Government. Here he sweeps to power with four tracks across four sides of vinyl for the Zement label, two following a slower, punishing pulse that's like P-funk remade in a robot factory, only with tons of added bubbling acid, Drexciya-style filtering and Juan Arkins-like synthetic strings. The other two are way faster, Ice So Bright sounding like someone secretly spiked Kraftwerk's cocoa with something extremely sinister, sending them racing off on their bikes at treble speed. Echo Park has an even more distinct flanging acid flavour and hyper, hooligan electro foundations, again with those Model 500 misty clouds of synthesiser floating overhead. Absolutely cracking stuff.

Review: Vancouver has long been a hotbed for electronic talent, a city with a score that's as sharp as it is deep, noises that feel submerged in the post-rave, post-techno, post-ambient and post-whatever else underground we've now grown accustomed to as the melting pot of modern dance culture. Khotin isn't letting his hometown down here, nor Ghostly International, the label carrying this release.

The downtempo, space-y 'Heavyball' comes with a particularly pleasing sort of crunch to the beat. Its running mate, 'Groove 32', follows up with a low-stepping groove. 'Ivory Tower' briefly resurfaces into jazz-inflected, dusty house-influenced downbeat. 'Outside Light' takes us into complex, melodic ambient places perhaps most definitive of what this record sounds like overall, and certainly in keeping with its predecessor, Beautiful You.

Review: It would be fair to say that the West Yorkshire city of Bradford is not known as a hotbed of drowsy post-rock-meets-trippy-ambient experimentation. Yet it was in the former textiles powerhouse (and sometime home of British bass music pioneers Unique 3) that Gavin Millar and Thomas Ragsdale recorded their latest album as Worriedaboutsatan, 'Europa'. As you'd expect given their track record, it's a wonderfully atmospheric, sonically detailed and ultimately ear-pleasing affair, with the duo offering up an inspired mixture of hypnotic, textured, groove-driven workouts (see the shoegaze techno haziness of 'Who Is A Hunter' and the near-Balearic bliss of 'Cloaking'), poignant and bittersweet electronic soundscapes (the bubbly and melancholic 'Vex' and deliciously layered ambient epics (sublime opener 'Sunk' and slow-motion closer 'Shift').

Review: The recent passing of one of the 20th century's greatest cinematic composers, Ennio Morricone, had many scurrying to streaming services to check out the best of his vast catalogue of work. Those who did will attest that his work touched on numerous themes, genres and styles. This compilation provides a more focussed retrospective of the late Italian composer's work. It concentrates purely on cinematic themes and incidental pieces - most from the 1960s and '70s - that could be loosely termed "lounge music". In reality, the assembled material is a mixture of smooth jazz, easy listening and tongue-in-cheek, library style kitsch. There's nothing quite as stirring as some of his more acclaimed works for movies like The Mission, but the music is certainly cheeky, cheery and highly entertaining.

Review: Trying to keep up with Danny 'Legowelt' Wolfers' many different aliases is like trying to stay abreast of the ever evolving UK Coronavirus lockdown rules. Impossible. Anyway, his latest offering comes in the form of this cult spyware album as Sammy Oso. It first came on CDR back in 2008 and now lands on vinyl in all its DX-7-drenched glory. Mysterious, packed with intrigue and all inspired by the landscapes of his locale in The Hague, it is a typically brilliant offering from the musical maverick that speaks of satellite surveillance, intergalactic space wars and creeping technological paranoia. It comes in a deluxe gatefold with extensive writing on each of the tracks, too.

Review: Given how prolific Detlef Weinrich was earlier in his career, we were rather surprised to learn that Jumping Dead Leafs? is his first solo album as Tolouse Low Tracks for almost six years. In keeping with his work to date, much of the gently mind-altering material on show blurs the boundaries between styles, with Weinrich variously offering up trippy, post hip-hop hypnotism ('Berrytone Souvenir'), sludgy dystopian beat-scapes ('The Incomprehensible Image', the jaunty and unusual title track), slow-burn ambient dub ('Inverted Sea'), exceedingly spaced-out dub-tronica ('Milk in Water'), and pedal-steel laden early morning eccentricity ('Sales Pitch'). While hard to pigeonhole, it's an excellent album, with Weinrich striking a perfect balance between challenging sounds, heady grooves and wavy, ear-pleasing instrumentation.

Review: Nicolas Jaar has been one of electronic music's most consistently hard to predict and innovative artists for a decade. The Chilean-American now offers up a full length on his own Other People label that he says is for inner battles. It is a work of masterful atmosphere that can be at times dense and gloomy, at others ethereal, and was written in isolation away from any form of stimulation-inducing drink and drugs. A constantly shifting sound means listeners are slipped in and out of reality as it plays out, making it tense, sombre and at times furious. This is yet another audacious record from the unrestrained mind of Nicolas Jaar.

Review: If you were judging Kieran Hebden's 11th Four Tet studio album merely on the way it's presented, you'd immediately think he'd spent the last two years immersed in early '90s ambient house albums. While it's unlikely he's done that, it's fair to say that New Energy does owe a debt to classic electronica sets from that period. For all the exotic instrumentation and subtle nods to post-dubstep "aquacrunk" experimentalism and chiming, head-in-the-clouds sunrise house, the album feels like a relic of a lost era. That's not meant as a criticism - New Energy is superb - but it is true that his choice of neo-classical strings, gentle new age melodies, sweeping synthesizer chords and disconnected vocal samples would not sound out of place on a Global Communication album.

Review: Those with extensive knowledge of Nurse With Wound's gargantuan back catalogue will happily tell you that Merzbild Schwet is one of the industrial outfit's greatest albums of all time. It was recorded in 1980, when Stephen Singleton dispatched with his then bandmates to make Nurse With Wound a solo project - as it has been ever since. It remains an alluring and intoxicating affair: a kind of 50-minute sound collage in two parts crafted from a mixture of tape loops, borrowed spoken word snippets, discordant jazz horns, dystopian post-industrial field recordings, outer-space electronics and tons of special effects. If you're interested in experimental music, then you need it in your life.

Review: If this is your first run in with New York's Ike Yard then Factory Records might be a good place to start - these guys were the first US act to sign with the iconic but doomed Manchester label back in the day, and that says a lot about what to expect from their output. This was their first EP, released in 1981, making their proto-post punk and no wave trappings all the more groundbreaking.

The five tracks still stand up today, and certainly compare with some of the era and canon's definitive names. It would be unfair to say you can hear A Certain Ratio, Joy Division or Section 25 here, though, as Ike Yard were doing this at roughly same time to those UK counterparts, so it's less about mimicry and more a sign of just how necessary noises like this were back then.

Review: You wait three years for a new Arca album and then two come along at once. The Barcelona-based, Venezuelan artist has already dropped 'Kick I' and 'Kick II' on his standard XL stomping ground this month, and has now decided to remind us why we fell in love in the first place. &&&&&& is the producer's seminal debut album, and it still sounds fresh today.

Occupying a space somewhere between techno, the proto-footwork and juke popularised by the likes of Addison Groove at the turn of the last decade, IDM and ambient, it's a difficult thing to get your head around, from the strange piano discordance of 'Mother' to 'Feminine''s suggestion of intense 140s and the submerged liquid downtempo of 'Anaesthetic'. A seminal moment in recent dance history.

Review: It's not everyday anything by Portray Heads finds its way back to the surface with us mere mortals. The mythical Japanese electronic punks have managed to retain a serious cult following among fans of a sound that's like synth pop squaring up to EBM, despite most of their back catalogue being buried somewhere in the depths of the best possible drum machine hell you could ask to be sent to.

Dark, weird, and absolutely one of a kind, Veronica Vasicka's famously exploratory Minimal Wave imprint and Bitter Lake Recordings will be understandably confident fans will be all over this one. Tracks like 'Industrial Eye' offered blueprints for a classic electro sound that hadn't really been heard when it was first dropped, in the mid-1980s, with the tune before, 'Generation Storm', a prime example of the epic synth work and tangibly sinister vibes that seem to define everything here.

Review: In a bid to make the first release on their freshly minted Philoxenia label stand out, Neu Verboten and Luigi Di Venere have turned to the invaluable experience of Steve Marie, a Paris-based Corsican producer known for his heady blends of techno, EBM and trance. It's a smart move, because Ho! hits home hard from the word go. Marie first offers some retro-futurist flavour in the shape of the bass-heavy, 1990 bleep and breaks style weight of the acid-flecked title track, before combining his EBM and neo-trance fascinations on the chiming and creepy 'Devil Inside'. He retains the deep bass and razor-sharp TB-303 motifs on laidback and angular electro number 'Romanee Conti', before puffing his chest out on trance-inducing, faintly foreboding late-night throb-job 'Trancia'.

Review: According to the label itself, this is the first and only release of 2020 from Hello Sailor Recordings. It is a fine addition to its cultured 7" series and is a reissue of a 1995 release by short lived band Silvanna & A Maquina do Tempo. Still, it sounds utterly relevant today and is perfect for the Balearic mafia with the retro-future drums and tropical vocals of 'Sera que eu to Pirada'. On the flip-side, things get more urgent and uptempo with fierce drum work and more wild vocals. Early electro, proto-house, call it what you will, Brazilian producer Hotaru has edited both cuts in a fashion that will no doubt make these cult hits.

Review: While some would argue that it was the Orb or Pete Namlook who defined the sound of the 1990s ambient movement, you'll struggle to find a finer set of immersive electronic tracks than Global Communication's 1994 debut album 76:14. Here reissued on vinyl by its creators, Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard, with stunning, re-mastered sound (seriously, it has never sounded better), packaging and liner notes, the album still has the ability to take your breath away with its beauty, emotiveness and the almost neo-classical style of the duo's track construction. Highlights are plentiful, from the hip-hop influenced IDM shuffle of '9:25' and Namlook-ish bliss of '9:39', to the delicately layered choral vocals and deep chords of '12:18', and rushing release of the '8.01'/'5:23' double-header (better-known as 'Maiden Voyage').

Review: 'Orchestral Studies Collectanea' consists of seven previously unreleased orchestral movements (Tracks 1-7) in addition to remastered variations of arrangements that originally appeared on, 'Orchestral Tape Studies' and 'Orchestral Tape Studies [Tyresta Reworks]'. Orchestral Studies Collectanea is a compilation arranged and produced by zake with additional production by close friend Tyresta. OSC is a group of richly layered movements of fragmented orchestral loops, paying homage to minimalist symphonic composers and orchestras. zake and Tyresta incorporate field recordings and faint drone billows to accompany these selected samples of orchestral loops. With an emphasis on tone and recurrent murmurs, these arrangements offer approximately 48 minutes of delicate repetition, reticent sound treatments, and subtle manipulations. OSC is intended for low-volume listening.

Review: The latest drop on the consistently brilliant Kimochi comes from Eho Kates, a new project from Todd Gys and Brendon Moeller. While the names involved may be familiar, the resulting sound is something wholly fresh. Certainly, Moeller's rightly heralded instinct for dubwise processes is no great shock, but there's a playful sense of experimentation powering every element of this release from the scuffed, fractured rhythms of 'Anxiety Sensitivity' to the submerged echo chamber surrealism of 'Emotional Distress Endurance'. Inquisitive processes and otherworldly sound design shape out the whole record, shot through with the alluring mystery that defines Kimochi output overall.

Review: Kashual Plastik have offered little clues to the concept behind their latest compilation of experimental electronica and hazy ambient soundscapes. What we can tell you is that the limited-edition release comprises a single vinyl album and bonus CD housed in a screen-printed sleeve. More importantly, the music contained within is largely superb. There are nods to creepy horror soundtracks, '90s ambient, the Radiophonic workshop, the Buchla works of Suzanne CIani, mid-70s German kosmiche, sludgy post-industrial beats, discordant noise artists, bleeding edge electronica, sound collage and much, much more, all presented with love in the most pleasingly DIY of ways. It's a trip, and one you'll want to take time and time again.

Review: Under the BVDub alias, ambient, drone and electronica explorer Brock Van Wey has amassed a vast discography of full-length excursions, though very few of these have been released on wax. The American producer has therefore pushed the boat out for new album Wrath & Empathy, which comprises four lengthy tracks stretched across two green vinyl plates. It's a hugely enjoyable set inspired by what van Wey calls the "magical realism" of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. We're not well versed enough in Murakami's work to spot the sonic references, but there's much to admire, not least the San Franciscan's uncanny ability to create musical gold with little more than layered and effected instrumentation, slow-release ambient chords, gentle IDM beats, tactile aural textures and melodies that linger long in the memory.

Review: Recently, Steve Pittis' long-running Dirter Promotions label has offered up a number of vital vinyl reissues of early albums by veteran industrial music experimentalists Nurse With Wound. It would be fair to say that 1980's To the Quiet Men from a Tiny Girl is another. For starters, only 500 copies were pressed first time around, making it one of the band's most hard-to-find releases. It' historically significant, too -it was the final set recorded by all three founding members (NWW quickly became a Stephen Singleton solo project) - but more importantly it's a fascinating, immersive and otherworldly listen, with each of the side-long compositions combining strange noises, odd field recordings, spoken word snippets, electrical interference, weirdo electronics and tipsy, solo free-jazz horns.

Review: There's not a lot of info about Scott Gailey Spring's first album as Hotspring, though Mood Hut's description of it being, 'digital technology half buried in the soil', is rather good. Throughout, Gailey employs a brilliantly inventive, off-kilter mixture of tipsy, off-kilter drumbeats, distant auto-tuned vocalizations, manipulated new age music sounds, pulsing ambient chords, fluttering electronic motifs and knowing nods to future R&B. It's extremely hard to accurately describe, but both brilliantly beautiful and undeniably eccentric: the kind of album that will have you scratching your head and smiling enthusiastically at the same time. If you don't believe us, we'd suggest checking out the clips ASAP.

Review: Nick Turner is open about the traumatic period of time in which this record was made, in the run up to his mother's death. A painful experience, nevertheless the record itself feel hopeful, seems to celebrate beauty and hold its hands out to offer listeners a welcoming embrace. The most profound losses can often make people feel resentful, but this couldn't sound any more compassionate and warm if it tried.

Somewhere in a world between ambient and full drone, 'All We Have' is about the shimmer and flow of harmonious refrain, soaring chimes and choral accents. There are blissful moments, serene sections and an overwhelmingly peaceful and tranquil ambience. It's not afraid to show us what it is, it invites us to explore its depths, and the effort on our part is massively rewarding. A record that could really inspire strength, despite its delicate and fragile nature.

Review: All three tracks here have a quality to them that suggests things could easily boot off at any moment, tension that rises and evolves and plays with intensity levels in very pleasing but never obvious ways. 'Psychedelic Frogs' is perhaps the best case in point, sending us spinning out into various cosmic realms that feel several planes above us. It's funk-disco-synth-leftfield business and we spent about an hour trying to come up with a more accurate, definitive description. We couldn't, which is indicative of what this sounds like.

Similarly label-defying is 'Gallium', a tune that seems to have been cut from the same cloth as 1960s spy themes and King of Woolworths productions. Closing out on the rumbling keyboard stabs of staccato builder 'Einstieg', it's not that they don't make them like this anymore, more that they have never really made much like this, period.