Juno Recommends Leftfield March 2021

Review: Bandmates Peter Christopherson and John Balance were allegedly holed up in a Victorian mansion in the almost-forgotten English seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare, in the midst of a drug binge when they got cracking on Musick To Play In The Dark. Location aside, it's hardly the most original genesis of an album, but nevertheless the end product was a sign of just how talented the artists are - give the average person a bag full of powders and pills and ask them for a record. Then see what happens.

Coil's tenth album arrived in 1999, bookending one part of their story and beginning the next. It's here the players opted to embrace ambient, glitch, minimalism and 'kosmische musik' - experimental rock sub-genre 'cosmic music' popularised in West Germany during the late-1960s. Or, to use the outfit's own terminology, they invented 'moon musick', marking their transition to a "lunar group". The results are mesmerising.

Review: This intriguing and predictably atmospheric album is the first collaborative full-length from experienced modern ambient producer Dennis Huddleston AKA 36, and Los Angeles duo Awakened Souls, whose full-length hook-up with Pepo Galan, Palettes, received plenty of praise last year. Between them the trio have conjured up a hugely evocative and emotion-rich collection of cuts, where heart-aching, slow-motion guitar laments stretch out across swelling synthesizer chords, meditative pads, distant-sounding vocal snippets, enveloping aural textures and soft-focus piano refrains. It's a wonderfully meditative and picturesque set all told, and one that could well turn out to be one of the most essential ambient albums of 2021.

Review: MIF, or Manchester International Festival, has been considered a seal of quality since its inception back in 2007. A biennial dedicated to showcasing world premieres, it's the place Damon Albarn first unveiled his epic Monkey: Journey To The West before the acclaimed spectacular went global, where Bjork presented Biophilia and the fantastic instruments she created to realise that vision, and the location of Skepta's science fiction warehouse rave, Dystopia987, among other landmark shows.

2019's edition featured Invisible Cities, a sparkling new adaptation of Italo Calvino's 1972 novel of the same name. Stars of the Lid founder Adam Wiltzie and L.A. composer Dustin O'Halloran were commissioned to score the action on stage, and now two years later their soundtrack is ready to own. At times majestic and rousing, in other moments tense and poised, but all breathtakingly beautiful contemporary classical fare, we highly recommend.

Review: This is a crucial reissue of another much sought after record by the revered Alessandro Alessandroni. Originally released in a few hundred copies on the cult Sermi imprint in February 1968, it features famous vocals from his wife that cane best described as scat over Italian Library music beats. Jazz styles, bouncy breaks groovy pop, lounge moods, big bossa tunes and much more all feature along the most absorbing of musical trips. This is a true landmark of the genre and one of many classics from this wizard.

Review: RECOMMENDED
This is a release that's thick with musical personality, layers, uses and ideas, which is why we're adamant it's going in the basket. A small but varied and well-chosen selection of remixers take on the original work of Rheinzand, better known to some as Reinhard Vanbergen, Charlotte Caluwaerts and Mo Disko.

As cosmic as all that might sound the versions here manage to lift us higher still into the stratosphere. 'Obey' gets turned into a trance-edged progressive chugger that makes clever use of percussion to keep things fresh as you could ask for. So props to Hardway Bros on that one. Red Axes bring on the slow, hypnotic, Sabres of Paradise-style otherworldly sludge with their interpretation of 'Kills & Kisses', and the remaining two pieces offer rich, textured electronic pop loveliness and epic, trippy soundscapes.

Review: Five years ago, as part of his ongoing vinyl reissue series, Norwegian ambient maestro Biosphere offered up an expanded edition of his 2000 album Cirque. Due to popular demand, he's decided to serve up this edition again in early 2021. The album remains as fresh as it did when it first emerged 21 years ago, with the producer's usual icy ambient sound washes being replaced by warmer, hazier aural textures, gentle melodies, deep bass and a wide variety of distant-sounding rhythms that rarely dominate the sound space. The additional material, most of which is featured on record three, is equally as impressive, with the publicity-shy Norwegian expertly blurring the boundaries between dub techno and ambient techno.

Review: The widely regarded king of soundtrack composition that is Enzo Morricone is enjoying a run of reissues right now by Music on Vinyl. The latest is his haunting score to Cosa Avete Fatto A Solange? from 1972. The film was directed by Massimo Dallamano and tells the tale of a series of violent murders that happened at a Catholic girls' school in England where a young student has gone missing. The soundtrack is suitably taught and tense throughout, with grand moments of drama and theatre in his usual unique fashion.

Review: 'Being Below' is a mini-album of short songs created with digital and analogue instruments. Written with a structure that reflects shifting states, overlooking the past and future as a split pathway with the present endlessly fluctuating between. The pangs of rumination. An exercise in loop-less writing.

Review: Let's face facts, there's pretty much always something haunting about the appropriately named moniker of British electronic soloist Blanck Mass, AKA Benjamin John Power. Carving out a unique corner of noise that combines elements of gothic synth, coldwave, industrial, math rock and classical sci-fi, In Ferneaux opens the scoring with a track that's arguably the most Blanck Mass of all time - 'Phase I'; a spellbinding, fantastical, arpeggiated keyboard exhibition that belongs in a cathedral of electronica.

'Phase II', the adjoining track, gives its predecessor a run for that money, mind. Bringing white noise to the fore, but creating a real sense of depth and atmosphere by way of a background sonic jumble, if part one was a display of staggering musicality by way of cascading organs, the second firmly stakes its claim in the idea that Mr Mass is at his best when presenting that which defies definition.

Review: Since first emerging earlier in the decade, French threesome Domenique Dumont (Arturs Liepins, Anete Stuce, and an 'enigmatic', yet-to-be-named producer) has delivered two picture-perfect albums of atmospheric, occasionally Balearic, underground synth-pop for the Antinote label. People on Sunday, their first album for two years, started life as a synthesizer-based score for celebrated 1930 German silent movie Menschen am Sonntag, which they performed live at a festival in December 2019. Musically, it's arguably even more atmospheric than the trio's previous work, but is still rooted in their now trademark sound. What we get is a succession of melodious, huggable, sun-kissed and occasionally spacey instrumental tracks that sound like the missing link between Tangerine Dream, Air, 1980s Greek new age composers, Jean-Michel Jarre and little-known electro-jazz pioneers.

Review: Flowered Knife Shadows is, by anyone's book, a rather odd title for an album, even one with clear experimental intent. It comes courtesy of Exael, a producer from Germany whose previous under-reported outings have shuffled between fractured techno, droning tones and unsettling ambient. This time round, she's drawn on an even wider variety of influences and inspirations, flitting between throbbing industrial techno (the hectic hum of 'Quikgel'), deep space ghetto-tech ('Kotch Metish (Exael Remix)'), sludgy doom-tronica ('Boneheaded'), IDM (the Autechre-in-deep space flex of 'Fig Jelly', and the melodious fizz of 'Anc), and - as you'd expect - hushed mutations of ambient electronica ('Ko').

Review: While only comprising four tracks, Ruckverzauberung Exhibition is a monumental work and a significant moment in the career of Wolfgang Voigt. Marking the 10th anniversary of his Ruckverzauberung project, which was conceived to explore abstract ambient sounds, and our emotional responses to those noises, it's a serene counterweight to the producer's heavier and more foreboding GAS alias.

Despite the brevity of the track list, this double-vinyl release is deceptively sprawling, which each arrangement spanning roughly 15-minutes or thereabouts, and really showing off the artist's skill at creating tangible textures with sound. You can feel these pieces living and breathing with us, organically developing, building, ebbing and flowing in a way that marks Voigt out as a true vanguard of minimalistic composition, whose appeal extends well beyond the worlds of dance and electronica.

Review: Steve Moore is a modern day synth master. He has been honing his craft over the last 20 years and now, having joined forces with legendary label KPM, he explores a more quiet and introspective sound on his latest record, Analog Sensitivity. Layered up with meticulously crafted sounds, there are twinkling stars, thoughtful drones and airy open spaces all run through with an ever present sense of electronic futurism. It's mysterious and atmospheric as it unfolds on its mysterious journey. You don't know where it's going, but you're always glad to be along for the ride.

Review: Aleksandir makes a great impression with his debut album, Omena, on the Skin label. It finds him push outside his comfort zone musically and conceptually and results in a truly personal and expressive record of electronic experimentation. It plots a line between uptempo and light tracks, and more doleful and dark material - but is that but just how life's? The always inventive rhythms range from worldly and funky to airy broken beats via immersive ambient. What's more, for the first time on record, Aleksandir uses his own voice on tracks for an extra personal dimension.

Review: RVNG INTL has scored something of a coup here by securing the rights to release Angel Tears in Sunglight, the first album in 30 years from the late, great new age composer and electronic experimentalist Pauline Anna Strom. Recorded towards the end of her life in the same San Francisco studio where she created her lauded 1980s work, the full-length is a beautiful, poignant and meditative as you'd expect, with Strom combining Reichian marimba melodies, sparkling synthesizer loops and luscious new age electronics with a variety of becalmed, creepy and glassy-eyed ambient textures. It's the aural equivalent of a deep bath in the company of an ambient master, which sounds like the kind of date night we'd really enjoy.

Review: Over the last five years, few producers have consistently delivered quite as many inspired, off-kilter and musically diverse albums as Phoebe Guillemot AKA Ramzi. It's for that reason that Cocon, her first full-length since late 2019, is such a significant release. Once agin, she's delivered a wonderfully immersive and impossible-to-pigeonhole affair rich in swelling synthesizer motifs, drifting chords, bubbly melodies, brilliantly programmed rhythms (think slipped D&B, IDM, post trip-hop, and pitched-down breaks), squeezable analogue basslines and occasional use of exotic instrumentation. Hugely listenable and accessible but with enough depth, variety and sonic imagination to please the heads, it's enough deep and immersive triumph.

Review: These Charms May Be Sung Over A Wound is Richard Skelton's first for Phantom Limb and the latest in a long line of standout releases from the cultured British star. It features plenty of the hallmarks of his signature sound - strings, pianos and acoustic instruments all mired in audio dust and dirt to make for tense pieces of electronic experimentation and ambient that can freak you out or calm you down depending on his mood. The artist again here uses signal-degradation "as a means of reflecting the processes of decay and transformation in the natural world" and the results are compelling.