Juno Recommends Leftfield: July 2023

Review: Ah, simpler times - both in terms of animation and the world itself. For those who missed the original Mr Benn books and TV show (the former, published first In 1967, the latter aired between 1971 and 1972 before making several returns via reruns on the BBC), then the plot is also straight forward. Black suit and bowler hat-clad London professional Mr Benn leaves his house each episode, walks to a local fancy-dress shop, and chooses an outfit. An adventure then ensues, set in a world that reflects his outfit. Harking back to a glorious time in children's television - one that has latterly been remembered for its psychedelic edges and surrealist tendencies - Duncan Lamont's score was a perfect accompaniment to those mini odysseys. It's woozy, blissful and dreamy at times, then jaunty and upbeat the next moment, taking the form of brief but beautiful accidentals to set those senes.

Review: Ryuichi Sakamoto is making a very welcome return here with his first solo album since 2017's async. Milan Records are releasing 12 in January to coincide with the venerated Japanese composer's 71st birthday, and the timing is poignant given the album draws from musical sketches created while Sakamoto battled for two and a half years with cancer. Sakamoto himself describes reaching for his synths as a kind of therapeutic response to a big operation, and so the music carries an added depth of personal experience from one of the most profound ordeals a person can go through.

Review: A collaborative new single by sampletronic master Kieran Hebden (aka. Four Tet) and guitarist and composer William Tyler, two acclaimed musicians and both longstanding friends. Part of a recent spewing-forth of Hebden-adjacent material to hit the shelves after the artist's oft-reported-upon "agent of chaos" phase, these two tracks, pressed to a furtive 12", provide a neat counterpoint to that assessment. Rather than a pair of riddim bangers, the record flaunts Hebden's signature electronic textures and Tyler's guitar into a hypnotic, nominally dark soundwhirl, reminiscent of the earliest days of Text, but with a unique edge - a sonic corner never quite scoured before by either artist.

Review: Silva Screen Records return to their mammoth compilation project paying tribute to the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, former member of Yellow Magic Orchestra and later acclaimed film scorer: for such blockbusters as Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, The Sheltering Sky and The Last Emperor. 'Music For Film' features star motifs from Sakamoto's back catalogue of film scores, and are all performed by the Brussels Philharmonic under the baton of Dirk Brosse. This version comes to black and white splattered vinyl.

Review: Carefully remastered by Andrew Liles, Nurse With Wound's Cooloorta Moon/Brained By Falling Masonry arrives on a unique picture disc with a die-cut sleeve and might be some of the most definitive sounds the cult outfit ever recorded. They are certainly ever-green favourites with fans and now appear for the first time on one album. These two EPs ushered in something of a stylistic shift for the Nurse - Brained came in 1984 with relentlessly churning sounds and the eccentric mania of JG Thirlwell's vocals. Cooloorta Moon from 1989 is more whimsical, a freely creative work that used more traditional instruments.

Review: Chocolate Hills is a duo made up of Paul Conboy and Alex Paterson, Orb founder and Orbscure Records boss. Their excellent Yarns From The Chocolate Triangle is one of those albums that is tailored made for listening to on good quality headphones, a lush and world class ambient soundscape with vivid designs and bright colours all in high definition. It draws on library music, exotica, kitsch, Balearic, downtempo, folk, spaced out pop and even d&b, all loosely based on an imagined nautical journey to the Bermuda triangle and back. All is calm at sea as you bob and drift on these roomy and magnificently realised sounds, mixing organic and electronic sources and taking a more gorgeosuly idiosyncratic route than the latest Orb album.

Review: A fantastic introduction to a Japanese electronic artist who has simultaneously influenced many while flying well under the radar, Gaia: Selected Ambient & Downtempo Works presents a deep dive into the world of Dream Dolphin, a producer who began releasing music under this moniker at the age of 16 and was brought up on classic Italian songs before discovering the likes of PIL, Yellow Magic Orchestra and The KLF. Amazingly, even thought there's a good chance you'd never heard of her before now, Dream Dolphin, also known as Noriko, released a staggering 20 albums in just eight years, and 18 of the tracks from that catalogue are here now. The vast majority never available on vinyl before, they span IDM, ambient, downbeat, trance, organic experimental and more, making this a real trove.

Review: Detroit-based Code Industry, for those who know, were a highly regarded and influential EBM-techno outfit. The always reliable Dark Entries has been digging in their vaults to serve up this vital reissue of their Structure EP. The quartet of Rob Myers, E.N. Sevy, Kyl Crys, and William Keith formed in 1989 having previously worked as Code Assault and were rare black artists working in the world of EBM and industrial. They were socially and politically minded so issues of racism, the media, and the hypocrisy of patriotism all comes up in their music which is denied by taught synths and dark vocal whispers that echo the work of acts like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb. Add in high tech grooves and you have s fantastic EP that was originally released in 1991 on the Antler-Subway label.

Review: Icelandic musician Gunnar Jonsson Collider debuts on A Strangely Isolated Place with an expansive trip through six fictional environments, brought further to life through an accompanying video by artist Arna Beth. S.W.I.M. is an equal parts trip through space ambient and hauntology; 36 meets Pye Corner Audio if you will. Intense, low-centric 'Environments', 1-6, inspire hazily glimpsed vistas in the mode of ambient warmth. As if accidentally finding oneself witnessing celestial phenomena one isn't meant to witness - the space-trip from 2001: A Space Odyssey springs to mind - each of these tracks are almost like time-locked landscapes, slowed down by their lo-fi temperaments and subby pulses of feeling.

Review: Past Inside The Present has really gone to town with the re-release of this 36 album The Lower Lights: it comes in several different formats and vinyl versions with this one being a limited, numbered and opaque red vinyl including a download code. Musically it is just as essential as a collection of tracks from a year-long 'Audio Diary' project undertaken by 36 between April 2018 and April 2019. It first came back in May 2019 and soon sold out, such is the quality of the vibrant and eclectic ambient sounds within. This is not sleep-inducing background material, but rather emotionally charged soundscaping with a mix of dark, futuristic and urgent pieces all making the cut.

Review: Fresh, cruddy electro dreamatics from mysterious production outfit Lazer Worshippers here, joining the Atmosphere label to stake their claim to their very own 'theme'. A name like Lazer Worshippers gives off vibes of a apparent machine cult with a penchant for building sonic monuments to our AI-mech overlords. The music is similarly vaunting and numinous, with its synthetic choirs and trilling arps dancing between the left and rights like heavenly visions of a mechanized future. B-siders 'On A Rise' and 'Free Flight' are just as teary-eyed, yet bleepy, recalling the entrancing, oldskool breaksy trance work of Spooky or Digital Justice.

Review: Another week, another new release from the unstoppable ambient powerhouse that is zake. His latest full-length LL has two new cuts by the American maestro with remixes from a hefty selection of equally prolific producers all served up on his home label Past Inside the Present and no fewer than six sides of vinyl. Across this immersive two hours of music, there is a mix of ambient, drone, drum & bass, electronica, and deep techno from Warmth, Aural Imbalance, ASC and Bvdub. It is yet another essential release from zake and co.

Review: Noted as a "beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue" (we're looking at you, Spotify) Tim Hecker's No Highs is a righteous paean for what ambient music should be. And that certainly isn't mindful background music for turning you, the listener, into the best and most productive capitalist you can possibly be. Instead, Hecker's latest invites considered and focused listening; an alternative to the mediated, telescreeny musical SSRIs that impose on us today. A world turned upside down, the album presents highlights such as 'Lotus Light', 'Pulse Depression' ad 'Winter Cop', which suggest anarchic themes, while also fastening a sense of jaggedness and tumult, in a style of music that is so incorrectly expected to be neither of those things.

Review: There's something fascinating about hearing the sound of true icons at their embryonic stage, and that's exactly what you get with this rare radio broadcast recording of Basildon's finest, Depeche Mode. In 1981 they had just released their debut album Speak & Spell and were still largely gigging around London and their native Essex (bar a sojourn to Hamburg). Before Vince Clarke left the band at the end of the year this session was recorded, showcasing the raw but seductively powerful sound of the band when they were still but teenagers trying their hand at this emergent synth-pop thing. Compared to the polish you might expect from the majority of the band's output, it's Depeche Mode reflecting the more typical minimal wave sound of the era, which is a treat in itself.

Review: This is a CD verison of Ryuichi Sakamoto's very welcome return to the fray. It is his first solo album since 2017's async. Milan Records have released 12 in January to coincide with the venerated Japanese composer's 71st birthday, and the timing is poignant given the album draws from musical sketches created while Sakamoto battled for two and a half years with cancer. Sakamoto himself describes reaching for his synths as a kind of therapeutic response to a big operation, and so the music carries an added depth of personal experience from one of the most profound ordeals a person can go through.

Review: Cult label hosting a very well established, if often under-the-radar proponent of the heads down, party-starting but intelligent side of house and techno. Doesn't sound like the worst combination in the world, in many ways Habe ich Gewonnen? is indicative of Maayan Nidam's studio progression, an artist who has long toyed with sounds similar to this EP while building a strong back catalogue on more 'straight up' imprints such as Perlon and Cadenza. Across four tunes things are resolutely non-conformist but instantly engaging and accessible. The loose, jazz-hued broken joy of 'Ice Bear', the jerky, off-kilter minimal lunge of 'In Reverence', pared back percussive wobble on the title track, and the post-punk styled 'Le Petit Mort' are all exceptional pieces, packed with musicality and ideas that go well beyond where many dancefloors stop.

Review: Experimental electronic supergroup Creep Show are certainly a dream team, with the band made up of various members of certain timeless acts: John Grant (of Hercules & Love Affair), Stephen Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire), Benge (Wrangler) and Phil Winter (Tunng). The album is a mix of darksynth, industrial funk and experimental noise, with vocals by Grant and Malinger providing a surreal, vocoded oeuvre. The titular 'Yawning Abyss' is ploddy and skeletal enough, but then we move into the real meat of things with the likes of 'Bungalow' and 'Moneyback', which carry on the album's extant deathly techno-dysoptian vibe with an increasingly post-punky effect.

Review: This is a vinyl release of the original soundtrack for Joe 90, a 1968 British science-fiction television series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. The soundtrack was composed and conducted by Barry Gray, a prolific British composer who worked on many of Anderson's shows, such as Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. The soundtrack features Gray's distinctive style of orchestral music, blending classical influences with jazz and pop and electronic elements. The release includes 24 tracks selected from the show's score, pressed on two LPs with orange and blue vinyl, and also features new artwork by illustrator Eric Chu, depicting the main character Joe McClaine and his many eccentric gadgets.

Review: Past Inside the Present label regulars zake and Tyresta at long last come together for a well-overdue collaboration. This collection of sounds is called Drift and is all about reflective mood music that will send you deep inside yourself. It's a typically immersive listen from two of ambient's finest practitioners with lots of wide open spaces for you to sink into, slowly shifting timbers to gaze at and poignant atmospheres that cannot fail to leave an indelible impression. As usual, the sound design is top-notch here and the attention to detail second to none. It was well worth the wait, then.

Review: Glasgow's Tomorrow Syndicate finally return to the release schedule after a near-three year hiatus, and we couldn't be happier. To put it mildly. The retro futurists have built an underground reputation for mastering sci-fi leaning synth pop of a subtly grandiose fashion - tracks that don't immediately present as huge but, by the time the last notes fade, have blossomed into huge things of real resonance. Take 'Twin Galaxies', for example.
A slow burn song, it evolves from hushed beginnings, stepping out into motoring pop, before exploding into full technicolour life. Setting things up perfectly for closer 'Soldered Dreams', an incredible low tempo, high impact gem packing neon keyboards, emotional key changes and a real sense of purpose, these two alone are worth the price tag. Not that 'Terminal Flux' and its blissed out electronic shoe gaze style, 'Hyper Receptive''s punchy and pace-y vibe, or 'Interphase''s hope and wonder aren't also amazing.

Review: Three collaborative albums by The Hafler Trio and Autechre - ae.o & h.ae (2003), aeo. & .hae (2005) and ah.eo & ha.oe (2011) - were released one after the other over a rather long period and despite their intention as a comprehensive trinity, came out first via separate labels. It was as good a collab back then as it is now: we all may know Autechre, but Hafler Trio by comparison was a neat audiovisual counterpart to the former's gyratory mayhem music, erring more on the side of multimedia. Together, their music provides a raucous blend of abstract, ambient, drone and experimental music, with minimal and complex soundscapes, long silences and wild dynamic variation. all adding up to something rather. This comp brings all three LPs together, limiting the culmination to just 500 copies.

Review: Thanks to this lovingly presented reissue from Past Inside The Present, you can own The Lower Lights by 36 in just about whatever coloured vinyl you wish: This is the Past Inside The Present translucent red version with others also available on Juno. It's an album first put together by the label back in 2019 shortly after 36 had finished a year-long 'Audio Diary' project. Not all of the tracks they wrote in that time make the cut, but the best 10 do. They are direct, absorbing and energetic ambient soundscapes that are emotionally charged and demanding of your attention.

Review: This is well known and much-loved ambient album amongst those who follow the genre closely, and after various vinyl formats before now, it finally arrives on CD courtesy of Past Inside the Present. The hugely prolific zake - who often releases several albums a year - and 36 really go deep on this one. It is a quietly epic and certainly adventurous journey into outer space where echoing sonic tones and drifting sound effects all melt into one another as electronic melodies arrive and disappear to soothing effect. There is an almost classical architecture to these grandiose tracks which makes it all the more of an absorbing and beautiful listen.

Review: Dead Can Dance's Lisa Gerrard and Jules Maxwell have reimagined their much loved 2021 collaboration Burn in an all new live arena. One Night in Porto was recorded whilst on tour in Portugal towards the end of 2022 and found the pair doing a fine job of recreating the Burn album in a live setting. Rather than try to simply serve it up in recognisable form, they instead used its melodic themes and sonic textures as a starting point to head off into new worlds. After four days of rehearsals they took it on the road and as this recording on the third of the four dates shows, it was a great success.