Leftfield / Experimental Recommendations July 2015

Review: A Strangely Isolated Place focuses on sparse electronica and drone music, and its founder Ryan Griffin has been pushing abstract sounds by new and exciting talent since 2008. Arovane, who has already appeared on the label with a bundle of devious outsider sounds, teams up with newcomer Hior Chronik (Mu-Nest, Kitchen) for a collaborative LP, In Between. As the name suggests, the album feels like a collection of sounds for contemplative moments, latching heavy loads of electronic sound design together with ingeniously placed field recordings. These recordings, however, aren't abstract layers of fuzz, but instead recall the sounds of nature and the passing of time. The sea, the air, the forests and beyond. Wonderfully meditative and highly recommended to anyone who wants to experience true tranquility.

Review: Yes! Pretty soon after Vancouver label 1080p issued Much Less Normal by local artist Lnrdcroy, there were rumours surfacing regarding label interest in licensing the album for a vinyl release. In the end it was Edinburgh's Firecracker Recordings that secured dibs on Lnrdcroy's fine collection of whimsical electronic odes to British Columbia and they've done a typically superb job of bringing it to the vinyl format. Put simply it looks amazing. This remastered double vinyl edition features a slightly amended track listing with two productions not making the transition. However in their place is new Lnrdcroy track "Kendal in Kalusia", an epic 13 minute finale that will have you pulling the needle back again and again.

Review: After a strong first release Contort Yourself returns with "Events at the Fatal Party" which comes over more as a description than a title, brimming with a bubbling sense of tension and fear. Hamburg duo Fallbeil kick things off in impressive style with a crunchy acid monster which twists and turns followed by two killer proto-techno cuts from legendary French industrial band Die Form from their 1985 tape Hurt. Here we find ourselves in a unsettling scenario with metallic voices scowling over clanging machines and guitar feedback in an unhinged way. The mysterious Slugbug (L.I.E.S./Russian Torrent Versions) starts the flip with "GOBACK", a creeping acidic beast moving unstoppably forward as a reverberating voice ripples throughout. Any calm is then shattered by IBM a.k.a. Jamal Moss whose remix of Die Form hammers home a tough seven minutes of mangled synths, bubbling acid and thundering drums. A highly recommended, intense journey.

Review: The latest release on Jonny Nash's Melody As Truth label sees Los Angeles-based talent Diego Herrera come forth with a new album under his familiar Suzanne Kraft moniker. It is of course just one of several projects the West Coast artist is involved in (Pharoahs, Dude Energy, Blase being several others) but the overall sunkissed, melodically rich sound he brings to them all make him a perfect fit for Melody As Truth. The seven tracks on Talk From Home were recorded over a few weeks in the winter of 2014, and feature Herrera playing guitar alongside more familiar synth tones in a mood that stays resolutely mellow from start to finish. Its three releases deep for Nash's label now and all of them have been sublime.

Review: Emotional Response open the Secret Circuit archives to some of Eddie Ruscha's contemporaries from the City of Angels for a fine exercise in how to do a remix 12". First up is Suzanne Kraft, aka Diego Herrera who forms one half of Blase along with Ruscha; in his hands the crazy afro-stylings of "Afrobotics" are pulled towards the dancefloor, adding percussion and sirens, forging the originals vibes in to a ethno-beat club jam that is all about that heads down moment. Next up The Samps turns "Shockers" into a warped mesh of psychedelic dance, whilst Superior Elevation's Tom Noble adds some killer boogie vibes to "Underdogs". Finally Sun Araw man Cameron Stallones appears under rare alter-ego Aristrocrat P. Child to re-edit "Roll" in superb fashion.

Review: Dark Entries know their stuff when it comes to '80s synth pop reissues, and this latest reissue of Carlos Peron's Dirty Songs single is a sign of just how deep into the crates these guys get. Originally out over thirty years ago, these instrumentals are still total killers and will go down a storm in most DJ sets which venture out of the 4/4 formula. "Nothing Is True; Everything Is Permitted" and "Breakin' Indistortion" are particularly fresh and must have truly cut the edge back then: metallic drum machine beats and sparse melodies ring away into the cavernous ambience created by Peron. Wonderful and highly recommended.

Review: If you are lucky enough to have visited Dusseldorf club Salon Des Amateurs, you may be familiar with one of its residents, the cultish Serbian DJ Vladimir Ivkovic whose daring sets are inspiration to another of the venue's stars in Lena Willikens. Often Music is Ivkovic's new label and their first release shines a light on the unreleased archives of pioneering Serbian electronic artist Rex Ilusivii, real name Mitar Suboti?. The Serbian artist sadly passed away in a studio fire in 1999 leaving behind a vast number of unreleased works recorded over a decade from 1980 onwards. Six of those rescued tracks feature on this double 12" release In The Moon Cage (side 4 houses an etched illustration) and the more daring selectors out there will find them quite inspirational.

Review: The inimitable Pye Corner Audio return after recent excursions on LP and the usual slew of electronic nuttiness that we've come to associate them with. This time they appear on the Other Voices series - for the fifth chapter of the series - with "Machines Are Obsolete", a synth-heavy jam which sounds like a walk through space, a mellow and hazy sway through unknown terrains. On the B-side, PCA team up with Belbury Poly on "Pathways", a similarly spacey synth piece which twists its way through mid-tempo beats and deep, funky basslines.

Review: The Sun God aka Hieroglyphic Being aka Jamal Moss is a difficult guy to keep up with, that's for damn sure. Spreading his signature trademark of gritty, fuzzed out pseudo-techno across so many aliases and labels, it's as if the dude is making music 24/7. For his latest excursion Mr. Moss appears as The Sun God - a tribute name to his idol Sun Ra - for Copenhagen's always-on-the-money Cejero imprint. The A-side, "Cosmic Chords One", is classic Moss with its stumbling, alcoholic drum pattern and beautifully distorted chords - one of his finest moments and surely the winner from this year, so far. The B-side, "Cosmic Chords Two" continues Moss' devious sounds but takes them onto more distant plateaus, where the beats have now fallen into place and the synths have taken a less abstract form. Warmly recommended.

Review: Number three in the four part SchleiBen series from Emotional Response arrives with Don't DJ and Tropical Hi-Fi at the controls. The former is the current creative endeavour of Florian Meyer, founder of the Diskant label and one of the more experimental and academic producers to surface from Dusseldorf in recent times. He also forms one third of The Durian Brothers. Meyer's "Kosmose" is a 20 minute piece which explores the link between polyrhythmic percussion and brooding electronics; understandably, it's ripe with introspective qualities. Offering some contrast, Northern Australian producer Tropical Hi-fi turns in "Oceanic Mythology", a meandering journey through found sounds, psychedelia, folk music and more which sounds like listening to SUED B-sides whilst tripped out on acid.

Review: The longevity of Alex Patterson's Orb project never ceases to amaze. While the ambient outfit has gone through many changes since making its debut in 1989 - longtime production partner Thomas Fehlmann being the man at the controls these days - Patterson shows little sign of wanting to call it a day. Here the duo delivers their 21st album, returning to the stargazing obsessions that have served them so well over the years. Consisting of four typically epic workouts, Moonbuilding 2703 AD doffs a cap to many of their obsessions of recent years - hypnotic Berlin techno, classic ambience, woozy tech-house and dub, primarily - with the jazz-funk-meets-ambient dub flex of the title track standing out.

Review: Bon Voyage adds in "Organisation" at the end of his name for his latest EP, a collection of tracks chosen by the fledgling Disque Pointu after a flurry of releases by La Femme. Much like the rest of his material, and the label itself for that matter, Xingye contains a diverse spectrum of sounds ranging from Oriental boogie to far-out electronic psychedelia (check "Schenzen"). The title track itself is a fantastically funky slice of neo-disco delight, whereas "La Piste Chinoise (Part 2)" is significantly more abstract and lo-fi. All in all, this is a neat little voyage into Ben's wide-eyed vision of dance music.

Review: London's mighty Honest Jon's Records - the primary home to the most obscure of African recordings - is more of an institution than a label or record shop. The imprint itself has been on fire since the early noughties thanks to a masterful selection of releases and remix series from world music outfits and contemporary electronic musicians alike. Berlin's dub techno doctor and mastering engineer, Moritz von Oswald, returns to the label with his current project, the Moritz Von Oswald Trio: Lagos icon Tony Allen takes care of the percussion, Max Loderbauer adds the electronic mystique alongside von Oswald himself, while Ricardo Villalobos takes care of the mixing duties. Well, that's quite an artillery already and as we're sure you already know, putting that lot together in a studio can only mean one thing: QUALITY. Dubby, percussive, minimalistic, psychedelic and totally recommended.

Review: DJ Guy, or Guy Evans as his friends know him, is one of those low key producers who has only recently been unearthed from the 90's, much like Frenchman Iueke. It was Glasgow's All Caps that got his noticed last year with a masterful EP and he returns herein with another single for Copenhagen's Cejero, home to releases by The Sun God aka Jamal Moss and Robert Turman, among others. The sounds are gritty, the melodies are organic and there's a distinctly sci-fi feel to Guy's grooves. This is machine music at its finest, emanating straight from the source and onto your turntables; our picks form the four nuggets have to be the beatless sonics of "White Tape Trk 1" and the bleepy hypnotics on "Basf Ferro Trk 3". We recommend you to be quick as this is kinda limited..!

Review: With a particularly expressive, adventurous approach to sound design and abstract composition, Luke Younger's Helm project has matured gracefully over the past seven years. He reaches his sixth album, and second for PAN, in fine fettle, matching eerie patience with studio flamboyance in a balance that few manage to successfully achieve. Olympic Mess moves from cloying hypnotism on the aptly titled "I Exist In A Fog" to unsettlingly spacious tension on "Often Destroyed", but rarely do the tracks idle for too long in one place. It's a pitfall of so much noise and drone music that Younger has side-stepped with ease on his latest effort.

Review: After debuting with that killer reissue of Papertiger and the Catcammer Orchestra's German disco wonder "In The Disko", Alexander 'Spacelex' Arpeggio's Mond Musik return with a second, and equally enlightening offering. Eiskalte Engel was the work of early 80s Mannheim artist Michael Bundt who's pop-brushed take on the NDW sound resulted in some minimalist dance tracks with undeniable hooks. This 12" is a fine introduction to Bundt's work for modern ears, pairing up two tracks from his one album with a selection of well-chosen remixers and extended versions. The archivally inquisitive minds will find much to savour in the original versions of "Mach Mich Nicht An Mann", "Die Kinder Aus Asbest" and "ROM" whilst Albion, Nixxon and Flemming Dalum & Steen Gjerulff all excel with their remixes.

Review: The fourth and final edition of SchleiBen is an extra special one, bringing forth acollaborative project between Colin Potter of Nurse With Wound fame, Not Waving artist Alessio Natalizia and Brain Machine's Guido Zen. Furthermore the series ties with Dusseldorf remain, as Osnabruck based producer Niklas Rehme-Schluter lines the flip with the beautiful ambient touches of his Cass project. The two part efforts from Potter, Natalizia and Zen offer a perfect marriage of methods, with percussion hinting at and Techno, while the constant Drone influx and disintegration grab your attention, overlapping with rhythmic repetition deeper and deeper. The Cass contributions see tracks from the German artist's cassette only Hiding Place album presented on vinyl for the first time and fit snugly into the sonic ethos explored over the previous SchleiBen releases.

Review: The legendary Coil becomes the latest group to benefit from the archival touch of Alessandro Adriani's Mannequin label, who present Expansion Naranja, a two track hook up with leftfield Mexican duo Ford Proco on vinyl for the very first time. The story goes Ford Proco met Coil's Peter Christopherson while seeing The Orb play in Los Angeles during the '90s where they exchanged contact details, and months later Christopherson was phoned up to see if he wanted to be an extra in an Ice-T video. Both "Ecuacion De Las Estrellas" and "Expansion Naranja" from this record were record in 1999 and until now have never seen a vinyl release, and across both productions you'll hear Peter Christopherson saxophone, drum and effects work, while the spoken vocals and singing yelps of the late John Balance appear throughout.

Review: Alex Barnett and Faith Coloccia return to the dark, militant and disorderly outlet that is Blackest Ever Black for a second LP of twisted ambient-filtered noise infusions. Much like their previous album, Weld is inherently abstract but still manages to tell a story, taking the listener on a journey by using primitive forms of sound design. There are certainly more concrete pieces within, such as the kick-powered "Dreamsnake" or the hazy stoner jam that is "AM Horizon", but the release is largely freeform and loosely held together by fuzzy shreds of electronic fuzz. "Ash Grove" is a favourite of ours, its circling toms giving the track a sporadic backbone. It's a beaut, as per usual.

Review: Veteran house oddball Matthew Herbert has been dormant on the dancefloor front since 2006's Scale LP, but recent times have seen him pick the mantle back up with a series of killer 12"s. The approach continues here with The Shakes, a twelve-track demonstration of just how finely tuned this man's production skills really are. The opener "Battle", much like "Stop", are prime examples of the album's versatility and conceptuality. By that, we mean that this LP makes sense as a whole unit and it's certainly not merely a collection of tunes. In fact, each song sounds like it's talking to the next, joining its soundscapes to reach the inevitable "Peak"...an aptly named final piece to this wonderful amalgamation of samples, vocals, electronics and experimentation. Lush.

Review: Chicago's Hakim Murphy teams up with Lyon's Vince Noog as Slowmotion for the latest episode of the excellent Machining Dreams series - Murphy's own personal outlet. Lead track "Affaire De Familie" wonks and bleeps its way across metallic percussion shots and grizzly low-ends, while "Evasion Urbaine" is more melodic and heavy on the sci-fi pads. Finale "Le Grand Saut" ties things off with a squelchy feel, taking the duo's industrial beats into deep space. Fine hardware jams for the early hours as per usual from Machining Dreams.