Juno Recommends Experimental July 2021

Review: Never one to sit still, Sasha used the change in mindset that came with the lockdown to inspire his approach to music. LUZoSCURA (which means light and dark) is the new compilation that has resulted having evolved from the playlist of the same name. It's packed with new music from the man himself as well as newer names and more established artists. There are floaty, synth heavy ambient pieces like the 'Yin/Yang' opener, lush melodic electronic grooves from QRTR, symphonic garage cuts from MJ Cole and crunchy old breakbeats with more than a hint of Renaissance from Because Of Art.

Review: It's amazing to think FSOL's most successful single remains We Have Explosive. After all, most people immediately rush to 'Papua New Guinea' whenever they think of the outfit, a track that rates among dance music's most immediately identifiable. Nevertheless, the title number and opener on this 1997 album reissue shifted more copies than anything the band did before or since, and if you're new to this end of their oeuvre brace for impact.

It takes very little time to work out why the tune itself was so popular. A ferocious, coiled spring of a breakbeat assault, it has one foot in the new school era into which it was born and another in truer forms of electro. A recipe the LP continues throughout the remaining ten bombs, occasionally calling off in quieter but nonetheless still clubby corners, like the proto-dnb-step of 'Abandoned Housing Blocks of Prypiat'.

Review: This fascinating compilation on Finders Keepers is a second, follow up volume to a series first started back in 2019. It finds Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton chronicling them all, and it makes for an often intense story full of noise experiments, soot-black guitar playing and haunting atmospheres. Rarely less than peculiar is a brilliantly dark and occult collection of weird soncis and experimental drones, shadowy electronic moods and witchy atmospheres.

Review: RECOMMENDED
Seven years is a fair amount of time to wait between instalments, even if you did misplace them. Mark Jenkins returns under his rightly revered Pye Corner Audio moniker to add another chapter to his Black Mills Tapes series, in turn unveiling some seriously expansive downtempo electronics that still somehow manage to sound pretty intimate.

A lot has changed about everything since the last instalment in the series dropped, with the artist himself even managing to find time to put out another four albums. Up against those, what's here doesn't sound like it was plucked from another back catalogue entirely compared, but these recordings are a literal extension of those earlier Tapes, not least in sound and atmosphere. Taking us to other places of synthdom, halfway between 1980s movie scores, video games, epic ambient beauties and suggestive warm up off-rhythms.

Review: Alessandro Cortini's solo album comes hot on the heels of his much loved collab with London's Daniel Avery. The title translates as 'dark light' and thematically the music contained within follows suit. The experimental artist best known as the keyboard player and bass guitarist of Nine Inch Nails and was recently inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame for that work. But here he layers up near-dissonant guitars, pulsing synthetic surfaces and the contrast between light and dark. It's intense, but intensely beautiful.

Review: Not a lot sounds like The Amorphous Androgynous, which is a relief because with a name like that you really do need to back it up with something experiential. A quick search online can tell anyone the duo - better known as Future Sound of London - have a strange relationship with Noel Gallagher, having recorded with him only to then be told by the Manchester man the outcome was shit so he destroyed the masters. Apparently these then turned up in a sock circa 2018 and you could almost be forgiven at least one of the tracks is here.

Actually, The World Is Full of Plankton comprises three tracks from 2005's album Alice in Ultraland, but the wailing, trippy, spaced out vocals that float in and out of dominance on the title number almost sound like the old Oasis lad. It's a deep and very operatic affair, which contrasts the exotic spatiality of 'All Is Harvest' and the prog rock piano stepper, 'The Emptiness of Nothingness'. Amazing stuff.

Review: Don Zilla has come a long way in a short space of time. Only a few years ago he was teaching himself how to use basic software like FL Studio, dreaming of becoming a venerated musician. His early internet-cafe experiments gave rise to 2019 EP From the Cave to the World and announced the artist's eerie fusion of shifting East-African rhythms with big bass and twisted, industrial electronics. That now continues and evolves through this much anticipated debut album, Ekizikiza Mubwengula, which is a beguiling mix of genres.Always futuristic, often austere, never predictable, this is a true work of sonic invention.

Review: nt.12K makes no secret of what it thinks about Dan Abrams. Let's quote from the website: "Shuttle358, the moniker of native Californian Dan Abrams, clearly stands as one of 12k's most revered, and mysterious, artists. Some say his work was responsible for humanizing [sic] the microsound movement of the early 2000's, and rightfully so." Whether you agree, whether you even knew there was a microsound movement let alone when it happened is irrelevant really. What counts is what's here.

Two decades after its initial release and Frame sounds like a lot of ambience and noise. At different points it could almost be musique concrete. And yet it's none of those things, and quite unlike much you will have heard since its first arrival. The path it trips out on, full of strange shimmers, whispers, morse code taps, epic harmonies with top end distortion, is worthy of flattery in the form of imitation, and yet it still feels utterly original.

Review: With just over a month to go until the long-awaited debut LP from Welsh beat-wizard Koreless arrives, it's easy to see why this two-track on the renamed Young imprint (formerly Young Turks) might tip a few heads over the edge. Anticipation was already pretty significant before last month's track was unveiled, 'Joy Squad', and now it's included on a double-A side and in many ways is the weaker of the two.

'White Picket Fence' is one of those real electronic oddities - it kind of almost sounds like cinematic acoustic or journeyman folk in moments, but really is all about waves of uplifting synth, the kind of noises that scream distorted euphoria. It's earthy, and yet out there like Pluto. Coupled with the beguiling horror movie, IDM, UK step of the flip, it's a powerhouse package for the mind.

Review: Wanderwelle & Bandhagens Musikforening's masterful Victory Over The Sun album gets skilfully reinterpreted by some of techno's most forward thinking protagonists. Amsterdam pair Wanderwelle themselves go first with a misty ambient take of 'An Unusual Sunrise' that sets a perfectly dramatic scene. Label boss Sverca serves up one of the highlights with his deep, pulsing hypnotic version of the title track and Anthony Linell sinks us way down below the ocean surface on his meditative dub roller. There is more energy to the busted beats and hidden vocal sounds of Celestial Crusade (E-Saggila remix) and plenty more greatness through the other tracks.

Review: Charlie And The Oscillator return to Polytechnic Youth for a second outing here that comes in library tracing paper sleeves which nod to the BBC style of the 70s. The London pair once agin fuse breakbeats, synths and ambient with weird and wonderful samples to make for fascinating sounds that have drawn parallels with everyone from DJ Shadow to Death in Vegas. 'Big Unit' is all 70s sci-fi sounds and jumbled claps, detuned chords and hurried rhythms while 'Ruftop' is a more lo-fi affair with hymnal chords and clouds of dust swirling around the groove.

Review: RECOMMENDED
If you know about musique concrete take note - Concretism is far from that sound. Not that there aren't moments where seemingly disparate sounds have an amazing accumulative affect. 'Luma' does this is in a cosmic, Bladerunner-deleted-tune kind of way. 'Black & Burst' is far more abrasive yet accessible, while still somehow sounding like a twisted spin-out on a ghost train.

But Tellifusion isn't about manipulation of found noises, and instead focuses on using musicality in ways that most people probably weren't immediately expecting. While the previous examples are cases in favour of abstract and experimental, on the whole Tellifusion is first and foremost about captivating tunes. 'One Thousand Striped Per Second' delivers one in opening credit-worthy stomps, 'Orthicon Halo' takes us into snappier, broken electro routes. Each track is its own, but the record also feels complete.

Review: If you've not been excited about a new Not Waving album you should probably get your coat and leave us to it. The Italian-born, London-based electronic enigma has been responsible for some of the most innovative and engaging 'is this EBM?' sounds in recent years - pulsating, muscular, damaged, aggressive, vulnerable beasts - and as such anything bearing the name should pique an interest. And How To Leave Your Body, the latest in an already-extensive oeuvre, is perhaps the biggest curveball yet.

Forsaking the menace, grit and serrated blades we have come to expect from the chap also known as Alessio Natalizia, this is Not Waving realising the suggestions of euphoria and uplifting emotions in past work. Of course, there are no bubbling synth overtures here, and plenty of tense atmospheres are present. But on the whole, the feeling of the record is more positive, like a determined fightback in the name of good beginning to unfold.