Juno Recommends Experimental: September 2022

Review: Shack is back! The master of intricately layered drumming, who has long been twisting our melons with his dark and intriguing experimental sounds, returns to Honest Jons here for some more mind-melting workouts. These feature drums the man himself played in Dakar in February 2020 across three layered and enchanting excursions. The first is a real awakening, the second is more twisted and tight, with toms and echo and bass and hand drums all jumbled up while the third is full of intrigue and mystery, ancient drums run through with modern synth sounds to make for something scrambled yet transcendental.

Review: There has been a steady stream of Nurse With Wound material released and reissued recently, with the fathomless creaks of Salt Marie Celeste still looming in our lower registers. Now Dirter are digging right back to the start to present a definitive version of the very first Nurse With Wound venture, originally recorded back in 1980 with a line-up of Steven Stapleton, Jim Thirlwell and William Bennett. Although it wasn't released until 10 years later, this amalgam of tape cut ups, sludge and noise make for a compelling time capsule on the various extremes of sonic exploration that were to come from all three. As you might well expect, there are additional tracks included here you would never have heard before, making this one for long time fans as well as those just beginning their NWW journey.

Review: With one foot in a kind of ancient religious dance, and another deep in the midst of a 21st Century music studio packed with the kit that makes things sound great, Parisian sonic explorer Dang-Khoa Chau, AKA DK, breaks from releasing on some of electronic music's most revered and respected contemporary labels (L.I.E.S., Second Circle, 12th Isle) for an outing entirely under his own spell.

Taking inspiration from his South East Asian heritage, this is hypnotic stuff that would sound equally at home in a gong bath as it would on some of the more experimental, worldly-travelled dance floors. From the ear worm loops and workshop percussion of 'Metal Frames', to the meditative 'Enlightenment Process', it's an incredibly coherent whole, but broken down into separate parts you have seven tracks that are equally strong on their own.

Review: Cry Sugar is the all-new album from long-time Warp mainstay Hudson Mohawke. It is yet another powerful statement that looks to mix the profane with the spiritual across some thrilling club tunes. The record is said to be inspired by "90s John Williams, film scores and spectacular soundtracks" and runs a gamut of emotions with plenty of dance floor euphoria served up in an array of innovative rhythms. HudMo himself says it is "a demented OST to score the twilight of our cultural meltdown." We say - we love it.

Review: One of the weirder stop-offs in Coil's discography, 'Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil' is a great example of the medium carrying the message as much as the evil sound of the project's music itself. In this case, only six out of 23 tracks found on this long-player from 2000 are named, and are thereafter lost in the event horizon that is track six, 'Tunnel Of Goats'. Crunching, groaning power electronics undulate through dubious monarchic proclamations in processed voice, such as "I am the green child" preceding maniacal laughter - and sounds befitting of an otherly funeral procession (ghostly xylophones, portly belches) - abound.

Review: Hudson Mohawke is a true enigma. The Scottish-born (Glasgow, to be exact), L.A.-based producer and DJ has always been keen to explore a twilight zone where retro commercial pop meets cinematic synth meets 4AM sweaty rave. His last record arrived six years ago to widespread acclaim, and between then and now he's run art classes for other dance music makers, offered bleary-eyed clubbers 7AM BBQs outside venues, and called both Kanye West and Drake out on socials for allegedly not paying him for beats.

All that has, in some ways, led to this point - Hud Mo's most artistically accomplished, challenging, unpredictable, and yet coherent record to date. An outing that perhaps best showcases where he's at and has always been trying to be, it runs the gamut from chart-friendly carnival dance ('Is It Supposed'), to strange ketamine R&B ('Cry Sugar'), and Vangelis-esque 'Stump'.

Review: Graham Lewis, Bruce Gibert, Mute label founder and all round legend Daniel Miller came together to make this Duet Emmo record way, way back in 1981. Finishing the work a year later, it would be another 12 months before fans and unexpected listeners could access their accomplishment: a landmark experimental electronic release that also set benchmarks for minimal wave.

Perhaps what's so remarkable is the way in which Or So It Seems doesn't just play with, but offers an aural essay on timbre and resonance, depth and texture. There's not a huge amount happening on any of the nine tracks, but nevertheless they suck you in so far you'll find it difficult to remember which way to swim to resurface. Up or down, sideways or diagonal, whatever route it all winds up with the delightfully weird-but-fun 'Heart of Hearts'.

Review: It's absolutely mind-blowing that Faust released this in 1973. Well, if you know Faust then you know when they became active, and as such it's perfectly logical that they were putting records out when this was unveiled. However, the sounds it contains are so beyond the realms of what we associate with that age it's hard to understand how they ever conceived them.

Having said that, some tracks here are more 'normal'. For example the sweet acoustic folk-ish-ness of 'Flashback Caruso', or the strange, trippy jazz blues on 'Hermanns Lament'. But even these seem to have been born in a different world. Or parallel universe. Then you're given the cut and paste broken beat numbers like 'Don't!', and you realise just how ahead of its time this is.

Review: Just when you thought slo-mo proggy stuff couldn't get more cinematic or devastating, along comes Franck Vigroux with the opener to Atotal. A bombshell packing waves of sirens, snares a plenty, coldwave sensibilities and a feeling of urgency despite its BPM count. A sign of things to come, make no mistake, this entire record is like dipping into a futuristic place of immersive noises and clear intention, synths breaking through walls of noise to create these huge, soaring soundscapes.

Well, perhaps not the whole album. Efforts like 'Perdu' are actually more like the kind of patient sci-fi scores of Vangelis, 'Accelerando' is a distorted, frenetic percussive piece that sounds like you're being dragged backwards thought the flues of a factory on Mars. 'Desarticule' uses space saws to create a feeling of distress, the shrieks of melody crying above hoover and broken beat. Bold stuff.

Review: Cherrystones returns with the second of the "Aged" EPs for Emotional Response. Time propels and so does sound, thus orbiting nuances and motion leads us here, to present whatever maybe or interpreted as. Since the acclaimed Aged Of Bronze EP a symbiotic progress of craft arrives in the aptly titled Aged Of Silver. Again each track is like a coded syntax, unlocking the puzzle to aid a listeners journey and experience, building blocks to a utopian scape in form without form notes and pictures living and residing in the dimensions.

Never pandering to trends, his art based on immediacy and the moment, no disposable sub genres that fade as fast as they emerge, transposing and emitting heard and unheard a way to communicate with himself and those that identify.

A capsule of touched emotions bearing gifts for those in the present and wishing to be present, a key with keys analogue for Silver Tongues and Brass monkeys living in the shadow of a Scorpian's Tail.

Review: Outlier experimental label Eating Music brings back more for us to chew on here in the form of a varied four tracker from various artists. It is Mindexxx that opens with 'Track 1' which layers up snaking synths and deeply buried dark bass that grows in intensity and washes over you like a Tsunami. Laughing Ears then cuts back to a tender mood with soft piano chords and slowly unfolding rhythms that are warm and lithe. Gooooose's 'The Dusk Of Digital Age' is a churchy affair with textured drones shot through with beams of synth light and Knopha's 'Off-Peak Season Tourists' layers up choral vocals and jumbled drum sounds into something hypnotic and escapist.