Juno Recommends Experimental: Best of 2022

Review: Burial's first full-length EP since 2012's 'Rival Dealer' hears the South London enigma plunge the depths of his newest dark ambient sound, wrenching the emo essences of rave from their breakbeats to produce a purely ambient affair. Spanning every emotion from depression to triumph, 'Antidawn' opens with a cough, in a seeming nod to the COVID lockdowns of recent years. Meanwhile, disparate sections buzz and weave in and out of one another on 'Shadow Paradise' and 'Strange Neighbourhood', never quite landing on their feet before being whisked away again. One of Burial's most defining world-building works.

Review: When it comes to heavy chug, Multi Culti has always known exactly where to strike to make the most memorable or - more accurately - inescapable impact. Thomas Jackson's 'Slow Train' is just the latest case in point, then, drawing dancers and listeners alike in with its warm-hued, hypnotic synth lines, stabs and warbles in all the right places to ensure that while not that much happens, you'll be stomping about like everything was going on at once. Far from a one-track-wonder, Calypso Cult II is the label setting out all its stalls with aplomb. 'Jungle Tungle' is a strange, somewhat shrill, constantly building and percussively dominated workout that's tough and yet not actually that tough. 'Big Plastic Room' is peak time acid meets Kraut oddness, while 'Hipocampos' brings things to a beautiful close with beguiling, downtempo sludge.

Review: U makes his 7" debut for Where To Now, and offers a great example of why the MPC machine should never be limited to MPC-sounding beats. It's a versatile instrument in the right hands, and there's no question in our minds that the producer in question here has the right hands. Offering three snapshots of a mind evidently packed with far-reaching, varied ideas, the musicality is surprising considering the process and the concepts at play utterly breathtaking.

From '2 Good 4 Me''s manipulated-yet-deep drum patterns, reversing in and out in a playful way while being cast in the dim light of a rainy, moody overhead arrangement, to the stepping, shuffle-inducing 'Almost Man', and its jazz-infused, candlelit vocal sections, this is quite possibly the most sophisticated electronic music you'll hear in some time.

Review: Vintage synthesiser fetishists Belbury Poly were last on record with author Justin Hopper and folk musician Sharron Kraus back in 2019 for the superb Chanctonbury Rings album. Here we're treated to a reissue of their very first EP Farmer's Angle from 2004, all magical electro-folk and left of centre new sound worlds that combine both new and old.

Review: The Castles In Space label has been quietly supporting esoteric synth works for the past seven or so years out of their home base in Biggleswade. Amongst the artists they've previously released are Antoni Maiovvi and CHXFX, and now they're presenting a new venture by the name of Twilight Sequence. So far, so synthy. The music on this single-sided one-track sureshot fits the vibe as well, dealing in expertly sculpted melodic patterns interwoven in a manner which sounds like it might well come from a modular set up, such is the undulating movement inherent in the sound and the symbiotic nature of the different elements.

Review: Seance Centre have put together this beautiful new limited edition package on hand-stamped 12" and it is a meditative escape of the highest order. 'Rust' opens up with shimmering pads and half-heard voices, scattered drum sounds and immersive ambient that is like waking up from a dream. 'Ah Bah Dee' then builds around an evolving synth melody with twinkling keys up top and 'Winterhaze' brings a warmer, more hopeful vibe with its whimsical flutes and gentle rhythm. Closing out the EP is 'Daylight Savings' with organic piano chords falling heavy on the heart.

Review: Suicide's Alan Vega was a truly visceral artist. Time and again he gave us mutated, spliced tracks, screwing mechanical futurism into familiarly human sounds to create hybrid noises that weren't born of our time, and instead sound like things that came before us, while also conjuring images of futures yet to arrive.

Invasion/Murder One follows in a similar vein, and lands in the wake of last year's Mutator. Again, this is Vega solo and plucked from the infamous archives of his previously unreleased and largely unheard stockpile of weird and wonderful music. The two tracks were both recorded in New York but decades apart, the most recent as part of a group of tracks that were laid down prior to sessions beginning for his 1999 album, 2007. If that's simply too many numbers, let's just say this is brooding, gritty, distorted but euphoric, empowering but tense experimental rock, with electronic effects.

Review: School Daze is a killer compilation put together by the Dark Entries label and the Honey Soundsystem crew, collating some of the early recordings produced by Patrick Cowley in the years between 1973-81 and were later used as soundtrack material in two gay porn films. You will probably know Cowley for his Hi-NRG output or 'that' Donna Summer remix or his behind the buttons work on Sylvester tracks. Be prepared for a surprise (well quite a few as the 'explicit content' warning on the cover lives up to its billing) as this collection presents Cowley as a producer capable of many styles and moods. The closest School Daze comes to the sound Cowley is most identified is opening track "Zygote" and from here the collection runs through primitive electronics, short bursts of wave and more with a few extended gems that highlight Cowley's talent for arrangement. One of the compilations of the year!

Review: "Another Bjork album?!" cry the naysayers. But little do they know they've been duped into thinking the Icelandic legend's last full-length, Utopia, was a recent affair. Actually, it's already been a good five years since the singer's flowery flabbergaster, and collab with experimentalists Arca and Doon Kanda, came to be. Fossora, by contrast, is a much more mournful LP: it's a meditation on generations, and was in part inspired by the death of Bjork's mother. It also contains collaborations with her two children, Sindri and isadora. A homelier affair, revisiting Bjork's upbringing in Iceland, on which she hadn't reflected on record since she was 16.

Review: FKA Twigs' latest LP 'Caprisongs', widely known as her poptimist opus (contrasting to her earlier experiments) now gets a luminous vinyl pressing via Young. It does well to justify her reinvention after breaking up with a disgraced actor whose name we shan't name: the album is a colossal collaborative affair, and even come with a carnivalesque duet with pop king The Weeknd ('Tears In The Club'). The melodic abandon that follows is just as apt.

Review: 25 years on from its original 1996 release, Neil Ollivierra's debut album as the Detroit Escalator Company gets a reissue. Emerging like a phoenix from Detroit's early dance music scene, 'Soundtrack [313]' deals in the rawer end of atmospheric, arpreggiated techno, each track taking on a different facet of the same shapeshifting platonic form. Enthusiastic panning and crystalline plucks adorn each mix here, re-evoking the same refractive, ascendant image we had of this album in 1996.

Review: Lion's Drums full length exists as en exploration in multiple dimensions. First by challenging the notion of the album format by presenting a body of work that lies snuggly between remixes, edits and original works and secondly as a means to delve into the transcendent potential of the drum. The album sets the tone by putting these two concepts fully on display with its hypnotic chant, swaying one into ease over the first two songs. In orderly cue folding and unfolding, meditatively through, melodies as muddied pastelle whispers cast over the measured language of the drum. Breaking away from the musing themes of the opening songs we find an ecstatic ritual in "Tanz der Korperlinge" and "Journey to Middle Earth", two distinct varieties but both of the same perennial species. Inky ether seeps back in through the second half of the album with a peak of frenzied tumbling toms and incongruous textures hovering above in the Manos Tsangaris' collaboration "Crying Tafel" and his re-imagining of Tullio De Piscopo's unhinged drum excursion "Fastness". The closing exemplifies the edit/remix/original ethos proposed for this work with Lions Drums drawing from tapes and original material of electronic pioneers Suzanne Ciani and Roberto Musci. Drawing from unreleased music and song sketches by the original artists as well as field recordings from travels & studio sessions made by Roberto Musci & Manos Tsangaris in the 80's and early 90's he constructs a side winding journey through playful textures and ethereal moods.

Review: Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard created a landmark of ambient music when they released 76:14 back in the 90s. Their Global Communication project was never just about ambient though, and it also coursed through deep house and more besides. In the spirit of progress, Middleton has returned to thinking about the project from a contemporary perspective, stepping forth as GCOM with the epic scope of E2 XO. From stirring orchestral suites to high octane DSP, it's an expansive listening experience that shows Middleton pushing himself into new terrain in the studio. Whether you tie it back to the prior material or not, it's a towering piece of work from an elder statesman of UK electronica.

Review: Martin Jenkins aka Pye Corner Audio has been a busy man. He ended a fine trio of albums last year with Entangled Routes, then dropped a live album on this label early in the year, and now quickly follows it up with yet another fine long player. Ride guitarist Andy Bell plays on five of the tunes and is a collection that comes heated by plenty of sun and coloured with bright acid psychedelics. Says the man himself, "I try to tailor my work slightly differently for the various labels that I work with, and this seems to fit nicely with Sonic Cathedral's ethos." He has sure done that.

Review: Moderat performed what they knew would be one of their last concerts in 2017 - at least, for a while, anyway. Having been in need for a hiatus, COVID restrictions kicked in and the pressure to juggle performing and music-making was off. Thus came 'MORE D4TA', an album that strove after connection and collaboration in an era where the potential for such was stunted. Now finally finished and polished, the album comes for all to enjoy, demonstrating some of the duo's most focused and pop-structured production and modular chops.

Review: Since releasing his debut album On Acid back in 2012, Lorenz Brummer AKA Recondite has released sets that various touch on techno, acid, tech-house, minimal and, most recently, ambient and downtempo grooves. Taum, his latest full-length offering, mixes and matches his various electronic influences and repackages them in interesting new ways. After opening with a spot of acid-sporting minimalist electro, Brummer confidently strides through trace-influenced mid-tempo chuggers, intergalactic IDM, ghostly post-dubstep electronica, experimental D&B and the kind of skittish, unpredictable electronic soundscapes that are refreshingly hard to pin down. Throughout, he opts for synthesizer sounds and machine drums that recall the halcyon days of ambient techno in the mid 1990s.