Juno Recommends Experimental: July 2023

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: 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: 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: Lisbon has a lot to answer for in electronic music. Not just a great city to party in (and we mean great), the Portuguese capital has, for a very long time now, been responsible for some of the most cutting edge beats and pieces being made in Europe as a whole. More impressive still, it has managed to build this reputation due to the predominance of location-specific noises. The country's colonialist history means the population is hugely diverse, resulting in a real cultural melting pot, and tunes are a major outlet through which people can express their identity.
A place packed with characters as big as the impact of their respective sounds, Teteu, AKA Normal Nada the Krakmaxter, AKA Qraqmaxter,AKA CiclOFF, AKA Erre Mente, certainly accounts for a good number of those personalities on monikers alone. And, as Tribal Progressive Heavy Metal shows, his tunes are also hard not to notice. At once harsh and yet also delicate, or at least spatial, we run from a plain evil gabber-chip music-fairground ride oddity ('Alive'), to dubby proggy techno ('Da Gamer'), off-kilter pianos and UK funky drums ('Batida 2 Dance'), and snare-bass minimalism ('Nai Na Chi (Na China)'), among other adventures.

Review: Experimental saxophonist Sam Gendel has been gifting us with reams of golden material in the past few years, from collaborative wonders to solo reflections, but this Fresh Bread will keep us chewing for days. Clearly Gendel can't help but make incredible music, and this collection is pulled from his personal archives of skits, sketches, unreleased pieces and more in between. It sounds shockingly complete for what is meant to be a gathering of offcuts, but the diaristic quality does feel like getting closer to the inner workings of the artist. If you appreciate beats, loops and experimental vignettes with an organic quality, you'll find a lot to enjoy in here.

Review: Ground Groove is the third album from LA-based, Iranian-American producer and DJ, Maral. It begins with the sprawling, achingly heavy 'Feedback Jam', dense enough to distort reality crushed beneath the track's lumbering heartbeat and waves of distortion. As each wave recedes, samples trickle forward in the mix, voices and instruments rising and falling in uncanny reverse. 'Feedback Jam' serves both as an initiation ritual, and a thesis statement for the record that follows.
Composed largely on Ableton, Ground Groove features frequent 'live recordings from Maral on guitar, bass, and vocals - but to say it's a huge step up in mixing and audio quality is an understatement. The attention to detail is immense. 'Ground Groove's eleven tracks are 'grooves' in the obvious sense, each being driven by a persistent, propulsive rhythm, but the album's title may just as well suggest the glacial passage of time that standout voices like these emerge as landmarks.

Review: 'Cutetronica' (for want of a better pun, perhaps) has been making recent waves in experimental electronic music circles, with artists like Boy Lucid, Toiret Status, Dialect or any other number of net-bound trailblazers building convincing, glitzy-shiny soundworlds. Mari Maurice, aka. More Eaze, is another expert in the field. Her latest eight-track LP nods to something between acoustic folk and slippery-plastic fantasy; from the off of 'Gentle Pets', it's as if a small child had gone wandering in a field and dropped their Nintendogs cartridge with such force that it caused the game's virtual universe to spill over into our world, with veritably soul-quelling results. The album errs off into darker and more emotive moments, as on 'Suped' or 'Goodnight', but this is for the most part a light-hearted yet emotionally complex LP, neither for the faint or the heavy of heart - it strikes just the right balance.

Review: One of two Tolerance albums to be reissued by Mesh-Key, Divin came as the second LP by the famous alias of Japanese singer and musician Junko Tange - a key fixture of the Osaka industrial scene in the late 1970s. Contrasting to their first album Anonym, Divin gets dubbier with it, abandoning many of the former album's creepy tones for subterranean, soily undulations. That being said, its weird blend of reversy 'pulse static', hues of tape noise, and found sound samples (vocals barely pop out from the buzz on occasion, making them sound like ghost EVPs picked up on ghostbusting equipment) make for a haunting listen as ever. To top it all off, this is an audiophile-primed pressing at 45 RPM, after having been remastered by one legacy stalwart, Stephan Mathieu.

Review: After a smattering of release in the latter stages of the last decade, David Koch revives his Shokh alias for this engrossing 12" on the ever-trusty brokntoys. The label is a natural home for Koch's scuffed and evocative strain of electronica, where the crunch of lo-fi electro serves as a vessel for strung-out synthesis that couldn't care less about the dancefloor. There's space for stripped down beat tracks, as on the mechanised 'Front Two' and purring 'Kolovento', but this is machine music as a mode of expression for your darkest dystopian fantasies. Sink into closing track 'Voyage Voyage' and you'll hear an orchestra of decaying circuits and cranky filters spelling out your deepest future shock fantasies.

Review: Sam Prekop and John McEntire made their debut as a collaborative partnership on Thrill Jockey with this album. Sons Of came on CD and limited, long since sold out cassette in 2022 and now it arrives on wax as a double LP that also includes the bonus cut 'A Drink At The Banquet.' Their experimental sound is a nimble mix of supple synth work an involving beats. Texture and timbre plays heavily across each freeform cut as moods build and grooves grow. There are rueful, far sighted star-gazers like 'Ascending By Night' and more lush dancers such as 'A Yellow Robe" (part 1)'.

Review: Romanian duo Khidja, known for their eclectic and adventurous blend of disco, krautrock, post-punk and psychedelia, lay down a fresh mini-album in the form of Transmissions Part 1. The first part of a series of releases to come via the label Malka Tuti, it's an impressive exercise in ricocheting, futuristic chuggage, recalling the krauty electronic janks of classic experimenters like Cluster, while bringing them to a freshly danceable, EBMmy context.