Juno Recommends Experimental: November 2023

Review: On their third LP, British-Singaporean singer-songwriter Nat Cmiel is moving in a new direction - not only with a move from Bayonet Records to Ninja Tune, but also favouring a guitar-led indie rock sound, a departure from the critically acclaimed 'Serotonin II' and Danny L Harle produced 'Glitch Princess'. Lead single 'sulky baby' is a bright affair, distorted guitars circling Yeule's brand of gloomy lyrics sang with a smile. 'dazies' gets off the mark with a killer electric guitar lead, giving way to a plucked ambience with a computerised Nat ringing off a word association of a person kicked to the curb. When Kin Leonn isn't working their production magic, Yeule's self-production breaks the space. 'fish in the pool' is an ambient piano interlude with light-as-a-feather vocal adlibs, something that wouldn't be out of place in a Studio Ghibli production.

Review: Lee Gamble is an artist who excels in delivering post-modern music with a strong sense of sentiment and history. Just look at his breakthrough Diversions 1994-1996, in which the ambient threads in first wave jungle were blown out into grandiose chasms of sound. On this latest album, he's taking a similar approach to source material, but this time the focus is on pop earworms in which all kinds of emotive, catchy sonics get dissolved and reformed into vast, unpredictable shapes. Vitally, the emotional dimension is maintained no matter how unrecognisable the original samples are, as Gamble continues his fascinating path forwards and backwards through time.

Review: In the wake of The Knife, Olof Dreijer has been plenty busy behind the scenes and scattering hints of his incredible production for those paying attention. Now it feels like he's building to a wider profile breakthrough as he lands a knockout blow with this release on Hessle Audio. It's a maverick release, which is its pass into the curious sound world shaped out by Ben UFO, Pearson Sound and Pangaea, but equally it brings something new to the label. The joyous, colourful melodic daubs across the EP alone are something to make a dance collectively look up in wonder, with 'Camelia' being an especially beautiful, uplifting track to bring hope and positivity when so much club music tips towards the darkness.

Review: Generations of modular might fold in on themselves as legendary Buchla pioneer Suzanne Ciani patches into accomplished French synthesist Jonathan Fitoussi for this outstanding album on Obliques. The title is clearly a tribute to Morton Subotnick, whose own Silver Apples Of The Moon is a true ground zero for West Coast synth albums and as you might surmise Ciani and Fitoussi opt to create something more shapely and inviting than the wild, brilliantly alien tonal mutations Subotnick conjured up back in the 60s. If you're familiar with either artist's work you won't be disappointed, as exquisitely rendered melodic flourishes, delicate spatial processing and subtle textural shifts unfurl around your ears across these eight beautiful pieces of synth perfection.

Review: FSOL continue to be a prolific force in the sonic universe of their own making. The Environments series they started in 2007 has come to a head with a trio of albums over the past year and this is the last of them. There's a pointed callback at work on Environment 7.003, the cover explicitly referencing seminal early album ISDN, and the album is scattered with subtle nods to those mid 90s glory days. But The Future Sound Of London has always been about pushing forwards and that's precisely what Brian Dougans and Garry Cobain do on this resplendent suite of electronica, sure to satisfy the die hard fans without lazily rehashing old ideas.

Review: Call Super has always been something of an underground darling - one of those untouchable artists with next level skills in the club, and a unique studio sound that excites even the most hardened and passionate fan. 'Eulo Cramps' is the artist's fourth album and one from the centre of a multifaceted project they call 'Tell Me I Didn't Choose This' which includes poetry, auto-biographical writing, painting and music. It is full of personal reflections and his signature melding of jazz, electronica and the unique voices of Julia Holter and Eden Samara. Though adventurous and experimental, it is an album steeped in very real emotion which we can all connect to.

Review: Jon Hopkins' fourth album Immunity is a bona fide classic that is now a full ten years old. To celebrate the milestone, it has been newly remastered for this special reissue. Listening back now reminds you just what a confident and adventurous record this was - a creative trip deep inside Hopkins' mind that brought totters everything he had done and learned up to that point. The focus was firmly on the dancefloor but still, the tracks come with plenty of emotional nuances, from sad piano motifs to stirring choral drones but shifting rhythms and real-world sound effects that brought the whole thing to life.

Review: The tide of (hyper)pop has ebbed into increasingly emo and indie directions and the frothiest edge of this fluid movement is perhaps best represented by the latest album from Yeule (Nat Cmiel). Softscars follows up Yeule's 2022 album Glitch Princess and continues the trend of ultra-glossy, CD-reflective, knife-edge sounds packed into the blueprint of downtempo dream pop, in which said gloss reflects Cmiel's own personal experience of healing from trauma. The likes of 'ghost', 'dazies' and 'sulky baby' are giving glitchy alternate-reality Green Day in their Boulevard Of Broken Dreams era, with a dash of ejector-jewel-cased lyrics and a sprinkling of George Clinton-esque production flavour.

Review: Music journalists and documentarians are trying hard to right some of the wrongs of the past - not least failing to ensure the limelight has been equally distributed among artists, communities, and ideas. The role of women within synthesised production is one area in which reparations have been particularly visible, and the female members of the groundbreaking BBC Radiophonic Workshop is one example. Nevertheless, the name Elizabeth Parker still won't be familiar to everyone. Joining the aforementioned experimental sound lab in 1978, she would remain part of the core team of talent through to 1996. She's also noted as the first graduate of East Anglia University's electronic music Masters degree, and a staggeringly good cellist and pianist. Future Perfect is a showcase not just of her deft musicianship, but incredible ideas for compositions, drifting between ambient, drone, space age classical overtures, and the bits in between.

Review: Actress is back with another masterful diversion away from the tired old narratives of what dance music used to be. Darren Cunningham himself suggests this record is a 'voyage into luxury sonics', and you can find yourself carried away on some truly exquisite musicality whether it's the meandering jazz piano of 'Push Power (a 1)' or the haunting voices flickering through 'Game Over (e 1)'. Throughout, though, there's still that strong sense of Actress as he's always been, anchored by grubby rhythms, passing through a filter unique to his sound alone. This special edition of the album comes with a bonus disc containing the '88' LP, which originally only came out on tape and digital in 2020.

Review: What a beautiful and strange world it is, capable of presenting work like Tilt. Luke Blair is now 15 years into his productions as Lukid, and we still don't now what to expect from him, ever. Sure, there are some totems - lack of rigidity in beats and various pieces, one foot in the darkened rooms of leftfield venues, another in the serene wilderness of ambient dreams - but variety and breadth are the two operative words when considering his output. Here, then, we're invited into a place that has so many reference points it's hard to know where best to begin. The strange syncopation of 'Anatolia', which sounds like harmonies fed through crystal and then strung out over the top of fidget drums. Or maybe the twinkling, plink and plonk of 'Daisy Cutter', a subtly uplifting beat-less paradise. Possibly 'Belly', with its lo fi take on UK club. Definitely 'End Loop', and that scuzzy, emotional refrain.

Review: Forest Swords (Matthew Barnes) is a beloved electronic artist, and his latest album Bolted will surely add to that credence. Though his earliest albums are bona fide modern classics, Barnes has since spent the past few years working as an in-demand composer and sound designer, writing music for ballet, film and video games. Now he returns to form: 'Bolted' was recorded over the past year in a warehouse factory space in Barnes' home city of Liverpool. As tends to be the case with Ninja Tune's roster of experimental electronic artists, we're again reminded of the sound Barnes has established over the years as entirely his own; a deeply earthen dub come electronica, spanning mournful, resampled-and-sequenced calls into the night ('Caged'), knockingly broken and ghostly schisms ('Butterfly Effect') and 'scapes evoking sublime desert pilgrimages ('The Low'). For those hoping to hear Ninja Tune return to their atmospheric side in the tradition of Lone or Amon Tobin, this is your record.

Review: The second act of Bucharest-based duo Khidja, the deep-groove junkies' debut LP 'Transmissions Part 1 & 2' released earlier this year. Over the 76-minute runtime, the two delve into downtempo industrial, on 'Under Stressure' with its droning horns and spacey synths, to more traditional, analogue-influenced synthwave techno, 'Laid Back' sounding like a crazy circuit bypassing experiment from the bygone age of manual electro. Throughout the transmission, Khidja employs 90s tribal influences just as faithfully as 80s space-age synthpop tropes - like the trilling synth falsettos on epic closing track 'Oil'. Khidja have been proving in, and outside, of the club scene that they are a force to be reckoned with.

Review: Manchester two-piece Hyperdawn land on consistently innovative northern imprint Them There with a full length of fractured pop anthems, in turns melancholic, driving and pensive, but always profoundly zonked. The album reads like a weary, extended night bus journey- plenty of time to think, fret, and ultimately heal. The album opens with the strained tones of 'Say it So' - a smudged soundscape punctuated by diagetic bleeps and undercut by filtered strings, before it opens out into the breezier bump of 'Lucky You Lucky Me' and the heads-down whomp of 'Basic', which expands around the midpoint into a hazy mass of seething sawteeth reminiscent of Peder Mannerfelt's narcotic rave experiments. 'Couple of Strangers' and 'Maybe' are more isolationist sketches, with saccharine pads gliding in the distance, and meandering piano riffs calling to mind Actress' more recent forays into pop concrete. Side two opens with the tender, sparse 'Interlude' before the almost James Blake-esque rollick of 'What Have We Come To' - a highlight which wrangles together a charred, swaying groove with heart wrenching extended chords and gossamer autotune vocals. The record then winds down once again over the last three tracks, which culminate in the darkly euphoric 'Steady', which will go down as a surefire autumn heartbreak anthem.

Review: Darren Cunningham continues his inimitable exploration as Actress with a new album reportedly informed by game theory. Drawing on the tactics of chess as a framework for creating and releasing his ninth studio album, the artist himself describes this as a 'voyage into luxury sonics', and indeed 'Push Power (a 1)' has a certain languid piano jazz sophistication to it. But there's still plenty of that rugged, off-centre groove beating away underneath, and in its subdued and singular style, it feels like an Actress record through and through. Profound, moving and bold in its originality, this is yet another triumph for an artist who constantly shakes up the conventions of club music.

Review: There's not a huge amount we can say with certainty about O$VMV$M. The act is based in Bristol, UK, and certainly reinforce preconceptions of the city as a hotbed for leftfield stuff. Whether that's politics, art, or, in this case, music. Or perhaps all three. Beach Road is as much an exercise in sound-as-art as it is music per se, and as such is a strong statement about the lack of vision and imagination stalking streaming services and record shops alike in 2023.

None of which is to say that O$VMV$M's six-track EP isn't packed with incredible music. 'Diablo', one of the wildest, strangest efforts here, is disjointed mutant pop-electronica that seems like someone is warming up for an MPC showcase, and exemplifies our point. It's pleasurable to hear, but fascinating to take apart. Similar points can be made about the sparse, glitchy percussion of 'Beach Road' and 'Follow', making this one for the deep dive enthusiasts.

Review: Brittany's Julien Hairon spent some ten years travelling the world gathering sonic artefacts from field recordings to obscure cassettes before arriving at the point of his musical project, Judgitzu. It's not often a Western artist appears on Nyege Nyege Tapes, but Hairon's extended time spent in Tanzania was influential, where the sound of singeli got under his skin and now manifests in his visceral productions. The relentless 175+ bpms of the pioneers like Sisso, Jay Mitta and Duke are very apparent on this wild ride of a record, where avant-garde sonic approaches collide with the energetic eruptions of East Africa's most forward thinking producers.

Review: Spanish modular synthesist and multi-instrumentalist Cecile Schott, aka. Colleen, has been prolific since 2003, and shows no signs of stopping for anyone. Through hypnotic synthwork and repetition, her latest 'Le jour et la nuit du reel' ('The day and the night of the real') gets at just one theme and one theme only; the sheer incomprehensibility of reality in its totality. Whether this is a theme we could glean from the sound of the record alone, we don't know, although it's certainly a mood that could be evoked by it. A whopping 21 original pieces of whirling, looping arpeggios and muted, tuned blips hears Colleen draw on every inspiration from old French adages to day-and-night cycles, making for an impressively impressionistic work of art.

Review: It can often take months or even years of therapy to even begin to start addressing the real reason you're in the room talking to a trained professional. For Gazelle Twin, it has taken three albums - and more than a decade - to get to a point where it feels comfortable enough to turn her razor sharp songwriting gaze inwards. So, whereas before we heard observations on outward looking subject matter, here we take a turn for the insular. The result is an altogether darker experience, musically and thematically. There's a constant sense of drama and tension to this art-pop odyssey, and subjects such as childhood trauma - and its impact on our adult selves - are never off the table. Almost operatic, while there's plenty here to challenge, not least the universal expectation that later in life things get less scary, ultimately Black Dog is also about overcoming and confronting our most existential fears.