Juno Recommends Experimental: Best of 2023

Review: While his AR antics and massive stage shows might be a far cry from the subversive rave culture he came up in, Aphex Twin remains one of the most fascinating and gifted electronic dance music producers of his generation. Get past the fanfare and bluster, and it's still an incredibly exciting prospect to be opening up a new box of his charms, and he's as generous as he's ever been on this new four-track EP. As a key architect of the braindance sound (whether he likes the tag or not), Richard D. James demonstrates his gift for uncanny emotionality and dexterous drum programming on the lead single 'Blackbox Life Recorder 21f', hitting a spot not too far from the realm of his last album Syro and The Tuss material. With a lush fold-out sleeve to house it all in, it's another fine addition to the canon of a true cult phenomenon.

Review: Is there any artist in electronic music that releases as little music yet remains as highly revered as Burial? We can't think of any. As it happens, this new Streetlands EP is actually the hallowed UK producer's second outing of 2022 after the ambient offering Antidawn back in January. As always it finds him back on Kode9's Hyperdub label. 'Hospital Chapel' is eerie atmosphere and lo-fi samples, 'Streelands' is another sparse ambient cut that is full of melancholy and 'Exokind' is the soundtrack of a faraway planet with distant solar winds and only the smallest of microbial activities for you to tune into before a signature angelic vocal brings the beauty.

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: Straddling the worlds of dancefloor techno and leftfield experimentation - very often in the same track - The Black Dog aka Black Dog Productions was made up of Ed Handley, Andy Turner and Ken Downie, and on this one the trio appear in various combinations under various guises such as Atypic, I.A.O, Close Up Over, Balil, Xeper, Discordian Popes and Plaid. They released Bytes 30 years ago this year, the third album in Warp's Artificial Intelligence series and this anniversary repress comes on gatefold double vinyl with original artwork. It has been re-cut for the occasion and is as immersive and widescreen now as it ever was.

Review: Sure to sate all of their North Face and/or Arcteryx-jacketed obsessives, a new reissues spate of Autechre's best albums is underway courtesy of Warp Records. This reissue of Confield (arguably one of their most straightforward and 'chilled' experimental records) comes in the form of a double LP and digital download. The album is characterised by its shifting in and out of tempo structures, as well as its serene pads and digital sloshing sounds, producing the overall sonic character of a transhuman rainmaker.

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: 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: Yu Su's eclectic, organic sound is one that has been perfected over every consecutive release, and reaches its yetmost peak with 'I Want An Earth'. As if to make a defiant cry for a habitable planet, this one contains four tracks inspired by the artist's time spent in the deserts of Ojai, California, and the coastal areas of British Columbia, presenting a deeply pad-driven, warm and modular sound to match. A dazzling work of odd-timed cosmickery and varied sonics.

Review: A new reissue run of Autechre's best albums is underway, courtesy of Warp Records. The seventh LP Draft 7:30 is one of their many lesser-cited projects, but easily rivals many of the greats for all its ahead-of-its-time tinkerings and extrahuman sonic abstractions. Highlights for those not yet in the know include the stop-start snares and machinic crunches of 'IV VV IV VV VIII', and the mood of psychic absentia conveyed by the rapid-delayed big beat breaks of 'V-PROC'.

Review: David Holmes' first solo album since 2008's The Holy Pictures, Blind On A Galloping Horse now comes to Heavenly Recordings. A politically-charged LP full of sonic interrogations of political disaster and turmoil, Holmes here joins the cast of artists using their art to provide solace to music fans suffering at the hands of the Uncertainocene. With updated versions of the previously released singles 'Hope Is The Last Thing To Die' and 'It's Over If We Run Out Of Love', as well as a recording of an unreleased song by Holmes' late friend Andrew Weatherall, we're reminded of conflict, migration and othering, as all manner of voices combine to form a diverse but unified whole against a backdrop of leftfield post-punk - be they the spoken word accounts from Afghan and Ukrainian refugees now welcomed as residents in Belfast, or the French and Irish observers of the UK's turmoil of recent years.

Review: Maintaining his trajectory into the upper echelons of alt-pop with carte blanche to do as he pleases, James Blake returns with his sixth studio album Playing Robots Into Heaven. From his brief dalliance with the post-dubstep underground into his sombre strain of electronic indie songwriting, Blake has confounded expectations at every turn and the drop of lead single 'Big Hammer' should maintain that trend. There's no big vocal turn from his delicate voice, but rather a twitchy, sub-loaded beat somewhere on the outer edges of trap with some diced up MC samples, pointing to an exciting foray into unpredictable waters from a truly gifted major league maverick.

Review: It almost seems redundant, writing something about the latest fabric Originals release. If you could think of a more enticing double-header for fans of bass, Leftfield techno, and UK-hued alternative electronic music then we want to hear it, with both producers here moving well beyond cult status and into the world of households names in homes well beyond their original audiences. And yet, remarkably, neither have strayed too far from where they initially set stalls. Hyperdub boss Kode 9 proves this first, with the sightly dizzying 'Infirmary'. Born from a combination of loose, open, galloping UKF and organic techno, with its foundations rooted in footwork, it's a bounding high-energy body mover that refuses to quit. Flip it and find Burial edging closer to 'dance music' than many might be used to, although it's a deep, moody interpretation packed with the spellbinding vocal flourishes of a mutant garage and suppressed, fidgety drums so subtle they're close to background noise.

Review: Platform 23's latest release sees them offer up a partial reissue of 'Music For Hippies', an impossible-to-find 1988 cassette from Dutch experimentalists De Febriek. What's an offer is a mix of original tracks and fresh remixes. In the former category you'll find 'Lullabye', a spacey, dubbed-out chunk of new wave/post-punk/cosmic funk fusion full of intergalactic synth sounds, rubbery bass, bluesy guitar solos and trippy vocals, and an edited version of the epic 'Come Down', a more atmospheric, but no less dubbed-out affair that combines layered ambient noise, rocket-launch sonics and a hushed, hypnotic groove. Bahnstag 23 contributor Dunkeltier provides two takes on 'Lullabye', a throbbing, druggy new wave mix and a total re-make. Completing the package is a fiendishly low-slung, dark and mind-altering '5am Mix' of 'Come Down' courtesy of Khidja.

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: After his superlative and rather unexpected foray into Afro and Latin fusion with his Sol Set project, John Beltran returns to more familiar territory with a rendition of his classic mid-90s album 'Ten Days of Blue' recorded at this year's Dekmantel in Amsterdam. We get a real feel for the whole gig experience, from the sound of murmured anticipation and intro tape to the resolution at the outro and the main meat of the music itself - lively, optimistic, groovy but understated and chilled at the same time - sits somewhere between his ambient and harder techno work. Among Beltran's very finest output.

Review: Guy J was making prog house way before it came back into fashion and likely will be doing way after it has passed through the hype cycle and out the other side. What that means is you get a certain quality from his work and that's evident again here. '94 Blossom' is his new one-sided 12" and is as broody and grandiose as you can imagine. The drums set the tone, rolling deep over a pulsing bassline with suspensory pads up top. The melodies eventually take over and sweep up to an infinite cosmos, leaving you looking on in awe.

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: Hyperdub continues to stamp its authority down on a wide variety of electronic music, in this case throwing the light, bouncing club-ready sounds of Canada's Jessy Lanza into the mix of a back catalogue that touches on everything from ambient to dubstep and footwork. But, while we open on the snare-happy garage-house of 'Don't Leave Me Now', and tracks like 'Drive' also look to the dancefloor, things don't stay there long. 'Don't Cry On My Pillow', for example, is a low stepping piece of alternative electronic soul. 'Big Pink Rose' opts for synth refrains and staccato drums to create a steamy, heady neon r&b brew with added yacht. 'Double Time' deconstructs pop balladry and makes it sound lo-fi yet huge, 'I Hate Myself' seems to take a lead from tropicalia-hued, leftfield electronica.

Review: Heavyweight heroes Kode9 and Burial are no stranger to working together having done so to great success on FABRICLIVE 100 back in 2018. They don't actually collaborate on this one, though, instead serving up one side each of a new 12" for Fabric. As experimental artists with a penchant for drawn from the UK hardcore continuum you roughly know what to expect - fresh rhythms, emotive sounds designs, compelling rhythms. The 140g 12" comes in both limited edition and standard black vinyl versions, and both have bespoke 3D design with the fabric logo printed on reverse board heavyweight card.

Review: Kraftwerk's 1975 performance at Fairfield Hall in Croydon is the stuff of legend. Finally it is available as a high quality audio pressing that allows you to relive all its glorious futurism. The show was broadcast on radio as part of a short tour of the UK that came after the release of the German computer music pioneer's hugely popular Autobahn. It features tracks from that album as well as 'Die Sonne, Der Mond, Die Sterne' and 'Showroom Dummies.' A real piece of electronic music history that will spice up any collection.

Review: WORKSHOP 32 has been a long time coming - not least as this is Kassem Mosse's first solo outing on Workshop since 2014. And what a way to return, presenting a full-length album that reflects the evolution of the artist while not denying any of the ideas and sounds and styles that first made us fall in love with him all those moons ago. A broad and varied celebration of off-centre electronic music that has as much right to be on the dancefloor as it does on a movie soundtrack. So what does that sound like? Well, in the case of 'Track 2', it's a skeletal toybox tech workout, while 'Track 6' takes us into deep and surrealist house music. Elsewhere, ''Track 7' explodes into a carnival of percussion and bleep, 'Track 4' offers lunging curveball fours, bassline seeming to bore holes in the very ground you're stomping on. Always pared back, but never truly minimal, it's one of 2023's earliest classics.

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: Death by Tickling is a masterfully intricate new collaborative album from Scotch Rolex and Shackleton. The is the sort of brain boggling and mind melting album that demand to be listened to loud, in the dark, on a great sound system or up close on headphones. It's a melange of languid dance music rhythms with experimental synths and percussion adding freaky details up top. Full of wildly unpredictable changes and weird time signatures, zoned out trance music and darkened dub, cosmic synth freak outs and ferocious sound designs, this is a truly unique record on every level.