Back catalogue: Balearic/Downtempo

Review: Al Wootton has always been able to cook up rhythms that are beyond even the wildest dreams of many and now he gets even more weird and esoteric on this fresh 12" on True. The six tracks layer up polyrhythmic hand percussion with sonorous bells and are all brought to life with modular synthesis and deft sound design that takes you deep into a humid jungle where moisture drips from the leaves and psychedelia lurks around every corner. It is both a heady and a heavy trip into worldly and dubby techno rhythms that will leave you feeling keen to hear more from the man.

Review: The iconic Is It Balearic heads to the slightly less iconic - in Balearic terms - West Midlands to retrieve this great EP of electric dance effort gems from Wrekin Havoc. 'Camino' is a loose, melody-rich sound with silvery drums and real nostalgia, then 'Moon Dance' it's a more laidback and zoned out sonic daydream for lazy and sunny afternoons by the pool. There is an electro vibe to 'RLTW' which is a reworking of a Christopher Cross Yacht classic then a T Kurt Remix reworks it into a boogie banger. Another varied and vital EP of grown up dance sounds.

Review: Brothers in sounds (and lineage) Mark and Clive Ives deal with two of the biggest issues impacting music right now on one incredible record.WOO have a reputation for taking parts of archived sounds and formulating new things from those segments, and in this case the work is born from excerpts of four-track tape recordings made in the late-1980s. They then began reflecting on the "imminent nature of humanoid robots", and starting to create Xylophonics/Robot X. From artificial intelligence to reuse and sample politics and economics, these themes seem to guide the sounds themselves, which feel strangely nostalgic and futuristic, a vision of tomorrow that is inseprtable from the humans that made it - their understanding of the unfolding machine age through weird distorted jazz tech, deconstructed dub and psychedelic electronica. So, remembering all this is a reconfigured version of stuff made almost 35 years ago is truly mind-blowing.