New releases last eight weeks: Balearic/Downtempo

Review: Athens-based label Ethos is looking to build on the good start it made with its first two outings with a third raw and direct EP. DimDJ is a legend in Greece and has been since the 90s when he first began making his mark. His sound is not all about nostalgia though - he opens his Welcome To This World EP with 'This Little Face' which is a deep house reverie with painterly pads smeared over dusty drums. Nice analogue textures make it all the more lived in and a Beatless version strips away everything but the suspensory synths. 'Welcome To This World is another lo-fi and crackly deep house meditation and 'Hyper Tonic' flips the script with some undulating acid lines, more light synth work and hissing hi-hats.

Review: Will Long aka Celer, Mississippi-born but now permanently resident in Tokyo, intensifies his investigation in personal house music with the fourth edition in his Long Trax series. A quartered circle of evolving textures of at first seemingly diminutive character, this manifest impression is dashed once we learn that each track on the record is given its own side, allowing each ample space to unfold within an economically restrained formula: dry drum machines, subtle chords, hygge bass. Clearly an ode to productive limitation: 'The Right Choice' tosses us the first chord against gambolling percs, while 'You Cannot Reform A Sin' brings marching, DC-offset acid. The release redresses historic wrongs too, using carefully extracted, recorded samples of key voices in the Afro-American civil rights movement.

Review: Originally confined to CDia relic of a different timeiJorg Burger's early-2000s masterwork finally sees the vinyl treatment it deserves. Lush, transportive, and quietly radical, this is ambient techno at its most fluid, a body of work that drifts between nostalgia and movement, solitude and propulsion. 'Leuchtturm' remains untouched, its soft hand drums and hazy atmospheres still unfolding like a slow sunrise. Elsewhere, 'AG Penthouse' undergoes a transformation, its flute-like trills and glassy keys now fused to a churning rhythm that recalls Tangerine Dream's work on Thief, minus the guitar histrionics. Beat-driven yet deeply immersive, each track rises, crests and recedes in perfect sequence, a travelogue in the vein of Carl Craig's Landcruising or Model 500's Deep Space. What makes this release endure isn't just its shimmering detail but its refusal to conform. In a landscape where ambient techno so often leans on a specific nostalgia, Burger sidesteps the obvious, creating a listening experience that still feels singular, 21 years later.