Back catalogue: Experimental/Electronic

Review: Sure Thing presents Well of Sand, its second compilation. Six tracks from the label's friends and favourites, each new to the roster, offer bold, untempered explorations of tempo and weight, a concise yet expansive collection recalling the deliberate cadence of rippling sand and the sheen of shimmering oases. From Command D's subtly groundswelling, but snappy 'Half Blue (Violet Mix)', to Foreign Material's alarmingly alien 'The Living Planet' and Third Space's supremely stereoized, lowercase opus 'Push (Part 2)', this is a release for that large intersection of audiophiles and techno-philes.

Review: Composer, sound designer, musician, artist. Vienna-based Ulrich Troyer has a number of strings to his bow, all of which have played into a world-building process deeply rooted in dub and sound system culture. Releases on the likes of Deep Midi Musik are a good reference point for newcomers. Here, though, we're in less structured and formalised places, with two pieces - well, one and a bit - of abstraction waiting for you to get lost in. 'Track 1' certainly comes with the kind of low reverberations and effects that call to mind huge speaker stacks in smoke-filled places. But it's also kind of deconstructed journey, it harmonises distorted beats and rhythms with beautiful melodic motifs in a way that's as innovative and beguiling as it is instantly pleasing. Flip it to find something we won't even bother trying to define, a celebration of the remnants of that opening arrangement, perhaps.

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: London-based duo Jockstrap have fully remixed their album I Love You Jennifer B from 2002. It was shortlisted for a Mercury Prize that year and was written by the band's Taylor Skye, who also had the idea for this remixed version while making different versions of the album's tracklisting. Several guests feature including Ersatz and Ian Starr and the inspiration for these new takes was texture and sound rather than the musical material itself. "It's an experiment! I'm still learning" says Syke of a wildly eclectic album that fuses club, noise, pop and indie into a thrilling contemporary record.

Review: Tangerine Dream were soundtrack masters who recorded a huge number of classics. Dead Solid Perfect was their 15th at the time and, rather astonishingly, their 41st album overall. It was recorded in 1989 but only dropped in 1991 as another immersive piece of prog and electronic rock featuring Edgar Froese and Jerome Froese on guitar and keyboards and Paul Haslinger also on keyboards. It is a soundtrack to Bobby Roth's film based on the novel by Dan Jenkins and features several similar pieces in which only the melodies are varied and - until now - has been a stinker to find.

Review: Thomas Xu from Steady Flight Circle and Tommy Kladis from Music Time with Friends come together on this new cassette-only release that captures three of their sessions at Kladis's studio. Xu was on synthesizers while Kladis was in charge of samples, drums and loops on the SP-555 and the final touch was lo-fi drums from John Shaughnessy. It takes the form of two extended jams that reach out to almost 15 minutes of dusty, ambient-laced soundscapes with distant percussive details and melancholic moods. 'Klaxu' has more darkness and more prominent rhythms to it but both pieces make for escapist listening.

Review: Following up her last spate of albums, Colourgrade and Highgrade, South London vocalist and musician Tirzah adds to her streak of successes with Trip9love...???, a comparatively glossier update to her sound. Produced in collaboration with her longtime friend, collaborator and composer Mica Levi, the album recalls the melancholic, piano-driven r&b and beats formula that ensured the success of her debut album Devotion. But there's a rougher, more phased-out extension to her sound here, with more emphasis and effects placed on Tirzah's vocals, and a production gamut that more recalls the early-2010s weightless 'wave' productions of Mr. Mitch or Mssingno. An icy, elusive addition to Tirzah's catalogue, sure to take the South London contingent in particular by storm.

Review: Ten years after she made her debut on Greco-Roman, singer-songwriter Tirzah drops her third studio album, a collection of imaginative and sugar-free love songs crafted with the help of frequent collaborator Mica Levi. Trip9Love, which was recorded over the course of a year at their homes and "various studios around South-East London and Kent", is relatively minimalistic in terms of the musical elements employed - think looped piano motifs, beats that sit somewhere between lo-fi hip-hop and hyper-pop, and Tirzah's now familiar voice - but still sounds surprisingly "big". It's a great example of a simple idea, executed brilliantly, with standout cuts including the infectious 'You All The Time', the ambient pop style 'Their Love', the gritty and crunchy 'Stars', and the flash-fried '2 D I C U V', where Polly Jean Harvey-esque guitars catch the ear.

Review: Marseille's IOT Records is the home for Azu Tiwaline's latest dubbed out and dreamy pads and manipulated field recordings. It's her second album and is another one that stands up to her reputation for being a true innovator. Following on from Draw Me a silence in 2020, Teh Fifth Dream is an hour long session that veers from reverberating and bass heavy steppers to next level synth-scapes. Field recordings made in the desert of her native El Djerid, in South Tunisia, feature heavily as do tombak drums and modular synths from Franco-Persian spar Cinna Peyghamy.

Review: It's been 40 years since Michal Turtle released his seminal, ground-breaking album Music From The Living Room into the world and promptly disappeared back into the aether. An extremely obscure cult classic known only to deep diggers and aficionados of the finest order, it wasn't until Music From Memory reissued some of the tracks from it via retrospective compilations of Turtle's unreleased music almost 30 years later that his name become more widely known and a new generation were able to discover the artist's unique and pioneering style of experimental electronic music production, the majority of it very much ahead of its time, and to this day still timeless. Invisible Inc. contacted Turtle in the summer of 2023 about releasing something else by him, and it was during this exchange of emails that ideas were expressed about releasing not simply a straightforward reissue of Music From The Living Room to mark its 40th anniversary (the album has never been reissued in full), but rather a re-imagined and re-constructed take on the album, bringing contemporary techniques, styles and newly recorded vocal and instrument parts into the mix and breathing new life into these wonderful compositions. Collaborators old and new were brought into the studio and the songs re-created from the ground up. Familiar songs like 'Are You Psychic?' and 'Village Voice' are overhauled and echo remnants of their original counterparts, but simultaneously sound like completely new tracks. The always mesmerising 'Phantoms Of Dreamland' is represented through a live recording at Cafe OTO, featuring original album vocalist Lucianne Lasalle and regular collaborator HOVE on electronics. The remaining tracks, however, will be completely new to the ears of most people, never having been reissued or heard in these new forms ever before.

Review: Shanghai-based, Malaysian-born artist Tzusing offers us a future-facing and experimental techno record that also serves as a meditation on "China's complicated history of patriarchal heteronormativity, and how these archaic double standards continue to dominate the culture in pervasive, often invisible ways." It is packed with dancefloor highlights after a deep-thinking cultural monologue to start with. Hard and funky drums, twisted sonics, manic uptempo bangers and wheezing voices and downtempo rhythms all combine into something utterly unique.