Back in stock: Experimental/Electronic

Review: It's been a rapid rise over the past few years for Alejandro Ghersi's Arca alias. Following some years spent as Nuuro, his current project launched with aplomb on UNO in 2012 before moving on to Hippos In Tanks, and then last year shored up at Mute with the Xen album in a demonstration of true ascendance through the leftfield ranks. Now Ghersi returns to Mute with a new album Mutant, which sees further exploration of his detailed, unusual style touching on elements of noise, bombastic ambient and neoclassical. "Soichiro" lays down wispy threads of trap in amongst dramatic stop-start dynamics while "En" flirts with lingering piano and static interference in the most artful of ways, just two examples of an album loaded with surprise and intrigue.

Review: Techno scholars have long believed that the release of Porter Ricks' 1996 album Biokinetics was something of a watershed moment. Not quite deep techno, dub techno, ambient techno or abstract experimentalism, but something in between, the album set new standards for sound design, minimalistic percussion programming (Ricardo Villaobos being one who learned much from its use of off-kilter approach) and dancefloor experimentalism. As this remastered 25th anniversary edition proves, Biokentics still sounds fresh, inspired and wonderfully unusual. If anything, it sounds more current now than it did way back in the late 1990s - a sure sign of its timeless, ground-breaking nature.