Review: On Club Tounsi, Tunisian producer Sofyann Ben Youssef, aka AMMAR 808, brings the raw rhythmic power of Mezoued-the folk music of Tunisia's working class-into a bold electronic future. Fusing pulsating synths, distorted textures and TR-808 beats with traditional instruments like goatskin bagpipes, hand drums, and the ney, he reimagines iconic Mezoued tunes for a new generation. Vocalists from classical, Sufi and Mezoued backgrounds also feature to add human soul and mean the album captures the genre's emotional depth while transforming it into something cinematic and club-ready. This LP is a bridge between past and future, tradition and innovation and one that makes you want to move.
Review: With a title inspired by the utterances of The Oracle of Delphi, a cult of female priestesses who reportedly "changed the course of civilisation" by inhaling volcanic vapours, it's clear that Lee Burtucci and Olivia Block's first collaborative album is rooted in paganistic visions and experimental mysticism. It's comprised of two lengthy tracks, each accompanied by edited 'excerpts', and combines Burtucci's experimental synth sounds and tape loops with Block's processed vocalisations and hazy field recordings. Dark and suspenseful, with each extended composition delivering a mixture of mind-mangling electronics, creepy ambience and musical elements doused in trippy effects, it sits somewhere between the charred "illbient" of DJ Spooky and the deep space soundscapes of the late Pete Namlook.
Review: Last year, regular collaborators Ian Boddy (a Sunderland-based electronics wizard who founded the ambient-focused DiN imprint years ago) and Erik Wallo (a long-serving Norwegian guitarist primiarly known for his experimental and ambient releases) performed their first joint concert for a decade. It's that performance, where they jammed out extended and much-changed versions of tracks featured on some of their prior studio sets, which forms the basis of their latest full-length, Transmissions. As you'd expect, it's a wonderfully atmospheric and evocative affair that gets the most out of both artists, with highlights including the wonderfully creepy 'Uncharted', the krautrock-style hypnotism of 'Aboena', the icy and ethereal 'Ice Station' and the slow-burn bliss of 'Salvage'.
Review: Multiple Angle Distortions (M.A.D) is the second of two EPs previewing The Future Sound of London's upcoming 2025 album. It dives into darker, more percussive terrain than before and blends acidic 303 textures with brooding orchestral layers as the cult FSOL continue to expand their sonic palette. Grammy-nominated Daniel Pemberton guests on the striking 'Improvisations,' which is a live recording from a London fashion show, while closing track 'Northern Point' showcases FSOL's own custom-built synths. The result is a heady fusion of house, electronica and techno with an experimental edge that is both cerebral and immersive. M.A.D affirms this outfit's legacy while still pushing boundaries decades into their career.
Review: Oskaa-born but truly otherworldly producer Daichi Furukawa, aka Ground, is back with a new album that is here to bend your mind and distort your reality with his fourth world follow-up to 2018's cult favourite Sunizm. This experimental odyssey truly defies genre, logic, and linearity as it assembles a chaotic yet mesmerising fusion of organic samples, synthetic textures, tribal rhythms and cosmic noise that are fantastic and freaky. Yaoyorozoo is one of those records that feels both ancient and futuristic as it taps into beautiful and unsettling, inviting and disorienting rhythms and sample sources. Across 73 minutes, it mutates like a dream-always shifting, never settling, so it makes for a cerebral collage for wide-open minds and ears only.
Review: German pair Markus Guentner and Joachim Spieth rightly got plenty of acclaim for their 2023 ambient album Overlay and now it gets revisited with a top selection of remixes that breathe new life into the original compositions. Prominent ambient and experimental artists such as Hollie Kenniff, Rafael Anton Irisarri and Pole all show their class while newer names like Abul Mogard smears synths into a misty wonder on 'Scope', Galan/Vogt layer in angelic vocal tones to 'Valenz' and Leandro Fresco brings a lightness of touch that fills with optimism on opener 'Apastron. Guentner and Spieth themselves provide two alternate versions of their originals that bring new emotional and sonic depth.
Review: Eli Keszler hears the New York percussionist and composer of the same name lord his soundworld over as yet unhaunted terrains. Rooted in dust residues of American abstraction, jazz noir, ancient melodic memory and crumbling industrial forms, the record unfolds as a footworking meditation on beauty and erosion, gawping at the anguishes and awes of the present moment. Keszler's metamorphic practice spans releases on PAN, Empty Editions, and ESP Disk, as well as collaborations with Oneohtrix Point Never, Rashad Becker and Laurel Halo. Icons emerges as a natural continuation of his previous, equally as unsettling LP Stadium from 2018, and this one emerges as its natural progression. The release coincides with a conversation between Keszler and filmmaker Adam Curtis, framing the album within a wider dialogue on sound, history and collapse.
Review: Machine Girl's debut album celebrates its tenth anniversary with a long-awaited reissue, which marks the first time it arrives on CD as well as vinyl. Originally released in 2014, WLFGRL fused footwork, jungle, digital hardcore and rave into a chaotic, euphoric sound that helped launch a global underground movement. The album's packed with raw intensity and plenty of breakcore influence so it introduced a new generation to extreme electronic music and to celebrate its return, a one-off livestreamed show at Brooklyn's Trans-Pecos accompanied the release. As we are reminded listening back now, WLFGRL is a real high-water mark in outsider music culture.
Review: Calling the curtain on Field Records' Waterworks trilogy, Yui Onodera turns his ear to confluences of hydrology and history, dedicating his latest record to Japan's Kiso Three Rivers and their transformation by 19th-century Dutch engineering. The Kiso, Nagara and Ibi rivers, once prone to catastrophic flooding, were reshaped under the guidance of Johannes de Rijke, whose work helped protect Nagoya from seasonal deluge by 1912. Onodera, known for his nuanced sound architecture, approaches this subject with a finely honed ear for subtlety, layering quiet field recordings with fuller instrumentation, evoking the widening of a river from brook to strait. The A-side's bell tones provide a sensory-meridian intimacy, processed alongside guitar, and ethereal pads; while the B-side's contradictorily colossal quietude makes itself across two long-form studies, which drift through sampled water and restrained electronics.
Review: Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard revive the collaboration first aired on the latter's 2016 album Unde The Sun, this time across a full album reportedly four years in the (top secret) making. It's a compelling synthesis of Yorke's atmospheric melancholy and Pritchard's textured production. It expores a range of moods, from the uneasy tension of 'A Fake In A Faker's World' to the hypnotic rhythms of 'Back In The Game', while the eerie, spectral qualities of 'This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice' reveal the pair's ability to intertwine experimental soundscapes with a visceral emotional pull. Standout moments include 'Gangsters,' where Pritchard's intricately layered beats mesh with Yorke's haunting vocal delivery, and 'Wandering Genie,' which closes the journey with a strange sense of release. The music takes unexpected turns, not just as a statement of collaboration, but as a reflection of two artists playing with the unknown, pulling their sonic worlds into unexplored spaces. Each track is a feather in the cap of their combined ingenuity, with Yorke's vocal vulnerability and Pritchard's production wizardry in full synergy.
Review: Since Radiohead went on hiatus a few years back, Thom Yorke has thrown himself into all sorts of solo and collaborative projects. His latest sees him join forces with Sydney-based British electronic music stalwart Mark Pritchard for an album that expands on their previous collaboration (the superb 'Beautiful People' from Pritchard's 2018 album Under The Sun). It's a breathtakingly brilliant concoction all told, with the pair conjuring ethereal, oddball and immersive songs in which Yorke's distinctive vocals - sometimes delivered as you'd expect, other times layered-up, mutilated or utilised as textures - rise above backing tracks made with unusual synths and drum machines, and variously indebted to ambient, IDM, ghostly electronica, lo-fi beat-scapes and the gripping intensity of horror soundtracks. A modern electronic classic in the making.
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