Discrepant Vinyl & CDs

Review: Tenerife-based trio LAGOSS are back with a second album of escapist electronic sounds. Goncalo F. Cardoso, Mladen Kurajica and Daniel Garcia leave behind the mega-mix vignette of their first album for a more song-based but still avant-gard collection here. Their raw, live jamming style mixes up tropicalia and electronic freakouts with found sounds, percussion, bird calls and rich samples that all bring these tracks to life as it moves through various different moods, gores, genres and eras with style. Somehow inviting yet eerie, this a very personal sound world but we're all welcome inside.

Review: People Like Us, the long-running project of Vicki Bennett, returns with her first album since 2018's The Mirror. Again via sampling, and stylising in vintage neo-psych-tronic audio collage, Copia here muses on abundance and self-replication, reassembling fragments of sound into something sub-interconnected, rhizomatic. Emerging from her recent AV performance The Library of Babel, the album blends electronic textures with whimsical, often uncanny vocal moments, inlining contributions from Matmos, Ergo Phizmiz, Hearty White, Gwilly Edmondez, and others. Lyrics and melodies by Phizmiz act as a connective spine, while the project as a whole embraces an "exquisite corpse" approach, multitracks traded over oceans and timelines, forming a gaudily grotesque patchwork resistant to linearity. As always with Bennett's work, Copia blurs the borders of past, present and potential, offering a poignant meditation on creativity.