Houndstooth Vinyl & CDs

Review: As the Houndstooth roster becomes increasingly diversified with age, so Call Super remains the label's brightest star. Responsible for inaugurating the Fabric-housed operation, J R Seaton has subsequently gone on to deliver some of their best 12" offerings and the time feels right for the Berlin-based producer to show his hand at full length albums. In contrast to the techno-focused approach of his Call Super 12"s, Suzi Ecto finds Seaton expanding on his palette with 11 tracks that veer wonderfully between moments of electronic poignancy and more thrusting fare. Spend some time with Suzi Ecto and you'll find it to be one of this year's most rewarding listens with new favourites emerging with each cycle - "Raindance" is the current fave here at Juno HQ.

Review: We live in a vastly different world to the one Aisha Devi presented her last album to. The critically acclaimed DNA Feelings was a dark, ethereal, world-making record, the kind of thing that lures you deeper into incredibly original soundscapes that feel born from theatre as much as rave culture. Five years on, the follow up Death Is Home arrives and picks up where its predecessor left off, opening on the menacing, tense and eerie 'Not Defined By The Visible'. Release information puts this as her most personal record to date, and while we'll have to take that as gospel it's certainly - and remarkably - even more explorative than ever. Tracks like 'Unborn Yet Alive' marry weird choral, twisted art rock, euphoric electronica, and more. 'Lick Your Wounds' is a synthesised opera looking for a new Terminator movie (and hopefully a good one), while 'Azoth Eyes' leaves us in completely unfamiliar territory, closing out with impact that's hard to compare.

Review: Djrum (Felix Manuel) presents his latest full album in six years, in what has been described as a "literal creative rebirth". Beginning in earnest in the 2020 COVID lockdown, this a record whose creation treads a path of almost archetypal infamy: all the best electronica albums, in our view, are born of hard-drive losses. And Djrum's hard-drive meltdown, of course, seemed to correspond to a literal collapse and renewal; such ostensible catastrophes are painful at first, but they tend to breed re-incarnal transformations. Reflecting in the shaking disaster-piece stutters of 'Three Foxes Chasing Each Other' to the ambi-spatially adept 'A Tune For Us', the record spans prodigious instrumentality and electronica abstractions, verging on speedcore, jazz and techno-halftime in places. From vinyl DJ to reckoner of hardcore musicianship.