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: Aisha Devi's brilliant Of Matter And Spirit release from last year gets the remix treatment by a stellar cast here, merging her esoteric electronica weirdness into new hybrids. Irish duo Lakker turn "Anatomy of Light" into a freeform techno excursion with ferocious broken beats and Devi's vocals chopped and morphed into new forms. No Pain In Pop/New Ninja Tune signing Throwing Shade turn in a rendition of "Kim & The Wheel Of Life" that's ethereal as much as it is jagged and unusual. Knives associates Mind:Body:Fitness give "Mazda" a turnover that mutates it into some alien urban flavour much like their associates on Kuedo's label. Finally there's another version of the track by Bristol's Killing Sound featuring MC Rider Safique and Bogues exploring the dark side of bass music and truly exorcising the demons.

Review: Katie Gately's second album "Loom" is a very different beast to its predecessor, 2016 debut full-length "Color". Deeply personal and recorded during her mother's ultimately unsuccessful battle against a rare form of cancer, it sees Gately reflect on grief and loss in a surprisingly confident and musically alluring manner. The assembled tracks make extensive use of both densely layered vocal textures and her own distinctive lead vocals, elements which she mixed with ear-catching melodies, woozy electronics and beats that were crafted in part from recordings she made of Californian earthquakes. You'd expect it to be tonally dark given the subject matter, but it's actually far more bold, beguiling and melodic, drawing just as much influence from more pastoral styles of music as Gately's usual experimental electronics and intricate sound design.

Review: Fifty Fathoms Deep marks the Houndstooth debut of Dixon Avenue Basement Jams member Marquis Hawkes. Interestingly, it largely eschews his raw and distorted machine funk sound in favour of a range of far smoother and polished cuts. Opener "Can't Find a Reason" is a formidable basement house jam - a '90s-influenced chunk of synth-bass driven garage-house that comes laden with cut-up vocal snippets and exotic melodies. Steve Downes collaboration "The Way" sounds like vintage Mr Fingers, while "Fifty Fathoms" fuses twinkling piano melodies and drifting vocal samples with a shuffling deep house rhythm. Finally, "Fat Man" draws influences from vintage '80s electro and synth-funk, melding them into a squidgy house groover.

Review: Bristol's Hodge served up his debut album Shadows In Blue just after the first lockdown hit. It was a record with all his usual hi fidelity sound and rhythmic inventiveness and was also inspired by his new found love of gardening. Now it gets ripped up and rebuilt by some seriously heavyweight names. Manchester via London, DJ and producer Anz kicks things off with a bouncy rave remix, fellow Bristolian Shanti Celeste impresses yet again with another fine rhythm and Surgeon goes for a tribal beat with lush synth work for his contribution, amongst other highlights.

Review: Anastasia Kristensen has brought new energy to tech in recent years. The Danish artist has does so primary as a DJ who is not afford to reach for rave, electro, whatever she needs to keep things bumping. As a producer she is in a fine run of form, too, and this Houndstooth 12' is another fine outing. There is a restless energy to opener 'Volshebno' with its flat footed drums and edgy synth loops, while 'Voice Within' ducks and dives on a warmer far-sighted deep techno rhythm. The closer is an alternative version of 'Volshebno' that becomes a monstrous breakbeat banger with jungle energy and epic synth work.

Review: J'Kerian Morgan aka Lotic has had quote the decade. Sage is one of the most hotly tipped producers armour - Bjork is a famous fan - but has had plenty of perusal difficulties and also moved from Texas to Berlin. Anyway, she has still managed to turn out this superb album of complex electronics and emotional defiance. This boundary pushing record finds Lotic performing as both an operatic singer and electronic rule breaker as well as plenty more in between. There is nothing quite like it out there and as such it makes a late call for album of the year.

Review: Although Abul Mogard has made some stunning albums over the years, in recent times it's his reworks that have been celebrated most. It's perhaps for that reason that Houndstooth has decided to offer up this retrospective of the shadowy artist's most admired remixes. The most notable inclusion is the producer's previously unheard revision of Becoming Animal's "The Sky Is Ever Falling", a stunning, stretched-out soundscape that re-imagines the song as a heart-aching ambient epic. It's almost as good as Mogard's jaw-dropping interpretation of Fovea Hex's "We Dream All The Dark Away", whose fragile folk vocals, ever-intensifying modular synthesizer cycles and layered electronic drones deliver a stunning climax to an impeccable collection of inspired ambient soundscapes.

Notes: 'Untold' is an experimental electronic LP from multi-disciplinary artist and author Sophia Loizou. Depicting a series of speculative sonic landscapes; animals, ocean waves and weather systems are abstracted into eco-centric cyber-dreams creating powerful ambient compositions that invite us to see the Earth through the eyes of others.
Untold is not about the natural or the technological but the relationships between the two; sonic textures, breaks and melodies are shaped by the dynamics of a lion's roar or the rhythm of a dolphin's echolocation emissions."I didn't want to make it human-centric," explains Sophia."I wanted to remove my compositional and structural domination, to find ways to make it about the symbiosis of systems I see in the world."

Untold is part of a much bigger multi-disciplinary project that also includes a collection of poems with accompanying audio, artworks, an AV show and a lecture performance.

Multidisciplinary artist and doctoral researcher Sophia Loizou's debut poetic collection 'Untold: A Tellurian Memorandum' imagines a series of speculative sentient landscapes. The six works envision different aspects of entangled Earthly relationships; from the aqueous roots of biotic life and non-human systems of perpetual growth, to biologically enhanced futures where multiple forms of life collide, connect and share their material qualities. "I wanted to portray an open and empathic multiform future,' explains Sophia. 'a world that celebrates the vibrant, messy and multifaceted beauty of non-human forces and forms."

The book is accompanied by a 30-minute speculative sonic landscape in which sounds from living systems, field recordings from human, animal and technological origins meet - producing wild and unpredictable results.

'A Tellurian Memorandum' is part of a much bigger multi-disciplinary project that also includes the LP 'Untold', artworks, an AV show and a lecture performance.