Infinite Fog Productions Vinyl & CDs

Review: On his return to China in 2019 after a period away, Brock van Wey noticed a "strange, sound emitting item" on the table. It was a handmade 'steel tongue drum', a unique percussion instrument associated with spirituality and meditation in Asian culture. A few days later, van Wey recorded an extended jam of himself playing it, and later overdubbed electronic sounds, melodies, chords and textures. The result is The Depth of Rain, the long-serving ambient and drone artist's second Bvdub album of 2024. Where some of van Wey's ambient sets can tend towards the intense and claustrophobic, The Depth of Rain is a genuinely melodious, evocative and spring-like affair that ebbs and flows wonderfully throughout, providing entertainment and sonic bliss in equal measure.

Review: Confusingly, two staggering out-there experimental albums arrived in 1992 bearing the same title: Thunder Perfect Mind. One came from Current 93, a group led by David Tibet featuring Nurse With Wound founder Steven Stapleton. The second was the latter's own experimental musical meditation on the same musical theme - a follow-up to the classic Soliloquy For Lilith that was, if anything, even darker, weirder and more intense than Current 93's paganistic LP. This expanded reissue presents a remastered version of the original two-track set on disc one - complete with musical contributions by Colin Potter and David Tibet - and a wealth of rare, unreleased and recently unearthed contemporaneous material on CD2. It's the ultimate version of an inspiringly out-there set.

Review: Amongst fans of the late Coil member (and prolific electronic experimentalist) Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson, the Amulet album has long been spoken of in hushed tones. The second and final set he recorded as The Threshold Houseboys Choir, it was recorded in 2008 and only available at gigs (or via mail-order) in a "hand-made four mini-CDR package housed in a circular Thai amulet case". This, then, is the set's first "proper" release, with the material now stretched across two CDs. Reminiscent of some of Coil's more colourful and polished works of the early-to-mid 1990s, much of the material on Amulet blurs the boundaries between ambient, dub, trip-hop and downtempo psychedelia, sitting somewhere between vintage Orb albums and the more out-there escapades of Future Sound of London.