Subexotic Vinyl & CDs

Review: To say Michael Coldwell sounds like he leads an interesting life would be an understatement, based on what we know. Based in Leeds, UK, the man better recognised - by us at least - as Conflux Coldwell is an academic at the highly respected University of Leeds. There, he researches the hauntology of media - the recurring persistence of socio-cultural ideas, artefacts and other items from our past in a present form. He's also active in the Urban Exploration community, which relishes in any chance to explore manmade structures, often abandoned. When none of that's happening, he puts out the kind of music that makes Memorex Mori so special. Built from samples taken off a load of half-worn VHS tapes found in a dusty box at his parent's house, the sounds here are at times abstract, in other moments direct and rhythmic, futuristic yet wonderfully analogue, always ghostly, and often pretty menacing.

Review: High concept and absolutely beautiful don't always fit together in a sentence. Enter St. Swithin's Day Storm, a record which in one way is to the point, but in almost every other completely wild and unique. Working with weather research scientist Nigel Meredith, the pair recorded the sounds made by a geomagnetic storm in space, on a day in June which, according to folklore, is supposed to decide the rest of summer's weather. Captured via the Halley VI Research Station's low frequency receiver, those moments of cosmic disruption, including chorus emissions, which, when played back, resemble birdsong, along with Meredith's explanations of such phenomena and its effect on Earth, then form the basis for a stargaze-worthy ambient journey that feels out of this world.

Review: It's arriving a little late, given the Summer Solstice was late-June, but when an electronic compilation is as strong as this you can forgive the little things. Fittingly, this is a very UK sounding affair, with some tracks almost feeling like Bob Moog has walked into a maypole dance in some strange corner of the British Isles where detectives go missing. On the whole, though, things are much deeper and cosmic, which is where the whole celestial link clearly comes from.

To call it all ambient would be pretty reductive, but the label is useful for much of what's here. In actual fact the collection spans strange downtempo broken beats ('And They Named Him When The Sun Stands Still'), building grooves ('Throbbing Motor Lifeforms'), hypnotic drone ('All of Us Under The Sun') and atmospheric ethereality ('Heralding the Dawn').