Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: First released in 2022, post-punk and industrial music legend Stephen Mallinder (half of Cabaret Voltaire for 40 years) returned for another collaboration with Eric Random (a storied post-punk UK musician in his own right) for the short EP 'Deadeye', consisting of two non-eponymous tracks, 'One Way No Run' and 'Stop / Begin Again'. Combining hypnotic rhythms, trembly synthwork and raucous whisper-singing, the songs form part of a series of releases from Eric Random for 2022-23 on the label eMERGENCY heARTS: an anarchist-run, indie collaborative media hub in Austin, Texas, spotlighting post-punk, outsider and non-genre specific music with political and darkwave aesthetics. Now reissued in late 2023 by Greece's very own Kinetik, the new version of the release hears two whopping and unprecedented remixes from Meat Beat Manifesto, who's remained at the bleeding edge of the fusion of said genres, together with IDM and techno, since he started out. The tracks are completely upended; flaymorphosed out from their original broken beaty, clean sensibilities and into far grittier and dirtier sonic gutters, ducts, bung pipes and vents.

Review: Cult TV buffs will no-doubt pick up on the 'Shatterday' reference here, name of the first episode of the first season of the 1980s reboot of The Twilight Zone. In turn, that borrowed its title from a collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison, which arrived at the beginning of the same decade, which contains the tale 'Jeffty Is Five', once voted as the finest short story of all time. Agree or not, the programme and publication go some way to preparing you for the sounds on this expansive Kinetik Greece release. Still none the wiser? Simply put, these are tunes that have one foot in the future, and another in the past, specifically the last time culture in general was as obsessed with what could be coming in the next half century. 1980s hues saturate many parts of here, somewhere between coldwave, downtempo synth, experimental electro, and movie score.