Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: DFA Records prime mysterious new Brighton signees Proper Monday Number with a sure start, flicking the proverbial Rube Goldberg machine into gear with a banging remix of their otherwise unreleased debut track 'High Horse'. Here, of course, it's LCD Soundsystem / DFA's very own James Murphy at the remix controls, together with resident DFA DJ and "decent human" Matt Cash. Toolroom dance moods extend over a lusciously simple seven minutes, bringing home FM stabs and LinnDrum faceslaps aplenty. And the lyrics: "stop what you're doing now... you ain't got no crown! get off your high horse! turn this ship around!" In our day and age, we need more anti-stagnation, ego-teardown anthems like this, so we welcome the sentiment by the masked duo.

Review: Michael Grigoni and Pan•American's latest collaboration is a series of contemplative reflections on the isolation, fractures and uncertainties that define today's world. The album delves into the emotional landscape shaped by political divisions, personal solitude, and the lingering aftereffects of the pandemic. Through its fusion of folk, country, bluegrass, and blues elements, paired with a modern, ambient atmosphere, the sound is both rooted in tradition and forward-looking. Tracks like 'Sun Morning Sun' and 'Silver Streams' carry a sense of quiet introspection, while 'Black River Song' and 'Mirage/Afternoon' showcase the duo's ability to merge organic instrumentation with spacious, textured soundscapes. The album's exploration of personal and collective experience creates a reflective space, asking listeners to pause and engage with the complexities of modern life. A musical journey that speaks to the heart of the American experience, offering an emotional response to an uncertain future.

Review: In celebration of Arvo Part's 90th year, his latest release showcases the Estonian composer's continued exploration of minimalist, spiritually charged sound . Part's work has always sought to blend the sacred with the secular, and this collection of new renditions brings forward the timeless resonance of his choral and orchestral compositions. Opening with 'Littlemore Tractus,' based on John Henry Newman's reflections, the piece sets the tone of quiet, introspective change that permeates the entire work. His music, a dialogue between sound and silence, invites profound contemplation, with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Tonu Kaljuste's direction offering nuanced, deeply attentive performances. Compositions like 'Vater unser,' showcase Part's ability to transform liturgical text into transcendent musical experience. There's an undeniable spiritual gravity in pieces such as 'Cantique des degres' and 'Sequentia,' where strings and vocals weave in delicate yet forceful patterns, revealing a steady undercurrent of renewal. The rich textures in these works evoke both a longing for and a reconciliation with the past, capturing Part's life-long exploration of sacred music's dialogue with the world. The album culminates with 'Vater unser,' an evocative reworking that brings together choir, strings, and piano, offering a meditative close to an album that is as much about reflection as it is about the continued forward momentum of Part's artistry. Recorded in Tallinn's Methodist Church, this latest chapter is a continuation of the Part-Eicher partnership that has defined so much of his career, expanding the legacy of albums like Tabula rasa and reinforcing Part's place as one of the most significant voices in contemporary classical music of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Review: Parus is a Belarusian ethno-ambient project blending pagan songs with modern soundscapes and Zara is their debut album. Led by ethnographer and folk singer Hanna Silivonchyk, the record features traditional Belarusian songs in various dialects, all accompanied by synths and field recordings crafted by Anton Anishchanka. The tracks were gathered during ethnographic expeditions across Belarusian national parks, and songs like 'Soniejka' and the title cut offer intimate reflections on life, love and mythology. It connects to the past while maintaining a deep personal edge that makes Zara a fascinating exploration of Belarusian culture.

Review: Celebrating its 30th anniversary this Record Store Day, 'Original Soundtracks 1' is a bold, imaginative collaboration between British ambient pioneer Brian Eno and Irish band U2 under the moniker Passengers. Blurring the line between ambient experimentation and cinematic storytelling, the album features 15 tracks that were all conceived as soundtracks for fictional films. Highlights include the haunting 'Miss Sarajevo' with Luciano Pavarotti and contributions from Howie B and Holi and this remastered anniversary edition comes on recycled black vinyl. An adventurous 1995 release that stands up now as an atmospheric, genre-blurring work and a rare and inspired detour in U2's discography.

Review: People Like Us, the long-running project of Vicki Bennett, returns with her first album since 2018's The Mirror. Again via sampling, and stylising in vintage neo-psych-tronic audio collage, Copia here muses on abundance and self-replication, reassembling fragments of sound into something sub-interconnected, rhizomatic. Emerging from her recent AV performance The Library of Babel, the album blends electronic textures with whimsical, often uncanny vocal moments, inlining contributions from Matmos, Ergo Phizmiz, Hearty White, Gwilly Edmondez, and others. Lyrics and melodies by Phizmiz act as a connective spine, while the project as a whole embraces an "exquisite corpse" approach, multitracks traded over oceans and timelines, forming a gaudily grotesque patchwork resistant to linearity. As always with Bennett's work, Copia blurs the borders of past, present and potential, offering a poignant meditation on creativity.

Review: Perila returns with a reflective spiritual successor to her 2022 album that comes on Vaagner's sister label A Sunken Mall. The album takes in eight tracks produced between 2021 and 2023 and they all do a fine job of conveying a serene vulnerability with its drifting, ethereal soundscapes smeared with echoing voices, droning guitars and resonant textures. It's like a whispered conversation during quiet moments and once again makes for a world that doesn't need to be understood, only felt. The Air Outside Feels Crazy Right Now reminds us that finding inner peace through music can counter the chaos of the external world and help turn fragility into strength.

Review: Pianist. Conductor. Composer. Impressario. Extraordinaire. We could probably leave it at that with Piero Piccioni, but for the sake of clarity let's get clear. One of Italy's most prolific film composers of the mid-late-20th Century, this monolith of big band and jazz wrote more than 300 movie scores in his career, and also lays claim to membership of 013, the first jazz outfit broadcast in his home country following the fall of Fascism in 1944. Born in Turin, one of the epicentres of Italian music, Cadaveri Eccellenti was a 1977 crime thriller about Lino Ventura, Italy's top homicide detective, who is investigating the assassination of a judge. Full of intrigue, mystery, and tension, not to mention that underlying sense of sexiness which seems to pervade European flicks of this era, by now you can probably imagine how cool the score is.

Review: Two of life's great escape artists, Polo & Pan, or Paul Armand-Delille and Alexandre Grynszpan, first bonded in the chronological hinterland of nightlife's operating hours, at the iconic Parisian nightclub, Le Baron. We weren't there, but in our minds they talked about quantum theories, and maybe came up with the phrase "everything everywhere all at once". But nobody can be sure. Apart from the artists. Since then, they've committed themselves to creating beautiful, weird, tropical house-synth-pop-electronica stuff which they say transcends moments and places, people and cultures. 22:22 is their triumphant return after four years without a full length, and it's every bit as good as fans were hoping for. Dive in, the water is lovely - wherever in the time-space continuum it is.

Review: French tropical house duo Polo & Pan return with another playful, transportive record, their third album, fusing their love of storytelling with a finely tuned sense of groove. Having cut their teeth as residents at Paris' Le Baron, the duoiPaul Armand-Delille and Alexandre Grynszpanihave built a world where fantasy meets the dancefloor, balancing carefree melodies with precise, spellbinding cadences. Their latest offering moves between daydream and dance, from the delicate charm of 'The Piano and The Violin' to the low-slung pulse of 'Disco Nap' featuring Metronomy. 'Petite Etoile' with Beth Ditto introduces a bold, cinematic energy, while 'A Different Side of Us' featuring PawPaw Rod leans into hazy, after-hours territory. 'Bluetopia' with Kids Return and 'La Nuit' featuring Arthur Teboul close things out with a reflective, late-night glow. It's another confident stride forward from a duo whose music feels both effortless and meticulously crafted.

Review: Posuposu Otani is a mysterious throat singer and songwriter from Japan who dropped his debut physical album in March. By merging open-tuned guitar, Kohkin (aka the Jew's harp) and traditional throat singing, Otani creates a sound filled with rich harmonics and fluid rhythms that all evoke the mood of Impressionist art and explore themes of freedom, nature and self-discovery. Influenced by his punk roots, worldly travels and immersion in mountain life, Otani's storytelling music reflects his deep connection to the natural world and makes for a far-journeying listen.

Review: Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard revive the collaboration first aired on the latter's 2016 album Unde The Sun, this time across a full album reportedly four years in the (top secret) making. It's a compelling synthesis of Yorke's atmospheric melancholy and Pritchard's textured production. It expores a range of moods, from the uneasy tension of 'A Fake In A Faker's World' to the hypnotic rhythms of 'Back In The Game', while the eerie, spectral qualities of 'This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice' reveal the pair's ability to intertwine experimental soundscapes with a visceral emotional pull. Standout moments include 'Gangsters,' where Pritchard's intricately layered beats mesh with Yorke's haunting vocal delivery, and 'Wandering Genie,' which closes the journey with a strange sense of release. The music takes unexpected turns, not just as a statement of collaboration, but as a reflection of two artists playing with the unknown, pulling their sonic worlds into unexplored spaces. Each track is a feather in the cap of their combined ingenuity, with Yorke's vocal vulnerability and Pritchard's production wizardry in full synergy.

Review: Begun in earnest during the COVID-19 pandemic, after the former had remixed the latter's new Radiohead material, Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke exchanged much of the for their new record Tall Tales remotely. Forerun by new single 'Back In The Game' then 'This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice', the album takes shape as a surreal mythopoesis, warping back in time to 2020's plague, where the former track's hyperreal music video (dir. by Jonathan Zawada) sees a rooftop figure defenestrating art itself amid grotesque figures bearing the worst of a mutant contortionist slice-of-life. Yorke has said that the album was crucial to him, describing the music-making process as "mental."

Review: Since Radiohead went on hiatus a few years back, Thom Yorke has thrown himself into all sorts of solo and collaborative projects. His latest sees him join forces with Sydney-based British electronic music stalwart Mark Pritchard for an album that expands on their previous collaboration (the superb 'Beautiful People' from Pritchard's 2018 album Under The Sun). It's a breathtakingly brilliant concoction all told, with the pair conjuring ethereal, oddball and immersive songs in which Yorke's distinctive vocals - sometimes delivered as you'd expect, other times layered-up, mutilated or utilised as textures - rise above backing tracks made with unusual synths and drum machines, and variously indebted to ambient, IDM, ghostly electronica, lo-fi beat-scapes and the gripping intensity of horror soundtracks. A modern electronic classic in the making.

Review: If you at first mistakenly read the title of the new Pye Corner Audio box set as "Where Things Are Now: No Tomorrow", you're not alone - Martin Jenkins' effortless blend of retro-nostalgia and forward-facing production is a keen match for reflexive cynicisms like this. His use of sizzling vintage audio-tropes could only have been achieved in the 21st Century and helps foster a reinstated optimism. The name of the full series is actually Where Things Are Hollow; and while two volumes have been released already, a third original one now comes added here, on top of a full remix roundoff featuring Alessandro Cortini, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and John Talabot, producing this rather banging four-volume set.