Back catalogue: Minimal/Tech House

Review: LILA mainstay Ayaavaaki and ambient veteran Purl speak different languages but used a translator to convey ideas to one another as they made this record. And they very much foment their own unique musical language on Ancient Skies, an album that blends ambient, drone and space music into richly layered soundscapes that are constantly on the move. Each piece is meticulously crafted and suspense you up amongst the clouds, hazing on at the smeared pads and swirling solar winds that prop you up. It's a record that would work as well in the depths of winter as a bright spring day such is the cathartic effect of the sounds. Beautiful, thought-provoking and innovative, this is as good an ambient record as we have heard all year.

Review: In the past 20 years Pan-Pot have ridden many a wave of techno's evolution, moving from their roots in the mid-00s minimal boom through to the fierce, kinetic techno they're putting out now. Having recently dropped the PROTO single on their Second State label, the Berlin duo present their third studio album. As that upfront single confirms, Pan-Pot are here to have fun with assistance from the likes of Hugh Betcha laying down a pitched-down spoken word turn that feels like big room Berlin techno in a nutshell. Across this ten-deep album, there are a lot of avenues explored as Pan-Pot demonstrate the depth and breadth of their vocabulary within the modern techno lexicon.

Review: Despite their name, we find that the music of retro technicians Paranoid London offers us a rest from the paranoid mental state that the Great Wen often instils. Now out on a tenth anniversary edition, the duo's raw acid techno debut, released in 2015, heard two Londoners take temporary flight to Chicago, re-imbuing urban smoky techno with a long-lost sense of looseness and grit. Working in relative anonymity, the duo drew praise for their sparse use of original Bernard Sumner vocal lines, affording the record an esteem-by-proxy as well as a sense of turning full circle, as PL's Quinn Whalley actually spent many a pre-teen afternoon in Factory production wizard MArtin Hannet' studio. But it's the record's own minimalism that keeps it satisfyingly repetitive yet never complaisant. PL go their own way, swirling the old school round a ringer road of outer-city grit.

Review: The remix has long been a staple of underground dance music culture and for its next release German label The Other Side has pulled together a whole album's worth of them. They find various key talents all their own minimal spin to tracks by Pheek and Kike Mayor. Up first is Audio Werner with the first of two remixes of 'Caveat' that is all silky tones and waves of rippling synth. Elsewhere 'Red Square' (Flabbergast remix) is a curling and rubbery rhythm with dry hits, 'Mad River' (Lowris remix) is a curious and lumpy roller with tripped-out spoken words and 'Matcha Breaks' (Mihigh remix) is a late night wonder.

Review: Photek's masterpiece for the new millennium Solaris catches a repress on Proper recordings. From propulsive, metro-setting opener 'Terminus' to the elegiac, trouble-in-paradise closing synth meditation 'Under The Palms ', Rupert Parkes casually shakes off all expectation with a flurry of infectious head boppers channeling everything from the fragmentary half-step of the nascent broken beat stylie- read: 'Juno' (sic), to the snarling Valve-era techstep of Dillinja and Lemon D on 'Infinity' via Larry Heard's late 90s deep lounge leanings on the peerless 'Mine To Give' (note the similarity in artwork with Heard's Genesis). Solaris is very much a product of its time, the highest praise possible given the early 00s was one of the most amoebic and fluid periods in UK dance music history. It speaks to the undying british dancefloor tendency to allide tempo and atmosphere, casually felling boundaries in genre to create something as reverential as it is innovative. Classiq.

Review: Truesoul is the little brother label of Drumcode, a label founded sometime this decade by international megastar DJ Adam Beyer. Welcoming their latest signing Pig & Dan to the imprint, their latest LP Soulcatcher hears the pair hears a thorough scouring of the wondrous limits of progressive house, melodic techno and all styles in between. Layers of kick-driven rhythm, filtrated texture and sublime rapture coalesce to form a monolithic body of work here.

Review: ***B-STOCK: Sleeve damaged but otherwise in excellent condition***


Truesoul is the little brother label of Drumcode, a label founded sometime this decade by international megastar DJ Adam Beyer. Welcoming their latest signing Pig & Dan to the imprint, their latest LP Soulcatcher hears the pair hears a thorough scouring of the wondrous limits of progressive house, melodic techno and all styles in between. Layers of kick-driven rhythm, filtrated texture and sublime rapture coalesce to form a monolithic body of work here.

Review: Back in 2021 Adam Pits heralded the start of the On Rotation label with his own debut album, A Recurring Nature. Now he's back with a follow-up which finds him stretching out as an artist ever more - a fact which is absolutely evident from the gorgeous ambient swathes of opening track 'Lost In The Ether'. Even when the drums kick in on 'Sleepless', they're more tilted towards fragmented patterns and organic tones rather than rote drum machine sounds. There's space for peppier electronica and steppy heads-down gear, but throughout Pits imbues his sound with the richest synthesis imaginable. In that sense, you can track the path of development from his earlier work while enjoying the adventurous new terrain he's exploring as an artist.

Review: South African Portable is one of those cultured artists who doesn't release a lot, but when he does, it is more than worth hearing. And this is a bumper new drop from him on Circus Company in the form of Augmented Dreams, a new double album that takes its title from the use of everyday technological advancements "to achieve what were once only dreams or visions of past generations." He goes deep into minimal, techno and ambient to fuse totters the synthetic and the organic, the real, the imagined and the unreal on a richly rewarding album that makes for a complete listening

Review: Bruno Pronsato has always operated at the fringes of the electronic world and draws as much from the inventiveness of jazz as anything else. Now he is back with a new album Rare Normal that is his most adventurous and ambitious yet, and it was made at a time that he was, we're told, "immersed in the work of Charles Ives" and that the eight tracks are a result of him experimenting with mixing dissonance and consonance, tone rows and twelve-tone theory. The result is deft and abstract minimalism with supple rhythms that rise and fall next to mending pads and deft sampled vocal whispers. Its intimate and late night and hella moving given how quiet and unassuming it is overall.