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Review: In the summer of 2017, New Order returned to Granada Studios in Manchester - the site of their first TV appearance - to perform a special concert. With the accompaniment of a "12-piece synthesizer orchestra" and a stunning, ever-changing stage set designed by Liam Gillick, the legendary Manchester band delivered an extended set featuring radically reworked versions of tracks from their back catalogue. This evocative live album presents the recording of the concert in its entirety, with Bernard Sumner and company mixing bona fide hits ("Shellshock", "Bizarre Love Triangle") with album tracks, lesser-celebrated songs and the odd stunning soundscape (a particularly beautiful version of "Elegia"). As you'd expect, it's superb and a cut above most live albums.

Review: Japanese avant-garde artist Phew (real name Hiromi Moritani) has released a string of inspired solo albums since the turn of the '80s, though few are quite as atmospheric and majestic as 1992's 'Our Likeness'. Like some of her other albums from the period, it was produced by Conny Plank and Can's Jaki Liebezeit, with various industrial and post-punk musicians joining in the fun. As this reissue proves, it remains a fantastic album - a set rooted in krautrock, post-rock and dub in which her expressive vocals sit amongst a mixture of squally guitars, loose-limbed drums, dubby bass, trippy electronics and effects aplenty.

Review: Richard H Kirk was rightly praised for 2020's Shadow of Fear, his first album since turning Cabaret Voltaire into a solo project back in 2014, and his recently follow-up EP, Shadow of Funk. Both distilled the essence of the Cabs' club-friendly industrial funk sound, re-formatting it for the 21st century. Dekadrone, though, is a different proposition altogether. Focused not on clubs but on immersive home listening, the four-phase, single track set removes Kirk's clanking, often paranoid beats in favour of dystopian aural textures (think dark, droning tones, abstract electronics, apocalyptic ambience and dirt-encrusted samples). Those who prefer the Cabs' more experimental, ambient-leaning works will love it.

Review: The arrival of a new Cabaret Voltaire album - the first since 1994 according to our records - should excite all those who hold the work of the pioneering Sheffield outfit dear. It's now a solo project from Richard H Kirk (he decided to keep the name after parting company with Stephen Mallinder in the late '90s), but the distinctive stylistic ticks remain (think paranoid sonic textures, metallic percussion hits, clear dub influences, plentiful spoken word samples, curious electronic noises and nods towards the industrial funk, EBM and post-punk). Naturally it's not as ground-breaking as Kirk and company's work in the '70s and '80s, but it is undeniably a Cabaret Voltaire album - and one that subtly updates the Cabs' particular brand of dense, dancefloor-ready paranoia for a new century.

Review: In 1979, Cabaret Voltaire - then consisting of all three founder members, Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson - recorded a soundtrack for an experimental film "for two projectors" by Babeth Mondini. 40 years on, that soundtrack has finally been given a release. It's similar in tone to some of the Sheffield experimentalists' other soundtrack work from the period, offering discordant, unsettling and otherworldly sound collages that fuse heavily modified and processed instrumental parts (guitar, bass, drums, clarinet, saxophone) with tape loops, sampled dialogue and the band's ever-present electronic tones. Whether you're an obsessive Cabs fan or not, it's well worth a listen. This is, after all, a slice of previously hidden musical history.

Review: Ever-changing Slovenian collective Laibach seems to have mellowed with age, with the band's inherent desire to court controversy (see their 2015 performances in North Korea for a relatively recently example) currently curtailed. Love Is Still Alive, which marks their first new music since the release of last year's well-received album Wir Sind das Volk, is actually an "extension" of the music they wrote to soundtrack the 2019 film 'Iron Sky -The Coming Race'. It is, they say, a "trip through space music genres of recent decades" (albeit with bonus nods to country, pop and so on) that loosely tells the story of a spaceship full of post-apocalyptic survivors making their way across the solar system. It's a lot of fun, all told, with the band expertly showcasing the breadth of their musical knowledge as well as skip-fulls of imagination.