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Review: Music has the power to fan the folk-mystical and spiritual flames inside even the most ardent of rationalists. Anonymous artist Craven Faults knows as much, which is mostly the reason why he's released his latest album Standers. Named after the colloquial term for the standing stones that pepper much of the north of England, the analog electronic music that makes up this album evokes the mood of trekking across wild country in search of these ancient monuments - occasionally stranded, always awed - sonically reviving and clarifying the oft-murky past of the English north.

Review: Born in Cannes in 1943, Michele Bokanowski has become a towering figure in the world of composing electroacoustic music. The Frenchwoman lives in Paris and this new and comprehensive four-CD collection brings together all the concert music she ever played. It is an ambitious release but a vital one that spans 1974 to 2020. Michele mainly composes for concert and for cinema but has also done so for TV, dance and theatre. She brings her own sense of mysterious atmosphere and poetic concrete sounds - which result from her studying music concrete - all with an artful cinematic editing job to finish it off.

Review: Drew McDowall is as complex and enigmatic an artist as Coil, who he worked closely with for many years. He's followed his own path as well as being tangled up in the world of Jhonn Balance and Sleazy, and now this box set on Dais offers an authoritative overview of four relatively recent LPs and additional exclusive material stretching over six CDs. 2015's Collapse, 2017's Unnatural Channel, 2018's The Third Helix and 2020's Agalma are joined by a disc of rare, alternative and extended versions and a disc of live performances. From oddly angled ambience to lithe, snaking electronica, there's a lot of different sides to McDowall's curious musical mind, and this extensive collection is a perfect way to navigate just part of it.

Review: With 'Long Gradus', Sarah Davachi seizes the opportunity to take one idea and explore it from as many angles as possible. The celebrated composer and ambient artist is consistently investigating musical possibilities from a learned, authoritative perspective and so this latest project finds her expanding on an initial invitation to the Composer's Kitchen residency in the Netherlands. Fundamentally scored for a string quartet, Davachi's intention with the stirring, sustained tension of 'Long Gradus' was that it could be performed on a number of different instruments, and this expansive four-CD edition on her Late Music label presents the piece performed on woodwinds, brass and organ and choir and electronics alongside the fundamental string version.

Review: Harald Uunk's take on techno may be angular, electronic and refreshingly avant-garde, but his creative inspirations are far more natural. Unseen, his expansive debut album, was not - as some may assume given its sonics and largely dystopian feel - influenced by the urban environments in which he lives and works, but rather his frequent adventures in the countryside. That's not immediately evident, but if you close your eyes and listen intently, the various off-kilter polyrhythms, distorted electronic motifs, ghostly electronics and dubbed-out textures soon conjure mind images of stumbling around dark woods and fields in moonlight and pre-dawn drives down deserted rural roads in the Netherlands' most isolated spots. More importantly, it's a hugely enjoyable and evocative beast, even if it does tend towards the dark, intense and unsettling.