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Review: Those who lived through the 1990s will happily tell you that few ambient and electronica outfits of the period could match the emotive, life-affirming majesty of Mark Pritchard and Tom Middleton's Global Communication project. Transmissions, the pair's first retrospective of their work under the alias, offers plenty of supporting evidence for this view. It features painstakingly re-mastered - and, we will add, brilliant-sounding - versions of two full-length releases: 1993's Blood Music: Pentamerous Metamorphosis, a radical set of lengthy ambient "translations" of tracks by forgotten shoegaze outfit Chapterhouse, and their peerless debut album 76:14, which remains one of the greatest ambient sets of all time. Throw in a third CD featuring collected singles and remixes, and you have a thoroughly essential three-disc set.

Review: For the uninitiated, Robin Crutchfield was one of the key early figures in New York's infamous "no wave" music scene, first as part of influential band DNA and then as the leader of his own outfit, Dark Day. This essential three-CD set tells the story of the hard-to-pigeonhole outfit's original incarnation between 1979 and 1989, offering a chronological trip through the pitch-black corners of the unique combo's slim but perfectly formed catalogue. The Dark Day sound was undoubtedly unique, with Gary Numan-ish synth sounds and arty, stylised vocals being underpinned by heavy, loose-limbed rhythms provided by two drummers. The accompanying booklet tells the story of the band in decent detail, too, making it as much an introduction as a celebration.

Review: There's something undeniably tactile about Japanese composer Ikeda's Ultratronics which here comes as a special Japanese Edition on CD. The bass is metallic and dense, the grainy and glitched-out synths ringing out in a mathematical tempo on tracks like 'ultratronics 05'. There's a philosophy of high art, a scene that Ikeda has dabbled in before with installations and exhibitions, that is a hallmark of Japanese electronica composers old and new. The album has just as many pared-back moments (like in 02 and 07, scattered throughout vocal samples of rocket and space radio transmissions) as it does hardcore electronic industrial thrashing (06 and 14 spring to mind for mind-blowing explosions of synths).

Review: In honour of the 25th birthday of painter-turned-DIY musician Tor Lundvall's hard-to-find debut album, 'Passing Through Alone', Dais has joined forces with the New York-based creative polymath to produce a career-spanning, five-disc box set. Naturally, it begins with that 1997 debut - on which he laid down his now familiar "signature palette of synth, sequencers, guitar, drum machines, and hushed spectral voice" (as the label puts it) - before delivering an expanded edition of his 2010 odds-and-ends collection 'Ghost Years'. What follows is inaugural CD editions of three of Lundvall's most recent albums: 'A Strangeness In Motion' (a collection of lo-fi pop tracks recorded across the 90s), 'A Dark Place' and 'Beautiful Illusions'. A fitting celebration of a genuinely unique artist.

Review: It wasn't so long ago we were writing about the joys of BVDUB's Fumika Fades, a new double pack in February that sunk us deep into moving ambient soundscapes. Now the Bay Area dub techno titan Brock van Wey is back once again with yet another album - he dropped plenty of them last year too so is clearly in a mad creative patch. Slowly Shifting Lakes comes in multiple formats, this one being a double CD. The ambient here is coarse and textured, fizzing synths stretching out over skittish rhythmic frameworks before sinking into calmer waters on cuts like the escapist 'Searching For Glowing Shores.' Another triumphant album for sure.

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.

Review: Confusingly, two staggering out-there experimental albums arrived in 1992 bearing the same title: Thunder Perfect Mind. One came from Current 93, a group led by David Tibet featuring Nurse With Wound founder Steven Stapleton. The second was the latter's own experimental musical meditation on the same musical theme - a follow-up to the classic Soliloquy For Lilith that was, if anything, even darker, weirder and more intense than Current 93's paganistic LP. This expanded reissue presents a remastered version of the original two-track set on disc one - complete with musical contributions by Colin Potter and David Tibet - and a wealth of rare, unreleased and recently unearthed contemporaneous material on CD2. It's the ultimate version of an inspiringly out-there set.

Review: Einsturzende Neubauten's description by label Potomoak - as a band that constantly evolves - is accurate enough. Over forty years on from their debut album Kollaps in 1981, Rampen appears as the latest and most unruly incarnation of their sound yet. Here, Blixa Bargeld, N. U. Unruh, Alexander Hacke, Jochen Arbeit, Rudolph Moser and Felix Gebhard present their least predictable and conventional sides: APM is described as alien pop music; the songs therein have been specially crafted not only for our universe but for every adjacent parallel universe to ours, with every slight multiversal variation in humanity's collective tastes held firmly in mind. The album fully lives up to its billing as anti-pop as alien pop, its challenging twists and turns fully sating the difficult whims of society's outcasts and cosmic punks.

Review: Something of ground-breaking album on its initial release in December 1994, ISDN is one of Future Sound of London's most name-checked sets. It's effectively a re-edited and rearranged collection of live recordings - jammed out tracks that were initially broadcast to the world via ISDN links to clubs and radio stations, which FSOL brilliantly moulded into a mind-mangling journey through IDM, trip-hop, proto-big beat, dub, ambient, found sounds, field recordings and wayward electronica. To celebrate the album's 30th birthday, it returns as a two-disc set, freshly 'amalgamated and re-sequenced' by FSOL to include material from both previous editions of the album. It is, then, a kind of 'definitive version' of the LP, and one that still sounds as joyously weird, trippy and psychedelic as it did first time around.