Swedish label FLUF has started 2018 as you know they’ll go on – with another example of next-gen electronics, sound-designed to the nth degree. The label, run by producer tuuun, is populating Bandcamp with avant-garde […]
Category: Album review
Serene ambience on The Black Dog’s Forgemasters: Shards Ov Light
Warp Records techno OGs The Black Dog have opened 2018 with their most serene ambient release yet – which has sadly turned into a sort of tribute to filmmaker Shaun Bloodworth, who died in hospital […]
A cult 80s DIY synth classic revived: Solid Space – Space Museum
This 1982 lo-fi minimal wave curio has just been hailed by bleep.com as the potential “reissue of the decade”. But ignoring the half-gram of coke up one nostril hyperbole, it’s another bullseye release from Dark […]
Bleep in heavenly peace: Can – Silent night (1976)
Christmas brings out the daftness in everyone — even if you’re a group of avant-garde experimentalists with a few free hours in the studio. Krautrock pioneers Can released the novelty single Silent Night in 1976 […]
‘It could be hate as far as I can see’: Public Image Ltd – Metal Box (1979)
What’s left to say about Metal Box? It’s one of those ‘canon’ records weighed down with too much baggage, wrung free of any objectivity. You’re told it’s one of these sacred slabs of vinyl that influenced […]
Real Gone is a bit of an outlier – even for Tom Waits
Tom Waits is a heritage act who doesn’t really play ball with the nostalgia crowd. Whenever there’s a rare news bulletin from Waits HQ I get a naive jolt of hope that he’s going on […]
Alessandro Cortini’s new LP Avanti is a fuzzy childhood time capsule
Anemoia is a word that describes an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia for a time you’ve never known, and it could also be a handy one-word filing tab for this new ambient album by electronic producer […]
Dälek’s Endangered Philosophies is the hip-hop album we deserve right now
The front cover of Endangered Philosophies is like a picture someone could just tweet and lazily caption: #2017. It’s a scene of deranged wrongness, arrows shooting into the hide of a screaming wild cat trampling […]
Brainwaltzera tries to squeeze all Warp Records’ best bits into his debut LP
The Aphex Twin references come pretty quickly when Brainwaltzera’s name comes up. When he released his EP Aescoba earlier this year, there were so many Aphex DNA strands running through the tracks that there was […]
Haco’s new album Qoosui sounds like it’s barely there, but it’s magical
Japanese sound artist Haco describes her voice as a ‘mist’, and it’s true, there’s something intangible and barely-there about her new ambient drone album Qoosui. Haco is the one-time singer of Japanese avant-pop band After […]
Perturbator goes one darker on surprise EP New Model
French electronic producer James Kent aka Perturbator has always lurked in the darker outskirts of the synthwave scene, so it’s no surprise that he’s just premiered his surprise new EP on the Metalsucks and Metal […]
Too smart for the charts: Sparks – Hello Young Lovers (2006)
Sparks are about to release their 24th album Hippopotamus this Friday, and it’s another pop sidestep from the brothers Ron and Russell Mael, who’ve been upending pop conventions for nearly 50 years. Hippopotamus is a […]
This is a drill: Talker – Battle Standards
If you want your techno to sound like Ancient Methods trapped inside an oil drum, Talker has just the thing. The Chicago duo’s new EP is three tracks of heavy metal without the guitars or […]
Bending nostalgia all sides: OOBE – Amarcord
The first track on Amarcord sounds like witch-house chancers Salem nudge-winking the build-up of Robert Miles’ Children, and there’s a guitar solo straight out of Tangerine Dream’s 1980s playbook. Virtual-E might sound like a brain-clash on […]
Moon Diagrams’ Lifetime of Love is thrift store gold
If you tried to make an album from samples nicked off Dublin charity records, you’d end up with some mouldy purgatory soundtracked by James Last, Leo Sayer, Harry Secombe and the RTE broadcast of the […]
Moo Kid 