Boomkat – new ALVA NOTO, WATER BORDERS, B.E.F. (BRITISH ELECTRIC FOUNDATION), etc.

Carsten Nicolai is hardly a slouch in terms of his release frequency, but it feels like a rare treat to hear the Raster Noton boss exploring the jerky rhythmic variations he does so well. ‘Univrs’ is a followup to 2008’s ‘Unitxt’, and has an equally lofty and academic sidestory, but we don’t really need to go into that. The fact is that this might be Carsten’s best full-length since the genre-numbing ‘Transform’ back in 2001. Yep, ten years ago – and while he’s had some cracking releases since, few seem as perfectly crafted and dangerous as this. The gorgeous humming melodies of ‘Xerrox’ and the serene experiments of his collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto are nowhere to be seen, instead we’re treated to rugged industrial barrages of beats, violent noise and occasional glassy tones. It’s like Pan Sonic or Sleeparchive thrown through the corroded guts of Ted Hughes’s Iron Man then fed into Bill Gates’s nightmares, trust me on this one. There are elements of the long-gone clicks ‘n cuts scene Nicolai helped create, echoes of Einsturzende Neubauten, and a sly wink to the current crop of gloomy 4/4 operators, but Nicolai’s sound is really all his own. He’s been perfecting these rhythms for so long that it feels he’s operating inside his own genre, and mercifully without any of the self-indulgence you might expect from someone of his stature. ‘Univrs’ is a record made for enjoyment – sleazy, basement style, rusty enjoyment. It’s the record we’ve wanted him to make for far too long and it delivers on every level.

*Incredible 4CD box set featuring 100 tracks taken from rare 78rpm recordings of African music (1909 to mid-1960s), none of which have ever been issued on CD until now* Pan-African in scope & wildly diverse, Opika Pende is a testament to the deep riches found in early recorded music across the continent. compiler bio: Jonathan Ward is a Los Angeles-based collector, researcher, & writer. In 2007, he began the well-known website Excavated Shellac, which features a wide-range of scarce, international 78rpm records from across the globe with extensive commentary. In 2010, Jonathan released his first LP in a series for Dust-to-Digital’s vinyl imprint Parlortone. Titled Excavated Shellac: Strings, it contains 14 exemplary performances on string instruments from across the globe, all from his collection of 78s.

*Limited first run on clear wax – Includes A6 postcard* Two twelves, six tracks of minimalist electronic sound design by Yves De Mey. Techno heads might best know Yves’ work from his Sendai collaborations with fellow Belgian national, Peter Van Hoesen, but he’s also got a solid body of solo releases available on labels such as Line and Knobsounds. Following Bob Ostertag and Rrose’s modular motions on ‘Motormouth Variations’, ‘Counting Triggers’ is reflective of Sandwell Districts’ increasingly esoteric vectors, and would probably be more suited to soundtracking contemporary dance choreography than any peaktime dancefloors. It’s not strictly club material, let’s put it that way. The aesthetic is more comparable with Frank Bretschneider’s Komet recordings or Ilpo Vaisanen’s Piiri project; all clinical wave-shapes and filigree digital rhythms programmed with a subtle appreciation of physical dynamics and diffuse spatial rendering. Recommended for the audiophiles and the ultra-modern techno fetishists, then.

Another compelling entry from Tri Angle Records, who’ve cleverly snapped up the frightening debut album by Water Borders. With ‘Harbored Mantras’ the San Fran-hailing duo of Amitai and Loric use the rhythms of contemporary ritual dance music to resurrect the occult soul of Coil and their cabal in unique and succinctly pop balanced new forms. A couple of mixtapes – both self-released and for the brilliant DIS magazine – display their influences quite clearly, working in a circle of influence ranging from Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson’s eerie Threshold HouseBoys Choir to James Blake’s chamber pop and the rhythm schematics of Doc Daneeka or DJ Elmoe, and it’s fair to say this album sums up all of those and more. The opening palette cleanser ‘Tread On Them’ crosses swords between gamelan, narcotically-blunted House and a deeply uncanny channelling of Jhonn Balance-like vocals, whose inspiration looms large into the stunning ‘What Wiwant’, practically scratching at the hairs of the neck with vocal anguish over the tuffest ‘ardcore subs and clammiest ambience. We could happily play this on repeat this until the national grid shut down. That chilling vocal continues to pervade deeper in, with ‘Bad Ethos’ summoning depth charge Bristolian Dubstep in a tableau of sneering choirs and poltergeist shrieks, and to sour effect on ‘Even In The Dark’ and the ‘Feasting On Mongeese’, beautifully sustaining the aura of affected gothic torment. In the closing rites, this poise is held to elegant effect in the sepulchral space of ‘Seed Bank’, MIDI sax bleat circling abyssal 808 bass hits, and to exotic infusions of ‘Antechamber’ leaving us to dreams of grotesquerie even Pasolini would be proud of.

**Limited 1st edition of 250 housed in hand-assembled jacket** Percussionist Mike Weis makes a very strong impression with this killer solo outing. Mike’s best known as the drummer with Zelionople, besides his contributions to records by The North Sea, Xela and Scott Tuma, but on ‘Loop Current’ his steady, layered drumming is the central feature amidst hypnotic, spaciously diffuse clouds of field recordings and short-wave radio tones. There’s a potent and wholly enveloping atmosphere to the record, thanks in no small part to the sense of meditative restraint with which he conducts his kit, dividing himself between a vast array of gongs, temple block, claves, dholak, doumbeks, thunder tube, rattles and mbira, to name a few. The strange, hypnotic tension between tangibly synthetic electro-acoustic drone clouds and his undulating tribal rhythms at once suck us into his core pulse and inflate our sense of space to the peripheries of perception, ultimately leaving us unsettled and almost uncomfortably at his mercy. Obvious comparisons can be made with Jon Mueller and Chris Corsano, but it’s the electro-acoustic magick and sense of synthesized space which gives this record an unheimlich, voodoo charge maybe more comparable to Cut Hands or The Haxan Cloak. Highly recommended.

Carsten Nicolai is hardly a slouch in terms of his release frequency, but it feels like a rare treat to hear the Raster Noton boss exploring the jerky rhythmic variations he does so well. ‘Univrs’ is a followup to 2008’s ‘Unitxt’, and has an equally lofty and academic sidestory, but we don’t really need to go into that. The fact is that this might be Carsten’s best full-length since the genre-numbing ‘Transform’ back in 2001. Yep, ten years ago – and while he’s had some cracking releases since, few seem as perfectly crafted and dangerous as this. The gorgeous humming melodies of ‘Xerrox’ and the serene experiments of his collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto are nowhere to be seen, instead we’re treated to rugged industrial barrages of beats, violent noise and occasional glassy tones. It’s like Pan Sonic or Sleeparchive thrown through the corroded guts of Ted Hughes’s Iron Man then fed into Bill Gates’s nightmares, trust me on this one. There are elements of the long-gone clicks ‘n cuts scene Nicolai helped create, echoes of Einsturzende Neubauten, and a sly wink to the current crop of gloomy 4/4 operators, but Nicolai’s sound is really all his own. He’s been perfecting these rhythms for so long that it feels he’s operating inside his own genre, and mercifully without any of the self-indulgence you might expect from someone of his stature. ‘Univrs’ is a record made for enjoyment – sleazy, basement style, rusty enjoyment. It’s the record we’ve wanted him to make for far too long and it delivers on every level.

*Killer box set featuring rare, early and classic material from the British Electric Foundation, the project founded by Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh after they left the Human League* In 1980 Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh left the Human League and went on to form British Electric Foundation (B.E.F.) as a production team rather than a band. Ware and Marsh then formed Heaven 17 with lead singer Glenn Gregory. This B.E.F. 1981-2011 Special Edition celebrates 30 years of B.E.F: it features Music of Quality and Distinction Volume 1 + 2 plus bonus tracks, Music for Stowaways plus bonus tracks and new previously unreleased Volume 3: Dark tracks. It also includes a foldout Poster and 4 Postcards housed in a clamshell box. For synth fiends among you – it’s is a must.

*Limited pressing – initial copies on transparent vinyl* Chubby Wolf was the title used by the late Dani Baquet-Long of Celer for her most glacially refined recordings. Her work is now carefully and lovingly curated by her husband and partner in Celer, Will Long, who has picked one of her most accessible albums ‘Turkey Decoy’ for this posthumous release on Digitalis. The phosphorescent cybernetic ambience of opener ‘Cantankerous Baby’ sets an understated tone which continues through the album, across the glassy pond-like reflections of ‘Birthday Suit’, and the exquisitely fragile expanse of ‘Rattling Mandibles’, to the subdued neo-classical splendour of ‘Scalloped Toes’ or the looming finale ‘Intrusively Coexisting’ where Dani’s beloved wolves make a cameo appearance. Existing in such a subtly tonal and near motionless world of sound, it’s difficult to describe the breathtaking sense of romance and sensuality to Dani’s songcraft, so we should simply stress it’s beauty and appeal to lovers of purest ambient music.

**Limited white vinyl – Includes digital download code redeemable from the label** Two years since his debut LP, Martyn drops one of 2011’s most anticipated dancefloor albums. With ‘Ghost People’ he cements well-nurtured ties to Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder camp, pooling his blend of UK Bass, US House & European Techno with the label’s kaleidoscopic vision of electronic beat music, one which already spans the sounds of Lorn, The Gaslamp Killer, Teebs and Samiyam among others. Guided by a steady, experienced hand, Martyn refracts ideas borrowed and assimilated from every corner of the modern ‘floor into a spectrum of helplessly futurist funk. Most notably, he’s nudged the tempos down to a cooler groovin’ 120-135bpm bracket, and what happens within this tempo zone is not far short of alchemy. From the top, Spaceape lends a sense of impending epicness to the synthscape intro ‘Love And Machine’, before ‘Viper’ sets up corrugated Techno riffs and metronomic hi-hats like a cosmically darkside D&B take on Zomby’s Eski-dubs.  The groove proper comes with ‘Masks’, a brooding Tech-House swinger with plump Reese bass and rippling Dub chords, next to the 2562-style rhythm mechanics and signature melodic progressions of ‘Distortions’. At the album’s apex, the sample-savvy breakbeat number ‘Popguns’ earns him countless future B-Boy points, while ‘Ghost People’ and the dippin’ ‘Twice As’ will endear him no end with the sub-loving post-Dubstep/Funky masses. To close, we’re taken further into Techno zones with the mighty, radioactive arpeggios of ‘Bauplan’ and the psychoactive Chicago stomp of ‘Horror Vacui’, before the tranced-glazed breakage of ‘We Are You In The Future’ leaves us floored and gurning for more. For our 2p, this album is more precise, concise and useful than its predecessor, you know what to do.

**Includes digital download code redeemable from the label** We’ve been banging on about Rustie since ‘Jagz The Smack’ had our jaws dragging on the lino back in ’07, and it’s hard to believe it’s taken him this long to get an album together. Sure there have been a handful of EPs, singles and splits, but few captured the chemically enhanced hedonism of that first plate, well, until now. It seems Rustie has somehow managed to fend off the weight of expectation by ignoring the devil on his shoulder and furrowing a path all his own through bass music. This is a pure Rustie album from beginning to end, and it succeeds by being just as uncompromising as those key early releases. It’s not the same; in the years since ‘Jagz The Smack’ we’ve seen the hiccupping digital glitch experiments replaced by an FM synthesis fetish and an eye on 80s stadium pop – but this is knocked so far into the bass music and contemporary rap template it’s hard to know where one begins and the other ends. Take album highlight ‘Hover Traps’ for example, which kicks off with a slap-bass intro straight outta Seinfeld then bashes it gruesomely into the kind of rap-trance Chris Brown has made his calling card (thankfully sans that woman hating tw*t whining over the top). AraabMUSIK may have jumpstarted the bass/rap trance crossover with ‘Electronic Dreams’, but Rustie makes it his own; nobody else would have the balls to use the sounds he does, and to be quite honest nobody else would manage it with the same finesse. These are club tracks, but with the kind of unpretentious trickery you rarely hear in contemporary pop. Somehow ‘Glass Swords’ seems totally out of time, and while it sort of fits in on some level with the bass/dubstep/hip hop instrumentals ‘thing’, it’s all and neither – it might be that Rustie has thrown so much into the mix he’s ended up with something totally new. If you want a record that will put a huge grin on yer face and have you coming back time and time again, Rustie has provided in spades. A huge recommendation.

A new collection of killer, tempered synthesizer workouts from Darren Ho on Spectrum Spools. The seven tracks featured have are have the kind of fragile beauty – and playfulness – that we associate with the early electronic music of Wendy Carlos, Daphne Oram, Raymond Scott and their ilk. There’s a strong narrative arc to the album, but each track explores distinct territory: ‘Slow Sum’ parts one and two’ are playful agglomerations of phased analogue patterns, ‘In Peru’ a Budd/Roedelius-style ambient pastoral, ‘Dots’ a right-on kosmische pastiche, ‘Smiley’ a sticky, KFW-style drone raga replete with distant, ritualistic choral chanting, the superlative ‘Chompers World’ a kind of piano-laced, malfunctioning digi-clock polka. The twee harpsichord flourishes of ‘Back Into The Hole’ bring things to an agreeably unheimlich, Ghost Box-esque finale, rounding off what undoubtedly counts among the more intriguing offerings from John Elliott’s ever-reliable imprint.

Dekorder bring the third and final part of the Xela trilogy to its vinyl resting place, following the original cassette release on Digitalis. Almost anyone who has followed Xela’s work will surely agree that this trilogy, including ‘The Illuminated’ and ‘The Divine’, comprises some of the subtlest and most affective music in his canon. ‘The Sublime’ takes Twells’ sound “into the sickly afterlife”, invoking a passage to exalted destinations almost beyond the reach of our mortal vessels, but possibly glimpsed here by those who peer deep enough. Side I is an exercise in synthesis entitled ‘Lust & Paradise’, and a glacial immersion into the kind of heavy breathing, elegiac ambience which defines Aphex Twin or Kevin Drumm’s most reflective moments. It creeps the senses like sleep paralysis and perhaps represents what death will be like, locked still with your imagination for eternity and unable to physically fulfil its desires. Side II, ‘Eve’s Riposte’ suggests a more opiated state, with a shimmering, golden blur of harp-like timbres washing through a system of low-end oscillations and caliginous ferric vapours. Coupled with the gorgeous sleeve art by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, it’s a compelling set.

*One of the most influential albums of the last 20 years available on vinyl for the first time in a generation* It’s impossible to overstate the love felt by so many for the two “experimental” Talk Talk albums – ‘Spirit of Eden’ and ‘Laughing Stock’. Basically, following the commercial triumph of their singles “It’s My Life”, “Life’s What You Make It” and album “The Colour of Spring” Talk Talk retreated back into the shadows and produced two albums that defied categorisation. Recorded in near-mythical conditions, Mark Hollis is said to have demanded the band work in almost complete darkness, improvising for hours to produce complex, multi-layered and ultimately completely groundbreaking material. “Laughing Stock” was to be their last album – but its legacy seems to grow in stature with every year that goes by. You can easily see the stylistic and conceptual markers left by Talk Talk in the way that bands like Radiohead went on to explore more open-ended and diverse sound sources and stylistic shifts – as if it were the most normal thing in the world for a band with considerable chart success to do. “Laughing Stock” is a quiet, contemplative album – and it hasn’t aged a day since it’s release over 20 years ago. If you own it – we’ll be preaching to the converted. If you don’t – we envy you for being able to hear it for the first time. In short – it’s just completely unmissable.

*Seminal solo-album from Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis, available on vinyl for the first time since its release* 7 years after the release of “Laughing Stock” and the end of Talk Talk, Mark Hollis recorded what has since gone on to be described as “quite possibly the most quiet and intimate record ever made”. In many respects it’s an album no-less influential than “Laughing Stock”, once again extending the parameters and smudging the boundaries between many disparate musical styles and influences, taking elements of jazz, classical and devotional music without ever really sounding like anyone or anything else you’ll have heard before. Much like “Spirit of Eden” and “Laughing Stock”, it’s an album that’s really attained an almost mythical status – leaving so many desperately waiting to see is Hollis would ever return to making music again. Either way – his influence appears to be stronger today than ever before, and this gorgeous vinyl pressing has sent us off once again into a place we’d almost forgotten about but which has accompanied and enriched our lives for many years…

**Limited, hand-numbered edition of 750 on marbled pink vinyl. Includes download coupon redeemable from the label** Houston, TX’s Pink Playground have hatched one of this years finest shoegaze tributes with their debut album, ‘Destination Ecstasy’. In the finest tradition of MBV or Jesus & Mary Chain it comprises eight cathartic noise pop stuns, hewn from amp-busting and jangling guitars, brittle drum machines and swooning, glossolalic vocals haunted by wraith-like synth dissonance, sometimes feeling so perfect they’re about to implode in a shower of excoriating diamond dust. It’s out-and-out pop music, of the almost-painfully beautiful kind, manicured distortion amping a sense of socio-cultural isolation, cocooning the neurotic bedroom listener in a (Kevin) shield(s) of narcissistic reverb reflections. Utterly lush stuff, well recommended.

Badass zoetrope picture disc of discombobulated Avant-Techno fractals from Sculpture. Like its predecessor ‘Rotary Signal Emitter’, this is a proper headful of intuitive sample mulching and cheap, busted electronics, bubbling and fried with a knowing sense of psychedelia. In the course of eleven tracks on ‘Toad Blinker’ Dan Hayhurst clearly rejects the normative values imposed on Techno which so many producers get bogged down in and ends up with something genuinely marvellous and thoroughly endearing. OK it might not rock a dancefloor, per se, but its rocking our tiny minds more than almost any bangers you might care to mention. A deliriously haphazard hand is at work here, conducting fragmented tape loops and lo-fi analogue electronics through battered reel-to-reel, CD player, hardware sampler and FX units, but all the while keeping a crucial sense of groove, the sort of feel for rhythm which makes records by Ekoplekz and Diamond Catalog some of our favourites this year. It’s batty in the best possible sense, and well recommended to fans of the aforementioned or even Raymond Scott, Dick Raaijmakers, Bruno Spoerri etc.

**Limited edition of 500 hand-numbered copies. Includes download code redeemable from the label** Harmonizer is the 5th world orienteering duo of Burlington, Vermont’s Greg Davis and Toby Aronson. They’re the first artists other than Ford & Lopatin to appear on Software, Daniel “Oneohtrix” Lopatin’s Mexican Summer offshoot label for synthy explorations, and beautifully benefit from his production expertise. With ‘World Complete’ they’re striking deep into uninhabited terrain, beautifully reflected in the satellite images licensed from the ESA-European Space Agency which adorn the cover and centre labels. Trousers tucked into their foil socks, they imagine four primal yet futurist soundscapes where supernatural sub-basses expand under plaintive rhythms and sparse, rare cloud formations of hyper-coloured synth awn and wash across undulating, expansive widescreen topographies. The mood is tranquil and meditative, often reverently awe-inspiring, and guided by an eyes-shut intuition which keeps everything suspended above ground level, levitating along the ley-tracks of ‘Landlines’ over the spiritual ground of ‘Derdeba’ to the savannah sprawl of the title track. Immensely lush stuff, advance tickets are strongly recommended!

The Eglo label co-owner presents his latest studio findings on surely his most esoteric, experimental release to date. A-side ‘Danger’ is concerned with finely sculpted, strobing rhythmic fluctuations which sound almost like Mark Fell meets Kassem Mosse, but with the unmistakable melodic soul of Sam Shepherd. The flipside ‘Miniature 27’ feels like a Tangerine Dream incidental from a Michael Mann flick and ends with two locked grooves. Limited copies!

Gescom’s five-track eagle finally lands on Skam’s underground Hip Hop affiliate imprint, Skullsnap. Like always, it’s hardly worth discussing who’s steering the Gescom jeep this time out, just accept that you’ll never know and you’ll enjoy the tunes better. It’s definitely one for the old skool heads; five beat-breaking instrumentals built from processed samples and optimised machine rhythms, all with a ruggedly rigged integrity for the authentically stush Skam stance. Personal highlights have to be the Hyper-B-Boy edit job ‘Cake Mic’ on the A-side and what sounds like a Roland 505 being battered into submission in the middle of a warehouse on ‘R Zee Oner Panix’ o’er on the flipside. Strong steez for fans of Autechre, Made, MR76IX, naturally. Limited copies!

Good to have you back Pole, where’ve you been lad? Germany’s foremost practitioner of crackle-infused dub atmospherics seems keen to emphasize his music’s reggae DNA here: the organ melody of ‘Wipfel’ sounds like the hook from a Jahtari digi killer put through the Berlin blender. ‘Wurzel’ is similarly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but with a fiercer skank on it, and a more minimal, focussed sound design. The highlight for many though will be Pole’s own dub of ‘Wipfel’ – in which he hollows out the original, filling the space with extra sub-bass pressure and some rude echo FX. It’s the sound of a master at work and demands to be heard LOUD.

VHS Head’s Video Club and Trademark Ribbons Of Gold rank as some of the finest outer-tronic records of recent times, representing as they do a completely unique, IDM-inflected and VCR-mangling take on the whole hypnagogic/hauntological fetish for re-processing the half-forgotten TV memories of yesteryear. This new EP finds the ‘Head going for a slightly heavier, harder sound, and in doing so he really strikes gold, from the cathode-fried cosmic undulations of ‘Decapitron’ to the itchy glitch-boogie of ‘Death Dimension’ and ‘Siege Express’ – clearly he’s been raiding the mid-80s exploitation section of his vid collection for this one. There are some curveballs too, like the chopped-up cocaine funk of ‘Jager’ and the beautifully washed out synthorama of ‘Nightmare Park’. We end on the deceptively mellowtitle track, its shimmering xylophone tones edited to all f*ck, like Autechre or BoC remixing The Advisory Circle. Seven exemplary video nasties for all the aspiring Max Renns among you. Rewind!

Following Peverelist and Kowton’s lead, Asusu commandeers the 2nd drop on Punch Drunk affiliated label, Livity Sound. A-side is a lush, Detroit-inspired Techno groove, working a similar route as Shed’s earliest Soloaction 12″ with motor city-oiled grooves under melancholy strings and keys. B-side takes it back to Bristol, via Berlin, creeping with offset dub bass and grim late night vibes for darker heads. Hand-stamped white label. Ace.

**Plain stamped/whitelabel edition – limited stock!** Punch Drunk celebrate their 20th release in typically idiosyncratic style with a Radiophonic dub-scaping session from the shadowy Ekoplekz. Not much is known about this guy, apart from the fact that he’s from Bristol and has an exceptional taste for gorgeously spooked analogue electronics. These two tracks deploy vintage hardware and lo-fi cassette players in an improvised manner to make charmingly trippy little riddims, perhaps like Daphne Oram, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Carter got locked in the studio with a sack of stinky green. ‘Stalag Zero’ is the more bloopy of the the two, full of frothy, flanging metallic sonorities and sci-fi skank vibes also reminding of Jahtari’s Tapes, whereas ‘Distended Dub’ is a touch darker and industrial, sounding like a mad outtake from that Conrad Schnitzler live performance on Mirror Tapes. Big up Punch Drunk, and Ekoplekz, top release.