Music for post-humanity: Watching is the follow-up to Edinburgh electronic musician Steven Anderson’s Proto Human, described by its creator as a casual surveying of the end of civilisation either through technology or a virus. Proto Human was released in February of this year, just as the world was lurching toward who knows what thanks to COVID-19, and where technological dependency was suddenly a reality for all of us if we actually wanted to stay connected.
Watching imagines what comes next. This is an album of wide-open spaces, unhurried melodies and a serene, almost soothing sense of realism and perspective. Its purview is the notion that what is going on with the human race can’t be all that there is out in the galaxy, that life must exist somewhere beyond our understanding. The effect is to give tracks like the corporeally-minded ‘Blood And Bone’, the mystique-heavy ‘In The Corner’ and the questing ‘Helix Nebula’ a feeling of discovery, the use of vintage-sounding electronics evoking some of the earliest electronic music.
There is a feeling of weightlessness to some of these pieces, while others suggest a weight being lifted from your shoulders. Beats drift into view gradually, pads ebb and flow around you like healing waves of cathartic sound, and melodies eddy and spin with grace and evanescence. Pieces like ‘1420 Megahertz’ and the haunting ‘Stars Went Missing’ are draped in foggy layers of thick reverb, meaning that when strident synth patterns and a crisp electro beat creep into view they are never presented aggressively, reinforcing a sense of expansiveness and wonder.
Amid the most harrowing global events we hope to witness in our lives, Anderson has created an album that takes a step back and tries to focus its electronic attentions on far greater concerns through the lens of an almost scientific enlightenment. The thirteen tracks here are dominated by a stateliness and an unhurried, slowly-evolving sense of purpose, one that asks us to look skyward, away from the trials and tribulations of a virus-ravaged Earth.
Watching by Letters From Mouse is released October 30 by Music Is The Devil.
Have you ever been broken up with by the same person twice? I have. If you thought the first time hurt, it’s nothing compare to the second time, which is as brutal and barbaric as someone running a knife through your already broken heart.
That’s kind of how I feel as we reach the fifth and final part of Front & Follow’s Isolation And Rejection series. I had only just got over the feeling of emptiness that Justin Watson’s label left when he shuttered it’s operations last year, only to suddenly feel rejuvenated at the announcement of this project. And now, as it draws to a close like the darkening evenings of a lockdown Autumn, I feel utterly bereft again.
Still, in many ways, Watson saved the best for last, as this collection of rejects includes some of the best material to have appeared in this whole series, the proceeds of which have all gone to The Brick charity in Wigan. The album commences with three grubby, edgy electronic belters – Assembled Minds’s ‘The Eeerie Machine Hums A Barley Song To The Sun’, Accidental Tones’s ‘Mute’ and ARC Soundtracks’s ‘Exhibit F’ – and it really just stays at that same level throughout. Those three set a precarious tone to the album, one that feels like they’re reflecting back our sundry concerns – a bit of paranoia; a skewed sense of purpose; a nagging feeling that things don’t feel quite real.
And so it progresses, through Simpl_Machines’s hypnotic ‘The Worst In Me’, which sounds like an alternative take on a key cue from the original Teen Wolf; the ceasless mechanistic strut of Bit Cloudy’s ‘Secret Genes’; das fax mattinger’s noisy ‘Sommerhit’; Isobel Ccircle~’s textural ‘Devour Isolation’; Synthetic Villain’s dreamy ‘Rhythm & Weep (Remix)’, which sounds like electronica nodding in the direction of dreamy easy listening; The Kendal Mintcake’s scattergun electro beats and icicle-sharp – almost Christmas-y – melodies on ‘∞%y’; the pulsing nod in the direction of minimal techno on Quartersized’s ‘Limiting’; Laica’s dramatic, submerged atmospherics on the standout ‘(Kakinuma) Traces Of The Soul’.
As with the previous volumes, it’s the straying away from the electronic template that reinforces Watson’s curatorial even-handedness. Petrine Cross’s doomy ‘Absorbed In An Artificial Night’ is a heavily-distorted metal cut that sounds like an outtake from Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, that was rejected from Trent’s gloomy masterpiece for not being optimistic enough. Sam Underwood and Graham Dunning’s Mammoth Beat Organ (Google it right now!) deliver the acoustic ‘Mast’, which sounds like an afterhours visit to Brian Cant’s shop on Bric-A-Brac.
The album concludes with the folksy acapella ‘Lo-Fi Symphony For Portslade-by-Sea’ by Dominic Bradnum, a mournful, yet optimistic piece of vocal sentimentality that sounds like a fishermen’s chorus singing Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy The Silence’. It’s this savagely beautiful piece that I’ll be listening to for comfort as I once more mourn the loss of one of my favourite labels.
Isolation & Rejection Volume 5 is released October 30 2020 by Front & Follow. RIP. Again.
Immy is London-born, Falmouth-based singer-songwriter Imogen Leach. ‘In The Morning’ is her debut single, showcasing a lightness of touch and a haunting vocal intonation that prompts comparison with the work of First Aid Kit. Ostensibly a frustrated paean to the transiency and impermanence of one-night stands, ‘In The Morning’ concludes with a firmness and resolution, even as Imogen delivers the song with a quietly stirring grace and subtlety. Expect great things. Released September 28 2020.
Spacelab – Kaleidomission (Wormhole World / HREA’M)
A joint release by the ever-dependable Wormhole World and HREA’M labels for Spacelab, a mysterious electronic project with absolutely no biographical backstory. Containing 36 short tracks, Kaleidomission is an exercise in plunderphonic dexterity, taking in freaky little segments of speech or birdsong culled from the ether, wonky loops of jazz drumming and ambient texture like ‘We Love Can’ and ‘Astral Dynamics’ that sound like they’re being broadcast from a broken AM transmitter in the overgrown grounds of Aleister Crowley’s house. The title of the standout skewed electronica of ‘Fucked Casio Melody’ requires no further explanation. Released October 16 2020.
Lagoss is a collaboration between Discrepant label head Gonçalo F. Cardoso and Tenerife-based electronica duo Tupperware. The 37 short tracks on Imaginary Island Music, Vol. 1 are like listening to Les Baxter or Martin Denny at a post-apocalyptic exotica club on a broken soundsystem. Swooning tropical lushness abounds here, but it’s skewed to the point of nauseating discordancy as vibraphones wobble and shimmer into dissonant sprawls and hip-hop / electro beats lurch awkwardly. If you listen closely to tracks like ‘Chipude’, you can hear the sound of waves lapping around a wrecked beach bar run by an old stoner dude in a Hawaiian shirt mixing Mai Tais for thirsty ghosts. Released October 9 2020.
For his first electronic album under his own name, Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante (aka Trickfinger) delivers an energetic tribute to two vastly different things: his recently-departed feline companion Maya, present with him in the studio since RHCP’s Stadium Arcadium, and his hitherto unknown love of jungle and drum ‘n’ bass. A time machine back to the period 1991 – 1996, tracks like ‘Brand E’ and ‘Amethyblowl’ fizz with turbulent breakbeat edginess, while his instantly-recognisable awareness of melody offsets that rhythmic freneticism and intensity with stirring ambient colour. Released October 23 2020.
Volutes is the debut album by French duo Christine Ott and Mathieu Gabry. With a title referring to the spiralling patterns evident in both architecture and nature, Volutes is a breathtaking masterpiece full of gentle, emotive twists. With a palette of sounds including piano, electronics and the expressive violin of Anne Irène-Kempf, moments such as ‘Trapezian Fields’ are freighted with an unpredictable, austere, haunted quality full of intricate detail. Ott’s work with Yann Tiersen can be heard in the mesmerising Ondes Martenot-led ‘Ultraviolet’, wherein layers of the instrument’s characteristic reedy alien sounds are encircled by Irène-Kempf’s savagely heart-wrenching violin as it plunges into minor key despair. Un album d’une beauté poignante. Released October 16 2020.
Fragments is the debut album from LA’s Body/Negative, the pseudonym of nonbinary multi-instrumentalist and producer Andy Schiaffino, and follows their Epoche EP from 2019. Beginning with an instrumental cover of Elliott Smith’s ‘Figure 8’ that sounds like it’s being heard through the gauzy vestiges of sleep, Schiaffino has produced an ambient album full of unique personality and highly personal, almost diaristic reference points. Here you can just make out their classical musical roots poking through on pieces like ‘Catholic Guilt’, but they are presented like elusive memories appearing out of the haze of long-buried emotions, making the fifteen minutes of Fragments one of the most haunting and transcendent albums I’ve ever heard. Released October 23 2020.
Paradise Cinema is a trio consisting of Portico Quartet multi-instrumentalist Jack Wyllie with percussionists Khadim Mbaye and Tons Sambe. Recorded while Wylie was on location in Dakar, Senegal, his vision for the album was prompted by the ceaseless rhythms he’d hear through the night and the faded aspirations and historical grandeur of the city. The timbres on pieces like ‘Liberté’ are immediately recognisable from Wylie’s day job with Portico Quartet, all shimmering ambience and considered, absorbing electronics, but it is their fusion with the Mbaye and Sambe’s percussive backbone that focusses the attention. ‘It Will Be Summer Soon’ is a restless, urgent highlight, sounding like rush-hour traffic on a hopeful Senegalese morning. Released October 9 2020.
Espen Eriksen Trio – End Of Summer (Rune Grammofon)
Seven tracks of piano jazz from the versatile fingertips of Espen Eriksen, recorded in Oslo during lockdown after the trio of Eriksen, double bassist Lars Tormod Jenset and drummer Andreas Bye saw all of their shows cancel in quick succession. Released as the strangest of summers drew to a close and the dork Norwegian autumn commenced, pieces like ‘Transparent Darkness’ carry a ruminative, reflective quality in their melodic structures, while the Latin rhythms of the album’s title track carries a sense of quietly chilled optimism. There is also a sense of catharsis and energy in the pieces here, borne from the trio finally getting back together in the studio for a vibrant, socially-distanced session. Released September 25 2020.
Sleep Through The Storm is the fifth album from James Vella’s A Lily. Beginning in 2006 with wake:sleep and continuing over the past fourteen years, Vella’s music under the A Lily name has been one of utmost flexibility, shifting his stylistic impulses refreshingly from drones to electronic pop with each release, without worrying about any sort of back catalogue compatibility issues.
His latest album finds Vella in a deeply contemplative frame of mind as he reflects on the parlous state of the world we call home in 2020. Outwardly simple yet richly complex beneath the surface, these eight pieces are the electronic equivalent of putting on a brave face when, inside, you are trying to manage the swirling emotions and myriad anxieties that seem to have existed in our daily realities for the past twenty years or more.
Opener ‘Endless Jasmine’ is presented as cluster of rapidly coruscating tones. Their presentation vividly recalls listening to peeling bells celebrating some joyous occasion, but instead they feel claustrophobic, relentlessly devoid of any sort of release. The deceptively beatific ‘A Softly Glitching Reality’ evokes the melodies of Vella’s work for piano, with subtly abrasive dissonance and slow filters giving the piece an uncertain, indecisive, troubled timbre.
The album’s centrepiece, the almost title track ‘Slept Through The Storm’ poses the question we’d all like to ask ourselves: what if this was all just a dream? What if that daily creeping dread and relentless non-specific unease and all the multitudes of hellish headlines we are confronted with were all just figments of our imagination? The track exists with a cautious optimism, spirals of wispy melodic cycles floating upwards, encircled by criss-crossing textural motifs.
‘Slept Through The Storm’ sets the tone for the remainder of the album, which proceeds with a gracefulness (if you’re feeling optimistic) or a sense of resignation (if you’re not). The album concludes with the slowly-evolving countermelody of ‘Slipped At The Edge Of The Pool’, a haunting, reflective, sweetly-fluctuating refrain that stays with you long after the album has ebbed away into a heavy, bereft silence.
Sleep Through The Storm by A Lily is released October 16 2020 by Bytes.
“In late 2004, after years of intense math calculations, four men determined the world wasn’t weird enough and decided to encase themselves in spray-painted fibreglass. They picked up some musical instruments, wrote a few songs and took to the road in an effort to generate a maniacal cyclone of fun and jubilation amid the cold thundering machine of life.” – The Killer Robots! biography.
I’m not sure how I never heard about The Killer Robots!, a ‘theatrical rock band’ from Orlando, FL where the band members wear huge robot costumes. They seem like a lot of irreverent fun, though I think you have to be a huge nerd to fully appreciate them; or maybe, given their predilection for on-stage pyrotechnics and tongue-in-cheek sci-fi-isms, you just need to be a fan of Muse.
Too big a concept to concentrate solely on music, The Robots seemed predestined to find a route into film. In 2016, they released their second movie (the first was called The Killer Robots And The Battle For The Cosmic Potato – yes, you did read that correctly). Co-opting the name from one of my favourite robot flicks from my youth, Crash & Burn was a B-movie-style adventure that followed the Robots as they tried to eliminate various nefarious villains in increasingly goofy chapters that was more like watching someone successfully playing a computer game than a traditional movie. The movie was started in 2010 and delivered on an amazingly small budget. The result was both deftly humorous but also, in its own inimitable way, a faithful tribute of sorts to the earliest sci-fi movies.
Killer Robots’ bassist founder Sam Gaffin, who put most of the film together single-handedly over five years, wrote a brilliant electronic score for the film that has now finally been made available through Bandcamp.
Containing 27 mostly short cues, Gaffin’s music is luridly vivid, with pieces like ‘Fury Of The Robots’ and ‘Prepping For Battle’ consisting of big orchestral melodies reminiscent of Eastern European military parade-ground demonstrations, mixed in with some tasty Neubauten-esque metal bashing. Befitting the rapid scene changes of the movies, most of these cues deliver a lot of intense action in a short space of time, their ideas being allowed to reach prominence before concluding rapidly. ‘Trog Goes Clubbing’ is a brilliant slice of futuristic techno, while ‘Max Talks Smack’ is determined electropunk, fusing rolling post-punk drums and a central electronic bassline that acts as the missing link between oompah music and Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft.
The concluding piece here, ‘Surfing On Space Junk’ sends the album out on a bang. Beginning with some eerie, theremin-esque wailing, the track suddenly opens out into a euphoric sequence of fizzy melodies and hi-NRG hooks that feels like you’re careering wildly through space, only just on the edge of control.
The Killer Robots! Crash & Burn OST by The Killer Robots! was released October 9 2020.
Words: Mat Smith. With thanks to Espen.
(c) 2020 Further. Note: an earlier version of this post appeared at documentaryevidence.co.uk in 2016
In 2019, to my immense disappointment, the Front & Follow label decided to shut up shop. It looked like either a temporary cessation of activities or a complete end of a 12-year run that had seen the Manchester-based imprint issue an incredible run of adventurous sonic material from a diverse set of artists.
Fortunately, 2020’s lockdown presented the ideal opportunity to bring the label back, specifically for the Isolation And Rejection series of artist compilations. From the off, the premise was simple – Justin Watson, who runs the label, put out an open call for artists to send in tracks that had been rejected by other compilers. Isolation And Rejection became something of a home for the unwanted, overlooked and unloved. All proceeds from the sales of the digital albums go to The Brick in Wigan, a charity focussed, like Isolation And Rejection, on the homeless.
In keeping with the previous three editions of the series, the tracks presented on the penultimate instalment are far from mere
offcuts or poor quality knock-offs. Volume 4 collects together twenty-four tracks from established, well-known artists like Kepier Widow, Howlround, Rupert Lally and Pulselovers – none of whom, frankly, should ever find their music on a compiler’s cutting room floor. These artists nestle evenly alongside material from less well-known individuals, creating a sense of even-handedness that is a credit to Watson and his label. That he selected an acoustic guitar strumfest – MJ Hibbett’s ‘Rocking Out But Quietly’ – as the album’s centrepiece is downright audacious amid the anxious, squalling, buzzing, droning and quietly ethereal electronics elsewhere, but then again Front & Follow were always defiantly atypical in their release schedules.
So here you get the woozy, hypnotic structures of Stellarays’ ‘Butterfly Control Tower’, all delicate melodies and an electro-shoegazery disposition; the nod in the direction of Cabaret Voltaire on Function Automat’s resolute ‘Data Data’; Earthborn Vision’s haunting, edgy electro pulses on ‘Effects Of Isolation’; Graham Reznick’s processed cello and choral vocal textures melding with stirring electronics on the beautiful ‘The Visit’; Kepier Widow’s brooding ‘Perfect Latency’. Elsewhere, Rupert Lally immerses himself in the same ambient sonic foreshore that inspired his Marine Life album with the pastoral ’It Learns From Its Mistakes’ and Lammergeiers delivers a psychedelic stew of amorphous, shapeshifting processed blues guitar riffs and grainy textures set to motorik rhythms on ‘Ephemeris’.
My personal favourite here comes from Joe Evans’ Runningonair. His ‘Cocktail Hour’ is a breezy slice of gentle exotica, all tranquil beats, discrete acid squelches, blurry shapes, vibes and jazzy piano, just perfect for mixing a Mai-Tai or three in the comfort of the Tiki bar you fashioned up because you had nothing else to do in lockdown. Cheers.
Isolation & Rejection Volume 4 is released September 25 2020 by Front & Follow.
For reasons that I don’t fully understand, for a significant proportion of lockdown I found myself drawn to the sea. Initially this was a strange feeling: in my mind’s eye I imagined the tranquillity of sunsets over rippling waves, the coolness of ocean spray and the scent of water in constant motion, but I was also reminded of how stressful I would find trips to the beach as a child – the embarrassment of changing into and out of swimming shorts under a towel, the uncomfortable feeling of sand between my toes and a sense of intense boredom that manifested itself, conservatively, seventeen minutes into a day by the sea. Nevertheless, the idea of the sea won out, and as soon as lockdown eased slightly, I took myself to the Cornish coast, to where I now find myself temporarily relocated.
Swiss-based electronic artist Rupert Lally’s latest album, Marine Life, also concerns itself with the sea, perhaps representing an emotive, wistful nod in the direction of his childhood growing up in Brighton. Across six deeply ambient pieces, Lally evokes both the calm quietude and intense volatility of the water. Taking together processed, degraded samples of orchestras and overlaying those with choral samples and plaintive synth accents, Lally has assembled a suite of sounds that drift gently between the acoustic and the electronic.
Pieces like ‘Deceptively Calm’ or ‘Shimmering Waves’ have a muted drama, an evolving pattern of beatific drones and constant cycles of minor crescendos smothered in a sort of hypnotic, though-provoking serenity. Like the ocean, what appears still on the surface might hide a restless, dangerous turbulence that prevails beneath; Lally’s work on Marine Life is sensitive to both, simultaneously carrying a reflectiveness but also a respect for the water and its latent, unpredictable power, best exemplified by a sequence of fluctuating discordancies on the title track.
A sense of danger floats to the choppy surface on ‘High Speed Crossing’ and the submerged pulse of ‘Diving Bell’, the former progressing on a submerged motorik rhythm that sounds like the close-up recording of a boat engine, and the latter on an unswerving sweeping sound reminiscent of sonar. These two pieces seem to symbolise, for me, mankind’s fragile relationship with the water and its untameable nature. I also found myself pondering how our continual disrespect for the natural order of the oceans have jeopardised the delicate ecosystem that it represents, feeling anxious about what overfishing, oil spills, engine emissions and plastic waste have done to those who call it home.
I found myself listening to Marine Life with the sound of seagulls chattering outside the Velux windows in the space I have commandeered for writing and reflection while I find myself here in Cornwall. It was a moment of natural, unexpected symbiosis that felt like it was completely in tune with the powerfully introspective yet elegiac tonalities of Lally’s latest work.
Marine Life by Rupert Lally is released September 21 2020 by Glass Reservoir in a limited edition of 50 CDs.
Gareth Jones is no stranger to helping artists shape astounding music. Having produced and mixed acts such as Depeche Mode, Erasure, Einstürzende Neubauten, MGMT, Can, Neu!, and beyond, it is safe to say Gareth knows his way around the studio. It is one thing to assist artists in honing their craft, however, and another to create original work, especially in a void of individualism.
With ElectroGenetic, his first solo release, Gareth has successfully managed to create a sonically-rich aural snapshot of his recent journey through loss. Although deeply personal, the emotions Gareth has managed to capture are immediately relatable as they are being told – not simply as one person’s reaction to the travails of life – but through the lens of an all-encompassing spiritualism.
ElectroGenetic sounds as the title suggests: a perfect blend of deep, earthly ambience accented with rich cosmic synth work. The listening experience of the nine-track ElectroGenetic (a seamless and flowing 40 minutes of morphing sounds) is a continuous journey one hardly knows they are on – much like life. Buzzing insect-like sferics hover over fields of sound in ‘Goonhilly’, low-pass filtered rhythms fluctuate atop ethereal beds in ‘Farewell’, choral swaths emerge from the depths as synth arps punctuate the darkness in ‘Trinity’, and effected spoken words reinforce a spiritual element throughout.
Gareth intricately blends raw modular electronics with floating atmospheres and the result is remarkably gentle and expressively emotive. There is a distance in the sound like someone observing a storm from afar. One is reminded of the pastoral ambience of O Yuki Conjugate’s Undercurrents (Into Dark Water) or the dream-laced techno of Air Liquide’s The Increased Difficulty Of Concentration.
With ElectroGenetic, Gareth presents a momentary journey through life – one fraught with sadness but never losing sight of a grand spiritual order to the perceived chaos. A journey immaculately reinterpreted through electronics, field recordings, poetry, and dreamcatchers. Gareth has made a deeply personal album based on a deeply personal journey but one that is relatable to all of us as it is presented by someone who is not only an expert in the field of sound manipulation but also cognisant of when it is best to abandon ego and let higher consciousness control the ebb and flow. Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which inspired the final piece ‘Alone Together’, offers a touching summation of the album:
“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.”
ElectroGenetic by Gareth Jones is released on September 18 2020 by Calm + Collect. Pre-save here: https://ffm.to/electrogenetic
Words: Bryan Michael. Bryan is one third of Alka. Alka’s new album, Regarding The Auguries, is released October 9 2020 by VeryRecords.
Tom Wheatley’s Round Trip is described as “an imaginary journey for double bass”.
For those who haven’t seen Wheatley performing, this potentially requires some explanation. For those who have, the journey through the limitless sonorities, textures and possibilities that he can manifest from his instrument will be all too familiar – scratches, hissing sounds, the sound of strings, scraped and subjected to intense pressure, noises that you cannot reconcile with an instrument that ordinarily seems to lend itself to ponderous, languid playing.
Wheatley is a master of using the whole instrument in his exploration of sound. Nothing is off limits. Nothing is sacred. Anything that can produce a sound is legitimate and accepted. I saw him perform once with such intensity that by the end the horsehair of his bow was detached, flailing, pathetic and thwarted; he had exploited the strings so close to the very limits of their elasticity that I thought they might snap; his performance was so physical and determined that if he had smashed the wood body against the gallery wall and played among the splinters it would have felt utterly logical.
You can imagine some of that technique being used to coax the myriad sounds that can be heard across Round Trip – frantic / frenetic; quiet / intricate; creaking / whining; droning / murky. At around the twenty-two minute mark, Wheatley creates a squall of bleats and stuttering sounds that feel like they must have been played on a sax, its performer bent double and pushing every last breath through the horn with wild abandon. I was not remotely surprised to be told that it was still Wheatley and his bass.
On Round Trip, he is accompanied by nothing more than location sounds. Birds tweet, chirp and trill melodically; pedestrians chatter; a lone dog barks; traffic can be heard far off in the distance; a delivery truck reverses nearby. Tune into that and you hear the cacophony of daily existence; a dramatic, disquieting, vibrant tapestry of ceaseless, beautiful noise. Heard in that context, Wheatley’s investigative playing here acts as an allegory for life’s quintessential, wonderful restlessness.
Round Trip by Tom Wheatley is released July 29 2020 by TAKUROKU. TAKUROKU is the download imprint of Café Oto in Dalston, London. Buy Round Trip at the TAKUROKU website here.
Seven tracks of dreamy and much needed ambient electronic music from prolific Palma-based composer Hypnodial (Ilia Rodríguez). Tracks such as the beatific, widescreen ‘Summerine’ are poised on the delicate axis between hopefulness and resignation that the album’s title plays with. Elsewhere, the standout ‘Brokelyn’ and ‘Cloopseend’ have a rougher edge thanks to gently undulating, bassy drones upon which are stacked euphoric vocal textures and chiming, stirring melodic counterpoints. Music to focus troubled minds. Released May 28 2020.
A second outing for Mutante, a Worcester duo of Jonathan Parkes and Alec Wood. Mutante II explores the rich and enduring legacy of early 1980s soundtracks, its seven tracks each full of evocative synth sounds and a sense of creeping paranoia and dread. ‘A New Horizon’ and ‘Magnetron’ are among the highlights, both moving ominously forward on a bed of prowling, heavy bass sequences and submerged rhythms offset by grainy sweeps and a topline suggesting imminent danger. Don’t have nightmares; or, if you must, make sure this is your soundtrack. Released June 8 2020.
The title of the new album from secretive Paris-based Couronne de Merde translates as “I wish the winds were ash.” Containing six tracks inspired by his frequent trips to Beirut, these pieces occupy a frontier land between emotive electronic music and the oppressive architecture of modern industrial music. Here you’ll find thunderous mechanical rhythms, subtle melodic interplay and drifting field recordings of life sounds recorded in Beirut but woven together back in Paris. ‘ﻻ ﻳﻮﺟﺪ ﻣﻮﺕ’ (‘There Is No Death’) is the album’s signature piece, a brooding, contemplative moment surrounded by sonic rubble and devastation, while ‘ﻗﻮﻯ ﺍﻟﻜﺘﺎﺋﺐ ﺍﻟﻨﻈﺎﻣﻴﺔ’ (‘A Strong Regiment’) snarls and inches relentlessly forward on menacing percussive tank tracks. Released June 5 2020.
Score is the solo project of d_rradio’s Chris Tate, and Modern Wreck is the follow-up to 2018’s Vent, released by Cruel Nature in a highly limited edition of just 40 cassettes. Many-layered and ushered in with sounds that have an organic, naturalistic earthiness to them, tracks like ‘Women And Children’ have a gracefulness and euphoric poise, full of jangly guitars and instrumentation of unknowable provenance. The playful ‘Crown Shoes’ is dominated by subtle electronics and a jazzy piano refrain, while ‘Inside Joke’ has a delightful wonkiness somewhere between nomadic glitch music and gentle folk. ‘Money Shot’ is the album’s pop highlight, wandering forth on a breezy warmth redolent of tropical island sunsets. Released June 5 2020.
de tian is the longstanding partnership between Sheffield guitarist and electronic musician Paul Shaft and free music and Discus Music co-founder Martin Archer. The original version of de tian sprang up in the post-punk / pre-synth-pop hinterlands but when Shaft and Archer hooked up, their music evolved toward a more sonically diverse point. New album Transcriptome features nine tracks that find the duo working grooves out of industrial-style rhythms overlaid with Archer’s distinctive textural reeds and sax, with the addition of percussion from early de tian member Paul Hague. Key track ‘Transcriptome 4’ thuds with a wild, frantic pulse, wailing synth stabs and African percussion giving the track an air of only just being on the edge of self-control. Archer sweeps in with some especially evocative processed sax toward the end which cements the track’s beautiful chaos. Released May 7 2020.
Eight tracks of mostly smooth, vaguely jazz-inflected electronica from Scottsdale, AZ-based ambient music stalwart Todd Fletcher. Each piece is characterised by sedate beats, gently washing pads, gorgeously understated synth work and heavily processed spoken word vocals mangled into melodic reference points. ‘Ice Angel’ stands out for his percussive melody and frosty sheen, while ‘Teleothenaion’ nods reverentially in the direction of Ken Ishii. The brilliant ‘China Radio Sunshine’ floats forth on an electro-dub pulse over which smart, fluid, jazz-inflected melody is allowed space to roam. Apparently Fletcher sold all his synths once upon a time and decided just to play the piano. Clearly, and for us very fortunately, he must have changed his mind. Released May 20 2020.
Further. 
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