Juno Recommends Leftfield: April 2022

Review: At this stage in his career, Jon Hopkins should be able to do whatever the hell he likes. After proving his synaesthetic abilities throughout the 2010s - with masterpieces like 'Light Through The Veins' and his last album 'Singularity'- it's clear this climactic electronica artist knows no bounds. Now he debuts a new full guided meditation-style LP documenting his ketamine-fulled revelations realised in a remote Ecuadorian cave. Relinquishing beats and drum sounds, this is a fully ambient affair from Hopkins, and routinely features soothing, sampled vocal snippets from the late yogi and guru Baba Ram Daas, as well as collabs with producer and psychedelic ceremony guide East Forest.

Review: Merrin Karras' 2020 foray into extended compositions combining his Berlin School tendencies and expansive ambient is finally pressed-up on cloudy transparent 12". Remastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri and featuring revisited art by Noah M / Keep Adding.

Review: The soundtrack to David Cronenberg's 1983 masterpiece, the Canadian science fiction horror film VIDEODROME has been fully, painstakingly restored from original master tapes over many years. Four decades after first release it remains a classic of the genre that Mondo, Backlot Music and Howe Records now serve up for the first time ever on vinyl. It was produced by Howard Shore and Alan Frey and comes on original artwork by Rich Kelly, with great liner notes by Annette DiGiovanni and pressed on 180 g vinyl. It is a futuristic and cinematic work that has more than stood the test of time.

Review: Second time around for Com Truise's acclaimed debut album Galactic Melt, which has now reached its tenth birthday. Now presented on rather fetching black and orange "swirl" vinyl housed in a similarly deluxe sleeve (there's spot-varnish aplenty), the remastered album has never looked and sounded so good. It always sounded great, of course, with the American producer effectively defining his now trademark sound - all eight-bit synthesizer sounds, sun-bright melodies, dusty drum machines, arcade-ready electronic motifs and feelgood aural references to 1980s musical culture. Highlights include 'VHS Sex', 'Aircal', 'Hyperlips', 'Glawio' and pulsating closing cut 'Futureworld'.

Review: Chicago's International Anthem serve up another high-grade contemporary jazz album, this time Recordings from the Aland Islands. It is the result of a journey to said islands in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland that Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia made in 2017. As they learned about the land, the concept for this record was devised. It opens with hazy, dream-like sounds and takes in plenty pastoral sounds that easily bring to mind images of the romantic woodlands, moss covered boulders and forest floors of the islands.

Review: Night Songs is the latest record from awakened souls, the Los Angeles based husband and wife duo- James and Cynthia Bernard (marine eyes). In the Spring of 2021, they found a good night's rest was more important than ever to help them through pandemic days of schooling kids from home and balancing work and life. After going on an evening walk, James and Cynthia would write in their bedroom studio and test the evening's songs out for sleep. Even prior to being together, they both loved searching for just the right album to calm their minds at the end of the day. Night Songs is their combined version of a sleepy evening record, exploring slowly evolving loop-based ambient primarily using bass guitar and vocal textures. The tracks which ultimately made it on the album helped them relax enough to go to a place where thoughts fade.

Review: 'Dwell Time' focuses on the moments in between. Expanding on Satie's Furniture Music, which explores the role of music as a backdrop, Dwell Time explores the moments in between active and passive listening. A sound that maintains a unique balance of properties can start as an active relationship that slowly dissolves into the background and accompanies a listener over its course. The Dwell Time signal remains completely analog, utilizing homemade tape samples and hardware synthesizers to encourage the listener to move between the different states of listening. Produced by Rafael Anton Irisarri and Mastered by Taylor Deupree.

Review: On his previous outings for Craigie Knowes, Fred Shepheard AKA No Moon has proved adept at wrapping punchy electro rhythms and crunchy breakbeats in immersive, deep space ambient chords, psychedelic acid lines and enveloping pads. On Spins Parities & Multipolarities, he further explores the latter portion of his trademark style, largely removing the beats in favour of weightless, meditative electronic soundscapes rich in emotive chord sequences, drifting pads, intergalactic electronics, atmospheric field recordings, blissful melodies and pleasing nods to the similarly framed aural world of Global Communication. The results are gorgeous, occasionally grandiose and always alluring, with more than a few nods to Pete Namlook and ambient techno outfits like MLO or Higher Intelligence Agency.

Review: Fairfax is an intriguing and beguiling album of masterfully quiet artistry. Remastered by Lawrence English and featuring brand new artwork, this new edition reveals an all new side to the American artist Nate Scheible's dark, dramatic and meditative sounds. It starts with some unsettling spoken word and then turns into glitch ambient soundscapes with eerie vocal sounds, haunting harmonies and more of those spoken words adding a very real narrative. It is an album of isolation, or uncertainty and one that make you confront the powerful spoken ideas that tell of less than perfect times.

Review: Loopsel throws a tapey curveball our way, reissuing the cassette that put their duo project on the map, this time in vinyl / digital format. The wooshing, minimal, and cold mood of this album, hailing from Gothenburg, reflects the moody production approach of the band Monokultur's Elin and Skiftande Enheter, the two artists that make it up. All sounds on this hazy-horizonned hisser formed the soundtrack for The Spiral, a 'multimedia spatial installation' by the artists Last Oblivion. Post-punky tape distortion bury swathes of radio-surfing sample and great planes of synth pad on 'The Spiral', which truly does sound like exactly that.

Review: Finnish studio wonder Sasu Ripatti returns under his Vladislav Delay moniker, arguably both his most recognised and obscure, universally adored and specialist. Opening on the logically titled and wholly immersive 'Track 1', these tunes are as rich as they are steely, combining white noise, distortion, and the clanging of surface on surface with tangibly eerie, atmospheric melodies.

Wherever you join things, the immediate impact is going to be significant. 'Track 4', for example, takes the elements that made its preceding numbers so spin-tingling, and finally builds those into something that packs inescapable rhythm while refusing to drop a beat, the culmination of that which has come before, marking this as a kind of set, leaving us with just that hint of the reassuring warm up, rather than purely an ambient album.

Review: Retro futurism would be one way to describe Cybernetic Window, and indeed Listening Center in general. Opting to approach the notions of the years ahead with a subtle Utopianism, rather than the more frequent and, given the state of the world now, believable dystopian tones, it's a glittering work of beauty born entirely of mechanics but still allowed to soar when it spreads its wings. Which is pretty much on most tracks.

Call it electro, call it synth fantasy, this limited pressing is deep but also dance floor, it's strange and otherworldly but feels like it's been in your collection for aeons - the last remnants of an advanced civilisation scattered to the wind. A wonderfully strange and melodic trip into a broken beat dream, the only question really is whether you want to wake up or not.

Review: Norwegian-Mexican artist and producer Carmen Villain was born in the US, so has a pretty global sound and wide sphere of influence. Only Love From Now in Small-town Supersound is her fourth studio album and is another beguiling and tightly woven tapestry of atmospheric sounds, field recordings, woodwinds, percussion, samples and synths. Elements of forth world, dub and ambient characterise the grooves and make for a deeply immersive world of steady rhythms, hypnotic melodies and mysterious sonic artefacts. At times loopy, at others loose and improvised, it is an essential listen once more.

Review: Japan is well known for its pretty out there contemporary arts and culture, a country that, during the 20th Century, reinvented itself, transforming the outward image from that of a historic imperial power ruled by tradition to a arguably the nation most prepared for the future to arrive. This is evident in many areas, not east children's entertainment, as this rather obscure outing goes to show.

'Computer Obaachan' was originally featured on the show Everyone's Song, whereby musicians, often high profile and rather influential, would make appearances, singing and performing work aimed squarely at keeping little ones glued. In this instance, that name was the legendary Ryuichi Sakamoto, who, among other things, is known for the innovative back catalogue of Yellow Magic Orchestra. Thanks to his involvement, the song, and its B-side made a few years later for a high quality vinyl single release catalysed by popular demand, has become something of a cult collector's item. So here's your chance to collect.

Review: Night Songs is the latest record from awakened souls, the Los Angeles based husband and wife duo- James and Cynthia Bernard (marine eyes). In the Spring of 2021, they found a good night's rest was more important than ever to help them through pandemic days of schooling kids from home and balancing work and life. After going on an evening walk, James and Cynthia would write in their bedroom studio and test the evening's songs out for sleep. Even prior to being together, they both loved searching for just the right album to calm their minds at the end of the day. Night Songs is their combined version of a sleepy evening record, exploring slowly evolving loop-based ambient primarily using bass guitar and vocal textures. The tracks which ultimately made it on the album helped them relax enough to go to a place where thoughts fade.