14 days

Review: A core member of Dzeltenie Pastnieki throughout the early 00s, Ingus Bauskenieks is all about abstraction and experimentation. Since he came back from a long stint in the shadows, the Latvian musician has self-released a heap of wonderfully surreal music that is often overlooked and slept on. While many talk about freedom of expression, this guy does it for real, and this latest album, Spoki, comes through on Stroom with a very clear concept and a maturity to experimentation that is often not heard. It's not all bleeps and bloops and, in fact, he manages to add in his own nation's heritage thanks to several moments of neo-folk vocalism that works ever so well with the myriad of drum machines and samples housed under tunes like "Roni" or "Lidojums Uz Sauli" - the latter of which is a house reinterpretation of Latvian pop music. This is something for those who want something new, unheard, and attention-grabbing. A fine album - TIP!

Review: Icelandic music producer Bjork, who requires absolutely no introduction given her massive contribution to electronic pop music over the last twenty years, finally returns with her new album Vulnicura on One Little Indian Records. Although the LP represents her breakup with Matthew Barney, there are vivid rays of light nested among the more dreary-eyed vocals and melodies. As per usual with her work, there is a distinctive personal touch to her songs. This is most vividly characterised by the droning style of her singing, a sort of juxtaposition when combined to the music below it. Expect an intricate blend of sci-fi electronics, break-ridden power beats and of course, plenty of hard ambience. Bjork's ninth studio album is another winner. This deluxe edition comes with a download code!

Review: Warp's Boards of Canada reissue campaign reaches Geogaddi, perhaps the duo's most expansive (if not their most popular) record, presented here on a 3LP gatefold edition. Considerably darker than its predecessor Music Has The Right To Children, the claustrophobic sounds of "Gyroscope" and sampled spoken word in tracks like "Dandelion" and "Energy Warning" present a somewhat dystopian setting, filled with unsettling sounds, such as the light but eerie melodies of "Alpha & Omega" and "1969". Undoubtedly one deserving of reappraisal.

Review: Disco producer, synthesizer pioneer and Hi-NRG originator Patrick Cowley made a lot of highly sexual music. In fact, his muscular synth-disco productions were, for years, the soundtrack of choice in San Francisco's notorious bathhouse scene. It doesn't stop there, though. Unbeknownst to most disco aficionados, Cowley also provided experimental synthesizer tracks to soundtrack gay porn films between 1973 and 1981. Initially released on vinyl last year, School Daze has now been granted a CD edition by Dark Entries and gathers together the best of those productions. Arguably, the material here is amongst his best work. Free of the constraints of the dancefloor, Cowley let himself go, delivering avant garde synthesizer compositions that ranged from spaciously psychedelic ("Out of Body", like some lost Confused House record) and decidedly cosmic (the chugging "Journey Home"), to otherworldly and outlandish ("Zygote"). Recommended.

Review: First released in 1986, "Electric World" was the debut single from Ryo Kawasaki and Satellites, a New York-based collective helmed by a computer programmer who built his own MIDI-workstation. Here it gets a timely reissue. It's an intriguing EP, with the title track - which is available in original mix and extended version form - offering a breezy, warm and (whisper it) Balearic mix of cheery synth-pop melodies, addictive female load vocals, dreamy chords, NYC freestyle ticks (the oft-used Fairlight orchestral stab) and beats that sit somewhere between electro and freestyle. Instrumental cut "727" continues on a similar theme, peppering a squelchy bassline and bustling machine drums with spacey chords and oodles of additional percussion sounds.

Review: Listening to Lee Okkyung doing her thing - or rather things - is real a delight. The South Korean-born, New York-based composer and improviser lays claim to an impressive formal education courtesy of the highly respected Berklee College of Music in the US. Specialising in writing and scoring, you can envisage the narrative potential of each arrangement here, where the serene and beautiful - informed in part by classical tones of the Far East - frequently dissipate into the experimental, cacophonous or accidental. The result is an album that can be traditional when it chooses to be, clearly the product of a formally trained musician, and yet is also surprising and playful, and at times somewhat challenging. Cellos, harps and pianos sitting front and centre, with a range of effects, white and found noises adding fathoms of depth and possibility to the mix.

Review: These are dark times, few can deny that. What's needed is a guiding light to help steer our vulnerable vessels through unpredictable, stormy seas, safely delivering us to better places.

Enter Mamiffer, an outfit that sound as though plucked from the pages of some otherworldly fantasy work of fiction, and couldn't be more welcome in our reality. "The Brilliant Tabernacle" is folk-tinged, in that there's an ancient air to the siren calls, tribal-like thuds of kicks drums and lilting minor keys. Yet it's also incredibly modern, daring to ignore the boundaries of genre to create a kind of magical, hallucinogenic rock. From the bewitching chants of "All That Is Beautiful", which could easily soundtrack a lost scene from "Braveheart", to the hypnotic, far lighter "To Be Seen", Faith Coloccia's project is a sublime oddity.

Review: For her latest immersive and impressive work, composer and producer Anna Meredith has joined forces with the Scottish Ensemble - a strings-only orchestra from Glasgow - to create a seamless album inspired by Vivaldi's Four Seasons. In many ways, Anno is a re-telling of the much-loved orchestral piece, with Vivaldi's familiar compositions squeezed between wonderful new pieces by Meredith that combine neo-classical string movements with bubbly electronics, subtle beats and field recordings of various natural phenomena. Interestingly, even the more electronic-minded compositions don't sound out of place amongst Vivaldi's familiar suite, suggesting that Meredith's unique approach to musical fusion is both far-sighted and sympathetic.

Review: For those that pay attention to these things, there's been plenty of talk on the margins about The Pilotwings, a young Lyonnaise duo whose first two EPs on Brothers From Different Mothers got tongues wagging. Here they step up to Macadam Mambo, delivering an EP nominally inspired by classic Chicago house, but with clear Japanese, African and classic electro influences. Analogue sounding, inventive and hard to accurately pigeonhole, Une Nuit Aux Boxboys is a thoroughly engaging and entertaining affair. Highlights are plentiful, from the twittering new age melodies and snappy percussion of "Le Stabisme De Richard" and exotic shuffle of "Cerisier", to the "Promised Land" bliss of the more obviously Chicago-influenced title track.

Review: Three years after the original landed in stores, Martin Jenkins AKA Pye Corner Audio has finally delivered a sequel to his acclaimed "Where Things Are Hollow"EP on Lapsus. Predictably it's rather good too, with Jenkins drifting between drowsy, gently warming dancefloor melancholia (the wonderfully bittersweet opener "Self Synchronise"), blissful and colourful IDM/4-4 techno fusion (the even better "Weather The Storm") and meandering, slow-burn ambient ("Phase B"). There's a thrilling bonus in the shape of John Talabot's remix of "Resist" from the EP's predecessor, which he re-imagines as a stuttering chunk of intergalactic, left-field electro.

Review: Matmos Member Drew Daniel was inspired to set to work on this new album following the election of Donald Trump as U.S President, and what he sees as the creeping rise of fascism around the globe. Yet instead of making it a solo musical expression of sadness, anger and frustration, he decided to gather together a bunch of like-minded musicians (guitars, strings, saxophone, vibraphone, percussion) and vocalists. The result is a suite of two 20-minute-plus tracks that smartly blend elements of Steve Reich style minimalism, neo-classical, ambient, deep electronica and otherworldly experimentalism to create stirring, emotion-rich epics. It may well be his greatest work to date, and that's saying something.

Review: The artists featured here on Invenciones come from an intermediate period, influenced by the hippie movement and the advent of punk. They hail from that decisive stage of technological socialisation, when small studios and home recording studios were set up. A spirit of experimentation that was redefining the directions taken by music in the region, at a time when native sounds were introduced, either linked to the use of poor or austere technologies or to the local context. These were a group of individuals who worked on counterculture projects but, above all, what these artists have in common is being Latin Americans who shared the difficulties of belonging to a particular time in history. When ideological polarisation resulting from the Cold War was rife, when they would witness complex social processes, military coups, dictatorships and radicalisation. Musikautomatika (Venezuela) and Via Lactea (Mexico) have acquired cult status now. Because all of them needed to imagine a new space, they could forge a new scene that punk and technology would go on to consolidate. Now we can listen to them on this compilation, which allows us to imagine a time in the past when this other avant-garde music scene exploded.

Review: Dialect melodies are passed along since time immemorial and yet are only spontaneously available in the moment. Before caught and preserved they have to be released. Antje Vowinckel reflects upon this paradox through a collection of dialect recordings which are then imitated by humming musicians who try to catch the correct melodic lines. Vowinckel recorded most of the voices herself in remote areas of Europe and the United States, because there you can find the most sing-songiest accents. However, it is not so easy to preserve the rich diversity of melodies. The work also deals with the difficulties of recording and the limits of our melodic memory, capturing a poetics of the speaking voice. Antje Vowinckel is a Berlin-based sound artist and radio artist. Her focus is on new ways of combining text and music i.e. in her projects on automatic speaking, simultaneous interpreting or compositions with dialect melodies. She has worked for German public radio stations and festivals as WDR, SWR, Deutschlandfunk, Ruhrtriennale, Eclat and performed in places like Issue Project room, Sophiensale and ZKM. Her piece Call Me Yesterday has been presented in sixteen countries. In recent years she also created video compositions and sound installations i.e. in the old town of Bucharest.