New releases last eight weeks: Experimental/Electronic

Review: There's something special in the water here. The Knife's Olof Dreijer presents three sprawling tracks on a new EP marking the start of a fresh chapter in his career, with the opener, 'Coral', starting the scoring with a strange and captivating bit of what you might call micro-techno. A lo-fi kind of workout that marries beautiful harmonic tones with a hoover bass in a way that almost calls to mind 'Rainforest' era Mathew Johnson, only more organic and live feeling. Overleaf, so to speak, 'Flora' invites us to sit on a cloud of gentle strings and mesmerising noises, like reliving a precious but now-faint memory, delicate enough to break. Meanwhile, 'Hazel' takes us back down to Earth, its slowly unfolding, muffled steel drum melodies feeling strangely homely while also not of this place, this here and now.

Review: Sergey Dmitriev and Nikita Chepurnoi resurface as Amkarahoi, the experimental project which, the release notes tell us, have prepared an album that "conjures ghosts of 90s chill out tents, aqueous ambient, exploratory turn of the century IDM and echoes of jammy dub." Borne from a largely improvised show that took place in Saint Petersburg, overdubbed and mixed down, it's patient yet wildly exploratory stuff. Amkarahoi is the name of a remote Siberian region and it's easy to see why the pair picked it for this project's name. Uncle Reed In The Purple Mine sounds desolate and sparse, but once we hone in on the details we realise it's taking us though cold, barren atmospheres and into warm, E-hued soundscapes. A thoughtful yet spontaneous slice of immersive ambient you won't regret committing to.

Review: Finally, the debut Bochum Welt album Module 2 has been reissued after an initial run on Rephlex. Bochum Welt (Gianluigi Di Costanzo) has just recently celebrated 30 years of releasing music. His brand of IDM, electro and techno has been often copied but never equaled. His futuristic music seems to always be forward thinking and ultimately, timeless sounding. This edition is on matching green vinyl and includes all the classic material of the first release. Fans of AFX, Squarepusher and Cylob are sure to be aware of Bochum Welt. But for those who aren't....

Review: French outfit Chateau Flight have spent two years in the studio making music, playing around and experimenting and now the fruits of that work are presented on this new album La Folie Studio. It is full of the sound of analogue machines conversing and the artists themselves speaking through their darkened basslines or eerie pads. Occult worlds are crafted, ambient soundscapes are cooked up and leftfield cosmic explorations occur throughout a journeying album full of a wide range of emotions. This lovely record features guests on the odd track such as Johnny Nash on guitar, Cosmic Neman mumbling on 'Mange', John Cravache playing 'his special organ" and Bony Bikaye singing on 'Esika Molimo Ezali'. It's an occult world of left of centre sound that will keep you coming back for more.

Review: Scottish electronic oddity Murray Collier returns on his own Real Landscape imprint - the sole preserve of this production alias - for a self-titled outing. His fifth release under the moniker certainly confirms what we already knew; this project is the work of a musical auteur, and is every bit as unique to the talent behind it as the label and EP name. Attempting to describe what's here isn't easy, then. 'The Conversation' uses mechanically precise percussion to lay out its otherworldly groove. 'Thin Ayrshire' goes lo fi and psychedelic, a track that sounds almost like a rural ritual being performed by a lost humanoid species. 'I'll Get To Hiding' is delightfully lackadaisical in vibe, strutting, shuffling, and stepping its way through what could be categorised as pop-r&b fed through the weird machine, and even that wouldn't come close.

Review: Ilian Tape's ITX Series provides another opportunity to sink into some deeply escapist ambient and drone soundscapes from the usually dance floor-focused breakbeat and techno label. MPU101 has served up a few of these EPs before and they always find them coax plenty of magic out of their analogue machines. 'TEAM 700_76' is a nice and bleary-eyed post-Blade Runner soundtrack, 'BLOCK-1_2AREA666' has a darker undercurrent of menace, 'TrailerparkBeauty' brings some twinkling celestial keys and 'Sunset Memories' closes on frazzled chords that speak of heat damage from a scorching sun.

Review: The enigmatic Light Sounds Dark label often seem nigh but murmurers of the electronic music underground, though they're best known for their reissue compilations of 80s synth rarities. Though that's not their entire scope, with no end of new solo LPs in the vein of textural dub, wilfully obscure ambient and new wave also gracing their register. Ever mysterious, but not having released new label material since 2018, they're now back on their business with the first volume of their Intersection On The Point Of Parallel, consisting of 14 unnamed, gothic glimpses of the dark, melted-ice sublime. Beginning on a note of cacophony before teasing later chord-driven emotes and ersatz falls into droning hell and temperate acid rainforests, there's a sonic biome here for every musical temperament, from open pearl to hard-cased extremophile.

Review: Intersection On The Points Of Parallel Vol. II is the second volume in the eponymous series from mysterious, largely new wave and post-punk oddity reissues label, Light Sounds Dark. Fittingly, and perhaps as it should be, very little info accompanies this incredible new release, allowing us to figuratively melt into the music here. With nineteen tracks of excess wonderment - teased out through found object tinkerings, circuit-bent synths, and pre-DAW hardware wringouts - you can be sure that every track here was sourced from the deepest, darkest depths of '70s-80s tape-bound Tartarus. Notable moments include the B1 and B2, both droning, but one serving as the rhythmical counterpoint to the doomy other, and the C3, an impossible-to-place coldwave experiment that sounds like something between a Dillinja throwaway and a DZ Lectric lost cut.