Trevor Jackson dances with the zeitgeist again on this bountiful 2nd volume of 'Metal Dance: Industrial/New Wave/EBM Classics & Rarities '79-'88'. The first volume was Resident Advisor's reissue of 2012 and, by all rights, this 26-track collection should be held in equally high regard. If anything, he's gone deeper into his famed collection, pulling out total rarities such as CHBB's 'Ima Iki-Mashoo' and the militant 'Riot Squad' by a pre-ABC Vice Versa alongside classic anthems such as Chris & Cosey's 'Driving Blind… Read more

**Archival discovery of supremely endearing bedroom electronic msuic conceived in '80s Manchester** Andy Popplewell's T.R.A.S.E., or Tape Recorder and Synthesiser Ensemble, is one of the loveliest reissues to have emerged from the Finders Keepers camp in recent times. Due to the diligent research of Andy Votel, it was only recently coaxed out of Popplewell, who is nowadays a renowned sound engineer/editor and vintage tape baker who's worked for everyone from Alpha Brussels to ZZT. This double LP worth of gear taken from his nascent recordings documents a vital, explorat… Read more

Group Rhoda follows up her delectable debut on Night School with a much sharper and equally seductive album for Not Not Fun - easily one of their best releases in 2013. Her songs are now rendered with a higher fidelity and clarity adopting the purposeful innovations of post punk and the hypnotism of modern electronic music to give her deft arrangements a sturdy poise and transcendent appeal. It's still DIY at heart and we doubt you're gonna hear them on Radio 1 any time soon, but the sense of theatrical detail and detached yet emotional investment is palpably more potent in the exquisite stepper… Read more

**Impeccably presented 20-track CD and 18-page booklet illustrated by legendary graphic artist Phillipe Druillet** There's little contest to the claim that French musicians pioneered electronic music in the 20th century. This compilation traces the period following the innovations of Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer at the GRM, post '68 when bold artists were intersecting their avant-garde concepts with pop, disco and rock. 'A Voyage Across French Cosmic & Electronic Avantgarde (1970 -1980)' is simply brimming with futuristic electronic good… Read more

**Patiently sublime live solo guitar landscapes by Austrian artist, a peer of Fennesz and formerly of Polweschel** "2003, London: the first time I visited Tate Britain, Tate Gallery, and the first time I saw and really experienced the paintings of JMW Turner (1775-1851). Overwhelmed, especially by his late and unfinished works I was stunned by the power of the stillness of his work. 25 years before that something similar; me, as a young man in Madrid; Prado, Goya paintings and etchings - for me an initiation which opened up the door to earlier art and its pioneers.… Read more

**Trifold double CD digipak containing 26 trax** 'Bang The Box!' documents the lost story of Chicago dance music when house was king from the perspective of Matt Warren's little known but vital AKA Dance Music label. Thru 26 tracks released between 1987-88 this awesome compilation renders a spectrum of truly authentic, original Windy City bangers, groovers and shakers hardly known beyond the city limits and the collections of proper house heads. At one end of the spectrum you've got the tantric 10 minute psychedelic… Read more

**2CD suite of five magisterial, extended drone compositions by the deeply influential minimalist, issued in the same week as his 80th birthday** Phill Niblock writes: "These CDs include pieces made in two different ways. Traditionally (since 1968), I recorded tones played by an instrument (by an instrumentalist), arranging these single tones into mutli-layered settings, making thick textured drones, with many microtones. In the early days, I prescribed the microtones, tuning the instrumentalist, when I was using audio tape. Later, I used the software ProTools, and made the microtones as I mad… Read more

**Captivating recording of a performance using field recordings from a major earthquake in New Zealand, 2011** "On 22 February 2011, an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter Scale hit Christchurch, which combined with a series of massive aftershocks destroyed huge swathes of the New Zealand city. At its epicentre in the port of Lyttelton, sound artist Jo Burzynska (Stanier Black-Five) grabbed a recording device as she ran from her home, leaving it running on her doorstep capturing the aftershocks that ricocheted though her house and the disaster unfolding on the street outs… Read more

**Edition of 200** 'Fleshpile Thematic' exposes the beguiling sonic world of Dale Cornish, formerly of "topless pop" duo, No Bra. Blending the techniques and textures of musique concrète with humorously detached poetic observations and electronics, it makes for compelling, focussed listening for anyone intrigued enough to attempt to decipher his wry and often bleak lyrics or those who'll appreciate his gently groping feel for grainy texture and tone. It should probably come as little surprise that Dale was partly responsible for compiling the brilliant '&c.;' album by Leslie Winer, with wh… Read more

**Edition of 200** Prix Ars Electronica award winner, Nicolas Bernier presents his first piece made entirely of synthetic sounds. Breaking with the musique concrete and field recording traditions he's evolved over the last half decade or more, his 'Frequencies (Synthetic Variations)' sounds like it just escaped the Raster Noton matrix. In 24 minutes, 15 pieces of buckling subbass rhythms, fizzing textures and crisp sine waves manifest in tangled, synaesthetically-pleasing patterns, each as abstract and intricately contoured as the last. We're recommended to play back th… Read more

**Edition of 200 copies** On 'Avast!', Jo Burzynska edits and layers location recordings made in and around the Port of Lyttelton, a volcanic harbour on the South Island of New Zealand, into richly detailed scapes evoking imagery of ecological phenomena and industry. Subtracted from their surroundings in the natural amphitheatre of Lyttelton's extinct volcanic caldera, the sounds of tugs, cargo ships, wartime bunkers and the haunted resonance of the Timeball Station - only recently destoyed in a major earthquake - provide a inquisitive sense of depth and space to 'Five''s three extended and ab… Read more

*12 Track CD Version includes the previous Fly Juice EP as well as the Mad hatter EP* Hyperdub's most colourful producer comes correct with the unhinged machine funk of his 'Mad Hatter' EP, backed with DJ Rashad remix. The title track's a teched-out slice of electro-boogie futurism with canny use of a classic sample in the breakdown; 'Gang Gang Riddim' invokes the Brooklyn band's vibe inna psychedelic bashment bounce; the demented 'Chilli Burrito' finally finds its way off Kode 9's Rinse 22 mix CD and onto the shop 'floor. Rashad's Slip Away remix of 'Walk It Out' joins the mutual dots between ballroom and footwork, culminating a final section like Moodymann gone febrile.

"Mississippi Moonchile is the much-anticipated new installment of Matana Roberts' unique and forward-looking project and it finds Roberts conjuring some of the most nuanced, thoughtful and substantial American liberation music of the 21st century. Mississippi Moonchile was developed for an intimately woven New York jazz sextet and represents the next leap forward in Roberts' iconoclastic and complex project of memory and recuperation, where historical and contemporary musical tropes, fragmentary spoken and sung narratives, and Matana's cascading alto saxophone… Read more

Cameron Mesirow presents a plush sophomore side building on the promise of her acclaimed 'Ring' with assistant producer, Van Rivers (Fever Ray/Blonde Redhead). 'Interiors' is conceptually inspired by the artists' move to New York, and manifests her attempt to get inside the city's architecture and their "metropolitan secrets" from a poetic and artistic perspective. Her vocals come off like a sophisticated gynoid simulation programmed with the characteristics of Björk, mapped against ornate, dense and complex arrangements consolidating location recordings, "proper" instruments, and synthetic sources … Read more

Douglas Dare is London-based 23 year-old singer-songwriter, originally from Bridport, [Dorset], South West England. 'Seven Hours' is his debut mini-album of pained solo piano torch songs. If you're into James Blake of Nils Frahm you might like it. Support from BBC6 Music, natch.

Review to follow shortly…

Review to follow shortly…

**Hand-numbered edition of 50 with card booklet and riso-printed A3poster designed by the artist** Thomas Shrubsole lends his own name to a slowly expanding constellation of aliases - In The Field, Jesus On Mars, Sub Loam, The Dissolving Orchestra - on his latest for Dissolving Records. Taking cues from Sun Ra and the European avant-garde, 'his 'Space Capsule' is a multi-planar improvisation meshing acoustic afternoon ambience, streaking cosmic jazz and free electric sound with "underground domestic production methods" (read: recorded in his house onto tape). Like much of Thomas' output,… Read more

Brock van Wey and Scott Morgan aka Bvdub and Loscil coax the best out of each other on this epic, romantic dedication to the darkness of night. 'Erebus' takes it name from the Greek mythological figure used to represent "the personification of darkness…one of the first five beings to come into existence, born from Chaos", which provides a suitably classical backdrop for its five widescreen soundscapes. Erebus is said to have fathered several other deities, who lend their name to the track titles. 'Aether' is a thirteen minute ascension thru airy chorales to exalted ambient heights; 'Hespiredes' is … Read more

UK electronica veterans Ultramarine present their first new album in 15 years. Crafted at their studio by the Essex marshes, 'This Tim Last Year' is a wistfully nostalgic, pastoral blend of treated acoustic instrumentation and electronics, knitting delicate, intricate rhythms to shimmering guitar lines and frothy electronics for the come down.

Nicolas Jaar debuts his Darkside project with Dave Harrington properly on 'Psychic'. It expands on their 2011 single, 'Darkside' for Jaar's now defunct Clown & Sunset label with an expensive-sounding arsenal of instrumentation and studio gloss in attempt to blur and consolidate the boundaries between rock music and Jaar's patented posh techno sound. The results converge their visions to an insoluble form, gently sweeping us across eight tracks ranging from the maudlin throb and proggy neo-classical elements of their epic opener, 'Golden Arrow' to the jaunty prog-pop indulg… Read more

*Remastered from original sources, CD housed in a deluxe gatefold tip-on jacket with 48-pg book* "The South Africa of the late 1970s was neither the right place nor time to launch a mixed-race punk band. Yet, following the student-inspired Soweto Uprising of 1976, it was also exactly the right conditions to foster a band like National Wake, one formed in an underground commune, and one whose very name exists in protest at the divisive, racist apartheid regime. Never before collected together, Light In The Attic is set to release National Wake’s full body of work as Walk In Africa 1979-81. … Read more

"Following her previous two long players, Baden-Baden and Los Angeles on monika enterprise F.S.K. bassist Michaela Melián now continues the theme of geographically titled albums with Monaco. Again the record is rich in hypnotically woven sounds with a resolute mood reminiscent of film music. In keeping with the previous two albums, the instrumentation is made up of largely classical acoustic instruments which are layered in loops to create mesmerising soundscapes. In addition to the traditional instruments such as Violoncello, Spanish and Electric Guitar and Banjo all played by Melián herself, t… Read more

Ambitiously scoped third album from London-based psych band, Teeth Of The Sea. Their first album in three years is a riotous collision of Goblin and Carpenter-esque cinematic themes factored by Prurient-like darkwave assimilations and nods to the driving rhythms of Powell or the heroic might of Moroder's disco templates and Wire's crafty rock muscle. Eight songs (plus intro) oscillate between hi-NRG charge and crashing stadium drums on 'TReaper', to Wire-like rock experimentation on 'The Servant', to the bleakly epic synth-scape 'Siren Spectre, Phase I, Phase II', a churning piece of Pete Swans… Read more

Review to follow shortly…

"Following her hugely successful run as curator of London’s Meltdown Festival, this album continues an astonishing bout of creativity for Ono, who is celebrating her 80th birthday with major museum retrospectives around the world, her 10th #1 hit on the Billboard Dance charts, a sequel to her instruction book Grapefruit, winning "Digital Genius" MTV O Award, and spearheading the activist effort against fracking in her home state of New York. A career retrospective book will be published by Genesis in Autumn followed by reissues of her '60s-80s albums in 2014. “My … Read more

Daniel Lopatin debuts for Warp with an eagerly awaited ninth solo album. 'R Plus 7' follows the increasingly complex vectors of his 'Returnal' and 'Replica' sides with an ambitious fervor, scoping ten dazzling planes of hyper-reality framing analog/digital productions. While the grand scale of his hypersonic architectures has increased, it's not at the expense of emotional impact: it's just that the route to those breathtaking widescreen moments has become more intricate, labyrinthine, and the resolutions more pretentious, striving ever higher for the crenellated heights of sacred '7… Read more

Axel Willner aka The Field unplugs his computer and powers up an outboard array for his captivating 4th album. Adopting an all-hardware set-up has resulted in a deceleration of his star-bound trajectory, recalibrating the curve of his vectors into tangibly darker techno realms - most explicitly inferred by the album's all-black cover art and a curiously suggestive title, 'Cupid's Head'. But the romantic types need not worry: it's really only a subtle deviation; that inimitably lush, widescreen appeal of 'From Here We Go Sublime' and 'Looping State Of Mind' is still firmly at its core, it's just … Read more

**Edition of 500** The conceptual follow-up to Richard Chartier's 'Fields for Mixing' is an immersive new stereo variation of a multi-channel installation diffusing detailed field recordings made in spaces around the world. Originally presented at Civilian Arts Projects in Washington, DC in 2012, it now manifests on CD. Through his patented processing techniques Chartier transposes unique spatial settings into a hyperreal cloud of drones, crackles and fizzing electrical energies which challenge perceptions of where and what you're listening to. The 2nd part uses significant elements of … Read more

Richard H Kirk's Intone label relaunches with a boxset of three CDs documenting Cabaret Voltaire live aktions in Liverpool, Sheffield and Toronto between 1982-85. Most notably the recordings start just after Chris Watson had left the band and they took on a new, "funkier" direction following their Rough Trade period and into the Some Bizarre/Virgin era recordings. CD1, 'Live at Liverpool warehouse 12.06.82' catches the band in lithe form, flexing tight drum machine and bass ably dubbed up by their soundman, Oz, and prodded with signature punkish yelps, documentary dialogue samples and w… Read more