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Sharing his InBach album with the world in 2020 set events into motion that ultimately led to Arandel making second edition in the critically acclaimed, borderless project that unites rare instruments, musical reimanigation. Arandel unites once again behind the musical phrases of the Leipzig composer specialists of ancient and modern instruments (Thomas Bloch), modern synthesizers and moogs, strings experts (Gaspar Claus), and the poetic spoken word of Myra Davies and Bridget St.John. Textextext - (add your write up) “There is a Bach for everyone” Arandel says, “and that discovery is what led me here, to InBach". Beneath the intricate history, the godlike adoration placed upon Bach, he was a playful musician, an eclectic one even. And so, a full year after the release of the first InBach record on InFiné, there is enough material to make a second one. “There is so much about Bach I didn’t even know when making the first one - but after the release, people kept coming to me, telling me about certain pieces I should listen to or rework; songs that I had never even heard of.” The second InBach grew like a garden from the seeds of the first one - an eclectic journey through melodic fantasies, intricate sound design and a certain Pop silver lining. Some tracks were born out of Arandel’s band performing on stage, experimenting with the songs live and composing them anew, like “Nos Contours", a new, French-lyrics version of Bodyline with Ornette, Arandel’s stage partner.

The Spinning Plates imprint returns this October with Club Winston’s ‘Guzzle’ EP, comprised of four gritty club workouts from the London artist. The UK’s Club Winston has been steadily unveiling a series of tripped-out club ready cuts via his own Ukgeorge label over the past few years along with remixes from the likes of D.Tiffany and Tim Reaper. Here though we see him join the roster of Spinning Plates with his latest collection of works, an imprint that’s played host to material from the likes of Shkn, Neksha, Andy Rantzen, DJ Spider and Bruno Schmidt since its inception in 2015. Title-track ‘Guzzle’ leads, laid out across five minutes with a menacing arpeggio bass lead, howling atmospherics and crunchy analogue drums. ‘Hell’ follows and tips the focus over to heavy doses of sub bass, intricately dynamic, modulating drums and intense swells of processed synths throughout. Opening the flip-side is ‘Chart’, upping the energy levels with a pacey 4/4 drum groove while twitchy resonant synth lines, low-end pulsations and cavernous reverberations ebb and flow throughout. ‘Partook’ then rounds out the release, a cinematic ambient composition which lays focus on swirling, textural pads, glitched out resonant bleeps and fluttering low end hits.

First compiled as a double CD in 2002, Moon's Milk (in Four Phases) is a suite of four EPs that Coil released seasonally via their in-house Eskaton imprint across 1998. The line-up for these sessions were John Balance, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, Drew McDowall, and William Breeze. Recorded primarily at their home studio in Chiswick, London on the eve of a permanent relocation to the small seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare, the collection has long loomed as a pivotal and pinnacle work in the group's discography, but has never been officially reissued, or repressed on vinyl. Time has only ripened its tapestry of regal strangeness. Arranged sequentially in tribute to the equinoxes and solstices, Moon's Milk captures Coil at a revelatory crossroads, leaning deeper into improvisation, spontaneity, and sound design. "Moon's Milk or Under an Unquiet Skull" initiates the proceedings on Spring Equinox, a two-part netherworld organ séance woven from vocal drones, cathedral keys, seasick strings, and opiated undertow. From there, Summer Solstice skews lighter but no less incantational, with Balance embracing his voice-as-instrument across lucid dream torch songs ("Bee Stings"), purgatorial spoken word ("Glowworms/Waveforms"), sultry chamber pieces ("Summer Substructures"), and falsetto ravings ("A Warning From The Sun (For Fritz)"). Autumn Equinox exudes more of a pensive and twilit mood, from the Rose McDowall-sung folk ballad "Rosa Decidua" ("I hear your voice sing near to me / I've put away the poisoned chalice (for now) / And lie down amongst the flowerbeds") to hall-of-lords hallucination "The Auto-Asphyxiating Hierophant" to the liminal string-plucked classic "Amethyst Deceivers," featuring excellent alien guitar by Breeze layered with Balance's oft-quoted couplet: "Pay your respects to the vultures / For they are your future." The album's final chapter, Winter Solstice, is its most swooning, remote, and ceremonial. Opener "A White Rainbow" stirs strings, layered choral vocals, and shivering rhythm into an imploding burial hymn. "North" oscillates bleakly, a ghost in the machine murmuring opaque prophecy ("This black dog has no owner / This black dog has no odour"), while "Magnetic North" is its inverse, a guided meditation of gently flickering software and surreal chakra poetics ("Red rose filling the skull / Yellow cube in the lower pelvis / Silver moon crescent below the navel"). The suite fades to grey with a traditional English carol ("Christmas Is Now Drawing Near"), rendered like an executioner's song by Rose McDowall's doomed, beautiful voice. The Dais box set includes the entirety of the rare Moon's Milk Bonus Disc Cd-r / 2019 Threshold Archives Copal CD, which includes three collaborations with Thighpaulsandra. This material is as rich and intoxicating as the previous four phases, ranging from electro-acoustic singing bowl rituals ("Copal") to dissonant electronic recitations of visionary Angus MacLise poetry ("The Coppice Meat") to ominous classical melancholia ("Bankside"). Once again, Coil confirm the vastness of their confounding, infinite alchemy, explored and refined across decades of experimentation - both sonic and bodily. From postindustrial to post-everything, theirs is an art untethered, in the wilds of its own design.

Shiny cover with goffering, printed insert. Cola Boyy gets members of Mgmt, The Avalanches, Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly, AIR's Nicolas Godin, Myd, Infinite Bisous, and John Carroll Kirby on debut album. There’s liberation on the dance floor in the songs of Matthew Urango – glimpses of revolution that glimmer beneath the disco ball. “I want my music to bring people together,” says the Californian pop innovator, best known as Cola Boyy. “Because standing together is our best chance at fighting this shit show.” The shit show in question is a broken, brutal system the acclaimed multi-instrumentalist has witnessed up-close. Urango was born with spina bifida and scoliosis in Oxnard, California: a town in which almost 30,000 are estimated to live in poverty. Prosthetic Boombox, his eagerly awaited debut album, might at first glance seem a joyous confetti-burst of pop eclecticism, engineered to sound like “scanning between stations on a car radio, landing on all these different sounds and styles” as Urango puts it. Dig deeper, though, and you’ll discover a simmering sense of rebellion. “The working class are injured, struggling to pay rent and struggling to put food on the table,” he says. “I want to represent that.” Prosthetic Boombox achieves that goal in a thrilling flurry of inventive indie, funk and soul: take Urango’s car radio analogy, place it in a time-travelling Delorean with Prince in the passenger seat, and you’re half-way there.

CRU Servers return to the 12th Isle after five long years with a new LP's worth of their technicolour machine mulch: "Part hexagonal lube-pool, part peatman’s gallbladder; EEL marks an encephalitic (onward) plowter for both of us. Like intractable flagellations hoisted through individual druse romps, staminate bleachfields give way to unillustrated gonging, in chiefly 12V 3A veinlets. EEL – acronymised in ‘pen scrape’ – decontaminates, in our eye, four key baronial globoids, expunging gladly by 5 pin toddy ladle. In the torrential burn below, head hair, jaw hair and clothes sticky, stinking and greased with black charcoaled remains; arms are held aloft, supplicants to a muse long rent from this earth"

500 copies on black vinyl includes bonus 7" featuring two tracks by the mysterious no-wave punks CCV.

All Cru Servers material written and produced by Rickie & Jamie McNeill CCV are, were and forevermore shall be Jon McNeill & George Cathro

Tape restoration for CCV by Connor Walker at the National Sound Archives of Scotland

Dax Pierson’s debut solo LP is coming via San Francisco’s Electronic powerhouse imprint Dark Entries Records and Oakland’s Ratskin Records collective. Pierson, an Oakland-based underground legend, has pushed the boundaries of experimental electronic music with his soul-moving opus Nerve Bumps; A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction, an endeavor two long years in the making. On Nerve Bumps, Pierson blends hip hop, jazz, John Carpenter-esque arpeggios, trap/anti trap-influenced percussion, and musique concrete-informed experiments. Futuristic synthesizers cut through layers of fog as Pierson’s bombastic drum programming forges new worlds within themselves. Pierson tells a complicated and inspiring story on Nerve Bumps, which is both a privilege and a gift to experience. Tracks such as “I Slay The Pain” reiterate that although Pierson has to live his life as a quadriplegic, this does not define him as an artist or as a person. The cinematic “For The Angels” plays as a masterclass in heart and body-moving rhythms and undulating synthesizers. Pierson directly confronts the listener on “Snap”, an act of solidarity with the disabled community. Sputtering orchestral swells become encapsulated by splintering shards of Pierson’s voice, evoking his relentless determination to learn new music production methods as well as share his experience with losing certain physical abilities. The album’s closing track, “nthng FKS U Hrdr THN TM”, is a perfect distillation of the varied emotions explored on the album. Warm, heavy synths masterfully guide us down a psychedelic slope through the track’s twelve minutes. On Nerve Bumps, honesty, empathy, and humanity bleed through the speakers like a dark liquid just beneath the skin’s surface. For Pierson, music is his lifeblood, both as a creator and a listener. Nerve Bumps was mastered by George Horn at Fantasy Studios. The front cover features a painting of pink and green horizontal stripes by Pierson’s partner, artist Chuck Nanney. A photograph of Pierson’s wheelchair by Lenny Gonzalez graces the back sleeve. Dax’s guiding mantra throughout this journey has been a quote from choreographer Martha Graham: “No artist is pleased… There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

My Interstellar Love Life is the third studio album by Berlin-based songwriter Adrian Schull aka Helmut. Formerly known for his eloquent use of the loop pedal in focused solo performances, he sought out a group of skilled friends to join the H train for his latest record. Starting off the songwriting process in playful sessions with close friend and multi instrumentalist/songwriter Do Mayer, they were later joined by jazz drummer/composer Akira Nakamura and guitarist/composer Johanna Weckesser, a recent student of Kurt Rosenwinkel.Nakamura since followed the calling to return to his hometown in Okinawa but drummer/producer Garagen Uwe took over for him during late studio production. Studio sessions were overseen by Helmut's longtime collaborator and co-producer (Polymono, Our Walls) Marius Bubat, one half of Cologne electronic duo Coma. Mastering was done in Berlin by Enyang Urbiks. The themes in this collection of 8 songs range from exhaustion with the overall human experience (Enough), metaphorical dreamscapes 'where men turn to stone' (Flowers), love/ghost stories (Ballin'), misplaced romantic expectations (Monster) on to bitter-sweet musings on the entertainment industry itself (Take All). To end things on a wholesome note the synth-pop-ballad Cheer u Up.. might just cheer u up in this brave new pandemic winter.

Bird Brains is a four song collection from Holy Fuck, recorded live at various studios over the past few years. They represent the ongoing creative process of a band whose members live in different cities (in both Canada and the US) yet insist their music should be a collaborative process. These four songs aim to capture the raw energy of four people, not apart as bedroom producers, but together as a spirited exchange of ideas, a dynamic interaction that comes from years of friendship. While Bird Brains was largely self-produced, a few very talented Engineers/Producers aided greatly in that process, including Shawn Everett (John Legend, Warpaint, Alabama Shakes), who recorded the song “Chains” at The Banff Centre for the Arts, and David Wrench (Caribou, FKA Twigs, The XX) who mixed the song “New Dang”. The cover image was designed by long time friend Seth Smith, visual artist, film maker, and musician from Nova Scotia. As the band describes, “the image is quite gross and beautiful, natural and artificial all at the same time, which we feel best represents how we hear our music.”

Kübler-Ross is a minimal synth/wave/industrial three-piece from Glasgow, Scotland, featuring Craig Clark, Katie Shannon, and veteran electronic producer and remixer producer Dave Clark, best-known for his Sparky moniker, and as one-half of the production/remix team Optimo (Espacio). First emerging in 2015 with a couple of compilation appearances, Kübler-Ross released their debut, self-titled album in 2020. Originally released as a limited-edition cassette on the Glasgow label Akashic Records, the album — now resequenced and released on vinyl via Suction Records’ minimal synth sublabel Ice Machine — is a collection of tracks recorded over a three year period in a variety of studios, rehearsal rooms, and gigs, documenting the musical variety and ferocity of their incendiary live performances. The Akashic tape, despite being low-key, under-the-radar, and released in limited quantity, managed to earn them a Long List nomination for SAY (Scottish Album of the Year) for 2020. Standout cut “Bridges”, first released in 2015, is synthpop perfection — sitting comfortably alongside classics from the first wave of UK electronic classics by Thomas Leer and Robert Rental, John Foxx, and even early Depeche Mode. It’s not the only synthpop track on the record, but the album is dominated by a more tough, raw, and punk spirit, featuring aggressive female vocals, live drums + bass guitar, and judicious use of crude analog synthesizers and tape delay fx. Think Liaisons Dangereuses meets Suicide, and you’re beginning to get close… Available digitally, and on limited vinyl LP in a reverse-board jacket. We’ve also pressed up a special edition with an additional bonus 7”, featuring covers of songs by US minimal synth oddball John Bender,and Australian industrial mavericks SeveredHeads. The special edition LP and 7” are on pink-vinyl LP + green-vinyl-7”, and strictly limited to 200 copies. Both versions include a Bandcamp download card inside.

Really strong, multi-layered new album from Olan Monk, released on the C.A.N.V.A.S. label/collective of which he is a co-founder and featuring vocals from Maria Somerville and James K, plus additional mixing by Xao. Highly recommended if yr into John Maus, The Normal, Actress, Eartheater, Suicide. In possession of its own unusual pace and styling, Love/Dead is a weird and brilliantly addictive gothic pop experiment that takes The Human League’s ‘Being Boiled’ as its starting point and builds from there in an asymmetric formation that feeds in elements from Suicide, Nine Inch Nails and John Maus, slows it all down and spits it back out covered in heaving subs, doom metal dynamics and distorted, angular electronics.

Allchival present their second look at the music of Roger Doyle and Operating Theatre (a little known proto synth-pop act and experimental theatre group that he led.)

In reverse chronological order the second disc contains music from the United Dairies release of 1979 – ‘Rapid Eye Movements’. Experimental tape work heavily influenced by the French school of music concretists and recorded at various points during the 70s in Finland, Holland and Ireland, although it is most certainly a Roger Doyle solo record the label ran by Nurses With Wounds John Fothergill decided to release it under the group name for reasons now lost to the fog of time.

After this a volte-face towards a more accessible sound, coming via his friendship with future Hollywood actress Olwen Fouéré and her connection to the theatre. It also featured the vocals of a young Spanish immigrant Elena López- bucking the 80’s trend by moving to rather than from Dublin. With Fouéré adding the theatrical element to the group (an almost essential part of any early 80s synth act) alongside pulsing synths, brass, a vocoder and the electro acoustic production talents of Doyle himself, it was the first time a Fairlight sampler was used in an Irish studio setting and gives a prescient but alternative take on the new wave sound that came to dominate the charts soon after. Doyle’s work on the newly released Fairlight sampler had brought him to the attention of U2’s Bono who had seen a feature about his sampling experimentations and reached out to him for piano lessons. This led to a deal on the bands embryonic Mother records for what Doyle calls his first “popular song” - Queen of No Heart - which alongside “Spring is Coming” made up the backbone of the EP which was released some years later (1986) on the Mother Records label. Established by U2 in 1984 and initially intended to launch Irish bands, many of the acts – including this one – were subsequently unhappy about the label’s haphazard approach to releases and lack of promotion. The record was released as a die cut 7 inch with the two main tracks and a 12 inch EP with additional tracks – ‘Part of My Make-Up’ / ‘Atlantean’ / ‘Satanasa’. The Mother experience was for Doyle and the rest of the group a frustrating one with no promotional plan and no tour. After that Operating Theatre as a quasi pop project ‘just kind of fizzled out’ says Doyle.

Doyle, the musical maverick at the heart of the act, continues to produce to this day and has released 30 albums. A frequent collaborator we round out the record with a remix from another Irish outsider - Morgan Buckley of the Wah Wah Wino fame.

“A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest [of humanity] – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison…”

You many have seen this quote attributed to Albert Einstein on social media, the archetypal Smartest Guy Ever apparently having an out-of-character religious epiphany. It certainly leapt out at Paul Hartnoll of Orbital who spotted it in Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.

“As soon as I saw ‘optical delusion’ I thought Oh hey, that’s the album title,” says Paul. “It just seemed to say so much about how people construct their own realities, how we see patterns that aren’t there, how we see what we want to see.

“But it’s actually a misquote. He never quite said that. In the German original what he’s really saying is that human experience is as relative as physics. Wouldn’t it be good if we could accept that, and find a kind of universal theory of everything for the human race? Then you look at everything from history to art to your Twitter feed and you think yeah, that’s what we’re all trying to do all of the time…”

Hence ‘Optical Delusion’, the tenth original Orbital album and the latest in a burst of renewed post-pandemic creativity for two brothers who’ve stayed at the top of their game longer than anyone from the post-1988 Class of Acid House.

Now with ‘Optical Delusion’ the Hartnolls dig deeper into the unquiet psyche of our increasingly surreal and disordered world. Sketched out partly during lockdown but fully recorded in the uncertain After Times, the album summons up conflicting emotions and sometimes beguiling images from years when the science fiction doomsdays that the Hartnolls watched on TV as kids finally came true. There are mesmeric tracks with names like ‘The New Abnormal’ and ‘Requiem For The Pre-Apocalypse’ and ‘Day One’. But there are also straight-up bangers and ethereal cosmic dreams, abstract sound wars and deeply human songs of separation and loss.

And it all starts with a bang. Lead single ‘Dirty Rat’, an outright Fall-meets-Front-242 class rant with vocals by Sleaford Mods mob orator Jason Williamson, harks right back to the Hartnolls’ days of politicised anarcho-squatpunk. It began as a remix swap (Orbital did the Sleafords’ ‘I Don’t Rate You’) and morphed into a comic, brutal, bass-driven harangue not so much against our rulers but at the petty, mean-spirited, frightened, Mail-reading voters who put them there: the people who are “blaming everyone in hospital/blaming everyone at the bottom of the English Channel/blaming everyone who doesn’t look like a fried animal.”

Also key to the album is opening track ‘Ringa Ringa (The Old Pandemic Folk Song)’ which returns to an Orbital truism, that time always becomes a loop. This chugging, cyclical Orbital groove gives way to an unnerving past-meets-present timeslip fit for ‘Sapphire And Steel’ as goth maenads The Mediaeval Baebes materialise to sing ‘Ring O’Roses’ – the innocent nursery rhyme whose roots are in the Black Death.

“I’ve always liked folk music and mediaeval sounds,” says Paul, himself an occasional Morris dancer. “I had the basis of that track and I wanted to spin it off somehow.” Trawling his archives he stumbled on The Mediaeval Baebes’ version of ‘Ring O’Roses’ “and my hackles just went up. I was like, my God, this is the original pandemic folk song.”

?his being Orbital, there are collaborations galore on the album, the roles once played by Alison Goldfrapp, Lady Leshurr or David Gray now filled by new talents. London singer-songwriter Anna B Savage contributes a compellingly fragile, Anohni-like vocal to ‘Home’, in which nature reclaims the scorched and vacant mega-cities. ‘Day One’ is a pulsing techno track featuring the singer Dina Ipavic. Paul got in touch with her after working on a score for a sculpture show of giant robotic installations by his friend Giles Walker during the pandemic. First Paul cut up his own score and Ipavic’s vocals on the track The Crane, which appears on the deluxe version of the album. Then he thought, Why not work with her for real? The result is school of ‘Belfast’, a bassy dreamscape with vocalised clouds billowing above.

The pensive ‘Are You ?live?’ adds to the Orbital product range of existential questions (‘Are We Here?’, ‘Where Is It Going?’) in collaboration Bella Union signings Penelope Isles, AKA brother and sister act Lily and Jack Wolter. “They’re our studio mates, they work upstairs!” says Paul happily. “And they’ve both got amazing voices.”

But Orbital are Orbital and never far from the dancefloor. “Eventually the more abrasive bits came back into the fold…” ‘You Are The Frequency’, first of two tracks to feature mysterious vocalist The Little Pest, surrounds the listener with warped voices ordering you to the dancefloor (Phil: “we wanted the idea that the music is kind of absorbing you”). And the second, the sinister ‘What A Surprise’, traps you in a paranoid electronic hall of mirrors.

In another nod to Orbital’s resurgent past the cover artwork once again comes from fine art painter John Greenwood, creator of fantastical grotesques for the covers of ‘Snivilisation’, ‘In Sides’ and Orbital’s most recent album, 2018’s ‘Monsters Exist’. Orbital had just had a slick Mark Farrow cover for ‘30 Something’ – this is a return to the overripe and bulbous techno-organic constructions that somehow express Orbital’s own uncontrollably fertile sound.

There are gaps in the future that Orbital are desperate to fill too; there will be tours and festivals and rooms and fields full of people. Those long paralysed months when we had little to look forward to but a Zoom DJ set made Paul and Phil appreciate the things that make life worth living.

“A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest [of humanity] – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison…”

You many have seen this quote attributed to Albert Einstein on social media, the archetypal Smartest Guy Ever apparently having an out-of-character religious epiphany. It certainly leapt out at Paul Hartnoll of Orbital who spotted it in Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.

“As soon as I saw ‘optical delusion’ I thought Oh hey, that’s the album title,” says Paul. “It just seemed to say so much about how people construct their own realities, how we see patterns that aren’t there, how we see what we want to see.

“But it’s actually a misquote. He never quite said that. In the German original what he’s really saying is that human experience is as relative as physics. Wouldn’t it be good if we could accept that, and find a kind of universal theory of everything for the human race? Then you look at everything from history to art to your Twitter feed and you think yeah, that’s what we’re all trying to do all of the time…”

Hence ‘Optical Delusion’, the tenth original Orbital album and the latest in a burst of renewed post-pandemic creativity for two brothers who’ve stayed at the top of their game longer than anyone from the post-1988 Class of Acid House.

Now with ‘Optical Delusion’ the Hartnolls dig deeper into the unquiet psyche of our increasingly surreal and disordered world. Sketched out partly during lockdown but fully recorded in the uncertain After Times, the album summons up conflicting emotions and sometimes beguiling images from years when the science fiction doomsdays that the Hartnolls watched on TV as kids finally came true. There are mesmeric tracks with names like ‘The New Abnormal’ and ‘Requiem For The Pre-Apocalypse’ and ‘Day One’. But there are also straight-up bangers and ethereal cosmic dreams, abstract sound wars and deeply human songs of separation and loss.

And it all starts with a bang. Lead single ‘Dirty Rat’, an outright Fall-meets-Front-242 class rant with vocals by Sleaford Mods mob orator Jason Williamson, harks right back to the Hartnolls’ days of politicised anarcho-squatpunk. It began as a remix swap (Orbital did the Sleafords’ ‘I Don’t Rate You’) and morphed into a comic, brutal, bass-driven harangue not so much against our rulers but at the petty, mean-spirited, frightened, Mail-reading voters who put them there: the people who are “blaming everyone in hospital/blaming everyone at the bottom of the English Channel/blaming everyone who doesn’t look like a fried animal.”

Also key to the album is opening track ‘Ringa Ringa (The Old Pandemic Folk Song)’ which returns to an Orbital truism, that time always becomes a loop. This chugging, cyclical Orbital groove gives way to an unnerving past-meets-present timeslip fit for ‘Sapphire And Steel’ as goth maenads The Mediaeval Baebes materialise to sing ‘Ring O’Roses’ – the innocent nursery rhyme whose roots are in the Black Death.

“I’ve always liked folk music and mediaeval sounds,” says Paul, himself an occasional Morris dancer. “I had the basis of that track and I wanted to spin it off somehow.” Trawling his archives he stumbled on The Mediaeval Baebes’ version of ‘Ring O’Roses’ “and my hackles just went up. I was like, my God, this is the original pandemic folk song.”

?his being Orbital, there are collaborations galore on the album, the roles once played by Alison Goldfrapp, Lady Leshurr or David Gray now filled by new talents. London singer-songwriter Anna B Savage contributes a compellingly fragile, Anohni-like vocal to ‘Home’, in which nature reclaims the scorched and vacant mega-cities. ‘Day One’ is a pulsing techno track featuring the singer Dina Ipavic. Paul got in touch with her after working on a score for a sculpture show of giant robotic installations by his friend Giles Walker during the pandemic. First Paul cut up his own score and Ipavic’s vocals on the track The Crane, which appears on the deluxe version of the album. Then he thought, Why not work with her for real? The result is school of ‘Belfast’, a bassy dreamscape with vocalised clouds billowing above.

The pensive ‘Are You ?live?’ adds to the Orbital product range of existential questions (‘Are We Here?’, ‘Where Is It Going?’) in collaboration Bella Union signings Penelope Isles, AKA brother and sister act Lily and Jack Wolter. “They’re our studio mates, they work upstairs!” says Paul happily. “And they’ve both got amazing voices.”

But Orbital are Orbital and never far from the dancefloor. “Eventually the more abrasive bits came back into the fold…” ‘You Are The Frequency’, first of two tracks to feature mysterious vocalist The Little Pest, surrounds the listener with warped voices ordering you to the dancefloor (Phil: “we wanted the idea that the music is kind of absorbing you”). And the second, the sinister ‘What A Surprise’, traps you in a paranoid electronic hall of mirrors.

In another nod to Orbital’s resurgent past the cover artwork once again comes from fine art painter John Greenwood, creator of fantastical grotesques for the covers of ‘Snivilisation’, ‘In Sides’ and Orbital’s most recent album, 2018’s ‘Monsters Exist’. Orbital had just had a slick Mark Farrow cover for ‘30 Something’ – this is a return to the overripe and bulbous techno-organic constructions that somehow express Orbital’s own uncontrollably fertile sound.

There are gaps in the future that Orbital are desperate to fill too; there will be tours and festivals and rooms and fields full of people. Those long paralysed months when we had little to look forward to but a Zoom DJ set made Paul and Phil appreciate the things that make life worth living.

“A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest [of humanity] – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison…”

You many have seen this quote attributed to Albert Einstein on social media, the archetypal Smartest Guy Ever apparently having an out-of-character religious epiphany. It certainly leapt out at Paul Hartnoll of Orbital who spotted it in Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.

“As soon as I saw ‘optical delusion’ I thought Oh hey, that’s the album title,” says Paul. “It just seemed to say so much about how people construct their own realities, how we see patterns that aren’t there, how we see what we want to see.

“But it’s actually a misquote. He never quite said that. In the German original what he’s really saying is that human experience is as relative as physics. Wouldn’t it be good if we could accept that, and find a kind of universal theory of everything for the human race? Then you look at everything from history to art to your Twitter feed and you think yeah, that’s what we’re all trying to do all of the time…”

Hence ‘Optical Delusion’, the tenth original Orbital album and the latest in a burst of renewed post-pandemic creativity for two brothers who’ve stayed at the top of their game longer than anyone from the post-1988 Class of Acid House.

Now with ‘Optical Delusion’ the Hartnolls dig deeper into the unquiet psyche of our increasingly surreal and disordered world. Sketched out partly during lockdown but fully recorded in the uncertain After Times, the album summons up conflicting emotions and sometimes beguiling images from years when the science fiction doomsdays that the Hartnolls watched on TV as kids finally came true. There are mesmeric tracks with names like ‘The New Abnormal’ and ‘Requiem For The Pre-Apocalypse’ and ‘Day One’. But there are also straight-up bangers and ethereal cosmic dreams, abstract sound wars and deeply human songs of separation and loss.

And it all starts with a bang. Lead single ‘Dirty Rat’, an outright Fall-meets-Front-242 class rant with vocals by Sleaford Mods mob orator Jason Williamson, harks right back to the Hartnolls’ days of politicised anarcho-squatpunk. It began as a remix swap (Orbital did the Sleafords’ ‘I Don’t Rate You’) and morphed into a comic, brutal, bass-driven harangue not so much against our rulers but at the petty, mean-spirited, frightened, Mail-reading voters who put them there: the people who are “blaming everyone in hospital/blaming everyone at the bottom of the English Channel/blaming everyone who doesn’t look like a fried animal.”

Also key to the album is opening track ‘Ringa Ringa (The Old Pandemic Folk Song)’ which returns to an Orbital truism, that time always becomes a loop. This chugging, cyclical Orbital groove gives way to an unnerving past-meets-present timeslip fit for ‘Sapphire And Steel’ as goth maenads The Mediaeval Baebes materialise to sing ‘Ring O’Roses’ – the innocent nursery rhyme whose roots are in the Black Death.

“I’ve always liked folk music and mediaeval sounds,” says Paul, himself an occasional Morris dancer. “I had the basis of that track and I wanted to spin it off somehow.” Trawling his archives he stumbled on The Mediaeval Baebes’ version of ‘Ring O’Roses’ “and my hackles just went up. I was like, my God, this is the original pandemic folk song.”

?his being Orbital, there are collaborations galore on the album, the roles once played by Alison Goldfrapp, Lady Leshurr or David Gray now filled by new talents. London singer-songwriter Anna B Savage contributes a compellingly fragile, Anohni-like vocal to ‘Home’, in which nature reclaims the scorched and vacant mega-cities. ‘Day One’ is a pulsing techno track featuring the singer Dina Ipavic. Paul got in touch with her after working on a score for a sculpture show of giant robotic installations by his friend Giles Walker during the pandemic. First Paul cut up his own score and Ipavic’s vocals on the track The Crane, which appears on the deluxe version of the album. Then he thought, Why not work with her for real? The result is school of ‘Belfast’, a bassy dreamscape with vocalised clouds billowing above.

The pensive ‘Are You ?live?’ adds to the Orbital product range of existential questions (‘Are We Here?’, ‘Where Is It Going?’) in collaboration Bella Union signings Penelope Isles, AKA brother and sister act Lily and Jack Wolter. “They’re our studio mates, they work upstairs!” says Paul happily. “And they’ve both got amazing voices.”

But Orbital are Orbital and never far from the dancefloor. “Eventually the more abrasive bits came back into the fold…” ‘You Are The Frequency’, first of two tracks to feature mysterious vocalist The Little Pest, surrounds the listener with warped voices ordering you to the dancefloor (Phil: “we wanted the idea that the music is kind of absorbing you”). And the second, the sinister ‘What A Surprise’, traps you in a paranoid electronic hall of mirrors.

In another nod to Orbital’s resurgent past the cover artwork once again comes from fine art painter John Greenwood, creator of fantastical grotesques for the covers of ‘Snivilisation’, ‘In Sides’ and Orbital’s most recent album, 2018’s ‘Monsters Exist’. Orbital had just had a slick Mark Farrow cover for ‘30 Something’ – this is a return to the overripe and bulbous techno-organic constructions that somehow express Orbital’s own uncontrollably fertile sound.

There are gaps in the future that Orbital are desperate to fill too; there will be tours and festivals and rooms and fields full of people. Those long paralysed months when we had little to look forward to but a Zoom DJ set made Paul and Phil appreciate the things that make life worth living.

The indie dance and leftfield techno magicians Radial Gaze join the Urge To Dance family after remarkable releases for labels such as TAU, Feines Tier, Calypso and Eskimo. The Saint Petersburg-based project is accompanied by Thomass Jackson and Zombies in Miami on remix duties for the mesmerizingly exotic “In Each Other” EP. The leading track, In Each Other, is a multi-layered and infectiously danceable combination of addictive bassline, magical Cameroonian drums, Amazonian percussions and mystical marimbas creating a mysterious and exotic track. Psych Subsidy delivers dirty, energising and somehow hypnotic emotions. Entrancing sitars loops, long pitched synthesizer and a twisted old lullaby female vocal will get you on board for an amazing psych-trip. The B-side is where Thomass Jackson and Zombies in Miami deliver their wild and unorthodox remixes of In Each Other. The Thomas Jackson True Love Remix is emotional, hypnotising and yet so trippy, a true testament of Calypso Records Boss’ remixing skills. The second take of the leading track is by Zombies in Miami, a powerful and forward-looking track that blends the hypnotic percussions of the original with a rhythmic bassline and flawless simplicity of all elements used in this remix.

Very much at the forefront of the UK electronic scene, since 2001, Shelley Parker has innovated and thrilled with live performances, DJ sets, sound installations, and scores for contemporary dance. Parker's recorded output is just a small part of her musical orbit. That said, a debut album 'Spurn Point' in 2014 and various singles, remixes and EPs for Hessle Audio, One Little Indie, Honest Jon's, Houndstooth, Structure Recordings and OOH-sounds have whet the appetite for more. 'Wisteria' lands on Hypercolour, and succinctly encapsulates Parker's layered and dense production aesthetic, as a myriad of concrete rhythms, breakbeat science, inner city ambience and industrial strength bass unfurl over eight uncompromising compositions. ‘Wisteria’ by Shelley Parker is available on 2LP/Digital from 25th March 2022 on Hypercolour.

The duo Spill Gold blends drums, synths and vocals into a sonic journey that invites listeners to explore realms of energy exchange. Nina de Jong on drums and Rosa Ronsdorf on vocals and synths joined forces in a collaboration that transcends genres. The music of Spill Gold serves as a woven tapestry of (unheard) voices, inviting you to lean in. The result is a fusion of psychedelic echoes, danceable rhythms, and intricate percussive layers.
Their newest album is a result of a need for hope that longs for an anti-anthropocentric and non-patriarchal world. The duo’s compositions navigate through cyclical patterns, echoing snakes biting their own skin, volcano’s starting to errupt, witches fingers that crumble towers and birds of steel and feather. They invite you into a world where the concept of ‘the first’ or ‘the best’ fades away and to join them on their musical journey with no clear beginning or end.

[Pals FM: Floor Materials Vol.2] is the second dance music compilation from Walls AND Pals. The aim is to share various ideas of dance floors instead of lingering on a certain genre or style, and while being DJ Friendly, it also serves as an exchange ground where production techniques of artists co-exist. All four tracks in [Vol.2] correspond with the common purpose of bringing out ‘Floor Materials’, keeping distinct identity from each musician. In ‘Cofrica’, rapper and producer Simo of Y2k92 injects his long-time affection of Detroit flavor into a minimalistic form. Conversely, Dott from the Thai label More Rice brings intricate and complex rhythms centered around the step sequencer in ‘Antibody Movement’, walking a fine line between House and Techno while the essence of Tech House is preserved . And in ‘Pump It Up’, Acidwork demonstrates what the outcome would be when Electro runs through digital instruments and samplers. Last but not least, Seo John, who put out his first EP [dive] last year from the label Goddezz, follows up with ‘miQro’, creating a different side of Trance that is more adequate for clubs or concrete spaces rather than outdoor raves or festivals. In the same manner with the preceding release [Pals FM: Floor Materials Vol.1], [Vol.2] is a compilation executed by fellow Asian musicians across the region. Beyond the reopened borders, and just like the excitement and stimulus at unusual events, this compilation serves to contribute to the dancefloor as an interesting ‘Material’ than simply as a ‘Tool’.

A1 Carsten Meyer in the Plaid remix The Black Dog remix of Lalo Schifrin’s “Bullitt": That was the wishful thinking directed at Plaid and what comes from England without customs? A Groovy Shizzel ;) A2 quadratschulz in the Lowfish remix Everything from Suction / Canada is THE nerd shit! Richard D. James likes to borrow something analog from them, e.g. a Yamaha cs5, see Saw2 album cover. B1 Cosmic Cars in Thee Church Ov Acid House remix. Since the cosmic highway was tarred by 47in4 & Rvds, a freeway church had to be built. A mysteri-ous sect from Frankfurt took pity and acidjunglete the exit. B2 Rosaceae in the John T. Gast remix Visit Europe, this is possible there.

Total turns 21 this year, and Kompakt’s venerable compilation series couldn’t have asked for a more auspicious coming-of-age collection. If Total 20 was consolidation against the odds, the Kompakt crew producing for a dreamt-of dancefloor in an uncertain future, then Total 21 feels abuzz and alive with possibilities. Significantly, it’s the first Total in some time that’s streamlined down to a single disc; this makes Total 21 even punchier than usual, a joyous, reflective, and always thrilling 75-minute audio scan of the world according to Kompakt.

As with every instalment of Total, there’s a deft balancing here of Kompakt regulars and new blood. Of the latter, there’s a first appearance by Kollmorgen, remixed by Patrice Bäumel into an astral torch song; Amsterdam’s Nicky Elisabeth, offering up Roman FLÜGEL’s pulsating, arpeggiated remix of “Celeste”; and Captain Mustache swoops down into view, Play Paul in tow, with the dream-like electro lift-off that is “Everything”. Jonathan Kaspar also drops by with a new track, “Von Draussen”, a stealthy and lethal floor-hugger with prowling bass.

Elsewhere, there’s the lead track to Michael Mayer’s astonishing recent EP, “Brainwave Technology”, which not-so-gently spears the tech-futurist babble of AI, transhumanism and posthumanism, soundtracked by one of Mayer’s typically lush, glimmering soundscapes. John Tejada reaches back to the heyday of glitch and dub techno with the gorgeous “Spectral Progressions”, while the brothers Voigt & Voigt, on “Nicht Mein Job”, seem reinvigorated by the interwoven patterns and funky minimalism of the Profan days. Not to be outdone, Jürgen Paape kicks Total 21 with “La Guittara Romantica”, a chiming and lilting lullaby for woozy late-night reflection.

Throughout, it feels as though Kompakt are taking a moment to both breathe in the dust of the past and look forward to a bright future. Perhaps that’s why, on “Fasson”, Sascha Funke seems so confident, with pinprick melodies bouncing around a hall of audio mirrors, or why THE Bionaut returns with “Blue Sky Motor Lodge”, a song so moistly melancholy, so enduringly lovely, it’ll make you weep tears of joy. Robag Wruhme gets a little delirious on the ticking, twisting “No”, and then GUI Boratto mops everything up with the bubbling, bumping glam-stomp “Wake Up”.

That’s not all – spring for the digital and/or vinyl edition and you’ll get a new cut, “Happy”, from Michael Mayer, and Marc Romboy & C.A.R.’s “I Am A Dancer”. But however you choose to play it, now Total’s turned 21, it’s your duty to throw it the celebration to end all celebrations. Let the party begin, and don’t forget to bring a party favo

Total turns 21 this year, and Kompakt’s venerable compilation series couldn’t have asked for a more auspicious coming-of-age collection. If Total 20 was consolidation against the odds, the Kompakt crew producing for a dreamt-of dancefloor in an uncertain future, then Total 21 feels abuzz and alive with possibilities. Significantly, it’s the first Total in some time that’s streamlined down to a single disc; this makes Total 21 even punchier than usual, a joyous, reflective, and always thrilling 75-minute audio scan of the world according to Kompakt.

As with every instalment of Total, there’s a deft balancing here of Kompakt regulars and new blood. Of the latter, there’s a first appearance by Kollmorgen, remixed by Patrice Bäumel into an astral torch song; Amsterdam’s Nicky Elisabeth, offering up Roman FLÜGEL’s pulsating, arpeggiated remix of “Celeste”; and Captain Mustache swoops down into view, Play Paul in tow, with the dream-like electro lift-off that is “Everything”. Jonathan Kaspar also drops by with a new track, “Von Draussen”, a stealthy and lethal floor-hugger with prowling bass.

Elsewhere, there’s the lead track to Michael Mayer’s astonishing recent EP, “Brainwave Technology”, which not-so-gently spears the tech-futurist babble of AI, transhumanism and posthumanism, soundtracked by one of Mayer’s typically lush, glimmering soundscapes. John Tejada reaches back to the heyday of glitch and dub techno with the gorgeous “Spectral Progressions”, while the brothers Voigt & Voigt, on “Nicht Mein Job”, seem reinvigorated by the interwoven patterns and funky minimalism of the Profan days. Not to be outdone, Jürgen Paape kicks Total 21 with “La Guittara Romantica”, a chiming and lilting lullaby for woozy late-night reflection.

Throughout, it feels as though Kompakt are taking a moment to both breathe in the dust of the past and look forward to a bright future. Perhaps that’s why, on “Fasson”, Sascha Funke seems so confident, with pinprick melodies bouncing around a hall of audio mirrors, or why THE Bionaut returns with “Blue Sky Motor Lodge”, a song so moistly melancholy, so enduringly lovely, it’ll make you weep tears of joy. Robag Wruhme gets a little delirious on the ticking, twisting “No”, and then GUI Boratto mops everything up with the bubbling, bumping glam-stomp “Wake Up”.

That’s not all – spring for the digital and/or vinyl edition and you’ll get a new cut, “Happy”, from Michael Mayer, and Marc Romboy & C.A.R.’s “I Am A Dancer”. But however you choose to play it, now Total’s turned 21, it’s your duty to throw it the celebration to end all celebrations. Let the party begin, and don’t forget to bring a party favo

Debut release on the newly-launched Mscty label, the first in a series of highly collectible, very limited and lovingly designed physical releases.
This is a state-of-the-art double cassette boxset complete with 12-page booklet and limted to only 100 copies.
It features a host of brilliant compositions, each exclusive to the label from a wide cross-section of some of the world's foremost emerging electronic artists, including Hannah Peel, Loraine James, Bill Fontana, Chisara Agor and many more.
Each piece represents the artist's response to work by the World's leading architects, unbuilt futuristic buildings and spaces created for London Design Festival 2020.
Mscty_EDN future releases will continue follow the theme of music created for places and spaces around the World, exclusive material specially commissioned musical artists across the globe, from the likes of Ryuchi Sakamoto, Midori Takada, Terry Riley, Moses Boyd, Scanner, Jon Hopkins, Erland Cooper, Craig Richards and any more.

Repress, generic sleeve with inner circle artwork only. Imogen announces the launch of her Wigs label with the inaugural release Wigs001, boasting collaborations with DJ Stingray 313, Ben Pest, DJ Plant Texture and Jerome Hill. Wigs001 EP takes off with a strong pairing, Imogen and DJ Stingray 313 join forces to mark their first production collaboration with ?A New Earth?. It is a hefty track blending electro and techno in an elegant and energetic fashion. ?Synthesised Heart? teams up Imogen and a long time favourite Bristolian Ben Pest to offer a hypnotic mixture of grainy and noisy electro textures laced with acid basslines. Second half of the release is where DJ Plant Texture and Jerome Hill come to play. ?What Should I Do Next? from DJ Plant Texture proves there?s no time to waste. Sophisticated percussion and chopped up broken vocals persisting throughout form a propelling dancefloor driving force. Lastly, Jerome Hill?s ?Hoods Up? loops a catchy sample, twisting the four to the floor approach into a layered acid jacking frenzy that builds up with vigour and patience.