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Upsammy returns to Die Orakel for her second EP entitled Branches On Ice – four tracks full with crystal clear, multi-layered textures.

Eduardo De La Calle s recent Distortion Theory III EP on Abstract Reasoning was another impressive piece of work from the prolific producer. Now come four diverse remixes of the title track, each with their own unique twist on the warped machinations of the original.

J - Keel kicks off proceedings with a droning, tense interpretation which toughens up the original considerably. Reversed chord stabs pitch up and down as ominous bass bores a steady course through the track s underbelly, with ticking percussive elements ensuring a motorik pulse.

The masterful Roman Fl gel teases out the chime motif of the original and supplements them with muted marimba-esque arpeggios for a soothing, underwater feel. The beats are kept to a succinct minimum, with subtle swathes of strings bringing a majestic, dreamlike tinge to this refined, minimalistic production.

Fellow Spaniard ORBE brings an ambient feel to the hazy, delicate melodics of his mix, with the delayed, warped synth patterns that struggle to be heard and beautiful atmospherics recalling Carl Craig. Moments of distorted pressure seep through and remind us of the buggedout flavour of the original.

Holland s Conforce rounds things off with plump low end throbs and sparse synth pulses reminiscent of Basic Channel, with gently shuffling hi-hats underpinning the murky yet warm textures and broad, heavily reverbed swathes of chord drama.

* The third release on SLEEVE fearlessly defies doubt-both internal and external-and continues its self-assigned mission forward. This last EP in the trilogy by STRIPPER™ completes a foundational artistic statement defined by it’s auditory, visual, and physical presence, with each piece playing equally an important part. The underlying theme of the EP is defined using a lexicon of atypical beat patterns and deep atmospheric textures. 

“Personal Nightmares” and its corresponding Farron remix explore two deep emotional extremes: from sinking hopelessness to the manic commitment to self-resurrection. “Clairsentience” is a cavernous journey that allows little for the listener to hold on to: there won’t be any guide ropes here. The final track “No Vision” is built around a snare reminiscent of a surgical scalpel, but is otherwise deprived of a musical theme. It’s only purpose is to cut through swiftly and efficiently through the listener’s mind.


* This is a physical release of a four track EP. It contains music tracks intended for social settings. Suitable for DJ Sets of varying styles in the range of 125 — 135 BPM. The material presented here is also available digitally.
All tracks produced, mixed, and stripped by Stripper™ using digital synthesizers and sequencers.

oothing cut-ups and analogue collages for dreamers in the summer breeze.

Originally released in 2003 (on CD only), conceived by Sora aka Takeshi Kurosawa. Re.sort is a miracle of Japanese electronica. Widely unknown but very necessary. Fragments and textures playfully flirt with each other, bossa nova and jazz records float in the air, an old phonograph sits by the sea. Leftfield that feels like a home away, where joyful nothings are everything. Sweet minimalism and micro melodies.

Sora means sky. Let's drift.

As a visual artist and ambient composer, Tor Lundvall's work often recontextualizes the familiarity of everyday life through abstraction and space. Starting with the snapshot of a moment, Lundvall extracts its underlying complexity of the seemingly mundane and gives sleeping suggestion a presence and purpose. Mainly working sans vocals, Lundvall returned to voice exploration for 2018's A Dark Place, a somber, dark synth album that merged his mastery of textural ambience with traditional pop structures.

Rescued from old DAT tapes A Strangeness In Motion: Early Pop Recordings 1989-1999 are some of Lundvall's earliest completed synth pop works which have remained unreleased until now.

Though Lundvall's work throughout the collection has the recognizable ambient bones and sensibilities he has refined throughout his career, many of the tracks call back to the synth-driven pop of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, The Human League and New Order, with the common thread being the sparse density and mood created by reservation and the lonely impulse to twist convention, not to rip it up and repurpose it. Rather than 10 disparate ideas, Lundvall's curation of A Strangeness In Motion: Early Pop Recordings 1989-1999 feels like excerpts from a broader work, allowing the listener to fill in the holes and ladder up to his larger themes and concepts, perhaps coloring his prior works in new hues and tones.

'For years I dismissed these songs as naive and youthful relics, but I've grown much fonder of them in recent years along with the memories they evoke,' he says of the decade spanning collection of tracks, many of which were sketched out in his duo with Drew Sullivan, After The Outing. 'Original One', 'Procession Day', 'The Clearing', and 'The Melting Hour' are present here as solo reworkings, originally culled from his sessions with Sullivan. The remaining songs were ideas originally considered for Passing Through Alone (1997) and its proposed follow up, provisionally and playfully titled Femalamania.

'The title was summing up my girl problems at the time and also a silly word spin on Robyn Hitchcock's Fegmania!' he says. 'Sadly, the project was abandoned—a rare decision for me and perhaps the only time I've scrapped an album entirely.'

Black Truffle is honoured to announce the first ever vinyl reissue of David Rosenboom’s legendary Brainwave Music, originally released on A.R.C. Records in 1975 and here expanded to a double LP with the addition of over 40 minutes of contemporaneous material. Pioneer of live electronics, innovator in music education, collaborator with artists as diverse as Jon Hassell, Jacqueline Humbert, Terry Riley and Anthony Braxton, Rosenboom is renowned for his ground-breaking experiments with the use of brain biofeedback to control live electronic systems.

Each of the three pieces that make up the original Brainwave Music LP integrates biofeedback with musical technology in different ways. In the side-long opening piece “Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones”, four performers have electrodes and monitoring devices attached to their bodies to receive information about brainwaves, temperature, and galvanic skin response. This information is analysed and fed into a complex set of frequency dividers and filters, manned by Rosenboom, but essentially played by each of the performers through their psychophysiological responses to the situation. The result is a slowly unfolding web of filtered electronic tones over a tanpura-esque fundamental, possessing the unhurried, stately grandeur of an electronic raga. In “Chilean Drought”, three different variations of a text about a drought in Chile, each read by a different voice in a different style, are associated with the Beta, Alpha, and Theta brainwave bands. Alongside an insistent piano accompaniment, we hear a constantly shifting combination of the three vocal recordings controlled by the relative preponderance of each of the brainwave bands in the soloist whose brainwaves are being monitored. “Piano Etude I (Alpha)”, the earliest piece included here, is based on research into the link between Alpha brain wave production and the execution of repetitive motor tasks. As Rosenboom plays a very rapid, incessantly repeated pattern in both hands – deliberately designed to be difficult to execute without being in an alert, non-thinking state similar to that associated with strong Alpha brainwave production – two filters controlled by monitoring his brainwaves process the piano sound, moving gradually higher in frequency as the average Alpha amplitude increases, resulting in a hypnotic, constantly shifting blur of repeated notes reflected through the shimmering, watery lights of the filters. For this reissue, the original LP is supplemented with an additional LP containing an unreleased 1977 live recording of Rosenboom’s “On Being Invisible”, in which the composer himself performs on an array of electronics that are fed information from his brainwaves. Stretching out over 40 minutes, the piece begins in similar territory to “Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones” but eventually becomes far wilder, building up to pointillistic bleeps and dense layers of electronic fizz that unexpectedly cut to near-silence. As Rosenboom explains, the piece creates a situation in which the ‘performer’s active imaginative listening became one of the ways to play their instrument, as well as an active agent in how self-organizing musical forms might emerge.’ Enriched with archival images and new notes from the composer, this expanded reissue of Brainwave Music is essential listening for anyone interested in the history of live electronic music and alive to the possibilities it might still contain.

"A manner or style, a frame of mind, thought or existence" (Mode).
"Intelligence quotient, the use of perception or awareness." (IQ).

Mode I/Q, the self-proclaimed unknown band, was a richly textured, bold project starting life in 1979 out the embers of punk and new wave resulting in a hypnotic convergence of love, the future, life and art.

Lucian and Nicolas, two creative spirits who viewed the world through their own prism, augmented by a moving cast of friends and acolytes, were together compelled to make great music. This was a concept from the heart, with transformativelive performances, channelling spaces into art "Mode" events orchestrated to bring about a full integration of site and sound.

Psychedelic, punk overtones. A funky electronic hybrid, mixing Kraftwerk with black music. Guitars delayed and twisted through echo boxes and micro synths. Casio and Commodores delivering the machine funk. CBGBs, Max's Kansas City and Danceteria - Mode I/Q played and much, much more.

Just 3 releases deep, 1984's mini LP Mind/Soul captures the band at their best. 6 songs to immerse, dance and shake the mind.

For its first release of 2019, Sol Power Sound is pleased to welcome back Nenor -- formally Obas Nenor-- to the label family. Since his now-classic Color Soul EP on Sol Power Sound back in 2015, Nenor has gone on to release a string of hugely successful EPs on Heist, Whiskey Disco, and on his own imprint, Nenorion Music.

With the Future Ancestor EP, Nenor revisits the African-inspired textures that made the Color Soul EP unforgettable, but ventures further into the subterranean reaches. On "Tike Ye Ya Kende", Nenor teams up with Congolese-born vocalist Natalie Wamba for a rousing dancefloor heat-rock, with pulsing marimbas and hazy synths.

"Nova Man" is a straight-up banger with huge chugging bass, dubby vocal samples, and thrilling atmospherics.

"Ibe" dives head-first into the deep with tripped-out arpeggios, complex, layered percussion, and more of those gritty signature Nenor synths.

"Knwo" speeds ahead on a bruk-n-bass trajectory as a frenetic stomper that will inspire late-night dancers to throw crazy shapes.

With early support from Simbad, Soul Clap, Jacques Renault and more, the Future Ancestor EP is sure to be another staple in ever-growing Nenor and Sol Power Sound catalogs and will keep dark rooms ablaze all summer long.

Legendary artist Mick Harris (Napalm Death, Painkiller, Scorn…) kicks off his 2019 with this EP of tar-black, bass heavy sonic violence. This EP features 4 reworks of “Salford Priors”, one of the heaviest tracks from his return-to-form album “Over Depth”, the first by Mick Harris himself, and 3 more by his longtime collaborators in the production guises of Fausten, Stormfield, and Monster X. The EP begins with an apocalyptic, dubbed out violent rework by the man himself, creeping in with a cold, calm eerie drone that quickly goes from zero to 100%, blasting into a full force attack of artillery percussion and strafing, shrapnel textures atop the landmine subs and characteristic Harris snarling mono-bass.

Julien Caraz has caused much distress over the years with the sheer rage and precision sonic assaults of his Monster X project. Here he eschews his usual frenetic tempos for a solid 130BPM, a sleek techno destroyer built for giant spaces and huge soundsystems in mind. The Combat Recordings boss has worked audiovisually with Mick since the Scorn AV at Bangface Weekend in 2011, touring with Fret AV in 2018. Here he switches back into audio mode to rework Salford Priors into a hard electro assault for the Stormfield remix.

Fausten is the shadowy, twisted collaboration between Monster X and Stormfield.
Having released a staggeringly twisted album on the legendary Ad Noiseam, Fausten
went into hibernation as the pair pursued their own projects, with only a few sporadic tracks surfacing over the years. The pair have been putting together an album’s worth of new material for 2019, beginning with a powerful remix of Salford Priors. Taking Fret back into it’s aquatic, fathoms-deep sonic territory, this remix is a behemoth work that moves at quarter-step tempo, allowing for more physicality and dynamics, the profound pulse of each profoundly deep bassdrum like an underwater volcanic explosion, with skittering percussion the resonates in the stillness.

Temporary linearity in a lysergic world.

Imagination and reality, science and humanity: SPIME.IM weave their audiovisual tales from the ethereal textures that shape our worlds. Their album "Exaland" synthesizes reality by combining human expression with technological potentialities in an infinitely changeable virtual world. The seven tracks are defined by razor-like sounds, crystal textures and digital overload, captured in those weightless seconds on a parabolic flight. Just as SPIME.IM's live performances, this album is a temporarily linear journey through a narrative space shaped by psychedelic landscapes, synthetic colors, mutating objects and transient life-forms.

SPIME.IM was born as a word pun between the concept theorized by Bruce Sterling - the spime for the note, an object that can be traced through space and time for the duration of its existence - and the contraction of English "I am". If the Being is therefore the object of the intertwining between the real and the virtual, then it becomes possible to create new imaginaries that turn into immersive environments and narrative spaces in which artificial and natural, science and humanity, imagination and reality interpenetrate, giving life to new boundaries to be explored, to experience the own consciousness and what, while invisible to our eyes, surrounds and influences us.

Affirming digital reality, the Turin-based media art collective SPIME.IM explores the boundaries and possibilities of identity and perception in a world where virtual doppelgängers take on an all-encompassing position. SPIME.IM use technology, 3D art and electronic music to weave immersive audio-video experiences.

Moonshoe Records has bowled over first listeners by presenting this new side of their sphere - Air Space Ark’s debut, “All Rivers Lead” charts the course of divergent streams of contemporary ambient music, downtempo rhythms, and electroacoustic experimentation, arriving at a calming confluence of these sources. Across the 6 songs on these two sides, they evoke a calming and contemplative headspace

333 is an exquisite study in balance - the intermingling of bird song water sounds that could equally be field recordings or synthesized foley - the ambiguity adding a delightful trompe l'oreille effect - and crystalline keys ; these airy sounds weighted by washes of subbass.

BLANK PAGE is almost like a version of the previous track, retaining the nimble birdsongs and heavy sub, but foregrounding a lolling, stumbling hip-hop beat and placing more emphasis on the effects wizardry as abstract sounds careen across the track in wipes and wisps, before stripping down to a beautiful coda of birdsong, piano plinks and a textured backdrop.

The celestial keys, flute-like thrums and gentle chimes of WORDS BETWEEN SELF evoke the golden age of spiritual jazz, but the hazy ambiance and shuffling beats transmute the other elements around them into something more introspective and personal than jubilant praise. Lyrics aside, the subtle funk coupled with the pensive, meditative air channels the spirit of Stanley Cowell’s classic TRAVELLIN’ MAN.

LOFT IN 7 Is the most “out” moment here. It has echoes, literally, of jazz. Like decaying tape reels disintegrating in real time, we feel the tape buckling and warping under the weight of time as the sounds of a synthetic band warp and shift against electronic impulses and glitches, eventually leaving just a lingering, ghostly imprint. .

DUST SONG veers the closest towards a straightforward instrumental hip hop cut - a submerged sounding breakbeat coupled with a tender piano melody - but is buoyed by drifting pads and a dense, hallucinatory bed of effects.

CONCRETE closes proceedings. Charged with a crepuscular energy, it’s all-together as mercurial and magical as the transition from day to night. Different elements swirl and coalesce, honing in on dense, textural moments across a horizontal drift. The end effect is hypnotic yet captivating, so much so that when the track eventually blooms into silence at the end you’re struck by the brevity of the whole experience. Thankfully you can listen to it again!

“Le Lisse et le Strié is a new work by french composer François J. Bonnet, released under his project name Kassel Jaeger. Based in Paris, Bonnet is the Director of INA GRM. He is also a writer and theoretician (The Order of Sounds, a sonorous Archipelago and The Infra-World have been published in english by Urbanomic). As a musician, Bonnet has been collaborating with artists such as Stephen O’Malley, Oren Ambarchi or Jim O’Rourke and most of his recent work has been published by Editions Mego.

Le Lisse et le Strié has been conceived as an exploration of the two antagonist concepts of “smooth” and “striated”, applied to the realm of electroacoustic sounds. If the “smooth” is linked to “nomos” as an open space of organic distribution, the “striated”, on the contrary, is associated to “logos”, as an enclosed space defined by a grid.

Elaborating a dialogue between these aspects, Kassel Jaeger draws here an intermediary space where pulsations become textures and layers, and where rhythmic elements are found in the qualities and bodies of sounds instead of being functionnalised, pre-determined sound objects, abstracted and frozen onto a temporal grid. The concept of “striated” is made audible only through the sonic landscape it inhabits, like the stripes of the camouflage fur of wild animals only exist as such in the woods and long grass, disappearing into a potentially uselessness in a desert plain.”

LA’s Cromie joins Detroit imprint Clave House to release four mesmerizing cuts entitled ‘Root Bulb’.

A familiar face in the Los Angeles house scene, Nikola Hlady aka Cromie has established himself through his talents and graft in the studio showcasing his distinctive deep house rhythms, clever chord progressions and focus on charismatic sound design. His previous releases on Material Image, Amadeus Records and These Things Take Time join hypnotically driven atmospheres with captivating rhythms creating forward- thinking yet classically-minded sonics. His ‘Root Bulb’ EP sees the LA producer join the Clave House family accompanying artists such as Ali Berger, Pascäal, 外神 deepspace, Appian, Gerald Norton, Segv and Berndt.

Cromie's ‘Root Bulb’ EP picks up where his 2018 releases left off, taking inspiration from the Southern California landscape that surrounds him, with its juxtaposition of endless expanses of concrete amidst its staggeringly diverse flora and famous sunshine.
‘Root Bulb’ kicks things off with absorbing pads layered over rough and raw percussion with angelic textures in the distance before ‘Lilac’ delivers breaks-tinged drums, a catchy, buried sample, infectious synth notes and warming melodies inviting the listener’s focus.

‘Aristocrat Motel’ maintains the enrapturing ambience by fusing pulsating bass shoots, alleviating tones and charming, earworm keys offering a club-focussed yet introspective track until ‘Root Bulb (Grove Mix)’ rounds off proceedings with downtempo broken-beat grooves, tantalising vibrations and undulating, cosmic elements.

Initially a duo formed in Berlin, FITH have since multiplied and expanded to become a revolving collective of musicians and poets spread out across a Paris/Manchester/Berlin axis. The project, currently comprised of members Dice Miller, Enir Da, Rachel Margetts, ChrIs Lmx, & Arnaud Mathé gesture towards notions of the literary salon, expanded cinema happenings, and the ancient traditions of Greek oratory and religious sermons. Driven by the spell of the spoken word, minimal percussive refrains, oneiric textures & deep melodic synths, FITH channel cinematic imagery, enigmatic narratives & spiritual frenzy.

Their self-titled debut 12' album was released via their collectively run imprint Wanda Portal in November 2016, a 'quietly alluring debut of post punk tempered avant-pop songs' (Boomkat) that laid out the project's foreboding mystique and intoxicating dream sequences with a lurking, devastating sense of purpose and (mis)direction. Other outings have included myriad solo collections of poetry, a two-track release of lurid dissonance and elegiac elevation (Signs / Cornerstone, December 2016) and an extraordinary reinterpretation of the soundtrack for cult film & iconic document of modern alienation Wanda (1971, dir. By Barbara Loden)

With Swamp, their sequel to this activity and their first appearance on Outer Reaches, FITH become a refined force, on a record where all their compelling pluralities and attributes are honed and augmented; everything dilated to delirium. The atmosphere here is one of veiled dread and psychic disturbance, a haunting and macabre psychedelia strewn with echo and dub FX, fragmentary fever dream poetics, elemental drum patterns and volatile synthetic interference. Although the collective conserve the raw crux of their earlier material their execution is, in this special instance, heightened by an intent to broaden and prolong their unique strain of intensity.

Emphatically sinister openers like Forest and Pound present sidereal sequences before building to barrelling, corrosively processed percussion, paroxysmal free jazz and a baleful, concrète-inflected score of electronics, while Swamp introduces phasing currents and a vocal evocative of a chorale from some forgotten giallo film. Elsewhere l'au delà (the beyond) presents a stunning, sombre passage to another state entirely, like some desolate new inflection on Coil's Going Up, before Bialystok shifts into a finale of transportive and meditative evaporation. Together these tracks make for an incredibly immersive and congruous conception; an utterly complete and mesmerising document.

In Swamp's various dimensions perhaps there's comparisons to be drawn with the ritualistic krautrock of Conny Plank and Holger Czukay's Les Vampyrettes, with the hallucinatory, tribal rhythm cycles of Shackleton & Anika's Behind The Glass collaboration, with the primeval drone of Jeremie Sauvage, Mathieu Tilly and Yann Gourdon's France project, with the echoic, disquieting chamber intimacies of Tuxedomoon's Pink Narcissus material and with Lucrecia Dalt's eerie free verse abstractions. But really, we've not heard anything like this before.

Discussing their own inspirations and touchstones the collective cites Franz Kafka, Dario Argento, Lucrecia Martel's La Ciénaga (The Swamp - the film the record is named after) and Yiddish ghost theatre as figures, works and artforms that were prominently drawn upon during the making of Swamp. Yet whilst their imprints could be traced by some, they resemble more of a covert presence within a nuanced whole rather than obvious aspects which moor this record to any familiar setting.

Instead, the acutely unsettling yet poignant spoken word of Miller and the mercurial nocturnes and visitations produced by Margetts, Lmx, Mathé and Da make for a record of strange, novel and striking energies. In revealing the remarkable location and period in which Swamp was recorded Margetts and Miller give a vivid indication as to how these energies are so potently invoked:

'The record was mostly recorded in a caretaker's wing of a 17th century castle in Normandy. It was early March 2018, and our first encounter with the Spring. We had no idea how everything would unfold. There was a lot of tension. Some of us felt compelled to get out the attic room where we had set up our makeshift recording studio and just walk and walk down the vast flat meadows and explore the relics of the wartime barracks, others wanted to keep recording. The outside was serene and inviting, and even though we had been cooped up indoors recording for long stretches of time, we could see from the corner of our eyes, the branches of the trees quivering; an impersonal energy blew through us and then things just happened.'

Repress available in early May.

Faitiche releases a new collaboration between the Japanese sound artist ASUNA and Jan Jelinek: the album Signals Bulletin brings together joint improvisations and compositions made over a period of three years in Berlin, Kyoto and Kanazawa. ASUNA’s meandering organ drones merge with Jelinek’s pulsating synthesizer and field recording loops to create dense superclusters that span broad harmonic arcs.

"Watching the Japanese sound artist ASUNA playing the organ, some people might be surprised. ASUNA is no virtuoso flying over the keyboard in a rage. Instead, with the calm gestures of an office worker, he cuts strips of adhesive tape to the correct length before sticking them onto the keys of his instrument. In this way, large clusters of keys are held down, creating a dense and sustained range of frequencies, while the sound artist continually prepares further sets of keys or removes tape again. I have rarely seen a more convincing performance concept, with such a power to fascinate.

I first met ASUNA when we both gave a concert at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, his home city. He performed the organ drones as described above and I immediately knew I wanted to collaborate with him. Six years and five meetings later, we completed Signals Bulletin. The album includes both joint improvisations and compositions, recorded in Berlin, Kanazawa and Kyoto.

Whether using prepared organ, Casio keyboards or mechanical plastic toys, ASUNA creates rich textures of sound that barely change over long stretches of time. It is a music without breaks. For a while, I was unsure how my loops made using modular synthesizers and live sampling fitted here – until I realized the role I had to take in this duet: I would provide the rhythmically pulsating foundation over which his dense continuums could unfold.

The result is harmonically drifting superclusters that put us into a meditation-like state. It can perhaps be compared to Automatic Writing – a mode of creative expression floating somewhere between concentration and distraction. Both the structure of our pieces and our approach to our instruments allow a similar “absence”: we let the machines play and repeat themselves – while we, in a mild form of trance, adopt the role of observers, intervening only occasionally.

It is no coincidence that ASUNA owns a collection of Doodle Art – drawings jotted down during conversations or while talking on the phone. It is said that works made like this point to the unconscious and reveal pet motifs – because a doodler always inadvertently returns to his or her favourite themes. The artwork for Signals Bulletin features pictures from the collection, in this case sheets of paper from the pads provided in stationery shops to test out pens. The special quality of such doodles is that the jumble of drawings is the work of a collective whose individual members do not know each other. Layer by layer is added, by someone different each time – until it becomes a dense cluster of lines and symbols ..."

Jan Jelinek, Berlin 2018

For the second release on the Galaxiid imprint, a label of electronic music archeology and quality, we are transported to the strange sonic world of an elusive 90s pioneer. Solar X's 1997 album X-Rated will be released for the first time on vinyl, as well as reissued digitally, with new artwork by the Japanese artist Keiichi Tanaami. Two worlds connecting sonically, visually and culturally.

Solar X enjoyed a burgeoning career in post-Perestroika Moscow making playful, low-tech electronica from Soviet analogue instruments, which he masterfully configured to forge animated compositions and dancefloor rarities. Fascinated by chaos and complexity, his music explores the ways in which our minds can be manipulated by structure - an endeavour quite plausibly linked to his other career as a lecturer and researcher of AI, information theory and cognitive science, his interest in which was in turn triggered by his young experiments in computer music.

Solar X gained international attention at a time when Russia was (quite unfairly) seen as a vacuum for electronic music, but was exploding in the period of piracy, poverty and freedom following the collapse of the USSR. Young Russians had benefited from the soviet education system and there was a strong DIY computer programming and music scene, fuelled by hackers, gear freaks and party animals. Viewed from today, the album is reborn at a time of further political and social strife, which many see as fuelling the huge creativity and radical thinking of modern Russia's young creatives.

X-Rated treats tempo and form as fluid concepts, administering sudden changes to its sonic landscape with disorienting effect, underlain with a subtle dose of humour and experimentation. Downtempo trip-hop sits alongside frenetic IDM and blistering electro, all bound together by peculiar melodic inflections and lively distortions. Warm, trippy harmonies and robotic synths are offset with angular drums, shifting erratically through moods and genres with cunning intent. Much like his contemporaries from the era, it's his ability to breathe life into a humble production setup that makes his music so compelling some twenty one years later.

The track titles are from a book of call girl cards in London phone booths, that reached the artist in Moscow in 1995. "I liked the titles from these cards, which were self-promoting and offering pleasure (e.g. "Mistress awaits you"). So, I thought since my tracks also offered some kind of pleasure, they might as well advertise this through their titles.'

Label head Nina Kraviz was introduced to the work of the 83 year old sensei Keiichi Tanaami by Ukawa Naoshiro, founder of Dommune in Tokyo, one of the brightest figureheads for the arts in Japan, responsible for the graphic design of the cover. In September 2017 Nina played for the opening of Tanaami-san's first exhibition in Moscow at Gary Tatintsian Gallery. Nina performed a live sound palette, to accompany the looping 7 minute animation, of experimental music from the Soviet Union, Russian pioneers of electronic music like Species Of Fishes and SolarX, Soviet-time pioneer Lev Termen, Kuryochin, avant-guard rock mixed with some Stockhausen and just pure abstract sounds, as well as treasured artists like Biogen.

Tanaami's illustrative work has strong sexual elements, so out of the five art pieces Nina selected and commissioned for Galaxiid, the first fits perfectly for 'X-rated'. The vertical line of text on the left is the traditional form for Japanese covers of foreign releases. The cover, together with the accompanying poster and sticker, are printed in Japan to ensure the highest print quality and purity of the colours.

Five years after his track 'Mr. Croissant Taker' appeared on Soulwax's Grand Theft Auto V radio station, Belgian producer Transistorcake releases his official debut release, the 'Future Plans' EP on Eskimo Recordings. Featuring 4 tracks of hazy electronica that would sit neatly alongside early releases on Aphex Twin's Rephlex label or recent excursions by the likes of Palmbomen and Betonkust.

Opening tracks 'Future Plan I' and 'Future Plan II' sets out Transistorcake's stall nicely. Swirling synth melodies, an ever evolving bassline that leads you down a labyrinthine maze and diaphanous strings and pads all add up to create an ecstatic yet at the same time melancholic quality to the music that manages to sound both ancient and modern.

"Future Plans I and II are constantly changing routes of ideas, improvisations and coincidences," explains Transistorcake, "nothing is a constant in the two numbers, outside the pulse of the drums. You can see them as two possible versions of the future or as an old version of the future alongside its current variation."

Whilst cut from the same cloth as the previous tracks 'Ribbles' has more than a touch of the Nordics to it. Sparkling, playful melodies glitter like snowflakes caught in the flash of a strobe light before a pulsing disco beat rockets the track into the stratosphere. In his own words the track is "an ode to spontaneity and dancing without braking. I pictured it being played by a live band next to a pool at an LA cocktail party in the '80s."

Closing the EP we have 'Kluts', driven by a stuttering, head-nodding, rhythm that recalls that rapping sound of a woodpecker in the forest, the track is gently swaddled in a warm embrace of synthetic stings that gradually develops and asserts its dominance over the course of nine, all-too brief as it happens, minutes. For all its gauzy textures there's also an undeniable solidity to these tracks, an underlying organic quality and nostalgic warmth that permeates them.

Having previously studied jazz composition and played in several bands over the years, Transistorcake brings a sense of spontaneity to the often all-to-structured world of electronic music. This EP just capturing a snapshot in time of these songs that can be endlessly reworked and reimagined in his live set, where live bass and drums, are added to his collection of vintage synths to an endless back and forth between man and machine.

Spencer Parker invites Swedish artist Billie Jo to Work Them Records with five driving techno cuts entitled 'The Ravenous' EP featuring a remix from Me Me Me boss Man Power.

Hailing from Stockholm, Billie Jo is a founding member of the .WAV collective and resident DJ at Gothenburg's Rottweiler when not performing at clubs like Tresor. She now joins Work Them Records, bringing an array of robust productions with her.

With its pounding drums and ghostly vocals, 'Erroneous' quickly sets the tone of the release, leading into 'Saturn' with its glassy textures and echoing effects. 'Ravenous' then takes us into murkier territories, generating a duskier aesthetic with its twisted sounds before British producer Man Power provides a vigorous reinterpretation under his newly minted MPX moniker, which focuses on raw club tracks, featuring hard stabs and acid licks.

With its saw-like lead and trippy atmospherics, 'Dir Vsseu' sounds like being pulled through a vortex, making way for the powerful 'Planet 9' which concludes the package with metallic elements and subtle pads.