CD/Digital releases

For the next album in the Lent Series – and this won’t be the only time – the chronology becomes more fluid. Cabaret Voltaire, comprising Richard Kirk, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson, formed in Sheffield in 1973, but it would be five more years before their music would start to …

Many of the albums i’m featuring in this year’s Lent Series feel as if they came out of nowhere, less part of a process of evolution than a sudden, out-of-the-blue flash of something fully-formed and entirely new. That’s very much the case with The Bridge, a remarkable one-off creation resulting …

The encroachment and infiltration of electronics into pop and rock caused, among other things, a whole lot of disquiet, disagreement and division. One of the recurring themes of this most liminal period are band shake-ups and break-ups, in which opinions about the presence, role and importance of electronics were often …

Through the 1970s, Bill Nelson was the driving force behind Be-Bop Deluxe, a band that took art rock in some highly progressive directions. Futurama (1975), though conventional, had as its highlight ‘Sound Track’, energised, expansive and imaginative, showing off Nelson’s outstanding guitar skill. Sunburst Finish (1976) included ‘Sleep That Burns’, …

Though synthesizer technology was new, throughout the 1970s various artists began to demonstrate its potential in serious, thoughtful ways. As early as 1971, Tonto’s Expanding Head Band created Zero Time, showcasing an astonishing array of dramatically intimate and immersive soundworlds, the kind of which would be explored further in years …

Where Suicide sought to reduce, compress, focus and minimise music in order to maximise its emotional charge, Ryuichi Sakamoto goes in completely the opposite direction in his remarkable debut album Thousand Knives. Two aspects of it are particularly striking. First is its diversity, an absolute panoply of polystylism that nonetheless …

When i conceived this year’s Lent Series, it didn’t take long to realise which album had to come first. US duo Suicide, comprising vocalist Alan Vega and Martin Rev on electronics, brought out their eponymous debut album at the very end of 1977.

Last year, i spent part of the summer vacationing in Czechia. During that time, i was fortunate to meet up with composer Petr Bakla, who is also director of the Czech Music Information Centre. i came away from my time with Petr much more clued up about Czech contemporary music, …

i’ve written previously about the precariousness of netlabels. One that i spent quite a bit of time with back in the day was Distance Recordings, which ran from 2008 until 2014. Their output was generally of a higher than usual standard for netlabels, which makes it all the more unfortunate …

Getting to know Estonian composer Olev Muska’s remarkable electronic music last year, and, more importantly, experiencing it in the context of a live event held in the Tallinn club HALL over the summer, made me aware of the label Glitch Please. That in turn led to me discovering a whole …

In the last few years, US composer Kenneth Kirschner has been exploring very large-scale compositional structures – three pieces since 2023 have had durations of over 3 hours – so i thought it would be nicely contrary to feature one of his shorter pieces, June 23, 2013, which has a …

Today’s bit of freely-available music is by French musician Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou, whose fantastic album Choke Enough was one of my best albums of 2025. Earlier in her career, around a decade ago, she put out a number of self-released EPs, one of which, For the Beasts, was a …

Who’s up for some January stasis? German composer Robert Henke‘s 10-minute piece Oomoo is a beautiful demonstration of ambient stillness. It dates from late 2007, and is, according to Henke, based on “a single recording of a longer pad-sound of a Yamaha SY77 synthesizer” which “has been sampled, transposed, filtered …

i’ve been revisiting the music of Switzerland-based sound artist D’Incise (aka Laurent Peter) lately, and one work in particular i’ve found myself coming back to again and again and again. For many of his releases, Peter gives succinct information elaborating their inspiration and / or production, but for his 2012 …

Two primary sensibilities characterise this remarkable album featuring six pieces by Patricia Alessandrini & Marco Fusi. The first is intimacy, conveyed in the close, careful, sympathetic way Alessandrini and Fusi approach and interact with one another’s sounds. The other is tactility, a pronounced sense of not merely touch but an …

There’s having your expectations met, there’s having them exceeded … and there’s this. When i first got to know Aya’s music, in 2021 with her debut album im hole (one of my best albums of that year), i was deeply impressed by the way her voice operated as something avant-vocal. …

There’s a deep, tragic irony in the title of Breton musician Emilie Quinquis’ latest album. Eor means ‘anchor’, suggesting not just water and depths, but security and immovability. Yet its eight tracks are a dark sequence continually articulating wistfulness, uncertainty and loss. Its initial sounds, in opening track ‘Inkanuko’ (desire) …

Körper; body – it’s kind of surprising that it took German composer Enno Poppe until 2021 to give that title to one of his compositions. In the course of his career, Poppe has established himself as the ensemble composer par excellence; a composer for whom the ensemble, the group, the …

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