CD/Digital releases

Something i haven’t drawn attention to in this Lent Series is the fact that almost every album i’ve explored has been a debut. It’s the case with Suicide, Sakamoto, P-Model, Human League, Leer & Rental, Der Plan and Fad Gadget. John Foxx and Bill Nelson’s Red Noise clearly pick up …

During the critical period i’m exploring in this Lent Series, 1977–81, alongside the assorted group divisions, schisms and reformations i’ve mentioned previously, another recurring problem was artists finding it difficult to get their music heard. San Francisco synthpunk band Units – led by husband and wife Scott Ryser and Rachel …

i’m not sure anyone in 1977, listening to Ultravox’s spectacular album Ha! Ha! Ha!, could have imagined what the band’s lead singer, John Foxx, would be doing in just three years’ time. One of the most pumped-up albums of the late ’70s, Ha! Ha! Ha! was partly fuelled by the …

Where some artists saw electronics as a means to undermine or break entirely from existing pop and rock tropes, UK musician Frank Tovey assimilated them in his work as Fad Gadget. His output under that nom de guerre – four albums, beginning in 1980 with Fireside Favourites, before continuing using …

Liminal times be liminal. If there’s one thing that typifies the period i’m focusing on in this Lent Series, 1977–81, it’s the extent to which, with the proliferation of electronics, more than usually strange and wonderful things suddenly seemed to be possible. As i’ve explored previously, this led to some …

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 …

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