Electronic

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The early 80s were prolific for Hideki Matsutake. As the go-to keyboard programmer for the Tokyo music scene, he worked on Akiko Yano's Gohan Ga Dekitayo, YMO's BGM, Ryuichi Sakamoto's B-2 Unit, Mkwaju Ensemble's Mkwaju and found time to record two Logic System albums in 1981. While the first album, Logic had a harder techno feel, the second one Venus was different affair. Recorded in Los Angeles at the new state of the art Yamaha Studio, it was loosely themed on the Greek goddess Venus and had a funkier more organic sound. For the album Matsutake had asked a handful of American musicians to provide songs he would then add his synth magic touch to. Michael Boddicker, Don Grusin, Nathan East and Roger Powell duly complied and also played on the album.The updated sound was achieved by switching from the Moog III to the E-mu modular System (which Matsutake brought over to LA) and other synths like the Prophet 5, the Roland MC-8 and TR 808 and the Yamaha GS-1, a forerunner of the DX7.The result is an amazing futuristic mix of electronic music and early 80s funk, announcing many genres to come, from techno and house to French electro and Vaporwave. From the breezy ambient synth of I Love You to the city pop edge of Be Yourself (originally written by Nathan East for Debra Laws) and the vocoder-led Daft Punk-ish Take A Chance, Venus is a fascinating album that both pushes the boundaries of electronic music and is yet strangely accessible and beautiful.The other key elements of Venus is the artwork designed by Japanese legendary illustrator Pater Sato. Sato had started in Japan in the early 70s doing many album covers for Japanese artists including Tatsuro Yamashita's cult Spacy LP before moving to New York in 1979 to pursue a career in fashion and advertising. His airbrush style became hugely influential over the years and in 2018, Stella McCartney dedicated a whole Men’s collection based on his Venus. Star make up artist Pat McGrath also regularly posts his artwork to her 3 million fans on her instagram.The original album came with a beautiful 8-panel insert illustrated by Sato which Wewantsounds has reproduced on this deluxe reissue also featuring remastered sound, OBI strip and a second insert featuring credits and line up plus liner notes by Hashim Bharoocha. The notes feature an exclusive interview with Hideki Matsutake reminiscing about the making of this visionary album which Wewantsounds is delighted to reissue.

LA BREICHE (“the witch”) features YAN AREXIS (Stille Volk / Sus Scrofa / Common Eider, King Eider / Coume Ouarnède), and PATRICK LAFFORGUE (Stille Volk / Sus Scrofa / Hantaoma). The two musicians are also the creators of the cult festival Lhomme Sauvage, held in Midi-Pyrenees each year. After their 2017 debut “Le Mal des Ardents” (Cold Spring), “Le Rite” opens a new door, with post-folk sounds close to post-rock, influenced by ancient music, with folk used in a modernist way. Dark, ambient and yet mystical… deep with grandiose landscapes. The sound of La Breiche is situated at the crossroads of early music and dark ambient; ambient music, industrial music with a strong ritual dimension. Their electro-acoustic is music based on old instruments such as the hurdy-gurdy, mixed with analogue synths, field recordings, and ritual objects, taking a mystified look at nature, archaic societies, rites, beliefs and lores, animism.

“Listen as if you were being told a secret” - Federico FelliniA companion piece to 2018’s Listening To Pictures, this second volume in the pentimento series presents eight new tracks by the music visionary, continuing his lifelong exploration of the possibilities of recombination and musical gene-splicing. Pentimento is defined as the “reappearance in a painting of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over” and this is evident in the innovative production style that ‘paints with sound’ using overlapping nuances to create an undefinable and intoxicating new palette.In classic Hassell fashion, the title can be interpreted in a myriad of ways, but perhaps the most pertinent at the moment is the human instinct to sing and play through a rain of difficulties. A future blues of indeterminate and ever-shifting shape. The album is buffered by two 8-minute plus epics at the beginning and the end - the hypnotic “Fearless” with it’s metronomic, almost Can-like rhythm, and blurry, noir-ish texture of sound emerging like car headlights from the fog; mirrored at the end of the record by the beautiful sci-fi lullaby of “Timeless”, a track with a gaseous, billowing quality as electronic clicks and bubbles float over a landscape of shimmering, glacially paced complexity. The bridge between those two worlds is no less compelling, from the frantic, spidery IDM sketch of “Reykjavik” to the collapsed-time ballad of “Unknown Wish”. Whilst containing seeds of classic ‘fourth world’ fusion, this record finds the artist still questing to create new forms and mutations of music, a thrilling window into what music could sound like in a world to come.

Japan, Live in Japan! This set was recorded at The Budokan, Tokyo in December 1982 and was their fifth from last show on that tour. The band had become friends with Yellow Magic Orchestra who joined them on some of the performances here – “Bamboo Music” is a duet featuring Akiko Yano, and “Taking Islands In Africa” features Yukihiro Takahashi. Ryuichi Sakamoto also plays on those tracks.

RY X and Frank Wiedemann reunite as Howling to present ‘Colure’ the sophomore full-length record from their joint musical enterprise released via Counter Records on 24th July. RY X, solo alternative artist and member of The Acid, and Frank, one half of Âme, bring fans a bigger, sharper follow-up to their debut, ‘Sacred Ground.’ On ‘Colure’, the Berlin-based Wiedemann and Los Angeles-based RY X conjure transcendent creations out of their contrasting musical backgrounds and environments. The album is assuredly dualistic: electronic and acoustic sounds sit comfortably side-by-side, and big melodic hooks are laced into hypnotic club productions.

In the icy twilight of 2018 a demo fell from the otherwise frozen and still German sky, severely interrupting the stagnant German black metal underground. Calling themselves Hexenbrett, theirs was a raucous, heavy metal-hearted, yet woodsy and deeply foreboding kind of black metal. Now Hexenbrett once again emerge from their benighted whereabouts bearing a twisted cornucopia of first wave black metal and blackened heavy metal wonders—plus a Townes Van Zandt cover! On their debut album Zweite Beschwörung: Ein Kind zu Töten, Hexenbrett sound at once like the past and the future of black metal hysteria.

John Foxx And The Maths return with a new line-up on their 5th studio album, Howl. Former Ultravox guitarist Robin Simon joins Foxx, Benge (Ben Edwards) and Hannah Peel after previously guesting with The Maths at their debut Roundhouse show in 2010. 'For years, I'd wanted to work with Robin Simon again,' says Foxx. 'There's something central about what he does - and I always miss it, no matter who I work with. It's what Rob can do with a song, and with the sheer power of sound.' Work on the album began back in April 2019 at Benge's Memetune studios in Cornwall with Rob Simon involved right from the start, his contributions instantly mutating the original ideas into something new. 'Give him a song and he'll give you three takes - all utterly different incarnations,' enthuses Foxx who first worked with Simon on Ultravox's Systems Of Romance album in 1978. 'And it will all be much better. Demolition intercision is what he does and when you get used to the violence he can wreak, it's a true delight.' Foxx and Benge originally got together back in 2010, playing a headline show at the Roundhouse in London as the first ever John Foxx And The Maths show before they'd even finished their debut album, Interplay, which came out a few months later in 2011. Forward-looking, intuitive and risk taking from the start (Critic Mark Fisher summed them up as 'a glimpse into another world in which rock 'n' roll was invented on Moogs') their passion for the strange sounds and atmospheres they seduce and rip from the machines in Benge's studio has inspired a series of fiercely personal electronic records - the Shape Of Things (2012), Evidence (2013) and The Machine (2017), an eerie instrumental score for the theatre production of E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops. Along the way they've collaborated with The Soft Moon, Gazelle Twin, ADULT., Xeno & Oaklander, Gary Numan, Matthew Dear and many more, but at the core of everything is Foxx and the Cornish-based artist/producer. 'Benge is this generation's Conny Plank', grins Foxx. 'Original thinker, open mind, eager conspirator in insanity and the desire to push everything beyond its limits and record it all perfectly - but holding no daft prejudices. In other words, the kind of captain you always want at the helm of the Enterprise.' Hannah Peel joined the line-up on the Interplay tour in 2011 and has played every show since, while also adding violin to Evidence and of course, Howl. 'Hannah did a few star turns on the album,' says Foxx, referring to the vicious noises that she conjured up as textures on a few songs. However on the electro-psychedelic 'Everything Is Happening At The Same Time', the complex interplay of the 'The Dance' and the romantic longing of 'Strange Beauty', Foxx describes her string-led contributions as 'luscious, expansive and eloquent.' The Maths have created an album of dark, writhing glamour. Opener 'My Ghost' sounds like haunted static in a cold wind, the title track is a twisted glam-punk celebration of 'the outsider' who leaves the fringes to make himself visible, while Foxx switches to a sinister Ferry-esque croon on 'Tarzan And Jane Regained'.'New York Times' is a report back from the city of the 1970s, with Foxx's vocals gently coaxing out the vulnerability of its street characters and Factory stars, while 'Last Time I Saw You' revels in an ice-cool narrative illuminated by neon-lit transformations and flickering revelations - this song is built for streets and strobes. The album ends with 'Strange Beauty', where Foxx sounds like an echo from the 1950s - a voice that is still searching across all these years for something just out of reach

Funk, soul, dance & electronic: the many sides of Fabien (Claudio Magnani) with music & co-production by Alberto Benati! With a solid background in performing/singing (Fabien) and music production (Alberto Benati) for the dance market – especially the Japanese “eurobeat” scene, but also in other areas (Alberto has been part of soul/funk band Ridillo for a long time) the people behind “Understatement”, originally released in 2011 by Greater London Records, surely know how to put together an album, showcasing different styles: a mix of funk and soul – some of the tracks are newly arranged versions of compositions made for a previous project called SeptemberGroove – with dance and electronic elements. Kutmusic – after striking a deal with the Benati & Magnani team in 2017 – proudly re-introduces this album to a new audience!

It was time Enisum cleaned out their closet. When they finally decided to open it, a pile of material dating back to their early days turned up: those were the days when Enisum was still the solo, studio project of guitarist, singer and composer Lys. Here is everything Lys ever composed and recorded prior to the proper debut, Samoht Nara.

DJ Don Carlos (born Carlo Troja, from Varese-Italy) with his productions in the 90s has become one of the cult producers for DJs around the world. His track Alone released in 1991 for Calypso (under the Irma Records label) was and still is one of the classics of House Music, played by all the major American and British DJs. At the time of its publication it was considered an underground song and therefore did not sell very much, but over the years its myth has grown thanks to its subsequent productions as for example his second single, the EP entitled Mediterraneo, title which it will then inspired his first CD album printed in the USA with the same title. Several other singles followed, another album, always printed only in the USA, entitled Aqua, from which a triple promo vinyl was extracted which today is one of the artist's most requested rarities. In Italy his third album was released in 2002 entitled The Music In My Mind where Kim Mazelle, Michelle Weeks, Taka Boom and Kevin Bryant were present as vocal guests. In 2009 a collection of the first two albums released in the USA titled Mediterraneo-Club Favourite Collection '90-98 and in 2010 his fourth album entitled The Cool Deep which reproduced the sounds closest to his first productions. Also active as a remixer for Italian and international labels, one of his most important works is the remix of Byron Stingily of the song You Make Me Feel of which he made a worldwide hit. As a producer he also used other pseudonyms such as Montego Bay, Aquanuts, Sotterranea and Love 2 Love Orchestra. He has played and plays in different countries such as London, New York, Miami and at various festivals, such as the Robot and the Stickermule Festival in an evening with Apparat, Derrick May, DJ Koze, Lil 'Louis, Young Marco and Ellen Allien, LTJ Xperience .His peculiarity has always been the musicality of his productions, thanks to the various musicians who accompanied him in the studio, which created a sound that defined in the 90s some of the House's subgenres such as Paradise House and the Ambient House. And this is the kind of sound that compose this new release of Don Carlos entitled Livin a Dream (the name of his Radio Show). It is a collection of unreleased tracks or alternative versions of tracks all produced in the 90s, collected on a double vinyl of 12 tracks and a double CD of 22. The productions made by the artist in those years were numerous and therefore a selection work was done in his archive to find the best of his sound that has remained unpublished to date!

GRAMMY nominated duo ODESZA and groundbreaking Australian producer Golden Features are releasing a new joint album as BRONSON. BRONSON was formed when ODESZA members Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight met Tom Stell of Golden Features at an Australian music festival in 2014. The three shared their mutual admiration for each other's performances and kept in touch by exchanging music across time zones and continents via dropbox files and FaceTime calls. The trio's encounter culminated in a 2018 meeting when the three artists spent a week in the remote region of Berry, Australia to record what would later become BRONSON's debut album. As can be seen from the first two singles, elements of light and dark run through the ten-song album, as the main theme of "BRONSON" wants to reflect the inherent struggle of light against darkness. The record combines melodic vocal songs with atmospheric, deeper electronica, and guest contributions from lau.ra (who, along with Nigel Godrich of Radiohead, is part of the experimental rock band Ultraísta), the celebrated US R&B singer Gallant and the British producer Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs (TEED). ODESZA's and Golden Features' combined streaming numbers reach into the billions and the two acts have each released several singles and albums that have been certified with gold and platinum. The artists have collaborated with a number of renowned artists such as Sia, Charli XCX, Leon Bridges, Regina Spektor, Katy Perry and others. As highly sought-after live acts, the two projects have also reached millions of fans around the world on their respective headline tours. ODESZA have also sold out legendary venues around the world such as Verti Music Hall in Berlin, London's O2 Academy Brixton, Staples Center in Los Angeles and Barclays Center in New York and have been headlining festivals such as Melt!, Coachella, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza.

Casebound CD with 8 panel booklet (with sleeve notes from both artists) - similar to the 2014 Eno solo album reissues on All Saint

25th anniversary reissue of this unique coming together of Brian Eno and ex-Public Image Limited bass player Jah Wobble, also featuring Jaki Liebezeit from Can on drums. Starting life as the soundtrack to Derek Jarman’s Glitterbug, Eno passed stereo mixes of the film cues to Wobble who embellished and built upon them to construct the Spinner tracks. The resulting fusion combines icy ambience with a kind of psychogeographical funk. - Spec: 4 panel digipak with 8 panel booklet (with sleeve notes from both artists)

Bonnie Li’s debut studio album ‘Wo Men’ features the successful single ‘I want you to Die’, self-described as “It’s as if The Ronettes were doing a jam with The Kills in a movie by David Lynch”. Growing up in China, Bonnie Li has always had an acute sense of the way the world views women and femininity. When asked about the album, the frontwoman said, “In Mandarin ‘wo’ means I/myself, ‘wo men’ is translated into ‘we/us’; and if you skip the space in between it gives you ‘women’, I wanted to play around with that.

Black Geez is an OG of the Rochester scene and as such, he has been working with a lot of the underground's most buzzing artists since before anyone outside of Flour City knew their names. One MC/producer he has seen rise to popularity is Eto (formerly known as Lil' Eto). The two have made classic material together, including last year's "Few More Holes" off Geez' Concrete Struggles album. In 2020 though, they uncaged a beast of a collab project titled Flour City Street Bible, which was produced entirely by Eto. The LP puts Geez raw street raps on display over a variety of vibes. The release features guest verses from 38 Spesh, Che Noir, Street Justice, and Eto gets a verse in as well.

Over the years, the composer David Moore has led the malleable classical group Bing & Ruth through all kinds of different explorations. Most recently, that resulted in 2017’s No Home Of The Mind. Now, Moore’s about to return with a new collection. Titled Species, it’s an album that delves into a variety of trance-like states, influenced by Moore spending time in the desert and his newfound love of long-distance running. Stereogum Sessions: Johanna Warren Part of the album’s genesis came from time Moore spent away from his home in New York, in California’s Point Dume. “I’d found myself in places unfamiliar enough that I could easily lose all sense of direction, size, and, more than anything, all sense of time,” Moore explained in a statement. “The music I was making became a kind of reflection of these intentional detachments — and a place to mirror that feeling of trance that had pushed them out in the first place.” Though its music has abstract, spiritual concerns, Species also found Bing & Ruth limiting the structures of their work. The album is dominated by the Farfisa organ, with accompaniment by clarinet and double bass played by founding members Jeremy Viner and Jeff Ratner. Trance experiences, and “submitting to the wave” of them, was very much on Moore’s mind. “I suppose what I was moving towards was a way to feel small — a way to feel deeply humble,” he said. “I had always made music in search of some sort of inner peace, but I no longer cared so much to comfort myself. I’d grown tired, it seemed, of looking inward. I wanted to look nowhere.” Along with the announcement, Bing & Ruth have shared “I Had No Dream.” As a first glimpse of Species, it delivers on all the promises of the album’s thematic aims. It’s a spacious, meditative drone, dotted by melodies that flicker like mirages in the deserts that birthed this music. Check it out below.

Banco de Gaia's fifth studio album, built on the groundwork laid by it's predecessors. Full of references to Indian and Near Eastern music, as well as less obvious glances at American minimalist music, the album was everything one had come to expect from Banco, but with additional highlights.

A world much like our own. The streets are empty. Panic is in the air. Mayhem is on the horizon. There’s a rogue planet hurtling through the cosmos on a direct course for Earth, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Welcome to Planet’s Mad, the epic new experience from dance music mad scientist Baauer.Planet’s Mad is more than just an album. It’s a massive work of world building (and, apparently, world hurtling) on a blockbuster cinematic scale, an immersive universe born from the mind of one of the most revolutionary talents on the pop landscape today. And it’s on its way to your corner of the galaxy.Music is still the core of the experience, as you might expect. But where it’s coming from might surprise you. Baauer’s never been a straightforward EDM musician. Revisit “Harlem Shake,” eight years after its world-shaking breakout success, and you might be surprised to notice the sonic allusions to 80s-era electro rap and New York Latin flavor right in there alongside the drop heard ‘round the Internet. His hip-hop heavy 2016 debut Aa brought him deeper towards his goal of making a “weird, in-between thing that doesn’t fit in one box,” as he puts it. Planet’s Mad brings it all the way there, plowing through genre barriers until it all bleeds together into something too crazy and complex to be pinned down.This time out Baauer’s going back to the sounds that were in his ears when he first started making beats at age 13. There are huge gobs of arena-sized 90s big beat and the unabashedly exuberant maximalism of Fatboy Slim and Basement Jaxx, which he channels through live samples, surreal synths, and breakbeats driven deep into the red. The animated supergroup Gorillaz provides not only partial inspiration for the idea to mix music with multimedia storytelling, but also a blueprint for embracing the more eccentric side of his artistry. Running through it all is a new sense of sonic scale informed by film scores, to match his cinematic world-building ambitions.The music was created in tandem with the story of the rogue planet (a real cosmological feature, by the way) and the extraterrestrials that inhabit it. Each alien was born at the same time as one of the album’s tracks, created through a kind of imaginative synesthesia where the sound suggested a particular body form: the lush rainforest vibes of “Cool One Seven One” suggesting ostentatious jungle birds, for instance, or the frenetic interdimensional hyper-rave of the single “Aether” manifesting a creature that looks like a pterodactyl. And lucky for the Earthlings in our story, they’ve come to party.As for what happens when these worlds collide, we’ll find out as Baauer and a team of collaborators will continue to explore this world in videos (created by Rick Farin and Claire Cochran of Actual Objects), social media content, and IRL activations that blur the line between fiction and reality. It’s a whole universe that Baauer’s inviting us into, and the album’s only the beginning.“I want to tell stories, more than just make records,” Baauer says. “I'm interested in branching out into different mediums and trying to build a bigger world.”

THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ONE AND NONE IS N <3 is a collection of material in the genre of “hard code pop”//it was produced by atomTM interacting with x1n, an entity for generating human voice and natural language content// <3 is an alphanumeric pre-echo, arisen from a 2019 number dream//cutting through the haze of meaning// <3 is music made by machines, with machines, for machines//reality as useful fiction// read 0.999... as the mantra of death, the ongoing chain of cycles, going down one by one.