Text-book BH GBH. A charged, densely rhythmic, super-ominous re-deployment of classic 80s sci-fi noir, shot through with spaced-out effects. Ekman in his best Robert Armanis on the flip.

This deadly Berlin—New Jersey nexus back in action, reinforced by the mighty Shifted.
F Planet itself is an in-for-the-kill stomper, husky and frantic, its sizzling bass and clanky hats inexorably dissolving in a sulphuric alarm of distortion and haywire bleeps. Astral Pilot ties you into a swirl of frequencies, rhythms and mechanical growling, before finally disentangling itself into some kind of cosmic lift-off. On the flip, grimly tightening the bolts, setting the controls inwards, and darkening and thickening its atmospheres into a kind of gut-churning possession, Shifted makes F Planet all his own.

With a Newworldaquarium dub.

A magnificently malevolent two-hander.
The Ekman is a furiously maxed-out piledriver; the Vereker is more Thing than machine, massive and roiling, scorpion-tailed and owl-eyed. The pulverising besiegement; the gory carnage.
Proper warehouse bangers, with a vengeance.

Up from down under, following crucial releases on his own Body Language imprint, LJ shifts gears and steers his intricate sound-world — torn between house and ambient, with Larry Heard’s Alien LP coursing through — into deeper, more techno-infused waters.
Watch out for The Centre Of Time, evoking over its twenty minutes both the arctic vapour of Vletrmx21-vintage Autechre and the expansiveness of Vangelis in full flight.
Next-level stuff from Berceuse Heroique.

‘Imagine the opposite of a snake shedding its skin: slithering among the debris of 21st-century music, a porous body, its viscid skin picking up bits and pieces along the way. Rusty, discarded remnants; scraps. Amongst them the jewels of crowns, unglued and fallen from grace, now recovered by this makeshift form. Where does a body end? Does it end where these prostheses begin?
‘This Soma — ‘body’ in Greek — is a palimpsest. Up close you can trace all sorts of DNA microarrays across its surface. Bristol voices, Detroit electro hums, the amen break, an all-encompassing dub haze. As with all palimpsests, they are simultaneously one and a multitude. The body lives, its prostheses live. The body moves.’ 

A new album by one half of the mighty Pilotwings crew. Guillaume Lespinasse convenes a sublimely alluring, ambient seance, invoking the spirits of Jon Hassell and Terry Riley, as befits the soundtrack of a dreamt Jacques Rivette movie. Imagine an impossible, questing collaboration between Les Disques Du Crepuscule and deep ECM. Imagine the long-awaited return of Berceuse Heroique and pinch yourself.

Baby Whale doses a cross between classic Chicago house and E2-E4 with a no-prisoners boogie bassline and piano chords glistering in from Rimini. JV’s signature spaced-out production assures a head-turning dancefloor banger for the 4am crew.
Adam & Eve is an intriguing mix of exotica and Arthur Russell. ‘The sound of Matisse,’ says the label.

The Bristolian bad boy, ex of Skudge and R-Zone, touting a blazing cocktail of acid mayhem and Wormhole-era Ed Rush. Other bad influences, by turn: Bunker and mid-90s Metalheadz; the tension and darkness of Torque; the Vangelis whoosh.

Right on for the darkness. Twelve minutes of shifting, sunken drones, massive kicks, shimmering veils of free-jazz drums, bells, synths. Warehouse runnings scared witless by Unit Moebius and Shitcluster on the flip.

‘The second of our odes to soundsystem culture. Logos back-burners the weightless sound for a minute and brings forward a chop-up laced with such tasty ingredients as the Bloom-era Aardvarck white labels, Shed’s Panamax Project and Wormhole-era Ed Rush and Optical.
‘To cap it off, Ossia delivers one of the heaviest remixes of the year. The ice-cold grime sensibilities of Eska infused with the militant sound of early Aba Shanti I on that Jah Lightning album.’

Out of all the twelves by MN on Jamal Moss’ Mathematics label, maybe the most outstanding goes under the name Ra Toth — and true to form this is double-sided trumps for BH, slapping together bad-minded, cosmic jazz and banging, bruk-up disco.
The A sounds like a young Pete Rock giving Theo a hand with some Dirty Edits; the flip like a blend of evilous Arkestra and prime Innerzone Orchestra.

The recording debut of a collaboration between Jordan ‘Jordache’ Czamanski and Ilya Ziblat Shay. Three freestyling chunks of hallucinatory electronica and freaking jazz; plus a sublime remix by Parisian maestro I:Cube, with MT’s wild keyboard lines, distant bells and general insobriety threading a tactile, sunrise-friendly house groove. Tropical jazz-funk for the synthesizer generation. Call it Balearic and die.

None other than Mick Harris from Napalm Death, and his deadly Midlands iteration of Detroit techno. Transatlantic motor-funk from the mid-nineties, when Brummie club-night the House Of God was alive and kicking. Still stinging.

‘Berceuse Heroique back in the fray with the first of three twelves serenading sound system culture. An invocation of the long-lost spirits of pure, heavyweight, hardcore hedonism.
‘Border Control is a fight anthem against Brexit, fusing the industrial slant of Brummie techno with the jungle techno pressure of the early nineties. The Dillinja-esque bassline of Fortune Teller tolls the death knell for all tin pan speakers. Loose Cables is an uncanny ringer for one of Pinch’s most underrated tunes, The Attack Of The Killer Robot Spiders.
‘Pinch runs the voodoo down one more time. He sounds totally pissed off and more fresh than ever.’