Housebound Demigod

Genre: Electronic, Alternative

Released: September 16, 2016

Long in the making debut album from Modern Love’s most elusive operator Gaz Howell. Recorded with a DR550, a battered Charvel guitar + assorted pedals, recommended if you're into Stephen O’Malley, Autechre, David Lynch, Shackleton, NWW, Demdike Stare...

From the disputed border somewhere between Lancashire and Yorkshire, G..H. claims a no mans land where he is free to decimate distinctions between black metal and concrète techno by drawing upon an elusive, metaphysical force that’s exclusively common to music rooted in that region; from Muslimgauze and Autechre thru Shackleton and Demdike Stare.

The inarguably mongrel Housebound Demigod is G.H.’s debut solo album, following the Ground EP (2011) and his involvement with the hexed Pendle Coven project & HATE, alongside Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, respectively, between 2003 - 2009. It sounds like nothing out there; the result of countless hours at the grindstone, using sound as tonal therapy and a purely expressive sculptural material to best render the feel of his bleak but extraordinarily beautiful surroundings with all the rugged texture and captivating aesthetic of some ancient cave graffiti.

The album unfolds as a treacherous topography of boggy drones, entrenched subbass and deforested, windswept feedback, strewn with the charred remains of black metal in opener Screaming Demon Pickups and the hollow-eyed stare down of Angels & Doormen, or prone to bury the senses with unpredictable slow techno mudslides in Mickey Cosmos or the subsidence of Packhorse.

He often underlines that physicality with a drily ambiguous wit; check the bitterly clipped narrative on Yorkshire Fog, or, equally, when he puts all his weight behind the stylus-troubling, bestial shudder of Devils Bit Scabious, and you can’t shake the feeling that he’s gurning like an evil loon behind the rotten torque of the album’s titular parting shot.

While ostensibly monotone, overcast, the devil is found in the album’s subtleties of timing and mixing detail; riddled with phantasms that lurk and lash out from the crevices of its granite slabs and pitch black ravines, all placed at oblique angles in his surreally folded, labyrinthine and unheimlich soundfield. [Boomkat]

As Strong as Death Is

Maurizio Bianchi & Ryan Martin

Genre: Electronic, Experimental

Released: August 12, 2016

Lifetime noise experimentalist Maurizio Bianchi worked with Ryan Martin of Dais Records for As Strong As Death Is: apparently their aim was to “score the abstract concept of marriage based on the Biblical Song of Solomon”. They achieve that through Bianchi’s violin, various electronics, and plenty of tape loop action. First issued on cassette in 2013, this edition of 500 LPs is this material’s first vinyl outing. On Backwards. [norman records]

Writer's Block

Lixo

Genre: Leftfield/IDM, Electronic

Released: September 23, 2016

Lixo - the production alias of Alex Hislop, founder of influential London party collective, GETME! - returns to the crew's label arm with new single 'Writer's Block', featuring 1-800-Dinosaurs signee Trim.

The follow-up to 2015's 'Gloomer' EP, 'Writer's Block' sees Lixo lay the perfect foil for Trim - and his notoriously off-beat flow - to navigate through. Sections of coarse, blacked-out vocal sampling are off-set by warm, tribal bass sounds and fluttery, dreamscape melodies that tug at the more experimental, exploratory corners of London's club music landscape.

With a back catalogue already spanning 13 records - including key releases from the likes of Becoming Real, Slime and Dam Mantle - and a regular slot on NTS Live, London party-come-label GETME! have established themselves as one of the city's key bass hubs over the last 10 years. Formed by Alex Hislop (Lixo) in 2006, the brand now spans events, radio and their aforementioned label arm. [kudos]

Liquefy

IOKOI

Genre: Downtempo, Electronic, Pop

Released: September 23, 2016

IOKOI’s debut album «Liquefy» unfolds into the waving territories of #HYPERCYBEREALISM, where physical and virtual spaces interweave. The dancing «self» modulates trough reflections, creating floating and drifting instances of identity. 

IOKOI is a blur. She plays with the barriers of reality and unconsciousness, creating a surreal performance in which she negotiates her identity, and enters a dialogue with the audience. She confronts the usual with capricious textures, oblique sounds and a subliminal voice. [-OUS]