Helena Hauff's Return To Disorder keeps it disordered with legendary producer DeFeKT next up with his vision of twisted electro. 'My Mother' has a dark undercurrent but is doused in synth radiance that provides great comfort, so if you ask us, it's a fitting title. It's texture that again stands out on 'Disastrous Infinity which has a squelch, acidic lead wriggling about the mix, pounding drums and crispy percussion that all pull back to reveal pixel-thin and eerie pads. 'No Coffee' is a dense and gauzy world of ice-cold melody and rigid grooves, and 'Soaked' turns the same vibe up to 11. 'Phaser' and 'Early Morning Tea' close out with opposing energies - raw and prickly, then more smooth and serene.

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Gal Perez is PRZ (and also Pluto Junkies, and the co-founder of Chateau Royal) and the German has put out a steady, quality stream of sounds since 2017. This outing on Helena Hauff's Return To Disorder is a twisted and acerbic collision of breaks, electro and UK rave. 'Cruising' has alarm sounds and blistering synth textures running through saw-tooth bass and big breaks. 'PIGMENTOR' is all acidic and chuggy while 'The Looper" is heads down, feet marching electro-techno. 'Good Bye' brings some electrified disco futurism to the party for a more colourful and outwardly expressive closer.

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WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
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WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
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DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
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Luke Eargoggle joins forces with Dataintrang here for a seasonally appropriate ice-cold electro outing on Return to Disorder. It kick off with side-long opener 'Top Of The Pyramid' which is full of sidewinding synths and squealing analogue lines over corrugated bass. After that one comes the manic and high tempo electro-shocks of 'Not Unique' with snappy snares and darkened vocals. Last but not least is the most brutal assault of them all - '7 Days A Week', a melange of wild acid lines and liquid metal leads with turbulent bass and a general sense of intergalactic warfare.



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Chilean artist Magda Rot makes a head-turning debut here with some ice-cold electro rhythms on the Return To Disorder label which is now fast approaching a quarter century of releases. There is no messing with these sounds - they're built on tight, kinetic rhythms with fierce sound designs and stark futurism. 'Triads' is a mix of crisp hits and gurgling synths with dramatic background chords. 'Black Sense' is a slamming cut with a twisted bassline and hammering drum funk and 'Coincidences' brings the chilliness with its frosted lines and cold waves of synth. 'Unusual Theory' shuts down with a far sighted sense of electro-techno doom.

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DJ Plant Texture aka Bari's Donato Basile makes a Return to Disorder with four blistering cuts of jungle, electro, techno and acid. He is a versatile producer who takes no prisoners and considers no sounds off-limits. This one kicks off with the brutalist beats and casuistic synths of 'The Other World' before funky, acid-laced techno bouncer 'Preserve The Rave' takes you to the next level. 'The Man Of The Street' (feat Mike Tansella Jr) is then a deeper, more cosmic cut with thinking synths but still plenty of powerful rhythms and last of all are the dark jungle breaks of 'Hasta La Vista, Baby.' These are highly charged and guaranteed dance floor destroyers from this ever-on-point wizard.

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Yet again, Helena Hauff's Return To Disorder label brings us a new talent from the world of electro production, this time in the shape of India's Investigations of a Dog. The four tracks here contain a lively, energetic feel sure to tempt the reticent onto the dancefloor, matched with a dreamy optimism that gives them an ultra pleasurable head-in-the-clouds celestial feel. 'Heliocentrism' has echoes of classic LFO's naive melodicism, '11 July' is sunny and gently bubbling in the same vein as Aphex's first 'Ambient Works' LP, and the rest is generally infectious and loveable yet employed with a touch of subtle restraint. We look forward to further Investigations

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New-ish Hamburg talent alert! After releasing a fantastic track on the second RTTD comp it would have been rather remiss of us not to share more of L.F.T.'s idiosyncratic synth-pop-electro-dirge with you. Cracking Stuff!"

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Rival Consoles has been concurrently in the foreground and background of electronic music since the late 00s; conjuring tense melancholia for Black Mirror soundtracks, playing in front of 10,000 dance fans at Drumsheds, selling out London’s Barbican Hall, and logging an expansive, wandering collection of synth-sculpted albums that explore a myriad different styles and aesthetics—but always with human emotion as their lodestar. Landscape from Memory, the ninth studio LP from the UK producer and musician born Ryan Lee West, finally blossomed following a frustrating fallow year away from the production desk. For West, having spent the past decade producing and writing in a habitual way, falling out of love with creativity meant a slowing of the clock that makes him tick, a sense of being swallowed whole by some elementary force. However, the time out also made room for his most invigorating record yet.

Partly stitched together from a scrapbook of discarded audio snippets, Landscape from Memory demanded a degree of openness and vulnerability in its assembly. “There is a kind of strange beauty to it because it involves the past, present and future in a very strong way,” offers the Erased Tapes mainstay. He set to work massaging melodic kernels into full tracks, like the skippy, haunted club shuffle of memory-jogging lead single ‘Catherine’, which is dedicated to his partner. “It’s extremely open, just a naked melody on drums, so exposed as an idea… I think because she was so excited by it, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I'm excited too, actually, I just didn't realise,” he reflects.

Appropriately, the title track became the first piece of music that made West “feel an emotional reaction after a long time of having zero reaction”—closing the record transcendently in a fever dream of euphoric synthwave—although ‘Catherine’ can be understood as the spark that lit the fuse, bristling with energetic joy. Similarly, ‘Known Shape’ makes a play for an otherworldly dancefloor, melding a loping drum pattern to a twitchy soundscape. Granted, some of the standout moments of the LP can be found lurking in its weirder, wilder corners, from the broken-sounding synth that runs like a rough river through ‘2 Forms’, to the head-nodding, disembodied bounce of uncanny valley bop ‘In a Trance’. “I remember making that in a New York hotel room, starting it, when Robert (Raths, Erased Tapes founder) was doing something on his phone and I was just being annoying in the background,” recalls West of one of several pieces made on the road. Yet Raths expressed his excitement about the track as he was hooked instantly.

“I like music that has a sense of momentum, really pushing forward,” he adds of the ‘Landscape from Memory’ ice-breaker. “And it just instantly has that from the first breath. So I kind of like moments like that when they appear.”

These climatic productions are characterised by their propulsive quality, and driven by West’s own push to step outside his comfort zone, having found inspiration flowing from new and unfamiliar sources. After his self-built Hackney studio suddenly felt too controlled of an environment, West altered course, mapping out tracks away from his desk. To that end, Landscape from Memory is a travelogue of creativity on the move, a collection of postcards from everywhere, and an album defined by its restlessness.

Just like the record itself sprang from conflicting emotions, bliss and dread tussle audibly for dominance throughout. You can hear this tug-of-war in the radiant swell of ‘Nocturne’, an eerie, reverb-drenched meander through classical tones, or the warm piano figures that collide with percussive crunch on ‘If Not Now’. Away from the music, this essence resides in a grainy film photo that in West’s eyes holds the record’s emotional DNA: a serene vista of tall green trees that hide the roaring A12 road beneath this studio. “I just think it’s quite evocative because even though it was an alarming place, it also looks really comforting at the same time,” he muses.

This dichotomy flourishes in that sweet spot between knotty ambient and widescreen electronica, where environmental tones and electro-acoustic textures converge to create a living document of sound. On Landscape from Memory, sonic touches hint at something intimate and familiar: cracking ice, the buzzing of a fridge, the distant hum of the motorway. Investing more time with the acoustic guitar in the initial stages helped West convey this homespun quality. For instance, on ‘In Reverse’, gossamer melodies are layered to create “a tapestry of guitar parts” while ‘Gaivotas’, which was born out of a residency at Lisbon’s synth hotspot Patch Point last February, contrasts “extremely digital synths” with a cheap acoustic guitar that snakes through dense, rhythmic terrain.

“A lot of things that go on in the music are like a guitarist's perspective of treating sounds,” he offers, explaining that much of the record involved “crudely recording” ideas into a laptop microphone. “I just like the honesty of it,” he says of the guitar, also pointing to the record’s additional array of “unusual recording techniques.” Among these, drums were placed on the sofa to create the muffled, deadened sensation on ‘Coda’, where a woozy shoegaze fog and angel sighs build into a jumpy, organic groove. Or ‘Tape Loop’, which “importantly, was recorded with a microphone. So not only does it slow down the music, but also the dimensions of the room the microphone picks up changes,” he explains.

Growing up, West would often mess around with the materials on his parents’ land in the small town of Syston outside of Leicester, hammering nails into wood and “sawing stuff,” which ignited a strong curiosity for making and materials from childhood. He soon found his way into music, starting on the guitar before teaching himself digital production and going on to study music technology at Leicester’s De Montfort University. He later became the first signee to the nascent London label Erased Tapes in 2007, establishing the label's shorthand for exploratory post-minimalism. IO, his debut album as Rival Consoles, came out in 2009, while his output has since evolved across nearly two decades of activity, from the critically acclaimed 2018 offering Persona to Landscape from Memory’s 2022 predecessor, Now Is.

As a multidisciplinary artist he has always been passionate about imagery and how it relates to and inspires music. His 2020 record Articulation was informed by drawings he made in his sketchbook. He has also been experimenting in various motion media, from programming particle animations in Max MSP to filming and editing daily video clips, and manipulating imagery in Touchdesigner or Blender, which would shape the visual counterpart in his live A/V shows since 2015.

As Rival Consoles, West’s calling card is his ability to channel hope, pain, sadness, and euphoria in one fell swoop, twisting the key in the lock of his internal world and telling stories without words. Crucially, Landscape from Memory is as much about zooming in on the details as it is about seeing past the horizon. Like a saturated photograph or an abstract painting daubed with bright splotches, Landscape from Memory is a riot of colour, an album blazing with a sound-shaper’s renewed love for his craft.

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When Peggy Gou released her debut EP 'Art of War' in 2016, she made a list of career goals. One of them was to become the first South Korean DJ to play Berlin's techno institution Berghain, an objective she achieved only a few months later. Another item on that list was to record an instalment of !K7's DJ-Kicks series. "It's the premier class of DJ mixes," she says. "Some of my favourite selectors have contributed to it." Now Peggy Gou can tick that off her list too as she proudly presents the 69th edition of the mix series. The Berliner-by-choice started working on the mix last year. It was a busy time for the 28-year-old: she'd just scored her first Mixmag cover and her single 'It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)' was receiving awards and critical acclaim. Each month she would DJ in 20 nightclubs all over the world. And yet, the goal for her mix was ambitious: instead of trying to capture the energy of her DJ sets, she aimed to create a portrayal of her own musical journey. An 18-track listening session that takes you straight into Peggy Gou's living room where she plays you the formative tunes from her collection. No genre boundaries - she moves across disco, house, techno and electro. No tempo limits - the mix ranges from 90 to 150 BPM. And no age restriction - the earliest tunes on the mix are from 1983

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Repress!

Another collection of early cassette recordings from J DILLA feat. more raw unreleased DILLA originals. "GENIUS" includes 13 remastered tracks showcasing DILLA's sonic growth in the late 90s--including some with him rhyming (not just beats). Full picture sleeve.

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