Long Reads

As driven and restless as ever, and with a new, career-spanning “director’s cut” compilation in the shops, The Orb’s Alex Paterson reflects on his eventful 30-year journey – with good tales, to boot

Throbbing Gristle’s visceral live performances were intense, powerful and often overwhelming. Notable witnesses and band insiders recall their heady experiences of seeing TG in the flesh

The new Field Music offering, ‘Limits Of Language’, finds brothers Peter and David Brewis in a nostalgic mood. Overdosing on Marmite in their favourite Wearside cafe, they look back on the vanished eateries and melancholy early Septembers of their youth

Former Virgin Prunes frontman Gavin Friday has just released his first solo work in 13 years. Reflecting his fabled life, steeped in hook-laden electronics, typically melodramatic and emotive, it’s one of the most absorbing albums he’s ever made

Taught by John Cage, and having worked with Morton Subotnick and Serge Tcherepnin, pioneering electronicist Jill Fraser has had quite the career. Her new solo effort, reframing American revival hymns in a modular setting, finds her at the very peak of her powers

Heirs apparent to the likes of Stereolab and Broadcast, Canterbury duo Memorials craft surrealist psych-pop and tape experiments into gloriously wayward grooves

NY synthpop duo Xeno & Oaklander are back with their ninth album, and it’s a real corker – all retro-futuristic earworms, analogue anthems and an intriguingly murky backstory

Dedicated to his late wife and former Low cohort, Mimi Parker, and made using his children’s drum machine and synths, Alan Sparhawk’s astonishing solo debut is both profound and propulsive

Extraterrestrial interlopers, hyperreal post-punksters or “cyberfeminists”? Whichever way you see it, NYC’s cumgirl8 are here to save us