Pet Shop Boys: Boys Keep Swinging

Pet Shop Boys are back with ‘Nonetheless’, their 15th studio album and a fresh creative peak that imbues their quintessential electonic sound with string arrangements and live instruments

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Jon Hopkins: Beats Surrender

bySharon O'Connell

Don’t be fooled, ‘Music For Psychedelic Therapy’ isn’t Jon Hopkins going all wallpaper ambient on us. It’s a weighty album he says needs to be listened to loud. We turn up the volume

LLong Reads

6 minute read

Tape Loops: The Splice Is Right

byMark Roland

Once upon a time, audio tape was so ubiquitous that most households had enough of the stuff to wrap around several football pitches. Now it’s an obsolete curio of a sonically explosive era. Loop back with us as we follow the Möbius strip of sound itself from Victorian Paris to a vast subterranean maze

LLong Reads

15 minute read

’Close To The Noise Floor’: The Robots Speak

byMark Roland

There was no single unifying event for the formative UK electronica scene, no point when something suddenly clicked, no precise year zero moment. But there was a bunch of like-minded souls beavering away in what they thought was their own little void, unaware there were others just like them all over the country. We talk to seven of the artists featured on the ’Close To The Noise Floor’ box set and get their big bang stories

LLong Reads

8 minute read

Michael Rother and Vittoria Maccabruni: The Light Fantastic

byJoe Banks

Recorded in a Pisa living room rather than his Forst home studio where he’s worked for five decades, ‘As Long As The Light’, Michael Rother’s collaboration with partner Vittoria Maccabruni, fizzes with life

LLong Reads

6 minute read

Leafcutter John: Making Waves

byBen Murphy

For his latest outing, Leafcutter John walked the Norfolk coast and recorded the sounds he heard along the way, mixing them with modular synth melodies for his latest album. Released on James Holden’s revered Border Community label, it’s his most direct and delightful work yet

LLong Reads

9 minute read

Orbury Common: Common People

byBob Fischer

Orbury Common’s records are fanciful delights, combining hazy hip hop beats and traditional folk trappings with the hallucinogenic imagery of a nightmarish parallel universe