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Bad Breeding share video for storming new single ‘Joyride’, filmed in the Datchworth Village Hall by Roger Sargent.

Chris Dodd tells us; “In the middle of Stevenage Town Centre stands a sculpture by Czechoslovakian artist Franta Belsky. Joyride was unveiled in 1958 and became a symbol for the growing New Towns movement. Named after the sculpture, the song is a celebration of the dogged persistence of working communities here, who have found themselves at the mercy of late capitalism and unattainable Tory-painted dreams, of pernicious scapegoating and punitive abuse. Joyride is a song about remembering the pain of living memory and all those punished at the whim of ideological warfare. We’ve never really been ones for putting a face to things but decided to film something that we had more of an attachment to. Roger has lived down the road from us for years and the live performance was filmed in a village hall where we had our end-of-season football presentations when we were younger.”

Following their anticipated second album ‘Made Of Static’, electro-soul duo Stubborn Heart have returned with the second release of their ambitious remix series ‘Out Of Our Hands’. The latest three track collection features Vanishing Twin, The Koreatown Oddity and Shamos.

World renowned handpan player and composer Manu Delago released his unique new album, ‘Environ Me’ in September and has followed it with his new video, ‘Autoshred’, which breaks down with the grinding textures of a workshop. The video follows the journey of a car being slowly demolished in a scrapyard, against a gorgeous, juxtaposing mountainous backdrop.

Following their second album ‘Made Of Static’, electro-soul duo Stubborn Heart have returned with the first release of their remix series ‘Out Of Our Hands’. Warp signees Plaid expand haunting single ‘Talking Gold’ with eerie atmospherics, brazen horn sections and a shuffling, ominous beat. Manchester producer FUMU turns ‘Proves To Be’ into a grinding, industrial cut seeped in a grimy and threatening aura. Detlef Weinrich aka Tolouse Low Trax hones in on the beats to craft an infectious but distant club anthem.

Icelandic singer-songwriter Arny Margret is in the process of making her eagerly anticipated arrival with the announcement of her debut EP, ‘intertwined’, out on February 25th. It comes alongside new single ‘akureyri’ and its accompanying video, directed and edited by Guðmundur Kristinn Jónsson and Arny herself, with cinematography by Hákon Hjartarson. Vivid imagery colours deeply personal writing across the whole EP. Each track tells a story of self-reflection and looking back at the people and places that have informed who she is today.  

Brighton based performer and composer Poppy Ackroyd has returned with her fourth full length album ‘Pause’. A collection of 10 solo piano works written during the pandemic and shortly after the birth of her first child, the title refers to the feeling of normal life being temporarily put on hold.

As individual stories ‘Pause’ is compelling and ambitious but in its entirety it’s a flawless snap-shot of its time, highlighting the highs and lows of the period as well as a unique and challenging era for its creator. It carries with it a host of stages we’ve all found ourselves working through and has done so with gorgeous, poetic lucidity, all the while expanding on the sounds usually expected of a solo piano record.

Using a combination of hardware hacking and industrial manufacturing techniques, Lomond builds his own unique instruments and devices for creating sound which he combines with modular synths, piano and voice. ‘LŪP’ came about when Campbell was commissioned to build a custom tape-looper for prolific Fife-based independent singer-songwriter King Creosote.

The machine itself, takes tape loops that are 601mm long which allows for approximately 10 seconds of audio. On its journey the tape passes a large, rotating disc containing magnets inside. The magnets gradually erase the audio information on the tape, whilst the rotating disc simultaneously drives two small follower gears with eccentric cams that generate gate signals. The small difference in size between these gears cause the gate signals they generate to slowly drift in and out of synchronisation. Using LŪP alongside a modular synth you can patch the drifting gate signals into your synth to trigger patterns that meander in and out of phase, whilst your tape loop is slowly disintegrating. The result is a dynamic, minimalist and introspective ambient pleasure.

When violinist and composer Galya Bisengalieva first conceived her 2020 album Aralkum, it was to be a meditation on ecological loss and grief, both metaphorically and literally through the shrinking of the Aral Sea, one of the worst man-made environmental disasters on the planet. Bisengalieva’s sombre, mournful drones sound a furious death knell not only of the natural world, but humanity’s connection to it, now seemingly severed for good.

Aralkum Aralas is a deepening of the wound, and yet it’s a remix album of great hope — if not in humankind’s ability to instigate radical structural change, then certainly in wide berths of artistic expression about our dying ecosystems. Where Bisengalieva unfurled misty ambiences, Coby Sey and Nazira see potentialities of rhythmic energy — ominous joy, even. Jing draws out an icy trip-hop soundscape and CHAINES emphasises the dreamlike nature of the music in a sublime, delicate rework. Footwork game changer Jlin clips and snips violin squeaks into a percussive landscape of mourning, while Moor Mother drenches the bilious, gaseous rise of reverb-laden sound with some fire and brimstone lyricism.