An album that fades in – grinding and beeping like a space shuttle returning to Earth – Born in the Echoes is the first LP in five years from the Chemical Brothers. It's a journey back home for the big beat or stadium dance duo, just like that spaceship intro implies, and one with all the necessary mutations. The dark, otherworldly, and prog rock sounds that kept many away from their 2010 release Further are back, although here they're framed much more attractively. Inspiration, innovation, and a well-chosen group of guest vocalists are rolled out sensibly, schooling the current EDM crowd on how to craft an album while balancing the heavy songs. With the hallucinatory, interlude-like "Taste of Honey" giving way to the Cate Le Bon feature on the Meco-meets-Nico title track, this album ebbs and flows as if the '70s Pink Floyd hadn't ignored disco. Speaking of, "Under Neon Lights" with St. Vincent as a robot siren is either Studio 54 on shrooms or The Matrix on acid. As usual, none of it is too garish even with all the loudness and chaos, and some of it is quite gothy and dark, including "EML Ritual" with Ali Love helping execute a mainstream dance tune that coolly acknowledges the passed-on genre of "witch house."

Cosmic Ground is a solo project by Dirk Jan Müller (keyboard player of the krautrock band Electric Orange). The musical identity admits a brilliant and radical medley of darkened primeval droning sonorities, driven hypno-electronic moves for an eloquent travel into the center of the mind. Mindsplitting and definitely recommended to lovers of the most innovative and inspired facets of Kosmische Musik's early standards.

Sweet Revenge is an amazingly sophisticated album in which Sakamoto sets the distinctive and heart-rending chordal and harmonic ideas of his soundtrack work to trip-hop and neo-bossa-nova beats. The songs are fronted by a succession of guest vocalists who each contribute lyrics which add up to an amazingly coherent whole–a mature meditation on love, longing, conflict, revenge and regret. As usual, Sakamoto was ahead of his time. By spotlighting the deep poetry of J-ME and Latasha Natasha Diggs, this 1994 album anticipated by years the introspective hip-hop diva trend popularized by Lauryn Hill.

At 73, it's tempting to call Roedelius the 'grand old man of ambient' or some such nonsense. To be sure, as a member of both Cluster and Harmonia his keyboard skills have been central in shaping the more 'new age' (for want of a better term) end of krautrock's sonic dna. Yet, despite his age Inlandish, finds Roedelius still supremely able to fire off beguilingly simple melodic piano lines, seemingly at will. His work on the album was completed in days, leaving electronica artist Tim Story to tinker and tweak them for several months afterwards. The results are stunning. In the same way that HJR's work with Eno remains strangely timeless, this album exists in a parallel universe where it's still possible to spend an hour in quiet contemplation. To call it 'ambient' is to do it a disservice. For these are tunes that wiggle and shimmer into the ears, gently refusing to melt into background noise.

Like drum 'n' bass, ambient is a genre which relies on making a little go a very long way; the resultant glut of weedy minimalist pastiches barely bears a cursory listen for the most part, but this collaboration between Harold Budd and Hector Zazou demonstrates better than any recent offering how the spaces between the sounds can be made pregnant with possibility. On "Pandas in Tandem", the ghost of Erik Satie treads lightly over a shuffle breakbeat; the result is fragile and crystalline, as tentatively pristine as snowflakes. Elsewhere, heavy rhythmic breathing carries "Around the Corner from Everywhere"; slivers of what sounds like hammered dulcimer undulate through "Johnny Cake", and clarinets collude conspiratorially on "As Fast as I Could Look Away She was Still There".

"Bricolage," a French word meaning to assemble something from available materials, is such a perfect term for the art of the remix that it's surprising no one has ever used it before. It's less surprising that Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose work has always had a cool Continental flair despite the artist's Japanese roots, would choose such an elegant term for his swish remix collection. Focusing on reworks of material from 2005's back-to-the-roots electro-pop experiment Chasm, Bricolages features a cross-cultural and cross-generational batch of remixers including Cornelius, whose playful sense of pastiche is to current hipster Japanese pop what Sakamoto's Yellow Magic Orchestra was a quarter-century before; his take on the spoken word cut-up "War & Peace" is considerably lighter and groovier than Aoki Takamasa's tense, austere version. Former Japan drummer Steve Jansen, whose collaboration with Sakamoto goes back to the early '80s, contributes the skittering "Break With," bridging the gap between new wave disco and contemporary IDM.

The most basic compilation for American audiences interested in Pete Namlook's Fax Records is a two-disc set including tracks from Namlook guises Air, the Putney, 4Voice and Shades of Orion. A host of other Fax favorites make appearances: Plastikman's Richie Hawtin on the epic From Within track "Sad Alliance," Deep Space Network and Dr. Atmo on I.F.'s "Kisy Loa," Atom Heart and Tetsu Inoue on their Datacide track "Data Haku." Fax is easily the most traditional-sounding ambient label, and the music would make an equally strong impression on fans of Hearts of Space and Basic Channel.

Since the early 2000s, Ott has produced, mixed and recorded music released on Twisted Records, including various collaborations with founder Simon Posford.
Skylon (2008). After 5 years of hiding in the west-country since his last album, musical oddity Ott gives Twisted Records his second solo offering under the name 'Skylon'. You can expect unique modern electro-acoustic dubs with generous spatterings of indigenous sounds from around the world ladled into the mix. But that's not all, there are a few tracks straying beautifully into different genres whilst maintaining the laid back but up beat dub vibe that we know and love. Add that to the usual mind-blowing production, arrangement, song writing skills and jaw-dropping effects combos and you've got a sonic feast emanating from your speakers…

The Woodlands of Old is a 2008 album by the Future Sound of London under the alias of their "engineer" "Yage". It is an electronic record foremost but using more traditional drums and percussion, ex-Propellerheads member Will White contributes drums, along with a number of ethnic sounding instruments, which tie in with the band's description of the album suggesting "the deserts of the middle east to the rain forests of Brazil".