Songwriter and pianist Anne Clark has been a cult figure since the early '80s and has amassed a rather sizable catalog despite her small but rabid following. She writes nearly-Gothic love songs full of obsession and pathos, and pretty orchestral settings with clever instrumental figures and stinging piano runs and minor-key epiphanies. She's a consummate artist, playing to her strengths while trying to subtly, but surely, extend her reach, and always following her own muse, even when it takes her into dissonant territory. Most of her albums are out of print even on CD, and sell for collector's prices when they can be found. This is too bad, because Clark has assembled a solid, if quirky, and passionately honest body of work. This best-of issued by Beehive is truly that. It features 24 tracks and clocks in at over 75 minutes. Many of these are Clark's most lovely songs, such as "The Sitting Room," "All Night Party" (with Vini Reilly of Durutti Column), the "12" remix" of "Our Darkness," and "The Last Emotion," as well as instrumental themes such as "Swimming" and "An Ordinary Life".

The third in Klaus Schulze's series of three-disc compilations of live and rare material (all of it previously released in his 50-disc Ultimate Edition box from 2000) is pure bliss for fans of early-'70s analog synthesizer music. The melodies swoop and whoosh like comets passing by a slowly drifting space station manned by dudes and ladies in unisex jumpsuits with long, perfectly coiffed hair, and beards on the men. Close your eyes and you're there. Many of these tracks are grouped into half-hour suites, but at the same time the whole nearly four-hour document can be seen as one solid piece of art, or a shaving from a vast iceberg. Schulze's droning pulses are like the rhythm of the universe, unending and, while beautiful, totally inhuman. If Kraftwerk was the sound of musicians attempting to become machines, Klaus Schulze's work is the sound of one musician attempting to become a planet. The beeping rhythms, like a heart monitor, provide a slight anchor to keep one from floating away completely as this music spins itself out in ever wider spiraling arcs across endless vistas of empty space, but the ultimate effect is near-total trance.

Volume Two (three CDs) in this series reissuing all the material found on the long out of print Ultimate Edition box sets (for more background on the series as a whole, see La Vie Electronique 1) is much more interesting than volume one, and the pick of the first six volumes. The music comes from 1972-1975 (but mostly 1972-1973), a rich period of experimentation, as Schulze was gradually forging what would be known as his "classic" sound, nearly palpable by "Blaue Stunde," the 38-minute piece from 1975 concluding the set. This second installment contains more finished works than the drafts-and-jams-packed volume one. "Das große Identifikationsspiel" (42 minutes) is a very good suite of rather experimental music written for a science fiction radio drama by Alfred Behrens. The 27-minute "Titanensee" was done with a ballet in mind, never to be produced; again, it is a strong work in Schulze's experimental vein. However, the undisputed highlight of volume two is a whole album's worth of collaborations with Hans-Jörg Stahlschmidt, a project that had been brought to completion, only to gather dust on a record company's shelves.

The limited-edition box sets in the Edition series (Silver Edition, 1993, ten CDs; Historic Edition, 1995, ten CDs; Jubilee Edition, 1997, 25 CDs; all gathered [with extra material added] in Ultimate Edition, 2000, 50 CDs) are the most sought-after items in Klaus Schulze collectors' circles, exchanging hands at outrageous prices. In 2009, Klaus D. Mueller and Schulze began releasing La Vie Electronique ("The Electronic Life"), a series of three-CD sets that reissued all the material previously released in these long-deleted box sets, plus a few unreleased tracks, with all the material put back in chronological sequence (the Edition sets mixed things up, time line-wise). Volume 1 covers the years 1968-1972 and is mainly very interesting. One highlight is "I Was Dreaming I Was Awake and Then I Woke Up and Found Myself Asleep," a previously unreleased 25-minute piece that, is stronger than Irrlicht, Schulze's debut LP. "Cyborgs Traum" is also major Schulze material.

A concept album exploring themes of broadcast communications, Radio-Activity marked Kraftwerk's return to more obtuse territory, extensively utilizing static, oscillators, and even Cage-like moments of silence to approximate the sense of radio transmission; a pivotal record in the group's continuing development, the title track – the first they ever recorded in English – is their most fully realized electro-pop effort to date, while "The Voice of Energy" precipitates the robot voice so crucial to their subsequent work.

This double disc is a collaboration between Ryuichi Sakamoto and Christian Fennesz, with the former man taking a decidedly dominant role throughout. The concept behind the album is fairly straightforward: on each night of a 24-date tour, Sakamoto wrote and performed a piano piece in a different key. By tour's end, he'd explored every possible tonal variation within Western notation. He provided these short, jewel-like solo piano melodies to Fennesz, who laid them in soft beds of gently caressing electronics. The results are very pretty…

The byproduct of a much anticipated, long-delayed, and ultimately scrapped album to have been called Technopop (and to have contained Kraftwerk's great dance single "Tour de France"), 1986's Electric Cafe suffers only slightly from lacking the thematic focus of previous Kraftwerk albums. Ironically, the '80s techno-pop wave had passed by band founders Florian Schneider and Ralf Hutter at this point, but their sly wit ("Boing Boom Tschak," "Telephone," "Sex Object") and melodic inventiveness still stand the test of time. Its segues virtually seamless, Electric Cafe plays like one mega-dance-mix, but with the tasteful restraint that has long been a Kraftwerk hallmark. This is club music for thinking men and women.

Ever the iconoclast, if there is one thing that Brian Eno has done with any degree of consistency throughout his varied career, it is presenting his art in an array of perpetually "out of the box" forums. All that changed – in a manner of speaking – with the release of two companion multi-disc compilations. Eno Box I: Instrumentals (1994) condenses his wordless creations, while Eno Box II: Vocals (1993) does the same for the rest of his major works on a similarly sized volume. Interestingly – and in his typically contrary fashion – this initial installment was actually issued last. Each of Eno Box I: Instrumentals' three CDs respectively concentrates on a specific facet of the artist's copious back catalog.

Shiver is the exciting and boundary pushing second record from LA-based Icelandic musician Jónsi, co-produced by A. G. Cook (PC Music, Charlie XCX) and comes a decade after his debut, Go, was released. The new album features tracks with Liz Fraser (Cocteau Twins) and pop icon Robyn. It will be released on 2nd October 2020 and was recorded in Berlin, Reykjavik, London and Helsinki.

In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud defines the term as follows: “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” To this end, a feeling of uncanniness distinguishes itself from just being afraid because of its relation to what we already know, a disturbing variation of what we expect to see when we look in the mirror or the kind of horror that comes from inside the house. The uncanny valley, for instance, describes the creepiness that seeps in when we encounter an almost but not quite perfect replica of a human being (robots, computer animations, the list goes on).

In an emotionally lush 5th volume, Carsten Nicolai completes the acclaimed Xerrox series of conceptual image-to-sound recordings with a romantic, richly melodic finale that epitomises his solo work’s clinamen from coldly mechanical and nanoscopic to warmer, widescreen themes since initiating the series in 2005 - RIYL Gas, Lawrence English, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Biosphere, Michael Nyman.

Noton is pleased to announce the release of HYbr:ID III, the third chapter of Alva Noto’s HYbr:ID series initiated in 2021. HYbr:ID III, continuing the trajectory established by its predecessors, crafts a soundscape of meditative and resonant tones. Drawing inspiration from Noh, a traditional Japanese musical drama dating back to the 14th century, the album reflects the genre's distinctive rhythmic movements and its nuanced expression of emotions through subtle gestures. “The HYbr:ID albums are conceived as worlds. My focus has been on crafting them to possess a sculptural quality. Each composition transitions into the next. I emphasize engaging with them in the intended track sequence, allowing sounds and structures to reveal their full dimension”. — Carsten Nicolai