Prior to the release of his second full-length, U.K. producer Ross from Friends wrote a unique piece of software for Ableton's Max for Live platform called Thresho that records, saves, and catalogs audio as it's being generated, beginning once the audio reaches a user-defined threshold and ending as soon as it goes below the threshold. This made it easy for the artist to improvise for hours and not worry if he got everything on tape or not. He ended up with a massive archive of samples and ideas just from experimenting for several months on end, and he was easily able to compose an album out of it. Written during pandemic lockdown, the record is a set of reflections about the producer's family and memories of the neighborhoods he grew up in, parties he'd attended, and music he'd listened to…

From the total effect, Do You Know Squarepusher (a brief LP or a good-sized mini-LP) doesn't just pose the question in the title, but practically demands compliance with the fact that Tom Jenkinson can't be pigeonholed. After moving from jazz fusion homage to 2-step satirist during previous years, Squarepusher turns in a record of radically different sounds, all of them well-intentioned but also difficult to focus into just a single statement (or two, or three). The title track is the best one here (in his usual vein), as close to a game of the dozens as a drill'n'bass producer is going to get; Jenkinson cues a monotoned vocal to repeat the title before moving into Aphex Twin territory with digital-piano melodies accompanying a series of brilliantly timed breakbeat trainwrecks. "F-Train" cuts up a vocal that sounds like DJ Spooky reading one of his favorite abstract textbooks, while "Mutilation Colony" comprises eight minutes of musique concrète that would sound familiar to any admirer of early tape-music composers Edgard Varèse and Vladimir Ussachevsky. And coming right on its heels is Jenkinson's first cover, a surprisingly straight reading of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" (using multiple overdubs of bass/guitar/drums), with a vocal so understated that Ian Curtis sounds like Ian Astbury in comparison.

Counterfeit² is the first full-length studio album by Martin Gore, the primary songwriter for the band Depeche Mode.
Martin Gore's Counterfeit² beat David Gahan's Paper Monsters to the punch by just over a month; with some better timing - and, you know, a synchronous album from Andrew Fletcher - Depeche Mode could've pulled a Kiss. This first full-length from DM's principal songwriter follows an EP he released 14 years prior. On that EP, Gore covered some of his favorite songs and made them sound unsurprisingly like his group circa that year. As one can tell from the title of this disc, this is the same concept, and even some of the most ardent fans no doubt breathed another sigh of relief with the knowledge that he decided once again to let other people provide the lyrics…

The North London group Komputer began its career in the late '90s as an electro-pop act modeled largely after Kraftwerk but changed its style considerably in subsequent years, moving toward a more original sound. Comprised of Simon Leonard and David Baker, Komputer actually began as a trio, also featuring Jane Brereton, and debuted on Mute Records in 1996 with a self-titled, four-song EP led by "Valentina Tereshkova," a future single for the group. A year later, in October 1997, Mute released The World of Tomorrow, Komputer's first full-length album. Seemingly a literal homage to Kraftwerk, characterized largely by analog synths and vocoderized singing, the album spawned three singles - "Looking Down on London," "Valentina," and "Terminus" - that Mute released individually with accompanying remixes over the course of 1997 and 1998…

Pentatonik (UK) is the name of R. Simeon Bowring’s solo project combining electronic and live instrumentation. Bowring released his first album Anthology in 1994 on Deviant Records. The music of Pentatonik combines strong melodies, classical progressions and experimental electronic soundscapes. The sound is both subtle and epic at the same time.

Andy Stott is a producer who has never sounded quite like anyone else. Covering unease, uncertainty and the unknown with a deceptive facade of the familiar, the Manchester-based creator specialises in the panic-attack soundtrack, pieces which, even at their most serene, still bristle with a fractious enthusiasm that’s hard to pin down.
In short, Stott doesn’t sound like anyone else precisely because his aural vision sounds so singularly wrong. His work is off-kilter, erratic, and unpredictable in all of the most startling ways. Stott’s tracks are baptised in a river of unrestrained distortion and acoustic artifacts in a manner which feels so unsustainable but sound so conceptually distinct; glass cannons that threaten to fall apart at any moment, but never do…

If you have an idea of Northern regions of the world or if you have travelled around Scandinavia then you already know something about Joel Tammik’s works. There’s a lot of space, small fragments and crispness, easily found in first chilly winter days or warm summer nights.
Joel Tammik began his musical journey at the beginning of the 90s playing bass guitar in different school bands. After Estonia’s emancipation and the collision of the iron curtain several cultures of western electronic music appeared on the local world of music and different raves took place in abandoned factory buildings. Around 1996 Joel met with the members of local jungle duo LU:K where he at first played the bass but some years later began also to compose tracks…

How one goes about surfing in the Arctic remains to be seen; perhaps our changing climate will make such a thing soon possible. Until then, we have to perform such a feat metaphorically, or at least do so vicariously, through the windswept beatscapes provided by the duo of Jarkko Turkulainen and Petter Friberg. The two Surfers manage to do a helluva job navigating their way across an icy tundra of expertly designed rhythm programming, over which skirt jittery synths making the most of sharp angles, steep inclines, and immaculately poised atmospheric tribbles that reflect a multitude of sun-dappled colors.

I Was Young And I Needed The Money! (1998). At its best, this album sounds like Stevie Wonder possessed and traveling at light speed; at its worst, it sounds like a battlefield of sonic carnage. "Deliver the Weird" is sure to go down as a classic drill'n'bass cut with its nuclear keyboard and bass work; this is where Gilberto is at his most potent. "Giant Jumps" makes playful allusions to Coltrane's Giant Steps. "Ms. Looney's Last Embrace" showcases his ability to integrate a wide variety of sources to his sound and keeps you laughing with him, not at him.

The '90s version of prog-rock meets the real thing on 1995's Deseo Remixes. Global Communication, Trans-Global Underground, Future Sound of London, and Deep Forest each contribute remixes of the world music project by Yes' Jon Anderson. The Deep Forest and Global Communication tracks are the highlights.

Initially limited to 100 copies on Boards of Canada's own Music70 label, 1995's Twoism EP set a high standard for future BoC output - though only the few willing to pay silly money for it were able to hear for themselves until Warp quietly reissued it on CD at the tail end of 2002. For those trying to compare it to the full-length debut (Music Has the Right to Children), it holds up surprisingly well (granted, two tracks here were only slightly reworked for later release). Excepting only the rigid drum monster "Basefree" (which sounds a bit like Aphex Twin circa 1992), Twoism features the same exquisitely spooky, textured emotronica that fans will want to hear, all at as high a level as the brilliant Music Has the Right to Children to boot.

This debut Solo-CD of Lorenzo Montanа is a fascinating mixture of IDM/Glitch and Chill-Out/Ambient combining different styles and modern production technologies. The sound is fresh and unassimilated,futuristic and "80s" at the same time. Using this unique music mixture Black Ivy describes the microcosmos of flora, lakes, ancient landscapes… the sound of the sap and microscopic life forms. Debut CDs often have this special magic that comes from years of collection and dedication to the best sounds and compositions the artist was able to find to finally release them. "Black Ivy" has this kind of magic and FAX is proud to present this music to you.

Mouse on Mars, the Berlin-based duo of Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma, approach electronic music with an inexhaustible curiosity and unparalleled ingenuity. Operating in their unique orbit within dance music’s nebulous echosystem, the duo’s hyper-detailed productions are inventive, groundbreaking but always possessing a signature joyful experimentation. A genre-less embrace of cutting-edge technologies have ensured that each Mouse on Mars release sounds strikingly modern, a fact made more remarkable when one reflects on the duo’s 25 years of making music. New album AAI (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence) takes Toma and Werner’s fascination with technology and undogmatic exploration a quantum leap further. Collaborating with writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei, a collective of computer programmers and longtime Mouse On Mars collaborator/percussionist Dodo NKishi, the duo explores artificial intelligence as both a narrative framework and compositional tool, summoning their most explicitly science-fiction work to date.