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.

Warp20 (Chosen) placed the track selection process in the hands of fans, who voted online with the option to add messages like "This song makes you feel like a proud parent, à la John Hurt in the movie Alien," as reprinted throughout the booklet. The ten tracks (+ bonus track for Japan) that received the most votes make up the first disc. After track five, the disc makes a swift transition from covering exemplary material (Aphex Twin's bent lounge-porn single "Windowlicker," Boards of Canada's eerie yet blissful "Roygbiv"), to looking more like a sampler of recent releases (from Plaid's "Eyen" to Clark's "Herzog," all 2001-2006 territory). The 14 tracks on the second disc were picked by label co-founder Steve Beckett…

An anthology of Seefeel’s 94-96 work made for Warp and Rephlex, including their out-of-print studio albums Succour and (Ch-Vox), two non-album EPs, Starethrough and Fracture/Tied, and 22 bonus tracks from the Seefeel archives, many previously unreleased tracks.
Succour was released quickly after the success of their 1993 debut Quique - regarded as a prophetic example of shoegaze’s eventual transformation into post-rock - a newly minted contract with Warp would prove symbolic of where the group would steer the project next. The few "rock" elements of its full-length predecessor had evaporated, and vast spaces of dub and ambient would come to inform 1995’s Succour. Skeletal rhythmic elements amalgamating into their brooding, elemental and completely singular sound…

The Pulse EPs gathers together some of the strongest tracks FSOL recorded before the release of Accelerator (1991). Originally pressed as four 12" EPs between 1991 and 1992, the record collects 16 pieces under the band's more well known aliases of Mental Cube, Indo Tribe, Yage and Smart Systems, plus the first ever Future Sound of London tracks (which, "Hardhead" in particular, are far removed from the layered, abstract work the name is most famous for). On that level, there is little here for those wanting another Lifeforms or Dead Cities, but any fans of Accelerator are urged to get ahold of this, and it works as a more singular and focussed effort than the similar Earthbeat compilation, which veers jarringly from vocal house to ambient breaks and acid house…

Chiplandschaften (2005). More than two and a half years of work have been invested into this debut and a great deal of this time, producer Harald Karla has put into the breathtaking production technique of his music: all tracks are based on 8-bit sounds only which the computer fetishist has exclusively created with an Commodore Amiga 1200. Step by step, the Amiga sounds then have been recorded manually with an Yamaha A5000 sampler and in another step have been further worked on. In this very rangy kind of work process, Jonson has produced all thirteen tracks plus two bonus tracks of his debut. Not surprisingly, the album shows an incredibly unique sound. On "Chiplandschaften", quiet, harmonic tracks are being mixed with subtle grooving beats ("Autumnbits"), weightless worlds of sound ("Tiefszene", "R.E.S.A.M.P.L.E.", "Prozessordenken") invite you to float thoughtlessly…

The Future Sound of London’s long and varied history stretches back almost 25 years and as such a vast amount of unrealised material exists in the FSOL Archives. Archived 8 brings together another 12 such tracks; in some cases these are completed but unreleased songs from that time, in others the songs have been reconstructed or enhanced and then further mixed to form the journey. This album is not just a collection of random off-cuts. It is a fully realised album, worthy of sitting alongside the rest of the band’s critically acclaimed work.