Plutonic Rainbows

Haunting debut album from Kelly Lee Owens, brimming with ethereal, floating vocals and almost sensual European house & techno. She has previous worked with Jenny Havl and Daniel Avery and they both appear on this album too.

A striking new album that deserves attention for the dizzying set of styles apparent on this debut piece. It's available as a digital download in the usual places and on Audio CD and vinyl as well.

Totally recommended listening.

College is the alias of David Grellier, a French electronic artist who contributed one of his songs on the soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive.

The album is a collection of film scores that are highly evocative - so much so that listening to these tracks, I kept wishing for some visual accompaniment. There are lots of slow-moving synth pads and plenty of space around them for the listener to fill in the gaps. Many of the tracks draw on 90s sounds in the fashion of Mark Snow and Angelo Badalamenti.

Shanghai is available on Audio CD in addition to vinyl from the Invada label.

Long-awaited album from this esteemed electronic artist. The tracks on the new album have an electro-acoustic feel and carry with them a ghostly melancholy that is always just out of reach.

Bleep Records:

The key to Sakamoto's genius lies in his ability to transform the sounds of his instruments into objects that sound like they are being transmitted from some far off land, from the Monolake rebreather style heart beat of Zure through the haunted rainfall that cloaks the late night wonderings of Walker, the sounds within async are further testament if any were needed of the acute musical genius of Sakamoto.

The new album is available on vinyl as well as Audio CD and 24Bit 96kHz digital from Japanese site, Ototoy.

This album dates all the way back to 1984. Despite that, I've only just got around to listening to it. It's a pleasant enough collection of strings and jazz that caused quite a stir back in the day. During the early 1980s, this would have appeared in many stores under the New Age banner. I remember seeing it mentioned in many magazines of the day as an essential album for relaxation and so forth. In many way, it really was a different world back then.

It also became a staple for the Japanese fashion house, Comme des Garçons - who used various works by the artist for their runway shows. Séigén Ono went on to compose albums of music specifically for the shows.

In truth, this album falls in with the Windham Hill collection and sounds a lot like George Winston and other artists of that era. Gentle piano appears on 'Manhattan' and although not typical of the album as a whole, it's a pleasant piece.

These days, albums like Seigén are largely forgotten but often find a new if somewhat strange after-life in the Vaporwave genre.

Seigén is available on Audio CD as a Japanese Import.

Aaron Dilloway is an artist still very new to me. He is also someone who has seemingly no understanding of, or interest in, the supposed limits of experimental music.

The Gag File his first new album since Modern Jester in 2012 is an abstract, visceral selection of experimental electronics and vocal manipulations that make for uneasy listening.

I don't really know what to make of The Gag File but absolutely nothing on this record is typical or expected.

You can pick up the vinyl from Bleep and digital editions are available from the artist's Bandcamp page.

Brand new three-track EP from Lone sees him continue to develop his own style. Crush Mood takes its cues from 90s rave while From A Past Life traverses darker terrain in a more satisfying way than elsewhere on this release.

You can order the new EP from most specialist retailers including Bleep & Bandcamp.

Bleep Records:

His first music since the release of his 7th album, Bibio hooks up with collaborator, Olivier St. Louis (Olivier Daysoul) for an EP brim filled with discoed delights and funky flecked rhythms. The title is tongue in cheek of sorts, with the lyrical content covering confused loves, blurred lines, unnecessary stresses and lonely nights. Serious only in the feat of love. The terrifically groovy guitar playing is the highlight of ‘Why So Serious’ though it is almost equally matched by St. Louis’ excellent vocal delivery, which glides from a pained whisper to a wailing chanteuse in seconds.

Link

Renowned science fiction writer will publish a new book, Agency next January. It will serve as both a sequel and prequel to his last novel, The Peripheral.

New York Times:

William Gibson’s science fiction is so eerily prophetic that sometimes it seems as if he’s creating the future, not just imagining it.

He coined the word “cyberspace” and popularized the concept through his 1984 debut novel, “Neuromancer,” well before the internet transformed human communication and daily life. He was crowned a prophet of the information age and has been credited with foreseeing the ways technology shapes our identity, and the rise of reality television and technological innovations like Google Glass.

But last fall, Mr. Gibson’s predictive abilities failed him. Like so many others, he never imagined that Donald J. Trump would prevail in the 2016 election. On Nov. 9, he woke up feeling as if he were living in an alternate reality. “It was a really weird and powerful sensation,” he said.

Most people who were stunned by the outcome managed to shake off the surreal feeling. But being a science fiction writer, Mr. Gibson, 69, decided to explore it.

The result is “Agency,” Mr. Gibson’s next novel, which Berkley will publish in January. The story unfolds in two timelines: San Francisco in 2017, in an alternate time track where Hillary Clinton won the election and Mr. Trump’s political ambitions were thwarted, and London in the 22nd century, after decades of cataclysmic events have killed 80 percent of humanity. In the present-day San Francisco setting, a shadowy start-up hires a young woman named Verity to test a new product: a “cross-platform personal avatar” that was developed by the military as a form of artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, characters in the distant future are interfering with the events unfolding in 2017, through technological time travel that allows them to send digital communications to the past.

For the most part, people living under President Clinton carry on as if nothing unusual has occurred. “The characters in the book are scarcely aware of the broader political landscape,” Mr. Gibson said. “No one ever says, ‘Thank God we’re not in that other time track.’”

In some ways, “Agency” functions as both a sequel and a prequel to Mr. Gibson’s noirish 2014 novel, “The Peripheral,”set partly in the same futuristic, postapocalyptic London, after the world has been devastated by climate change, droughts, famines and political chaos. The novel’s plot also hinges on technological time travel, which enables people from the future to alter past events and create a “stub,” or an alternate time track.

Mr. Gibson never set out to write a sequel, but the plots of “Agency” and “The Peripheral” converged unexpectedly last fall. He had spent about a year writing “Agency” when the 2016 election rendered the fictional world he had created obsolete. “I assumed that if Trump won, I’d be able to shift a few things and continue to tell my story,” he said. But when he tried tinkering with the draft, he realized that the world had changed too drastically for him to plausibly salvage the story. “It was immediately obvious to me that there had been some fundamental shift and I would have to rebuild the whole thing,” he said.

He changed the framework by resurrecting the time-travel mechanism he created in “The Peripheral” and making the world in which Mrs. Clinton won the presidency a stub, an alternate branch of reality created by a meddling time traveler.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given his grim vision of the future, Mr. Gibson tries to shrug off the prophet label. He’d rather not be called a prescient visionary.

“Every imaginary future ever written is about the time it was written in,” he said. “People talk about science fiction’s predictive possibilities, but that’s a byproduct. It’s all really about now.”

There is no pre-order page yet but I imagine it will appear in the next few months.

New release from Kompakt. Gas has crafted an album of droning, mounting dread mixed with symphonic reveries that take the listener away to other worlds.

As an ambient album, it's okay but I found my attention wandering during the latter half with some pieces being too long and unmemorable.

It's available on Audio CD and vinyl but it's pricey, I think.