VA Soul of The Machine: The Windham Hill Sampler of New Electronic Music (1987)

The 1980s were an epoch of upheaval and rapid change in South Africa. The decade began with the country’s apartheid government fighting to maintain its institutionalized racial segregation in the face of global protests and demands for the release of human rights activist Nelson Mandela, who had been jailed since the early 1960s. By 1990, Mandela was free, and apartheid was on the way to being dismantled. On the music front, things were changing too; At the beginning of the decade, the main music style of black South Africans was the jazzy indigenous jive of mbaqanga, a provincial style that had held its place as the sound of South Africa since Mandela was first imprisoned. By the end of the decade, South African music stars were making international waves with bubblegum, a flashy variety of Afro-techno-pop.

Manikin Records is on of the most prominent record companies present that promotes electronic music. Owned by Mario Schönwälder, himself a prominent musician, the company has on its books classic artists from the seventies electronic era such as Ash Ra Tempel and Klaus Schulze as well as lesser known and newer artists, many of whom are featured on this compilation that is a collection from the best releases by Manikin Records over the 2000.

Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise is the fifteenth studio album of French electronic musician Jean Michel Jarre. It is the second of a two-part album (the first being Electronica 1: The Time Machine) that is based around collaborations with other electronic musicians from a wide range of decades and styles. Electronica 1 included artists such as Vince Clarke, Gesaffelstein, M83, Armin van Buuren, John Carpenter, 3D (of Massive Attack), Pete Townshend, Tangerine Dream, and others, while Electronica 2 is expected to include collaborations with Pet Shop Boys, Rone, Julia Holter, Primal Scream, Gary Numan, Hans Zimmer, Edward Snowden, Peaches, Sébastien Tellier, The Orb, Siriusmo, Yello, Jeff Mills, Cyndi Lauper and Christophe. In all, the two-album collaboration is expected to have as many as 30 collaborators, and Jarre has described it as his "most ambitious project."

With ensemble vocal jazz, the danger is always that tight and complex harmony writing will come across as too smooth and too sweet – for some reason, chords that sound sharp and bracing when distributed among reed instruments can sound cloying and overly slick when sung by human voices. The vocal/instrumental quartet New York Voices don't avoid that trap entirely on their latest album (and their first as an ensemble in seven years), but they continue to demonstrate their mastery of the genre with a solid program of new and old songs and innovative arrangements. Their take on "Darn That Dream" is startlingly new (and features a fine bass clarinet solo by Bob Mintzer), and the lyrics that group members added to John Coltrane's "Moment's Notice" work very nicely. Not everyone will agree that the world needed a vocal jazz version of Laura Nyro's "Stoned Soul Picnic," but the New York Voices' version is really lots of fun and is sure to bring a nostalgic tear to more than one baby-boomer eye. Apart from a couple of saccharine moments on "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning," A Day Like This is a pleasure from start to finish. Recommended.

The seminal output of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop has delighted fans of electronic music and soundtracks over the decades. BBC Radiophonic Music (known as “The Pink album”), The Radiophonic Workshop, Fourth Dimension and Through A Glass Darkly have been released extensively on vinyl, but only the first two of these have been released commercially on a CD format. They include works from composers Delia Derbyshire, David Cain, John Baker, Dick Mills, Roger Limb, Paddy Kingsland and Peter Howell amongst others. The bonus discs of The Changes (Paddy Kingsland, 1975) and The Stone Tape (Desmond Briscoe/Glynis Jones, 1972), TV soundtracks to BBC series of the same names, make their debut on CD to complete the set, which represents the legacy of one of the UK’s most respected and ground-breaking musical institutions.