Electronic Sim

Plastic Wood is a huge departure from the jangle rock albums that Lloyd Cole usually creates. Purely instrumental and recorded alone in New York and London in 1999 and 2000, the album is a startlingly beautiful collection of 18 ambient electronic songs. Cole's gentle, pastoral melodies are everywhere, but they're remarkably subtle and delicate here. Indeed, this is no noisy, experimental Aphex Twin wannabe at work. This is Cole operating in the hushed tones of Brian Eno's acclaimed ambient albums. One could easily confuse Plastic Wood with the work of ISAN or another of the acclaimed artists on the Morr Music label.

The long-awaited new album by Jamie xx In Waves is the next chapter in the career of one of the most in demand producers of his generation. With In Waves, Jamie replicates the emotional crescendos and thrilling volatility of an almost mystical night out– one where you return home in the cigarette ash dawn, the specifics of the last eight hours already blurring, but aware that these feelings will remain a crystalline memory.

This anthology is the second compilation from EM Records of the works of the late Henry Kawahara, a media artist and electronic music producer who was particularly active in the Japanese cyber-occult underground of the 1990s, a scene linked with technologies such as 3D (binaural) recordings, brain machines, sound chairs, computer graphics and compact discs. These tracks, produced 1990-95, include a series of recordings described as “Parallel Data Sounds” and “Sound LSD”, a “new language system that speaks directly to the cerebrum” using “frequency components that are not perceived by the conscious mind”, reflecting Kawahara’s interest in concepts such as astrology, love mantras, and astral projection. Also here are two pieces featuring dolphin sounds and human brainwave feedback, as well as pieces from a recording unit called H Music De-perception (HMD) and a group called Xiaoyun.