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Bunnington JUDAH / ROOTS UNITYBack OffRoots Unity

If you type Gothenburg into the search bar at least a couple of the releases should come with gushing words written by our team, attempting to convey the fact that Sweden's second city is the country's hotbed of alternative, experimental, hard-hitting and uncompromising electronic music talent. From sledgehammer techno to weird rave mutants to blissful ambient, the town really seems to understand how to make the unexpected work.Arv & Miljo's two-side, two-track mini-epic is the latest case in point we've come across. Drone in the truest sense, it's a journey into the deepest sonic landscapes imaginable, slowly shifting but never risking leaving the previous elements behind, developing and enveloping in such a way that hypnotises and mesmerises. File under: How to make subtlety a truly powerful experience.ARV & MILJOValnad Av FornskogDiscreet Music

Finally the missing piece of the puzzle arrives, the early and absolute classic slice of genre-defining techno from Basic Channel under their Quadrant guise.Infinition was originally licensed to Carl Craig's Planet E imprint in 1993, and also Renaat's now sadly defunct R & S label, and became an instant sell out on both slightly differing versions and has been sought after ever since. Here Moritz re-masters the two cut's Infinition and Hyperprism onto a loud and crisp 45rpm press. The demand for Basic Channel records has been hyped of late due to the 10th anniversary re-press of the original 9 releases, this further 12" completes the early evolution of their sound, and the bare 909 drums and classic washy synth's show the early leaning's toward the Phylyps Trak style cuts, and their first foray in to the annals of techno history.Hyperprism has a more acidic feel, and a definite Planet E/Detroit sound with the lush strings backing the modulating acid line, while the subtle drum programming makes the groove sit superbly under the music, a lush and deep as you like vintage cut from Basic Channel finally available. An unmissable re-issue of a bona-fide classic, and remember kids - we've been waiting for far too long for a record to land with a new Basic Channel catalogue number - here it is. Legendary.

“Don’t listen to my record, listen to my message, vibrate to my music, let’s merge our dreams, together spreading our combined energy in an immense blue wave that will flood the world - and the truth with emerge.”Announcing his long awaited return with this distinct message, Sébastien Tellier bounds back to the forefront of our collective musical conscience with his highly anticipated fourth studio album, My God Is Blue.It’s a record whose message is powered by something almighty, by some higher plane, by something much more spiritually significant than anything else the Parisian artist has composed to date. It’s an album harbouring a prophetic philosophy and a vision of ideality, an album whose music seeks to not only entertain, inspire and charm, but also to create a community of like minded individuals searching to follow their dreams, and find their true path in life.“I’d finished my tour for Sexuality and needed to recharge and re-motivate myself to go and make a new record,” says Tellier. “But I was a little bit… lost. I was looking for a subject that I was passionate about.” It was this search, this quest for spiritual and musical inspiration that led Tellier to take heed of the advice that “ to be able to make pure music, you have to focus on removing yourself, distancing yourself from your dreams.”As such, Tellier began to notice a pattern in his dreams, and one which would go on to become the foundation of his latest oeuvre: “It had a really strong effect on me, I realised that I had blue dreams, I was having blue visions. When I went back to Paris to start making music, I wrote while thinking about what this meant, thinking about blue dreams, about spirituality, about truth.”With inspiration firmly back in place – the quest to understand and to realise one’s dreams - the creation of My God is Blue was able to commence. Starting things off in his usual manner, Tellier went about composing his newest creation in his studio in his apartment, before completing the record alongside reputed producer and Ed Banger stalwart, Mr Flash. “Each song holds a message within to be uncovered” says Tellier of the lyrical thread of the album. Leading single and opening track, the choral, grandiose ‘Pépito Bleu’ for example, carries the missive of “self reinvention” and “having the imagination to dream.”Citing artists such as “Michael Jackson and George Michael” as musical inspirations for this album, it’s clear the Tellier hasn’t lost his knack or desire for a pop pinch and serious dance floor appeal. A track such as ‘Cochon Ville’, for example, plays host to enrapturing rhythms and outlandishly catchy melodic hooks designed to entrance, mystify and seduce the listener as only Sébastien Tellier knows how, and to “put the imaginary, put dreams back at the centre of our consciousness.”Throughout his career, Tellier has been inspired, almost infatuated with different mentally, spiritually and physically provocative subjects, with each such infatuation going on to conceive a vision and a theme for an album. From 2004’s Politics, through to the hugely successful Sexuality in 2008, Tellier has spent the past decade practising and mastering the art of igniting a flash of inspiration into a blazing inferno of realised creativity. “I’m always inspired by a current subject, like sexuality, politics, and truth were the subjects of my first album. But in fact, you need to talk about the mystery of these subjects.”It’s this mystery that provides the real spark to these 12 tracks, with deep rooted philosophy woven through the album’s core and transmitted through mystical, sumptuous, spirited lyrics. There’s a vision encompassed in each melodic transition and shift, but more than that, there’s an invitation to enlightenment that pulsates through the essence of the songs, a vision and a promise which is strengthened by the union, the kinship of the online community being built around and through the music, L’Alliance Bleue (The Blue Alliance). “The aim of L’Alliance Bleue is to create a place of freedom… that’s what L’Alliance Bleue is to me, in a literal sense.” A collective with an “ambition to revolutionise our relationship with the world and all it contains”, Tellier aspires to create an “an amusement park for adults”, an online community where ‘followers’ are invited to share visions and to build ideas together under the musical guidance of My God Is Blue, a veritable discothèque of light, of colour, of spiritual vibrancy and of shimmering vision.From the first rattles of debut single ‘Fantino’ back in 2001, through to the enduring popularity of 2005’s sumptuous ‘La Ritournelle’ and the smash hit success of Eurovision touted ‘Divine’, Tellier has proved himself to be the undisputed king of a pop classic with a psychical, sensual and physical pull. His latest work presents a transcendental record of far reaching prowess and a road to a thoroughly modern, community led enlightenment. My God Is Blue is the work of a composer, a poet, a visionary, an inventor, and it’s merely opening the door to a world of thought and revelation which is yet to fully unfold. His ambition is to “bring back the imaginary, to revive dreaming…” It’s an invitation, and what a glorious place Sébastien Tellier’s imagination is proving to be.

Habitat, an environmental music collaboration by Berlin based composer Niklas Kramer and percussionist Joda Foerster, is inspired by the drawings of Italian architect Ettore Sottsass. Each of the eight tracks represents a room in an imaginary building.In Habitat the duo layers, loops and merges sonic textures and patterns into fluid blocks without the restraint of statics. African log drum, Bolivian chajchas, vibraphone, kalimba and various other percussion instruments are processed, pitched, harmonised and filtered through modular synth and script based sample cutting to form a collage of asynchronous layers.By using acoustic instruments and expanding their sound into abstract shapes, Habitat evokes a vague intimacy, a curious state of comfort in the unknown.