New music – Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Ruin: It’s Not Just Music (SOMEONE SPECIAL)

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posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the album’s press release.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith returns with Ruin: It’s Not Just Music, a new studio album that marks one of the most decisive statements in her creative trajectory to date and released via her own label SOMEONE SPECIAL.

 Preceded by four singles across the summer beginning in May with Ruin, followed by GTP, I Don’t Know What It Is, and September’s That Is Like You, the full album is out now on digital, streaming and vinyl.

Kaitlyn says: “I usually shield myself from thinking about how something will be received because I don’t want it to influence me and my creative process; but there has been a lot more connection through this album with people who listen to my music and with every new single, I’ve been able to reflect just how special it feels to be received as an artist rather than confined to a genre. Connecting with people on a purely creative level rather than feeling like I will need to uphold a specific “lane”, and hearing that those who enjoy the music also enjoy being a part of what is a really personal journey of exploring new sounds and artistic directions is something I’m very proud of.”

Across the past decade, Smith has established herself as a unique voice in experimental electronic music, a composer and synthesist whose work dissolves the boundaries between ambient electronica, contemporary classical, composition, and immersive sound design. Her new album Ruin: It’s Not Just Music arrives with a distinctive gravitational pull. The record moves with greater physical force, placing rhythm and impact at the centre of its architecture, revealing a more confrontational and embodied dimension of her musical language.

The release was brought to life during run of recent live appearances, including a live orchestral performance at the Barbican, Four Tet’s Finsbury Park show in London, and Björk’s Iceland Echolalia Festival; whilst the increasingly physical and performance driven direction surrounding this new chapter of her work is further reflected in future performances at ATOMIKA Festival in New Mexico, the Warehouse Project in Manchester, Berlin’s legendary Berghain, and fabric London.

Where much of KAS’s earlier work explored harmonic environments, the new album is built around tension and release. Inspired by the sound of drum and bass, breakbeats fracture through dense fields of synthesis, percussive patterns and her signature melodic fragments – motions that feel closer to the kinetic language of club music than the meditative spaces often associated with her past catalogue. The result is a body of work that feels both recognisably hers and newly charged, music that moves through the body as insistently as it engages the mind.

“I realised I needed to make something confrontational, almost like sonic combat,” Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith explains. “Not a ‘fuck you’ aimed at anyone in particular, but a record that creates space for catharsis. I wanted the music to feel physical and direct, something that releases tension as much as it creates it.”

The philosophical foundation of the new album emerges from an idea she describes as combustion and reconstruction. The title reflects a moment of collapse in which structures disintegrate and something more resilient begins to take shape in their place. The music inhabits that unstable territory between destruction and renewal, where force, discipline, and instinct intersect. “Ruin lives in that moment where everything breaks and something else asserts itself,” she says. “It’s music for the shock and the aftershock. Sound designed for endurance rather than comfort.”

The record draws energy from jungle, drum and bass, and dance-floor focused electronic music while retaining the intricate synthesis and tonal curiosity that have defined KAS’s work from the beginning. The result is a record that feels equally at home within club culture, contemporary composition, and the experimental spaces that have long championed her artistry.

Ruin: It’s Not Just Music ultimately reveals Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith at a moment of clarity and momentum; signalling an artist who continues to expand the possibilities of electronic music while refusing the constraints of genre or expectation.

Published post no.3,036 – Friday 2 October 2026

New music – Acid Casuals: Wa Da Da (Remastered) (Circuitry Electronic)

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posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the album’s press release.

The sole Acid Casuals album, Omni, a document of a carefree era of collective, anything goes creativity in Cardiff in the mid-noughties approaches its first ever vinyl pressing, reissued in remastered form by Circuitry Electronic on Fri 30 October 2026. Following the band opening their archive with the yearning harmonies of Bowl Me Over last month, Acid Casuals now reveal new visuals for Wa Da Da, a low-key cut of evocative electronica, typifying the album’s freewheeling creative approach.

Wa Da Da’s spacey bleeps, electronic pulse and murmured, intermittent vocal, expanding into a cascade of synthesised bells and beats, is a notable product of Acid Casuals’ experimentalism. While welcoming an ever-changing roll call of artists, Omni’s creation was thanks to the nucleic trio of Super Furry Animals’ Cian Ciarán, former Big Leaves bassist Kevin Tame and musician and actor Llyr Evans, coming together free of agendas to see where the combination of technology, instruments and melody might lead.

Refocusing on Wa Da Da just weeks before Omni’s overdue reissue, it comes days ahead of the band’s first ever live performance of the album at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama as part of Cardiff Music City Festival on Fri 2 October 2026. The video release also brings the band back together with visual collaborator, Bobby Klang.

“I think ‘Wa Da Da’ stemmed from listening to a Lee Scratch Perry double album, where the instrumental versions followed the singing versions. Not being able to remember if we’d played the album in full, it was played over and over until one of us remembered if a song had already been played,” says Cian Ciarán. “I miss those days. With the title meaning ‘love’, I think the track reflects this sentiment of ‘one love’.

“We must thank Greg Haver, the engineer who also recorded ‘Guacamole’ with Super Furry Animals, here too. He let me borrow his Proteus, which is the backbone of this track with all the bells and twinkles,”

Finding members between their ‘day jobs’ in music and film, with Evans notably starting in the cult classic film, Twin Town, collective’s activities stretched well beyond synth soundscapes. Acid Casuals ran an art gallery in central Cardiff, working with local artists and exploring street art, and later opened Capsule, a pizzeria, gallery and beer garden that hosted openings, listening parties and album launches. Then there was the Acid Casuals fashion line including a distinctive pair of jeans called The Scoop, designed to retain the loose shape of 1990s baggy denim without the hems being destroyed underfoot, each pair made in a small factory in Port Talbot.

Such a broad span of activities, alongside a spread of external interest including a Mixmag cover feature and landing a track on an episode of global hit US crime drama, CSI Miami, means that the story of Acid Casuals will never be one reduced to the status side project or tangential curiosity.
Originally released on Mon 30 January 2006, Omni arrived between the Super Furry Animals albums Love Kraft and Hey Venus! and has since become a singular document of the adventurous musical and creative community found within the cheaply rented studio spaces and commercial property of a pre-regeneration Welsh capital city. Pressed on coloured LP for the first time, the remastered edition is accompanied by CD and digital versions that feature additional tracks picked from the Acid Casuals archive.

Published post no.3,035 – Thursday 1 October 2026

New music – David Sylvian: The Distance Between the Killer and the Killing (Nanoq)

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posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the album’s press release.

The freshly minted label Nanoq is proud to announce a new album by David Sylvian. Titled The Distance Between the Killer and the Killing, it is the first album Sylvian has released in 15 years.

Comprised of sessions recorded between 2012 and 2025, the album is based on recomposed improvisational sessions with a variety of artists ranging from Otomo Yoshihide, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bilianna Voutchkova and Miako Klein, to Jamie Drouin, Lance Austin Olson and more. The 46-minute instrumental is unlike anything tackled by Sylvian before and is seen by Sylvian himself as the official follow up to his 2009 album Manafon.

In Pauline Nadrigny’s essay on the album, she describes something of the listening experience.  “…voices surge that belong to no one in particular. One that hoots and hums across a violin, worked until it loses its voice, becomes mere matter among other matter. A voice inside the breath of a clarinet or a recorder. Grunts, gurgles, distant cries, somewhere between man and bird, woman and nuthatch. Fragments of choirs, far off, snatches of a song long since lost. Too far to be recovered.”

The Distance Between the Killer and the Killing will be released on 26 February 2027 and is available to preorder now on a variety of formats and special editions, art directed by Sylvian and designed by Chris Bigg. Alongside the standard vinyl LP and plastic-free gatefold CD, there are two limited editions: a marbled vinyl housed in a mirror-board sleeve; and a deluxe CD in case-bound book packaging.

Published post no.3,033 – Wednesday 30 September 2026

Switched On – Various Artists: Total 26 (Kompakt)

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Reviewed by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

Having celebrated a quarter of a century of top-level electronic music, Kompakt look to the next phase with another annual round-up. With sixteen tracks primed for fans, they include reassuringly familiar names who the label followers will immediately lap up.

As the Cologne label say in their humourous press release, “It’s as sure as night follows day, one of the last truly reliable things in these uncertain times, a rock in the storm of information overload, and still one of the best things you can make from PVC.”

What’s the music like?

Typically varied and occupying slots both inside and outside of the box. Kompakt always bring fresh inventions to their compilation, which never feels like a cast-off of nearly or forgotten tracks, and is sequenced to ensure the biggest benefits are felt from listening start to finish.

To which end, DJ H0TLINE gets us off to a strong, four to the floor-based start, picked up by Orlando Voorn who brings more of a breakbeat edge to the remix of So Deep. What then works is a very satisfying variation of speeds, from the wondrous dub-heavy sounds of Jürgen Paape, with Fenja Ludwig guesting on Unter dem Himmel, to the sparse but driven techno of Robag Wruhme. Sabrah Desha is one of the collection’s biggest thrills, its bassline deserving of the biggest possible subwoofer.

The smoky Burn Attitude of Michael Mayer leaves its mark, as does an extended version of Rex The Dog’s Far Out! and an introduction to Jörg Burger’s Team 85E project courtesy of Komm Schlaf Bei Mir. Add productions from Reinhard Voigt, Sog (aka cofounder Wolfgang Voigt) and Frankey & Sandrino and you have a very strong line-up.

Does it all work?

Yes, it does – and any idea that this might be a routine exercise is dismissed very early on. Listen several times and this will become your electronic playlist of choice to round off the summer.

Is it recommended?

Fans will need no persuasion of course, but in the unlikely event that you haven’t yet dabbled in anything Kompakt, the Pop Ambient and Total compilations always act as the ideal springboard from which to plan your discoveries. This is no exception!

Listen / Buy

Published post no.3,032 – Tuesday 29 September 2026

Switched On – BUNKR: Signs EP (VLSI)

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Reviewed by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

As James Dean, aka BUNKR, writes: “Signs is a companion piece created from the same sessions as my recent album Signals, but looking in a different direction.

Where Signals explored the mysteries, memories and hidden histories of the Surrey Hills, Signs follows those signals towards the distant glow of the city beyond.

The EP captures the pull of the metropolis: the lights, movement and endless energy of urban life viewed from afar. Built around hypnotic loops, shifting rhythms and immersive electronic textures, Signs continues the story begun with Signals: a journey through memory, place and the unseen connections between the natural and human worlds.”

What’s the music like?

If you know BUNKR, you know Dean has a high quality threshold for what he releases, and this EP is no different, presenting typically atmospheric and evocative music, with a hint of mystery and bags of widescreen colour.

From the outset Construct Collapse grips the listener with its widescreen panorama, reaching a thrilling high when the four to the floor beat drops. Cruisen presents a cooler but equally rewarding picture, before the reassuring thick drone backing Eternal Cities comes to the fore. When it cuts loose, the beat and busy synths on this track are a killer combination – and are complemented by The Distance Ate Itself, bringing us back to earth.

Does it all work?

It does – time and space are a given in BUNKR’s music, but so are melody and imagination. All are present here.

Is it recommended?

Absolutely – the ideal companion piece to the excellent LP. If you don’t have either yet, get both!

Listen / Buy

Published post no.3,031 – Monday 28 September 2026