Category Archives: Switched On

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

In appreciation: Martin Wheeler, aka Vector Lovers

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by Ben Hogwood

In the last few days we have heard the very sad news of the death of electronic musician Martin Wheeler at the age of 57. Perhaps best known under his alias of Vector Lovers, Martin was a prodigiously talented musician who made some of his very best albums for the Glasgow-based label Soma Records.

One of these, IPhonica, was completed in 2013 on an iPhone, using just a pair of Sennheiser HD-25 headphones and Blip Interactive’s first Nanostudio app. I was fortunate to review it for DMC World

I also had the pleasure of reviewing two of Wheeler’s very best albums under his Vector Lovers pseudonym. The first, Capsule For One, was released in 2005, and featured the coldly beautiful City Lights From A Train, an example of his ability to capture the weird feeling of detachment often felt in a busy city. Here are my thoughts for musicOMH on a rather special album

Next up, two years later, was Afterglow, where Wheeler successfully blended his descriptive sound as a hybrid, moving from instrumentals to vocals such as Crash Premonition, an unexpectedly emotive song with the author as vocalist. My review is here, with both key excerpts available to listen to below:

Capsule for One was re-released in 2022, with remixes by Wheeler himself. You can explore it at the Bandcamp link below:

Published post no.3,026 – Wednesday 23 September 2026

New music – Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan: Industrial Growth (Castles in Space)

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

Industrial Growth is the new long player by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan. First emerging in 2020, Gordon Chapman-Fox‘s WRNTDP project explores the modernist utopian aesthetic of the UK’s post-war new town development programme through timeless retro-futurist electronic music. Encompassing the programme’s progressive optimism and the dystopian echoes of its failure, the project has since explored a compelling range of connected ideas and resonances across a prolific body of work.

Expanding on the ambient excursions of earlier material, Industrial Growth augments WRNTDP’s scintillating soundworld with profuse volumes of distortion and dissonance, across arguably the project’s darkest LP to date. With sleek, engrossing synthesis, Kraftwerkian odysseys, proto-kosmische and uncanny atmospheres, the album dramatically confronts the spectre of societal decline. A stark, unflinching evolution for the project, it retains the civic mystique of WRNTDP’s best work while adding an increasingly uncompromising spirit.

“My music has been getting heavier and heavier over the years”, says Chapman-Fox. “As my music often reflects my feelings on the outside world, this is very much a visceral response to our current times. There’s always been a darkness to my work, but this felt like the time to unleash it all”.

A captivating record filled with murk and menace, Industrial Growth hints at hidden undercurrents and insidious forces, as Chapman-Fox reveals: “The ‘growth’ of the title isn’t about economics, this is something far more organic, eating away at our society.”

With the brutal, glowering sturm und drang of album opener This Machine, there’s the immediate sense of a gauntlet being thrown down. The discordant dread, jackhammer rhythms and searing white noise of this opening make for a monumental statement of intent. The track segues beautifully into The Wire, a passage which evokes the cyclical reprises of Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express, with Chapman-Fox reiterating and reshaping abiding musical themes and ideas.

A pervasive gloom hangs across the tracks Warrington Bank Quay and Heavy Industry, yet there’s still a sparkling beauty to be found at the heart of this music; an irrefutable sense of motion, dynamics, the use of light and shade. Chapman-Fox describes ‘Heavy Industry’ as a “rare moment of light” in all this. Evoking John Carpenter composing an iconic soundtrack theme for a lost public information film, it’s a stirring, resplendent highlight.

The album progresses fearlessly, from the eerie machine music of ‘Parkside’ to the hypnotizing industrial kosmische of Post Industrial Policy – like Chris & Cosey collaborating with Klaus Schulze – and into the melancholic dark ambient mist of Astmoor. Closing with the sublime, noise-contorted havoc of Industrial Unrest, Chapman-Fox ends an immense, foreboding album with one of his most discordant tracks to date. It’s a thrilling climax to an intransigent, hard-hitting work that bravely and cathartically contends with the adversities and injustices of our contemporary moment.

The majority of the album is part of a suite that was commissioned by Roadburn Festival for their 2024 edition in Tilburg, Netherlands. The studio version has been in gestation since then, with tracks being further honed on a tour of the UK.

The album is complimented on Bandcamp by a bonus remix of the lead track This Machine by TVAM. “I’ve worked with Joe from TVAM in the past. We grew up in the same area, and he’s an absolute joy”, says Chapman-Fox.

Designed by Chapman-Fox, the artwork is complemented by Michael Cooke, whose illustrations have appeared on the WRNTDP albums Districts, Roads, Open Space and Your Community Hub. Michael grew up in Runcorn and much of the artwork is based on his first-hand experience of living in the town.

Published post no.3,025 – Tuesday 22 September 2026

New music – Actress: Radical Frame (Ninja Tune)

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posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the album’s Bandcamp page.

Darren Cunningham, the man behind Actress, has a compelling musical presence – one that makes his new album Radical Frame an essential listen. Returning to a more spiritual, deeper house music in the form of early Matthew Herbert, Cunningham has made an album of intriguing contrasts, short snippets juxtaposed with sprawling, piano-led house epics.

The text accompanying the album goes deeper: “The idea of the black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically – as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence on the exclusion of the other. Now this is probably an overstatement of the case. Yet it’s all but justified by a vast interdisciplinary text representative not only of a problematically positivist conclusion that the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American, but of a deeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avant-garde as necessarily not black. Part of what I’m after now is this: an assertion that the avant-garde is a black thing.”- Fred Moten

When we go searching for a Black avant-garde, we have to be prepared to look in unexpected places. The route to a Black avant-garde involves walking down – what some might consider – peculiar highways. Where they see strangeness, a road leading them nowhere, we see nothing but beauty. The paths Darren Cunningham went down, the highways he took to make Actress, are a chapter in the story of the Black avant-garde. Cunningham the footballer. Cunningham the Wulfrunian. Cunningham the ex-footballer. Cunningham the DJ. Cunningham the Londoner. Cunningham the producer. Cunningham the painter. Cunningham the writer. Cunningham the composer. This is where the Black avant-garde in Britain is made. This is where you have to go to find it.

Across an expansive discography of more than ten LPs, Actress has created his own arcane language of hermetic references and inter-dimensional electronic composition.

Radical Frame arrives 18 years since debut album Hazyville, and it feels like an apotheosis. The image realised. We get the full gamut of Actress signatures. Short bursts of broken down music. Tiny sketches of zoomed-in sound. Refracted dance floor heat. And we get more. We get appearances from CASISDEAD on Live By You (another image, another mask) and Rainy Miller (another artist from the provinces, Preston).

Overchord, the centre of the album, is paired with its precursor Live By You. It arrives alongside a video by Anna van der Velde, featuring Cunningham trapped in a luxury prison of his own making, contained but not constrained.

Perhaps Radical Frame is a container for everything that Cunningham has built so far. A frame he is handing over to the next in line. The next artist to make their own way in the Black British avant-garde.”

Make sure you immerse yourself in this one! Radical Frame is out now on Ninja Tune.

Published post no.3,021 – Saturday 19 September 2026