Category Archives: Switched On

New music – Jamie Lidell & Luke Schneider: New Land (Northern Spy Records)

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adapted from the press release by Ben Hogwood

Jamie Lidell and Luke Schneider have created a kind of sonic tool to navigate a liminal state of mind. Their new collaborative LP, A Companion For The Spaces Between Dreams, is due for release on 31 October on Brooklyn experimental imprint Northern Spy Records, designed as a reverent companion for psychedelic journeys born from Lidell’s own ketamine therapy sessions, which deepened his belief in art’s healing power.

“A mind is often found more exposed during psychedelic experiences,” Lidell explains. “Specifically in a therapeutic setting, where trust is key to approach issues and work through events in the way of growth. This is music to support and guide the listening with or without psychedelic sensory heightening.”

From the album, and released today, New Land travels the distance, shape shifting with sparkling, pulsating textures and vast drones that stretch for miles. Brent Stewart’s accompanying film for New Land combines three simple ingredients- expired Super 8mm tri X black & white film, sunlight and pure water from a hidden Tennessee creek.”

Neither Lidell nor Schneider is a stranger to brain-bending timbres. UK-born Lidell cut his teeth as a member of the microhouse duo Super_Collider and later released genre bending solo albums on Warp Records, spanning abstract techno to neo-soul. His prior 2025 album, Places of Unknowing, was Lidell’s first in nine years, exploring symphonic arrangements indebted to David Bowie and David Sylvian. As a pedal steel guitarist, Schneider has worked with artists including Margo Price, William Tyler, and Orville Peck. He has issued cosmic solo LPs on Third Man Records and Leaving Records, which meld instrumental shoegaze, outlaw country, and new age.

Their partnership emerged unexpectedly while working on a promotional video for Moog. Two days of freewheeling collaboration in the studio sparked A Companion For The Spaces Between Dreams, a collection of five long-form pieces that are almost suite-like. Lidell uses modular synths, Fender Rhodes, tape effects, and percussion to weave a fathomless tapestry from Schneider’s improvised pedal steel swells. 

Lidell later returned to the sessions in a window of heightened neuroplasticity, refining the material through layers of sonic micro‑detail. The result is tactile and transportive. Prickly textures and sinewy drones call to mind dewy flowers at dawn. Whispers of krautrock flicker, echoing Lidell’s preference for jagged sonics during treatments. A Companion For The Spaces Between Dreams evades the pitfalls of clinical sterility, inducing a vulnerable inner voyage.

Published post no.2,694 – Tuesday 21 October 2025

New music – Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore: Melting Moon (InFiné)

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adapted from the press release by Ben Hogwood

Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore have formed a formidable duo to release a new album, Tragic Magic, due out on 16 January 2026 via InFiné. Today they release the new single Melted Moon, one of “seven immersive, evocative songs” that make up the album. The press release details how, “together in freeform dialogue, voice and instrument, Barwick and Lattimore render a meditation on tragedy, wonder, and the restorative power of shared experience.”

The story continues: “Co-produced by Trevor Spencer (Fleet Foxes, Beach House), Tragic Magic came together in just nine days, a testament to the “musical telepathy,” as Barwick puts it, that has developed between the two artists over the years traveling the world as friends and tourmates. Sessions crossed improvisation with loose ideas they arrived in Paris with from Los Angeles, shortly after the January 2025 wildfires while still reeling for their community.

Barwick and Lattimore were given access to the extraordinary instrument collection of the Philharmonie de Paris’ Musée de la Musique in partnership with InFiné. The two artists embraced a divine setting, overwhelmed by the beauty and history at their fingertips. Lattimore selected three harps tracing the evolution of the instrument from 1728 to 1873, and Barwick chose several analog synthesizers that have shaped decades of exploratory music, including the Roland JUPITER and Sequential Circuits PROPHET-5, among other treasures.

“We were so lucky to have access to this experience. There was a lot of reverence, working with people with such warmth and enthusiasm, bringing these instruments into a modern context, literally taken off the shelves of the museum,” says Lattimore. “We wanted to honor the past while making music that we feel is a true expression of ourselves,” Barwick adds.

Today’s release of Melted Moon is accompanied by a video of Barwick and Lattimore performing the song live. Directed and edited by Joel Kazuo Knoernschild, the performance was filmed at Lou Lou’s Jungle Room at the Lafayette Hotel in San Diego this past April.”

The first single, Perpetual Adoration, is followed by the album’s closing track Melted Moon, a direct response to the Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025. The bold strokes of Lattimore’s harp soften as a calming chord progression asserts itself, before Barwick’s seraphic vocal adds a beautiful counter melody.

Barwick recalls “packing up her life under the dark ash clouds, “What do I need for these trips, but also, what do we need if we can’t come back to this house?” Lattimore lends a harp refrain that loops and echoes in the eventide, a measure in which she plays above as Barwick, uncharacteristically free of effects, offers her lyrics in poignant clarity, both haunting and hopeful (“Under the melted moon / The lights are all out / A strange taste in my mouth / You may never go home again / At least not the home you know”).

The notion embodies Tragic Magic as a whole: two artists and friends processing life through music, observing moments and working through emotions, contributing what they can to the world, within a lineage of creative expression and visionary invention represented by the very tools they used to realize this project.

Published post no.2,688 – Wednesday 15 October 2025

Switched On – Elninodiablo – The Downey Groove (El Niño Diablo Music)

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by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

Elninodiablo is the pseudonym of Berlin-based Stephanos Pantelas, who is releasing what he describes as ‘his most personal and unrestrained release to date’.

The Downey Groove took shape during a long stay in the mountains of Cyprus, Pantelas with only a laptop, headphones, and a field recorder for company. His sketches gradually evolved into an album proper, enjoying the differing styles of dub, synth-based electronica and freeform beats with good feeling. Live percussion rubs shoulders with boomy bass, Pantelas operating without a concept.

“For me, music is spirit in sound, truth expressed through frequency”, says the producer. “It moves through you. It transforms.” He goes on to describe the album as “a womb-like slap in the face and a warm, gentle cuddle.”

What’s the music like?

All of the above – but operating in a wide-open space, reflecting the place where The Downey Groove began.

This is freeform, feelgood music, themed loosely on dub-based rhythms operating at the speed of slower house or breakbeat. It is atmospheric and often drenched in heat; a definite boon this time of year. Highlights include the brooding, slightly glitchy Misteriosa Noche, while The Soul Monad is an effective fusion of electro and dub, with numerous soundbites.

Rodeotheque is a lot of fun, going continental with a big beat, but the best two are saved for late in the album, with The Downey Groove and especially Rise In Dub hitting the sweet spot.

Does it all work?

It does. The freeform music is easy to enjoy and kick back to, but the stealthy bass grooves don’t take long to work their magic if movement is what you’re after.

Is it recommended?

It is indeed – readily recommended to lovers of dub or easy-paced electronica. Good vibes abound, with plenty of bass!

Listen / Buy

Published post no.2,683 – Friday 10 October 2025

New music – Chris Liebing & Speedy J – Collabs 3000 (NovaMute)

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adapted from the press release by Ben Hogwood

Collabs 3000 – Chris Liebing & Speedy J (aka Jochem Paap) -announce the 20th Anniversary Edition of their smouldering collision of taught techno rhythms and sonic abstraction, Metalism,and the release of tracks from their first collaboration in nearly two decades. Metalism will be available in full on vinyl for the first time, and on CD and digitally – both with the original artwork by The Designers Republic – on 14 November. That will be preceded by the ‘2025 EP’, available now on vinyl (limited edition of 500), with the digital following on 7 November, via NovaMute.

The 2025 EP kicks off with ‘Zwart’, a track of driving kaleidoscopic techno burrowing deep into your brain and limbs, and ‘Spiegeling’, where propulsive techno rhythms, and minimal ricocheting melodies coalesce for this essential dancefloor track. Both cuts offer a tantalising glimpse of what these two these two Techno titans have been creating nearly 25 years after they originally joined forces for Collabs 3000. Artwork for the EP is a playful nod to ‘Comedian’, Maurizio Cattelan’s controversial conceptual artwork and references the duo’s “bass banana”, which is passed between them to signal whose turn it is to lead the beats.

Techno innovators, Chris Liebing & Speedy J, began their Collabs 3000 project in 2001, at Frankfurt’s notorious U60311 club. Liebing and Paap, already key players in the European Techno scene, performed an off-the-cuff set that saw Liebing mixing out of a Speedy J live set and Speedy J bouncing off Liebing’s selections behind the deck, creating an utterly unique set.

Soon after that set the pair recorded at Paap’s studio in Rotterdam for a release for Speedy J’s celebrated collaborative series on NovaMute, Collabs. The resulting 12” helped to define the sound of early ‘00s Techno and their chemistry in the studio meant that they soon reconvened to record an album, Metalism.

The 20th Anniversary edition of Metalism has been remastered by Chris Liebing, and comes housed in the original art by The Designers Republic. The eleven relentless, layered tracks that move from brutal tough drums and dancefloor bound techno to more experimental meanderings, combine the pair’s mastery of subversive electronics and peak time techno and have lost none of their sheer power in the intervening years. 

The 20th Anniversary Edition of Metalism is available on double vinyl, CD and digitally on 14 November via NovaMute. Pre-order HERE
2025 EP is out now on limited vinyl, and digitally on 7 November via NovaMute. Pre-save HERE

Published post no.2,661 – Thursday 18 September 2025

Switched On – John Tejada – The Watchline (Palette Recordings)

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by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

The press release for John Tejada’s new album puts his subtle shift in musical direction in perspective. The Watchline is described as “a quiet evolution in tone and form”… “emotionally focussed, sonically weathered”.

His fifteenth album, it is a more personal affair, more than likely influenced by experiencing the trauma of the 2024 fires in California, more or less on his doorstep.

What’s the music like?

Tejada’s deeply personal writing is some of his best music yet. Always a consistent producer, he has often explored the mechanical side of techno to excellent effect – but this time, bringing in tightly woven guitar lines and strong, solid beats, he has hit the sweet spot.

Until The End Of The World encapsulates where he is right now, a dynamic track that builds gradually but with increasing strength and depth, and an underlying feeling of strength in adversity.

Tejada uses a beefier sound here, with bigger drums that are especially evident on the scattered beats of Hollowcrest and the excellent Vaporail, a broken beat shapeshifter. Elsewhere there are widescreen panoramas, with the broad expanse of Driftreturn a notably open affair, while Static Searching benefits from an excellent blend of strong, danceable rhythms and electronic chatter, topped with guest vocals from March Adstrum.

Does it all work?

It does. A cohesive and really strong set, with no weak links.

Is it recommended?

It is. Always a consistent producer, John Tejada has excelled himself here with some of the finest music he has made to date. Emotive and beautifully weaved together, this is a deeply rewarding collection of subtle yet meaningful techno music.

Listen / Buy

Published post no.2,659 – Tuesday 16 September 2025