New releases last two weeks: Experimental/Electronic

Review: Robert Smith has always treated remixing less like revision, more like ritual i a habit that's followed him since his days in Crawley, West Sussex and then surfacing officially on the first Cure remix album, 1990's Mixed Up. This triple-disc release of reworkings from the band's latest LP Songs of a Lost World feels assembled with obsessive care, mapping out every possible mood lurking beneath the surface. There are club-ready flips, yes i Sally C, Danny Briottet and Gregor Tresher all push the rhythm forward i but they sit beside glacial pieces that feel more like haunted sketches than reworks. Mura Masa's take on 'All I Ever Am' is disintegrated almost beyond recognition, its vocal a flickering memory. Mogwai's 'Endsong' feels like the end of the world in slow motion. Even Chino Moreno turns in something striking i 'WarSong' morphs into a sludgy howl with heat-warped edges. But it's the sequencing that surprises: these aren't bolted together, but grouped in arcs, as though Smith were arranging the bones of an old idea into something still alive. Four Tet's version of 'Alone' is a high point i deeply textured but featherlight. Like all The Cure's output, what really matters is the feeling of being drawn somewhere, and Smith's hand never letting go.

Review: Composed in New York by the Baltimore-born minimalist Philip Glass and released in 1971, Music With Changing Parts was the album that put his vivid, colour-rich sound on the map, marking a shift away from the ultra minimal 600 Lines (1967) and Two Pages (1968). Performed with free instrumentation, the piece allows musicians to switch between eight staves at specified cues, generating abrupt shifts in texture and timbre. Though its melodic material remains tightly looped and minimal, changes in orchestration continuously refresh the sonic landscape. Most striking is the psychoacoustic illusion Glass observed during rehearsals: when multiple players repeated the same short patterns, sustained tones seemed to emerge on their own. He eventually formalised this in the score, permitting long notes to enhance the effect. What results is a hallucinated resonance that pulses and flickersian early indication of the harmonic depth he would later bring to works like the miestone Einstein On The Beach.

Review: The twelfth studio release from Manchester duo Marconi Union reaffirms why they remain such a quietly vital force in ambient music. Formed in 2003, the pair's latest work arrives after a two-year process of reorientation i one that saw them scrap old habits, test new material live, and ultimately return to the atmospheric instinct that first defined them. The result is a seamless 55-minute composition split into nine movements: fluid, immersive, and full of emotional nuance. It's a brand new release that spans sequencer-driven passages, low-lit drone work and impressionistic electronics, all stitched together with an elegant sense of pacing. 'Eight Miles High Alone', the first piece completed and shared publicly, sets the tone with a solitary pulse and slow-building tension i its clarity and weightlessness shaping much of what follows. The music unfolds without force, evoking both disquiet and release. Though wordless, the journey speaks volumes. A sense of modern anxiety hovers throughout, yet it's counterbalanced by warmth, space and stillness. After years of refining their sound across acclaimed releases and multimedia collaborations, Marconi Union deliver some of their most affecting work to date i not by reinventing themselves, but by rediscovering the beauty of doing less, slowly, and with purpose.