The Cinematic Orchestra is a British nu jazz and electronic music group, created in 1999 by Jason Swinscoe. The group is signed to independent record label Ninja Tune.

For the true follow-up to 2002's Every Day — since 2003's Man with a Movie Camera soundtrack had actually been recorded four years earlier — J. Swinscoe & co.'s Cinematic Orchestra produced another soundtrack, this one virtually invisible. Not long after Every Day's release, Swinscoe began writing music for another Cinematic LP, but in another direction from where he'd gone previously. This was a series of quiet, contemplative instrumentals, with Rhodes keyboards and reedy clarinets, simply begging for a narrative (call them orchestrations for cinema). With scripts for each supplied by a friend — each track got its own story, together comprising different scenes from a single life — and a series of unpeopled photographs supplied by Maya Hayuk, Cinematic Orchestra had the narrative they needed for their invisible soundtrack. (Added vocals from Fontella Bass, Lou Rhodes, and Patrick Watson represent the same person at different ages.) The results form an intensely affecting record, but one whose monochromatic format unfortunately serves no large purpose; when every song attempts to become a mini-masterpiece of melodrama, patience grows thin. Swinscoe tells us that he wanted to record an album where "leaving the spaces as empty as possible was paramount," but he can hardly complain if we choose to leave him the space to himself. [A U.K. version of the album was also released.]

Julianna Barwick is an American musician who composes using electronic loops. Her first album was released in 2009.

A huge return from Sam Shepherd as Floating Points with Crush, his first album in four years and his first with Ninja Tune. It twists whatever you think you know about him on its head again.
Available as a limited Indie Shop Exclusive Edition - 140g black vinyl housed in an glossy sleeve with exclusive alternate cover art. Artwork printed inside and out, 4 page A4 booklet featuring a score of album track ‘Birth’. Download code included.
A tempestuous blast of electronic experimentalism with some of Shepherd’s heaviest, most propulsive tracks yet, nodding to the UK bass scene he emerged from in the late 2000s, such as the dystopian low-end bounce of previously shared striking lead single ‘LesAlpx’ but also some of his most expressive songs with his signature melancholia.
It’s the sound of the many sides of Floating Points finally fusing together: the carefree selector, the considered composer and the passionate label curator.
Standard LP: 140g black vinyl housed in a glossy sleeve with artwork printed inside and out, 4 page A4 booklet featuring a score of album track ‘Birth’. Download code included.
CD: CD in card digipack with fold-out booklet featuring a score of album track ‘Birth’.
Artwork by Hamill Industries.

Sophomore album from innovative alternative hip hop artist features 11 tracks packaged in a cardboard gatefold sleeve. Ninja Tune. 2003.

Sampa The Great creates a sense of home on her debut album The Return. Its reference points range from classic hip-hop to ancient Southern African sounds. Built on four years of personal and musical soul-searching, it’s an assured statement, the product of meaningful musical connections and of Sampa having to redefine her self-identity away from the comforts of family and old friends.
OnThe Return Sampa has enlisted a string of collaborators and peers to create the album. Mixed by Jonwayne (of Stones Throw notoriety), MsM (Skepta/Boy Better Know) and Andrei Eremin (GRAMMY-nominated engineer for Hiatus Kaiyote and Chet Faker), productions are by Silentjay, Slowthai producer Kwes Darko, Clever Austin (Perrin Moss of Hiatus Kiayote), Blue Lab Beats and Syreniscreamy. The album also features collaborations with Ecca Vandal and London jazz collective Steam Down.
Building on her formative works, The Return sees Sampa tackle bigger questions, exploring what it means to feel at home, to feel excluded, and to see someone as an outsider. The themes behind the album are addressed head on in title track ‘The Return’. At the close of the track, Whosane’s lyrics refer to “returning to the self of my self”. This, for Sampa, is what she’s been trying to do for the past six years: to find new ways of feeling at home and rediscover an emboldened idea of herself. "Home is described in a lot of ways and means a lot of different things to different people,” she says. “I had to redefine in my mind and in my spirit what home means.” The album is both a re-telling of that journey, and the realisation of her aim; the album walks us through that return to home, while the accomplished sound and lyricism underscores the steps she’s made as a person and artist.

Without meaning to sound hyperbolic, fabric presents Bonobo is a really big deal. For starters, it was a really big deal that fabric decided to end its original mix series. Fabriclive and fabric were, of course, among the best-loved, most influential and longest-running DJ mix series of all time. Those iconic silver CD tins were the way many people discovered dance music. fabric presents is also a big deal because of changes at the club. The weekly programme has been significantly diversified, with new event series such as Forms, nights curated by individual artists, and Craig Richards no longer playing every Saturday. This new mix series will apparently aim to reflect some of these changes. And it's also a big deal because, well, it's fabric. The club turns 20 this year. Over the past two decades it's navigated extreme ups and downs, but has remained central to London's club scene, the biggest and most competitive dance music market in the world.
Your view on the choice of Bonobo for the first edition of fabric presents may depend on your relationship with fabric itself. According to Resident Advisor, Simon Green has played at fabric only once before (in October 2018), and his style of mellow, mainstream-leaning house and electronica hasn't been a regular feature at the club. It's easy to imagine older fabric heads, who know the club as an early adopter of tech house, minimal and new UK club music, finding him a strange fit. Viewed from a different angle, though, Green represents new ground for fabric. He's an artist with broader appeal than most fabric regulars, representing a sound less esoteric and more musically rich.
Green wastes very little time in showing exactly this. The first chunk of the mix is an explosion of melody, instrumentation and good vibes. It's almost too much. There's a noticeable key clash in the mix between Alex Kassian's "Hidden Tropics" and Âme's 2004 track "Nia" that shows a DJ doing too much too quickly. "Nia" is a rousing house music classic, but its execution here feels rushed. Plenty of the tracks Green selects have a "more is more" attitude—more melodies, more percussion, more sunshine—that both helps and hinders the mix. "Nia," for example, is followed by Durante's "Maia," a pretty synth-led number that smartly chills things out. With the introduction of an extra synth line, though, it becomes drunk on its own sense of grandeur.
The mix is at its best when Green deviates more between light and dark, a balance he attains nicely towards the end. The greater contrast helps a track like Dan Kye's vocal-led "Focus" feel extra deep and soulful, and Barakas's "Roach," which comes next, sound especially rude and shady. R. Lyle's "Perpetrator," a sort of broken techno cut with cascades of strings—one of the many unreleased tracks on the mix—also benefits from being next to Laurent Garnier's loved-up remix of Rone's "Mirapolis." There's little on the mix that's more than a couple years old, but the strength of two tracks near the end show this may have been a mistake. Nepa Allstar's "The Way," a bubbly 2001 broken beat track, and John Beltran's "Collage Of Dreams," a pristine 1996 ambient piece, are both very sick in very different ways.
fabric presents Bonobo hangs together a little awkwardly, with the control of energy at times misjudged. Still, there are plenty of ear-catching moments. Dance music fans who prefer upbeat moods should find plenty to like, and the availability of the full individual tracks, a new move for fabric, is a bonus. The reality in which fabric finds itself is that it might need to piss off some people as it develops new directions—the choice of the next DJ, whose mix comes out three months from now, should be very interesting.
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In November 2017, Young Fathers announced that they’d completed work on a new album. The trio – Alloysious Massaquoi, Graham ‘ G’ Hastings and Kayus Bankole – marked the news by previewing a brand new song, ‘Lord’ and a subsequent accompanying video. Just like their previous standalone 2017 single ‘Only God Knows’ (written for the Trainspotting T2 film and described by director Danny Boyle as “the heartbeat of the film”), ‘Lord’ provided an enticing glimpse of what to expect from Young Fathers’ third full album; something typically unique and exhilarating, but leaner, more muscular and self-assured than ever before.
Titled Cocoa Sugar, the twelve track album will be released on 9th March 2018 via Ninja Tune and follows the group’s previous two albums; 2014’s Mercury Prize-winning DEAD and 2015’s White Men Are Black Men Too. Written and recorded throughout 2017 in the band’s basement studio and HQ, Cocoa Sugar sees Young Fathers operating with a newfound clarity and direction, and is without doubt their most confident and complete statement to date.

Kevin Martin, under a dozen-or-so aliases and across numerous genres, has been screwing around with deep bass for well over a decade. 1997's Tapping the Conversation-- a concept album conceived as a surrogate soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation-- was his first release as the Bug, and in retrospect, it sounds like an alternate-universe prototype of dubstep, based on instrumental hip-hop rather than UK garage rhythms. By the time he issued his 2003 follow-up Pressure, he'd already charged headlong into heavy digital ragga, building a repertoire of grimy, distorted beats that mutated dancehall into a glitchy, blown-out commotion.
Martin's latest Bug album, London Zoo, is very much in keeping with that permutation, which stands out amidst the recent wave of dubstep in a way that makes Burial's Untrue sound like Music for Airports. But it also takes the Bug's work into a somewhat cleaner, less abrasive area-- it streamlines the sound, shaves away the distortion, and draws most of its impact from the rhythms themselves. Of course, "less abrasive" doesn't necessarily mean it hit any less hard: Martin knows how and when to drop a heavy beat directly on top of you, and there's a carefully crafted tension throughout this record, no matter how sparse or dense that beat actually is.
Sparseness and density tend to work in tandem on London Zoo's strongest tracks: Bass hits at machine-gun intervals, leaving deep, tube-station echoes disintegrating in its wake and giving a number of these tracks a simultaneous sensation of freeness and claustrophobia. Reverberating, distorted voices and spare synth melodies close in on you even as they recede into the distance, and the rhythms are so pervasive and locked in that after a while you start hearing the spaces in between as much as you're hearing the beats themselves.
Martin has also enlisted an army of top-notch singers and toasters for the record, ranging from dancehall veterans like Tippa Irie to Burial and Kode9 collaborator Spaceape. However, three names in particular stand out. First, there's Roll Deep member Flowdan, whose grumbling, elastic baritone contributions to the chaingun-rhythm "Jah War" (heard on the fantastic 2006 Planet Mu comp Mary Anne Hobbs Presents the Warrior Dubz) and last year's sinster, headknock single "Skeng" show up again here. Flowdan is also at the center of the manic "Warning", which features one of the album's best hooks and a hell of a rampaging performance; there's one cool bit about halfway through where he ratchets the intensity in his voice down to a conversational rumble to match a moment in the song where the bass draws back, then resumes shouting right when it drops back in.
Singer/toaster Ricky Ranking shows up on three tracks as well, and his vocal range-- switching from sweet melodies to foreboding chants-- is impressive, even if he's best suited to the slower numbers (especially the dirgelike closer "Judgement"). And the two appearances from Warrior Queen are knockouts: "Poison Dart", originally released as a single last year, is ruffneck feminism ("Though me na sling no gun, a boy think sey me soft/ But me a real poison dart") delivered with a sharp, wailing sneer over more low end than most MCs could contend with, and "Insane", which augments a chirpier, more buoyant flow with a smoothly-sung chorus and a few out-there adlibs, including a funny little riff on Tears for Fears' "Mad World".
The only caveat concerning London Zoo is how far it might skew away from your traditional notions of dancehall-- and even then, it helps to recognize that, if anything, this record is another manifestation of how London has transformed the sounds of Jamaica to its own ends, from 2-tone to jungle to dubstep. It's a tense record, sure, but that tension is palpable in a crossover-friendly way, invoking Babylon and fire while avoiding the more problematic aspects of "slack" lyrics. It's angry and ferocious, but always triumphant: When it threatens to bust out your windows and rip holes in your speakers, it crackles with the kind of force that makes you want to punch the air as hard as your subwoofers do.
----- Pitchfork