Tim Hecker is a Canadian-based musician and sound artist, born in Vancouver. Since 1996, he has produced a range of audio works for Kranky, Alien8, Mille Plateaux, Room40, Force Inc, Staalplaat, and Fat Cat. His works have been described as "structured ambient", "tectonic color plates" and "cathedral electronic music". More to the point, he has focused on exploring the intersection of noise, dissonance and melody, fostering an approach to songcraft which is both physical and emotive. The New York Times has described his work as "foreboding, abstract pieces in which static and sub-bass rumbles open up around slow moving notes and chords, like fissures in the earth waiting to swallow them whole". His Harmony in Ultraviolet received critical acclaim, including being recognized by Pitchfork as a top recording of 2006. It's been very rewarding to be an Andy Stott fan over the years. If you got into the Manchester producer early on, you would have enjoyed the quality and quantity of his singles for the excellent Manchester label Modern Love. Stott had a knack for writing novel tracks out of classic sounds, and in particular dub techno, a genre that's notoriously tricky to get right without sounding like a Basic Channel replica. He eventually grew tired of his club-orientated music, and after a period of banging his head against the wall, Stott returned with a distinctive new style he described at the time as "knackered house"--sludgy tempos, grainy sounds, dense atmospheres. It was a sharp left turn, but rather than losing followers he seemed to gain many more. This period established Stott as an album artist, and he's since written two more full-lengths: Faith In Strangers, RA's favourite album of 2014, was weirder, more diverse and, in places, song-orientated, while its follow-up, Too Many Voices, came out last month and pushed deeper into the unique sonic space he's created for himself. Demdike Stare is a collaboration between Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker, two childhood friends from the North of England with voracious appetites for record collecting. After years spent mining vinyl bins for source material, the pair started collaborating in earnest back in 2008, re-appropriating sounds they had spent a lifetime cataloguing into weird and immersive music of their own. The project went on to produce a string of albums: Symbiosis, Triptych and Elemental that were largely guided by the occult and the strange symbolism their surroundings in Pendle provided, but as a number of intriguing DDS mixtapes released over the last couple of years indicated, the project was starting to head in unexpected directions. In 2013 the first in an ongoing series of exploratory 12''s brought together under the 'Testpressing' banner appeared on Modern Love, finding Demdike heading into much more intense, brutal terrain. Inspired by everything from Industrial music to Noise, Library music to Free Jazz, House, Techno, Hip Hop and Jungle - Demdike Stare have refused to rest on their laurels or become overly familiar with their surroundings, creating an odd tension that's perhaps most evident when contrasting the sheer scale of the projects they have undertaken in just the last couple of years - from live-scoring films for the BFI to more commercial soundtrack work such as their input on Xan Cassavette's Kiss Of The Damned, and the Nicholas Cage drama Joe. This bridges over to their more multi-disciplinary projects such as their 'Concealed' productions with video artist Michael England and Krakow's Sinfonietta Cracovia, which featured in Doug Aitkens Station To Station curation for the Barbican, and into the esoteric selections of their 'Before My Eyes' DJ nights with Raime/BEB and the searing late night sets anyone lucky enough to have seen them play at a club somewhere in the world will no doubt have imprinted in their minds. You never quite know what mood you'll find them in... Stepping back from his luxurious and hard-working house/disco project Magic Touch, Damon Eliza Palermo looks back through Cocteau- and Kompakt-types of filters but with an ear toward the influence of shoegaze and krautrock and into full crystalline immersion - full, forestial ambience padded by light percussion and large swathes of breathy, deep blue melody.