Owing to the incredible summer weather, I haven’t been overindulging in my typical diet of frosty electronic drones. It has all been lite reggae and salsa-flavoured hip-hop round here. Honest. Trust the Highpoint Lowlife bunch to tempt me back to the dark side. Ruaridh Law, (The Village Orchestra), has enlisted the help of fellow HPLL artists Dave Fyans (Erstlaub) and Dave Donnelly (Production Unit), as well as fellow sonic mischief-makers Tom Scholefield (Konx-om-Pax) and Chris Dooks (Chris Dooks…hang on, is that right? Anyone want to invent a pseudonym for him?) to create I Can Hear The Sirens Singing Again, while Fyans’s new solo work Broadcasting On Ghost Frequencies has found a home on the Moving Furniture label.

I Can Hear The Sirens Singing Again is the soundtrack to an episode of cult Japanese director Takashi Miike’s MPD Psycho. Given the identity of the director, you should probably be expecting the unexpected. And given the massed ranks deployed in the its creation, it is an unexpectedly focused and compelling piece – even when divorced from the visuals. This may be because of the way it was conceived, with different artists given different sections of the soundtrack to work on, their different moods and scenes diffusing slowly into each other. I’m not sure who is exactly responsible for which part, especially as at least some of those involved are playing considerably against type, but the narrative takes in rainy landscapes, metallic drones, spacey electronics, and crisp skittery rhythms. And a telephone. And Kristin Hersh’s “Your Ghost” played backwards. What does it all mean? I’d love to see the show to find out, but even without it, this is a gripping recording. Available now from HPLL, listen at Last.fm.

I’ve featured some solo HPLL grade Erstlaub on here before, and am pleased to find that this new release for Moving Furniture is hewn from the same dark gritty stone as I Am The Line Drawn In The Sand Between The Living And The Dead. The opening is pure Psycho, window wipers beating a lashing rain off the windscreen, while an ominous whine builds in the background. Just as a storm warning is issued, I think I hear some rumbling bass and tolling bells appear from amidst thick clouds of crackling static. Or do I? Erstlaub sought inspiration from the Gantzfeld Procedure whereby “where the participant is deprived of visual stimulus and bombarded with white/pink noise drawing the mind to form patterns in the chaos often hearing voices from the past or inventing entirely new constructs within their consciousness”. It reminds me of that other album of ghost frequencies I’ve been listening to of late, William Fowler Collins’s Perdition Hill Radio. Too soon, with a screech the dial is pulled off the set, leaving the listener trapped amongst pulsating drones and whining feedback, before it fades to an eerie near-silence. Apparently recorded in one take, this is another demonstration of Erstlaub’s growing, glowering greatness. It is available now from Moving Furniture – go there for a full stream too.