Shackleton calls on his cosmic ensemble for another Tunes Of Negation release. Together with vocalist Heather Leigh, pianist Takumi Motokawa and percussionist Raphael Meinhart, Shackleton takes you on a deep space excursion, with extended run times and a colourful collage of instrumentation. The tracks range from serene, Midori Takada-esque passages to full-throttle jazz, humid ambience and boundary-pushing electronics. The centrepiece, ‘Naked Shall I Return’, features a shamanic vocal performance from Heather Leigh, peaking the energy before ‘Water To Ashes’ finds the band in the kind of sludgy style you might hear from Muslimgauze.

Vocalist Heather Leigh, percussionist Takumi Motokawa, mallet player Raphael Meinhart and club luminary Shackelton unite as Tunes Of Negation for a vibrant and unclassifiable LP. Reach The Endless Sea takes off where Shackleton’s 2018 EP Furnace Of Guts left off. With Shackleton manning his electronic tuned percussion, he, Motokawa and Meinhart combine to create a set of droning rhythm pieces that draw heavily on Indian raga cycles. Leigh’s incantory chants crop up from time to time, something that makes Reach The Endless Sea an even headier brew. Comparisons can be made to Boredoms and Peter Zummo, but really this is a record out on its own.

Shackleton continues his voyage away from the moody dance music of his early years and into a brave new sonic world on Primal Forms, an LP made in collaboration with Polish clarinetist/multi-instrumentalist Wacław Zimpel. There is certainly a through line between this record and Tunes Of Negation, Shackleton's previous outing on Cosmo Rhythmatic. Here Shackleton and Zimpel blast the sounds of Jon Hassell’s Fourth World into hyperspace, blending them with pulsating minimalism, drone, free jazz, new-age and a whole cornucopia of other styles. The result is a trio of verdant pieces remaining wildly in a league of their own.

Shack’s back! The enigmatic producer returns with two tunes on his own Woe To The Septic Heart! imprint. It goes without saying that what we have here is club music of eerie deepness - that’s standard Shackleton procedure at this point. The interesting thing about both ‘Furnace Of Guts’ and ‘Wakefulness And Obsession’ is how they appear to be tracks that take shape in real time. Both tunes begin without form. ‘Furnace’ turns over a sample of an Irish folk song in a way that could be an oblique nod to Bullion while the B-side is a droning sound-soup. As the tunes progress their grooves slowly coalesce from a mish-mash of synthetic tuned percussion, dubby bass and lackadaisical drums. It’s almost as if Shackleton is giving us his own twisted take on the Principe sound here. Both numbers are, of course, hypnotically powerful.