Latest releases reviewed.

LAURENT GARNIER
The Cloud Making Machine
F Communications
***

For the techno fans in the audience, this is a Laurent Garnier title that will remain in the racks. Everything which made Unreasonable Behaviour an Eiffel Tower of an album for that particular audience has been put quietly to one side. Instead, it's Garnier wilfully indulging a more experimental side, having a stab at a few blue-sky collaborations and expanding his range. Reminiscent in places of some of Francois de Roubaix's film scores, such Garnier productions as Barbiturik and Huis Clos, both featuring champion jazz keyboardist Bugge Wesseltoft, are grooves waiting for cinema to catch up. While there are still tenuous links to his previous dancehall days (the dark, trippy patches on Controlling The House Pt 2, for instance), The Cloud Making Machine may well be intended as a pitch for some soundtrack work. As propositions go, it's a seductive one. www.fcom.fr

A GUY CALLED GERALD
To All The Things What They Need
!K7
***

Now based in Berlin and taking obvious inspiration from that city's burgeoning electronic scene, Voodoo Ray pioneer Gerald Simpson's latest work is an apt reminder that abandoning formulas can lead to some magnificent music. As deep and wide as the very best of his output - indeed, a match for the bewitching Black Secret Technology - the atmospheres and sounds which blanket To All The Things . . . in a fuzzy, spirited glow cover a lot of ground. Ursula Rucker's semi-submerged jazz-poetry on Millennium Sanhedrin loops into the Arabic flow of Call for A Prayer via a Margaret Thatcher sample, allowing the music to make a lot of points without resorting to a megaphone. Simpson hasn't turned away entirely from a Detroit way of thinking; First Try and the urgent, pacy What God Is are high on beeps and bleeps, but also rich with soul. www.aguycalledgerald.com