The Quietus went to Czech medieval castle to speak with the leaders of the local dungeon synth scene, music reminiscent of the one that can be heard in fantasy video games. Fans of this genre number in the thousands, with a number of creators of this type of music being really small. Its creators, the Q writes, guard the promise of adventure somewhere else, in a never-never land whose laws cannot be fully explained. Dungeon synth is the outpost of those survivors, who have retained their childhoods' free imagination.

The Guardian presents 'Guerrilla', the debut album by Angolan electronic artist Nazar as "a psychohistorical investigation", going from civil war in Angola to the rhythms of kuduro – a dense, explosive electronic music. Nazar calls the result “rough kuduro” – a caustic inversion of Angolan pride that packs the energy of kuduro down like gunpowder before blasting it apart, leaving distorted drums and pockmarks of dirt and noise, gun-cocks as percussion and whirring helicopter blades. Listen to the album 'Guerrilla' in full at Bandcamp.

An amazing interview in the Quietus with Egyptian poet Abdullah Miniawy and German electronic band Carl Gari about their collaborative album 'The Act Of Falling From The 8th Floor', about personal fear and struggle to reach freedom. Miniawy had to leave Kairo, settling in France and the group now operates between Paris and Munich, recording in a remote house in Neunburg vorm Wald, a town nestled in the Bavarian forest. When they started, Carl Gari played minimalistic techno instrumentals, when Miniawy joined them they grew increasingly abstract, skirting the edges of deconstructed club sounds and into sections of pure ambience to prop up Miniawy’s dramatic readings. Amazing stuff...

The Cabo Verdean popular music genre of funaná was outlawed by the Portuguese colonial government in the 1950s as too proud an expression of identity, and it emerged only in the 1990s as a symbol of political activism. A new compilation 'Pour Me a Grog: The Funaná Revolt in the 1990s' is driven by the gaita (the type of accordion), an instrument materially linked to colonial influences even as it necessarily revolts against them. It's accompanied by passionate vocals and plentiful drums and synths, with remarkable speed on instruments. PopMatters says the album is worth a listen if only to make the acquaintance of a wholly unique musical style.

"When faced with certain doom, our natural instinct is not one of self-preservation but of dogged pleasure-seeking" - FACT says in an announcement of Blanck Mass' mix. "Oscillating from jubilation to dread from one moment to the next and veering from post-punk and harsh noise to synth-pop and kosmische, Power pulls together a selection of tracks that’ll have you confused as to whether you should be celebrating or running for cover" - FACT adds. Intense, strong, a hard listen. Listen to it - here.

She decided to become a singer after hearing a female Buddhist monk chanting at a temple), her songs pair Gregorian chants with gagaku, imperial court music from ancient Japan. Director David Lynch selected her to perform at his 2019 Manchester international festival showcase, and super-producer Rick Rubin invited her to his US Showtime documentary series Shangri-La. Unusual music, but pleasant enough.

The Quietus picked up the best of the leftfield French music for the month of September. It's much easier listen them it would seem, but still unusual music, hard to put in any genre. Like a benign strange guy. Paper eaters in Papivores are really atmospheric, Palm Unit are on the jazzy side, and want […]

LA producer Maral made a new mixtape 'Mahur Club' where she combined Iranian folk, pop and classical music with reggaeton, dub and Jersey Club. As it turns out it's not just interesting, it's actually quite good. Worth a few listens. Listen to it here. Fact Magazine found it out.

It's hard to listen to, raw and sometimes vulgar in language, very serious, and - worth listening to, ambitious and thought through. Not everybody is going to like it, but everybody should listen to it, as there is beauty behind it's brutality. The Quietus says "it is an album of baroque intensity and gothic flamboyance […]

The latest work from experimental electronic composer Keith Fullerton Whitman 'STS' is 15 years in the making, with the eight-channel installation work being made up of recordings made on differing Serge Modular systems, Fact Magazine reports. The sound experiment is the result of the “mapping of the frequency spectra of time-aligned formants to a catalog […]

The Quietus went outside Moscow and St Petersburg looking for "weird" Russian music. What did they find? - Viking metal from Stavropol, goggle-eyed punks from satellite towns, delicate folk, psych post-punk, poetic electro-punk, righteous raving from Nizhniy Novgorod, a band with a controversial name etc. TQ has audios of those bands as well, maybe not […]

"Ambient music... creeps in, then situates its listener in its sonic world: background music that lodges itself in the front of perception... Thoughts come. Stimulated, my mind wanders. I remain still" - the Quietus says in it's review of 'Anthology Of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 2: The Canon', made by former Ramones and Suicide producer, […]

Saudi Arabian singer-producer MSYLMA takes in pre-Islamic and Quranic poetry and culture and melds them with industrial music, dubstep, techno, grime... MSYLMA’s voice drips with sadness, anger, despair and hope, each line delivered in a wash of reverb and echo to make matters all the more otherworldly - the Quietus recommends. Listen to his song […]