Audiopile Review: You may remember us recently singing the praises of Australian composer Paul Schütze’s cinematic ambient masterwork ‘New Maps of Hell’. In truth, all the 90s albums Schütze made for Melbourne’s Extreme label are essential. And, wouldn’t you know it, Kontakt Audio seems to be releasing first-time-on-vinyl editions of the lot. While ‘New Maps of Hell’ may be the finest of that lot, ‘Deus Ex Machina’ is surely the most ambitious. Comprised of a single hour-long epic (plus bonus tracks in this edition) it’s an exceptional achievement that rewards deep, dark immersion. Essential for fans of everything from Jon Hassell’s fourth-world fever dreams to Miles Davis’s oceanic avant fusion and the post-industrial ambient of O Yuki Conjugate and Zoviet France. We just love the fact that records by underappreciated artists like this are becoming available. Now, if someone could do an equivalently lush reissue series for the godlike Peter Hammill….

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Another one of the very best ever Tribal Ambient Dub albums, originally released on the famous Australian Extreme label.

This 59 minute piece was conceived as part of a total environment for the exhibition Deus Ex Machina. The project as a whole seeks to define and articulate the emotional, cultural and aesthetic manifestations of man’s uneasy relationship with technology. The music takes the form of a film score complete with stylized dialogue and actions. During the 59 minutes four basic layers repeat in various configurations.

The effect is to provide a template of narrative in which the pieces exhibited may become protagonists, situated in hypothetical scenarios which illustrate the contentions of Deus Ex Machina and the transmission of information.