Issue 116

Thomas Dolby is back! And as well as putting him on the cover of this month’s Electronic Sound, we are bundling the issue with an exclusive blue vinyl seven-inch featuring two tracks from Dolby’s dazzling ‘The Flat Earth’ album, one of them the awesome ‘Hyperactive!’.

One of the biggest synthpop stars of the 1980s, Thomas Dolby is coming towards the end of a lengthy live tour to mark the 40th anniversary reissue of ‘The Flat Earth’. He’s spent the last few weeks criss-crossing North America and is now in the UK for more dates later this month. He talks a lot about the album in our cover feature, but there is still plenty of time for a stream of hugely entertaining and often hilarious stories, involving everyone from David Bowie to Prince to The Muppets. No wonder writer Bob Fischer says Dolby is ‘‘the perfect interviewee’’. You don’t want to miss a single word of this. 

Keep turning the pages and you’ll also uncover ambitronic voyager Banco De Gaia, hotly tipped electronics-meets-jazz-meets-dub collective Ishmael Ensemble, and post-punk innovators This Heat. Plus Arab Strap frontman Aidan Moffat, experimental shape-shifter Boris Hauf, avant-goth trio Tristwch Y Fenywod, and unflinching future-pop producer Julie-Sophie. We have an article about the Castlemorton Common Festival too, which took place in 1992 and is the UK’s most infamous illegal rave. It lasted for several days and many of those who attended still haven’t come down yet. 

We’re bundling this issue with an exclusive blue vinyl seven-inch featuring two tracks from ‘The Flat Earth’, Thomas Dolby’s 1984 masterpiece. The A-side is his irresistible pop classic ‘Hyperactive!’, which was first released as a single just before the album came out, giving him his best-known hit in the UK. Four decades on, he still describes it as ‘‘a real earworm’’. It’s backed by the beautiful ‘Mulu The Rain Forest’, an atmospheric soundscape combining organic instrumentation with what was then revolutionary technology. Dolby composed the track after reading a book with the same title written by a British adventurer about his journeys through the Malaysian jungle. 

As with all our music releases, this record is strictly limited and is only available to readers of Electronic Sound, so make sure you get your copy right away.