We turned the selection of this month's commentary podcast over to our Patreon backers and by a strong margin they opted for ¡Chakra : Red!, the 1997 LP by German darkwave-cum-electro-industrial oddballs Project Pitchfork. It's a record which taps into both the band's then established core strengths while also showcasing their increasingly left-field approach to composition and instrumentation. Join us as we go track by track through a record frontloaded with dramatic and human approaches to human-made endtimes...and backloaded with a slew of sex jams.

With one foot out the door for Calgary and Terminus Festival, we're offering up a fairly light and breezy Pick Five episode focusing on sentimental songs. What in particular do we mean by that? Nostalgic? Melancholy? A little cheesy? Personally resonant? Listen and find out.

Our pair of records on the podcast this week tilts towards the Germanic, with Die Krupps' 2013 release The Machinists Of Joy holding up as one of the veterans' strongest efforts upon review, and Oklahoman act Karger Traum's III still shining as an homage to classic NDW experimentation. We're also looking ahead to Terminus next week and playing America's favourite game show, "Giallo or Inkubus Sukkubus?".

This week we're discussing a pair of darkwave records which both show off the range of the genre and also sit quite far away from especially trendy versions of the style which have perhaps worn out their welcome. Fist up is the classic Gala from Argentinian legends Euroshima, which helped establish the standard for the genre for generations of South American acts to come. Next, the moody but forceful Mire Of Mercury, the most recent LP from Estonia's Bedless Bones, draws links between the dancefloor and pagan ancience.

The very website you're reading this on right now turned fifteen years old on Tuesday, and so we're using this week's episode as an opportunity to look back and the hows and whys of one and a half decades of our work here. We're also talking about our friend Rexx Arkana, and next year's Shadowlands festival in the UK.

We're flashing back to 2005 for a discussion of Ladytron's Witching Hour, the record that saw the British quartet fully break out of the electro-pop terrain (and electro-clash pigeonholing) of their early work with a record that was inescapable in goth clubs far beyond. From indie and shoegaze ambitions to the oddly prevalent Suicide-styled electro grooves which ride through it, we're looking at a record which captured a moment where electro was simply everywhere.

A classic two album format episode of the podcast has us revisiting a couple of eras in which "darkwave" meant something profoundly different from what it does today. First up is Bay Area act The Razor Skyline's rough and tumble and broad reaching 1996 debut, "Journal Of Trauma", followed by the slick NDH-leaning ambitions of In Strict Confidence's 2010 LP "La Parade Monstrueuse".

We're each picking five needledrops on this week's episode of We Have A Technical. A little bit different from discussion of soundtrack originals, we're talking about the use of existing songs in film and television, often for the purposes of a particular effect (and hopefully more than just the cheap recognition pop of "Hey, I know and like that song!").

Two bands each linked closely to their own time and place are the subject of this week's podcast, but that's where the similarities between Fiendflug and Tearist end. The debate and controversy surrounding the former's tapping of Nazi history and aesthetics invariably overshadowed their music, though we make an effort to discuss both aspects of Fiendflug's 1996 self-titled LP, while Tearist's 2010 debut pointed towards a changing of the guard in North American dark music which their vocal charisma and mix of styles primed them to lead, yet that was not to be.

The tenth instalment of Vancouver's own Verboden festival is in the books, and as we've done for years we're here to break the whole affair down and talk about the live sets we caught from a slew of acts across a wide spread of dark genres, originating both from the fest's home in the Pacific Northwest and abroad.