dance music
Kieron Tyler
Of all the idiosyncratic artists coming through the door opened by punk, Adrian Sherwood remains one of the most singular. Reggae had been given a new platform and Sherwood, though he has never done anything remotely musically akin to punk rock, comfortably found a place alongside boundary-crossing post-punk individualists like The Pop Group and Public Image Ltd. The former’s Mark Stewart and the latter’s Jah Wobble went on to record with Sherwood’s On-U Sound label.Although Sherwood would deconstruct and then reassemble hip-hop with Tackhead and similarly explore various forms of electronic Read more ...
joe.muggs
Questions of what is authentic and what is retro get more complicated the more the information economy matures. Music from decades past that only tens or hundreds of people heard at the time it was made becomes readily available, gets sampled by new musicians, and passes into the current vernacular. Modern musicians play archaic styles day in day out until it becomes so worn into their musculature that it reflects their natural way of being. Tiny snippets of time that were once meaningless become memes that are shared and snared into the post-post-modern digital tangle.And in the thick of all Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is language a barrier to international recognition? Is English necessary to make waves worldwide? Musicians from the African continent and South America regularly perform in their native tongue beyond the borders of their home countries. But often they are – rightly or wrongly – marketed or pigeon-holed as world music, a branding which allows for eschewing the Anglophone. The always problematic label of world music can be and is debated endlessly, but one thing is certain: for Scandinavia, most internationally successful music is delivered in English.Of course, after setting quirky micro- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any Christmas album worth its salt draws from the classics. Versions of, say, “We Three Kings”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “Silent Night”, “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” and “The Little Drummer boy” are compulsory. What is not so inevitable is how these musical and seasonal chestnuts are tackled. All five songs are covered on Lit Up: Music for Christmas, and all five sound like they never have before.Astrocolor are from Canada. The five-piece from Victoria, British Columbia formed specifically to make a Christmas album like no other. Want a Massive Attack-style “We Three Read more ...
Barney Harsent
If there was any doubt as to the musical preferences of BBC4's commissioning arm, consider this: the whole history of funk got an hour. Meanwhile, indie music – a niche, artistic movement that somehow ended up drinking champagne while wallowing in its own mess by the mid-Nineties – gets a three-part series. Just thought I’d mention it.With time on its side, as we began part two, Music for Misfits was up to the Eighties. Following last week’s implication that punk was some kind of year zero for privately pressed records (it wasn’t), this episode started with the claim that, in the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
For a band that makes such a vivid and irresistibly danceable sound, Caravan Palace’s ascent – ten years and three albums now – has been a stealthy one, built on the traditional virtues of word-of-mouth, and selling out gigs. On paper, combining traditional “hot” jazz, the dance music of the 1950s, with the sleek hedonism of electronic dance music seems both unlikely and unpalatable. On stage, and on record, it’s a riot.Grooving, syncopated rhythm and the slick, acoustic sound of brass and violin were what made the original music such a dance sensation. Adding the limb-twitching Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An encounter with Hamburg’s Reeperbahn is akin to assimilation into a real-life kaleidoscope where bright lights, mass revellers and shills touting bars, night clubs or strip joints combine in a single multi-sense overload. The tumultuous thoroughfare is dedicated to excess.The Reeperbahn, the main drag of Hamburg’s St. Pauli district, approximates two garish, illuminated British seafront parades – maybe Blackpool and Southend – that have been elongated and then arranged face-to-face on each side of a street with emporia such as Amsterdam Headshop, beer halls and pole-dancing venues Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A film about 20 years in the life of a character acknowledged as peripheral to a movement in popular culture which spawned global stars is a difficult sell. Audiences are going to wonder whether the chronicling of a minor player not central to the bigger picture is the wrong focus. With Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden the light is on Paul Vallée, a club DJ trying to make his way in the fertile early Nineties French electro-dance music scene from which Daft Punk became the global breakout phenomenon. And it’s the helmet-wearing duo which loom large over Eden.Eden takes the factual and merges it with Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When International Feel label boss Mark Barrott moved from Uruguay to Ibiza, it was surely only a matter of time before he hooked up with Café Del Mar’s legendary sunset soundtracker José Padilla – inevitable even. The choice of producers to work alongside Padilla on this, his fourth album, is far from predictable however – in fact it’s inspired. Alongside Padilla himself and Barrott are Henning Severud (Telephones), Jan Schulte (Wolf Müller) and Lewis Day (Tornado Wallace). Padilla is in good company here – a fact he has been keen to acknowledge himself.On first listen, this seems Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Hot Chip are a band who have, over the years, brought a different personality to the hedonistic house party – one that often seems caught halfway between the kitchen and the designated dancefloor. This, their sixth album, sees them trying to edge their way towards the latter while questioning their place – and relevance – in the wider musical firmament.Things kick off well enough with “Huarache Lights”, a song strong enough even to bear the weight of a hamfisted First Choice sample and hackneyed Daft Punk-esque vocoder and still cross the finishing line smiling. Similarly, the fidgity bounce Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Todd Rundgren is not known for sitting on his laurels and churning out the same old stuff year after year. Since Runt, his debut solo album from 1970, he has tried out a vast array of genres from heavy metal to prog rock, EDM and power pop, as well as having a prominent role in Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. Runddans, his second album of 2015, sees him venture further into pastures new by teaming up with Scandinavian electronica boffins Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Emil Nikolaisen for a one-track ambient beast – albeit one with a hefty injection of prog sounds.Runddans came about after Rundgren Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s no doubt SPOT is Europe’s tidiest music festival. In hosting SPOT, Denmark’s second-city Aarhus turns the expectation of what a festival can be around. There’s no mud, no one takes a stage late and the sound is always immaculate. Underworked stewards collect what little debris there is. The two main venues are so spotlessly non-rock they force the focus towards the music.The Aarhus Musikhuset is an airy, early-Eighties complex with a glass-walled façade reminiscent of London’s Royal Festival Hall. Inside, cool wood panelling and designer light fittings set the tone. SPOT has seven Read more ...