electronica
Kieron Tyler
It’s enough to make any bedroom electronicist green with envy. A home experimenter releases their debut album to instant attention. Under normal circumstances, another Squarepusher wannabe would be hard pushed getting anyone to take much notice. These aren’t normal circumstances as Luftbobler is by one half of agitated art siblings Jake and Dinos Chapman.Despite being wholly in thrall to its influences, bits of Luftbobler are ok – it’s not entirely style over substance. As well as Squarepusher and the less-white noise end of early Aphex Twin, “Still Walking” and “Hot on the Heels of Love” Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Walking into the auditorium of a packed Heaven last night, we were instantly treated to the sensation of having our bodies invaded by thousands of infinitely complex machine insects. It's rare that a band can have such an instant and disquieting effect, but Fiium Shaark's music, we discovered, is as unusual as their name in many ways. At first seemingly entirely improvising, Rudi Fischerlehner on drumkit and Maurizio Ravalico on assorted high-tech looking percussion set arrhythmic patterns scampering around one another while Isambard Khroustaliov filled the spaces with itchy fragments of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A giant arm sweeps across the rapt audience. The newly anointed onlookers all wear the same, white-framed, glasses. A chant is heard:“We are the robots.” Those congregating in the over-sized shoebox of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall could be at a cult meeting. In gathering to pay respect, the audience share more than a passion for Kraftwerk. They also all wear the same 3D glasses. Performing their 1978 album The Man Machine in full, Kraftwerk restate the uncertainty of the natural order. Whether prophetic or not, their message still resonates.Introducing The Man Machine before its release to the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Welcome to the latest edition of The Arts Desk Radio Show, originally broadcast live from London's glamorous Dalston last Tuesday on NTS Live. Once again Joe found himself flying solo as Peter was off on his travels – although this time, rather than visiting his usual far-flung destinations he was on the road, driving Malcolm McLaren's Mercedes back from Paris. In his absence, Joe kept things international, causing himself severe pronunciation anxiety by including tracks from Japanese, Lebanese, Welsh, Emirati, Malian and Danish musicians, and welcoming a Zanzibari-Dutch guest for the second Read more ...
Chris Mugan
“Tschernobyl… Harrisburg... Sellafield… Fukushima” reads the display above the four figures standing impassively below like toys, suddenly turning these harbingers of the computer age into proselytisers for an anti-nuclear energy policy.Kraftwerk’s reinvention as agitpop polemicists, if only for Radio-Activity, is just one surprise in a two-hour set that cements their place as a seminal cultural force whose key works reward close reappraisal. It is night two of The Catalogue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, their typically thorough concerts series that sees them play eight albums over successive nights. If Read more ...
Chris Mugan
Childlike wonder is a rare emotion at a gig, so gasps of delight are doubly jolting as the first images appear to float out of the mammoth screen behind the stage and float over our heads. These are notes of musical notation that cascade from a car radio at the moment when the dial shifts in "Autobahn", the track where Kraftwerk’s concepts first properly coalesced and that gave their breakthrough album its title. The German electronica pioneers are to play 1974’s Autobahn in full as they begin an eight-night residency revisiting much of their back catalogue in order.It is also their first Read more ...
Joe Muggs
If you listened to the last archived Arts Desk Radio Show you'll have heard me play a couple of tracks from this, and it was all I could do not to play more. As so often I'd gone into the studio with the previous couple of days' post pile and started picking through it for CDs to play. Usually this is a faff involving flicking through tracks and hoping one will jump out, but as soon as this one went into the machine, every single track got a tick by its name.The name Fimber Bravo meant nothing to me and I hadn't read the press release to find out the provenance of the album, but the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Of all the major acts from the the acid house/rave explosion, Leeds's LFO seem least interested in becoming a “heritage act”. Perhaps it's because Mark Bell (the sole member of LFO since the early departure of Gez Varley) has no need to cash in on the brand, thanks to his lucrative “day job” as producer of choice for the likes of Björk and Depeche Mode.Which isn't to say he's left LFO behind at any point; although it's almost ten years since his last album Sheath, he continues to periodically play live at clubs and festivals and by all accounts prolifically produces new tracks, but enabled by Read more ...
Joe Muggs
End of year lists are, of course, wildly arbitrary – based on what raddled writers can scrape from their memory-barrels come deadline day, with half an eye on what we think our colleagues are going to pick so our choices will end up in aggregated lists too.I could easily find a way to argue that the rarefied ambience of Santiago Latorre was my record of the year, or sing the praises of Message To Bears's chamber music all day long. I could honestly say that I'd been playing the Jessie Ware and Norah Jones albums on repeat, or loving the off-centre electronic squonk of Mouse On Mars, just to Read more ...
theartsdesk
Joe Muggs writes: “KanZeOn is one of my favourite films – not just music films, but in any genre – of the past year. Not quite documentary, not quite art film, not quite music video, it's a slow, abstract audiovisual love poem to Japan and its relationship to sound and music. For the most part it shows three main characters (see the description by co-director Neil Cantwell below), playing music and narrating their understanding of that music – but in so doing, it tells us a vast amount about Japanese culture, psychology and spirituality, as well as showing some of the most stunning sacred Read more ...
theartsdesk
Herbert: Bodily Functions (Special Edition)Thomas H GreenMatthew Herbert is an electronic polymath whose career is fascinating whether you’re a fan of his music or not. Currently he’s working hard resurrecting the BBC’s iconic music and sound effects unit, the Radiophonic Workshop, and he’s recently released an album (as Wishmountain) sampling the top ten best-selling items in Tesco’s, while also having time for the odd Björk collaboration and the occasional tour wherein pig parts are cooked on stage in an anti-consumerist sonic performance art extravaganza. In short, Herbert has grown into Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Theo Keating – AKA DJ Touché - has been creating club-functional tunes for over twenty years. His most high profile moment was as half of The Wiseguys whose song "Ooh La La" was unavoidable in the late Nineties, both in nightclubs and on TV ads. Nowadays he has a secure career on the global DJ circuit, grounded in his eclectic taste and turntable skills developed as a teenage B-boy, but he appears restless, always exploring new areas. His Black Ghosts project with ex-Simian singer Simon Lord, loosely based around the theoretical intersection of dance music and horror films, never came to much Read more ...