There’s a whole sonic aesthetic that’s everywhere now. A kind of ghost of the Eighties, or maybe a throwback to a cocaine-comedown Eighties: the kind of deluxe digital uncanny you can hear in records like Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night, weirder Eurythmics songs or Dennis Edwards and Siedah Garrett’s “Don’t Look Any Further”. It first got resurrected in 2000s “glo-fi”, “chillwave” and “hypnagogic pop”, was perfected by Dave Okumu in his production for Jessie Ware’s 2012 Devotion and seems to have filtered from there all the way through general pop all the way up to Harry Styles and Taylor Read more ...

VINYL OF THE MONTHMykki Blanco Café Paradiso (Transgressive) Image Mykki Blanco’s combination of punk snark, drag queen attitude, stonking electronic beats, eclecticism, potty-mouthed filth, playfulness, and trans-gender activism makes them always one to watch out for. Their fourth album, which comes with a Café Paradiso paper napkin, is created with usual production partner FaltyDL, who mashes up dirty electro skittering, 4/4 bangers and, on “NYC Dogs”, dirty-rock nastiness. From the opening fretless bass, bedroom slow-disco of “Little Feet Read more ...

This useful five-CD clamshell box set collects the soundtrack music from the Tarkovsky films Ivan's Childhood (1962), Andrei Roublev (1966), Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975) and Stalker (1979). The first two featured scores by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov. Eduard Artemyev created the music and what can only be called soundscapes for the latter three. The set's title, Tarkovsky, does not give away what it includes.Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov (Вячесла́в Овчи́нников, 1936–2019) first worked with Tarkovsky (Андрей Тарковский, 1932–1986) on the 1960 short film The Steamroller and the Violin. The composer’s Read more ...

Simon Green, aka Bonobo, has been gently gliding through a kind of soft electronica, music whose warm embrace, has for some years explored the ways in which elements of music from other continents can lend to the dance-floor a dream-like quality that escapes the hard edges characteristic of so much technology.Distance in Static finds him collaborating weaving a series of dreamscapes that combine an enchanting sense of space – laden with gentle reverb, with a heart-calming feeling of intimacy: a paradoxical magic that calms as much as it entrains, calls to the dance as much as it conjures Read more ...

“He was our grandfather.” “He was the grandfather of all of us.” Reactions on Friday 28 August to the news that Norway’s King Harald V has died this morning are frequently expressed during the 30th-anniversary edition of Hardanger Music Festival – Hardanger Musikkfest. On the festival’s second day, his passing casts a shadow.In the central Norway fjord-side village of Lofthus, about two-and-a-half hours east of Bergen, there is an unexpected need to rethink how the festival would work on the day, and during a period of national mourning. A Friday evening concert was meant to showcase members Read more ...

Almost 20 years ago, Late Of The Pier were an exciting post-nu-rave band who injected synthesizer sparkiness into indie. They even had a Top 30 album. They were a breath of fresh air. One of their members, Sam Eastgate, went on to produce solo material as LA Priest. While electronically constructed, his output has often wandered into Moderat/James Blake territory. Which is to say, sensitive, falsetto-leaning singer-songwriter fare. But for album number four he’s amped up the bang factor.To assist him in this, his producer is Alex Ridha, AKA German EDM kingpin Boys Noize, a man who’s worked Read more ...

“My Lost One”, Materia’s second track, is remarkable. Exemplifying the Julia Holter ethos to the max, it begins wispily with interweaving rippling electric piano figures, a whispered, echoey vocal and slippery acoustic bass. Gradually, grandeur is assumed: a sonic architecture soaring into and beyond the clouds, and outwards into the wider cosmos.Despite the next track “Fantasy” having a similar, though much more brief exposition, nothing else on Materia is so strikingly consummated. The rest of the album is more muted, foggy, out of focus, restrained. Etiolated, even.Overall, Materia is line Read more ...

The key track gives the album its title. “Where the Fades Meet” opens with swelling strings, which are swiftly underpinned by groovy, shuffling, percussion. The lyrics are carried by a chorale singing of a “fading signal”, “stillness” and “shadows.” It seems to about what lies in the gaps between the perceivable. The melody has a vaguely eastern Mediterranean lilt. Overall, it leans into evoking an exotica-inclined Rotary Connection – the late-Sixties/early Seventies outfit that was a core influence on acid jazz.“Where the Fades Meet” is the sixth track on the seventh album – there has also Read more ...

The title “Tone Phase 1 for 2 Guitars & 4 Oscillators” is a giveaway, clearly indicating what’s going to be heard once the LP has landed on the record player. And, indeed, the first track on the second side of Eleh’s newly reissued Floating Frequencies / Intuitive Synthesis 1 seamlessly fuses single tones generated by electric guitars and analogue oscillators. However, what’s less apparent from taking in the title is the magnetic power exerted by the track during its translucent progress over ten minutes. Hypnotic.The same applies to what follows: the also-ten-minute “Tone Phase 2 for Read more ...

VINYL OF THE MONTHEd O’Brien Blue Morpho (Transgressive) Image The last thing theartsdesk on Vinyl thought it needed was a solo album from Radiohead’s guitarist but Blue Morpho, Ed O’Brien’s second album, spikes expectations. The opening “Incantations” is fab, a low-rolling, bongo-tastic thing hazed in mysticism, like a particularly stoned offcut from Plant & Page’s No Quarter project. The album was, apparently, a healing exercise for O’Brien, who was having brain doldrums. It feels that way, lightness touched with sadness, like that Read more ...

Shadows opens with “The Lone West,” a short, desolate instrumental featuring a simple keyboard refrain with a flute-like quality and what may be an early Seventies drum machine. There’s a bit of Young Marble Giants in there. The Brian Eno of Another Green World, too. The Ghost Box label’s characteristic nebulousness is also apparent.The next track features a vocal. Sailing over a similar musical bedding, Cate Kennan’s voice on “Shadows” is distant, etiolated, devoid of colour. A twangy guitar plays single notes. There is some Santo and Johnny-esque lap steel and sparingly used castanets. The Read more ...

Beginning with “The Ground Above” and closing with “Otherside”, there’s an ambient, otherwordly, disembodied feel to Beth Orton’s new album on Partisan Records, a follow-up to  2022’s self-produced Weather Alive, which had its own spectral, dreamlike airs. “The Ground Above” is voiced by one of those unsettled spirits that rise out of one the hoary old Murder Ballads, but here, Orton is disembodied “among the choirs of the gods”, “ecstatic as a mother’s love” and lusty too: “And you kissed me and I knew what I was for, And it wiped me out like chalk off of a board.”Her voice is worn and Read more ...