electronica
Owen Richards
The Shock of the Future is for anyone who's watched a music biopic and thought "that's not how it works!" Directed and co-written by Marc Collin of Nouvelle Vague fame, it's perhaps the most realisitic film about recording music ever made. But as anyone who's ever been in the studio will tell you, the legends are much more exciting than the reality.Alma Jodorwsky plays Ana, an aspiring synth wave sensation. She spends her day (which takes up the entire length of the film) in a friend's flat that she's sitting, along with his huge collection of synthesisers, keyboards and recording equipment. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On a first pass, The Practice of Love seems to be an electropop album in thrall to trance music’s tropes: the synth wash, repeated musical phrases, a whooshy programmed percussive pulse, an otherworldly atmosphere. But the lyrics invite further inspection. On the first track “Lions”, a narrator invites the listener to look at grass and trees, ants on the ground, flowers, mushrooms. “Study this, and ask yourself where is God? This place doesn’t know, this place doesn’t care...[it’s]…whispering a pagan song.”As The Practice of Love moves beyond its opener, trance remains the musical template Read more ...
Owen Richards
According to Metronomy maestro Joseph Mount, his first attempt of album number six was a much snappier affair. But it wasn’t until he broke from his self-imposed immediacy that it started connecting with him. In its final form, Metronomy Forever clocks in at 17 tracks of singles, instrumentals and soundscapes, and though it skirts close to double-album indulgence, you’re never more than one song away from a winner.The title Metronomy Forever refers to the never-ending nature of radio, and this airwave-skipping mindset has given Mount a toy box of genres and forms to play with. The preceding Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the latest edition of theartsdesk on Vinyl, the monthly online musical resource that knows no genre boundaries as it treks through every release on plastic that it can find. This time round we’ve everything from death metal to obscure jazz to electropop, sounds for almost every musical taste. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHDona Onete Rebujo (Maid Um)Known as the “Grande Dame of Amazonian song” Dona Onete, now 80, only recorded her first album at 73. She’s now a sensation in her home country of Brazil. She’s seen as representing the country’s minority peoples and is as much a folk Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The thing about Wilderness is that it’s just so jolly decent. Acres of decadence, sprawled safely over the yawning magnificence of Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire, combine to create a scintillating country fair reverie – a heady mix of good music, high end food, luxury outdoorsyness and companionable folk.Yes, their fashion choices might be bold, but there is no one here who isn’t game for a laugh, or on hand to help out a neighbour. Plus you’re far more likely to be worried about their judgement of how fine your wine is than whether or not they’ve nicked your camping cooker.Revellers have Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As this month’s edition of theartsdesk on Vinyl appears the sun is blazing outside, a heatwave hits, and our record collections must hide in the shadows or warp. Yet still we want more to join them in their sheltered rows and where better to seek the greatest new releases than the longest, most complete monthly round-up of new vinyl releases. As ever, we run the gamut. This time there’s everything from grunge to soul to trap to Qawwali and a whole lot more most of us never imagined could exist. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHQasim Naqvi Teenages (Erased Tapes)Teenages, latest album from New York Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Club music has its own micro-universe, with its own rules, jargon, and fans. It also has globe-trotting stars most people have never heard of. Much of the music is functional, to be danced to at 3.00 AM on MDMA, no more, no less, unconcerned with the usual structures and frameworks of rock and pop. In this world, Hot Since 82 is a kingpin.Yorkshire DJ-producer Daley Padley adopted the Hot Since 82 moniker seven years ago and has made a name for himself since, DJing all over the world. He released an album in 2013 and has fired out many tunes and remixes since, garnering multi-millions of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Thom Yorke is frontman of Radiohead, a festival-headlining rock band who sell out stadiums all over the globe. His artistic aspirations, however, right back to Radiohead’s Kid A album 19 years ago, often seem to lie elsewhere, in the world of glitching, otherworldly electronica. He’s had mixed success in this area but with last year’s soundtrack to Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria he finally nailed it. Anima proves that album was no fluke.This is Yorke’s third solo album (excluding the soundtrack), and where its predecessors attempted, sometimes awkwardly, to staple classic song Read more ...
Owen Richards
Among the summer gigs being held in Caerphilly this summer, it seemed a tall order for electronic/math rock instrumentalists Public Service Broadcasting to pack out a castle. They may be more current, but the others (The Stranglers, Groove Armada, The Zutons et al) at least had notable commercial periods. PSB’s biggest singles have never troubled the UK Top 75. And though a £40 ticket price on the door seemed optimistic, the castle’s savvy booking became clear as we passed through those ancient gates. A large courtyard, very much packed.After three albums and several EPs, PSB have crafted Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
So theartsdesk on Vinyl reaches its 50th edition. That’s at least a novels’ worth of words. Maybe two! But we’re not stopping yet. The heat of the summer has arrived but the vinyl deluge hasn’t dried up, so check in for everything from Germanic electro to Scottish Seventies pop-rock to Japanese minyo music reimagined. And much more. All vinyl life is here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHQuantic Atlantic Oscillations (Tru Thoughts)Will Holland – Quantic – has spent the past few years successfully indulging in his penchant for South American, living there and recording a multiplicity of releases Read more ...
joe.muggs
Nineteen years, seven albums and untold side projects into their career, Hot Chip have for the first time enlisted outside producers: Rodaidh McDonald and French disco/house don Philippe Zdar. And it's worked. Over the course of the previous albums, the band had steadily evolved from ramshackle and rather self-consciously quirky writers and players to a far slicker operation. Notably this was informed by Alexis Taylor's broadening as a songwriter through various experiments and collaborations, and Joe Goddard's deep immersion in bittersweet deep house music, both solo and in 2 Bears – but the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If contemplated without a context, Loops in the Secret Society initially appears to be a bold 68-minute, double-album fusion of Hawkwind’s hum and whir, Krautrock insistence, spacey electronica and folky otherness. Jane Weaver’s voice is disembodied, as if in a trance. As one track bleeds into another, ambient linking pieces instil the feeling this is more a lengthy mood piece rather than a series of individual compositions. If the soundtrack were needed to a flickering silent film about artificial creatures escaping from underworld bondage and emerging into the daylight, this is it.However, Read more ...