electronica
Lisa-Marie Ferla
This need to classify music with all sorts of made-up words might be irritating, but "toytronica" - a label frequently given to Psapp - is as succinct a description as any of the next 40 minutes after you hit "play" on their fourth album, What Makes Us Glow. The label comes from the odds and ends that the duo, made up of ex-Londonders Carim Clasmann and Galia Durant, have been known to incorporate into their signature sound, but it’s just as apt a descriptor of their playful rhythms and bursts of sweet melody.Yes, the album opens with a 17-second burst of the sombre mooing of milk-laden cows Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
No preparation is sufficient for hearing the theme to Doctor Who live. It’s obviously going to be on the menu, yet as the familiar “dung-a, dung-a, dung-a” refrain kicks off something deep and unexpected stirs within. The emotional bond with this sound and this melody is so strong it’s akin to being transported to one of the Doctor’s exotic destinations. Recreated on stage, the familiar suddenly becomes thrillingly fresh.What the BBC Radiophonic Workshop created became part of the fabric of British society. They invented the voice of the Daleks. Yet in 1998, under John Birt, the BBC closed it Read more ...
joe.muggs
The thought of attending a dance music conference in Amsterdam frankly gave me the creeping horrors. I'd never been to Amsterdam Dance Event before, and the combination of DJ egos, business hustling and relentless partying through hundreds of club venues in a renownedly liberal city presented so many opportunities for both boredom and complete catastrophe, it just seemed like a fool's errand. But this, of course, wasn't fair. The dance music business is far more interesting than rumour and memories of the ego-bloated nineties superclub era would have it, and Amsterdam is a delightful place to Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Without doubt, 2013 has been the year of Rudimental on Planet Pop: a second number one single with “Waiting All Night”; a number one debut album with Home, hugely successful festival appearances, and plenty of TV coverage. It’s no wonder that the youth of the West Midlands (and some of their mums and dads, by the look of things) turned up to see the band in their droves at this O2 Academy show that’s been sold out for weeks. “Eagerly anticipated” doesn’t cover it.Things kicked off early with plenty of warm-up action from Joel Compass and then Shakka’s laid-back grooves and finally DJ Gorgon Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Over the decade and a half that I’ve been writing about music, it has been my goal to distinguish between music that I just don’t like and music that is, in a more objective sense, terrible. Sometimes the line is a fine one, and - as many a Leona Lewis fan reading this site will attest - I don’t always end up on the side of it I think I am on. But even bearing that in mind, the new album from Gary Numan is a genuine puzzler: I can’t decide if it’s a sluggish, noisy, unlistenable record, packed with laughably nihilistic lyrics; or if it’s just me.To give a bit of context I should note that new Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
From no visible source, the instantly recognisable voice of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis croons the words of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. But the lyrics aren’t in their familiar setting. Alone, he’s stripped from the band, naked and vulnerable. He’s been dead for 33 years, but this was as close as he could possibly be. Moments earlier, a string section had begun a cascading pattern that was more Bernard Herrmann than Joy Division, giving a new slant to this most familiar of post-punk musical landmarks.Live_Transmission was a bold, multi-media reconfiguration of Joy Division’s music by electronic Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's always nice when musical events of an overtly academic bent are taken away from the academy: when high-falutin' or exploratory music is made to stand on its own. All right, this show demonstrating new technical innovations by musicians affiliated with the Goldsmiths College Computer Music courses hadn't come that far, being some couple of hundred yards along the road from the college, but the Amersham Arms backroom is more used to rock gigs and raves. Dark, rough and ready with a hefty sound system and no seating, the first act starting well after 9pm, it signalled immediately that this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The last album released by Iceland’s múm was Early Birds, an archive trawl from 2012 which unearthed previously unheard material recorded between 1998 and 2000. Before that was 2009’s Sing Along to Songs You Don't Know. Smilewound is a comeback, and a welcome one. It’s also a statement of who múm are and closer in sound to an early album like Finally We Are No One than the – for them – relatively grandiose …Songs You Don't Know.For Smilewound, múm’s core duo Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason are reunited with founder member Gyða Valtýsdóttir. Kylie Minogue also crops up. Despite Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is an incredibly hard album to work out. One major clue comes, though, with its second track, “Maxim's 1”, the backing for which is a dead ringer for a lost track from Cocteau Twins's 1990 Heaven or Las Vegas album. Not that any of the rest of the album sounds like Cocteau Twins, but it does hit a very similar magic formula. That is, though it ostensibly comes from an “indie” milieu, it has vast sonic ambition closer to the biggest pop/soul/R&B records of its time than to any guitar-wrangling mitherers, but it is also psychedelically alien to the point of indecipherability.Los Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A disembodied, wispy female voice declares “this is not true”, the only emotion left a resignation so acute she may as well be contemplating her imminent demise. On Soft Metals’ “Tell me”, her deliberation is accompanied by electronic music drawing from the pulse Giorgio Moroder created for Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”, 20 Jazz Funk Greats-era Throbbing Gristle, French cold wave and the drifting vapourousness of the early Orb. On the next track, “When I Look Into Your Eyes”, she sighs “we all die”.Patricia Hall and Ian Hicks, the Portland-formed and now Los Angeles-based duo who operate as Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The city of Katowice in Upper Silesia, Poland, was once an epic industrial hub on the western edge of the Soviet bloc. It was a gigantic centre for coal and steel that was awesome in scale. Those days are long gone yet it seems fitting that one of the city’s now disused coal mines plays host, from August 22-25, 2013, to Tauron Nowa Muzyka, a leading European festival of electronic music.Here, inside spaces that were once warehouses and carpentries, with many of the giant piston mechanisms still intact, hundreds gather once a year to party to sounds that seem to have been beamed in from the Read more ...
joe.muggs
“Formulaic” is all too frequently used pejoratively in reviews – but from minuets to minimalism, Bo Diddley to drum'n'bass, finding a formula that works and sticking to it has produced some of the finest music in human history. Liverpool-born producer E.m.m.a. might not yet be in the history-changing category, but she's certainly found a simple and distinctive recipe and her explorations of its possibilities are currently extremely fruitful.In essence, E.m.m.a. takes the rugged grooves of UK pirate radio, and adds an extra layer of melody and harmony which connects them back into the much Read more ...