electronica
joe.muggs
Floridian-born, longtime Brooklyn resident, now Asheville, North Carolina based Roberto Carlos Lange doesn’t rush things, but he gets them done. This is his ninth album in 15 years, during which time he’s built a substantial body of audiovisual / computer art / installation work too. And as with all this creative endeavour, it’s not showy, it doesn’t demand your attention, but it spreads out its ideas and emotions very much at its own pace.His relocation to Asheville came after the Covid lockdown experience in New York – which explicitly inspired 2021’s Far In – and it’s easy to hear a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Declan McKenna is that rare thing, a popular contemporary male British singer-songwriter whose work tends to avoid solipsism, relentlessly projected vulnerability, and general whining. He writes interesting songs about an array of subjects, some even political in intent, and revels in expanding his musical palette. His last album, Zeros, almost made it to the top of the UK album charts despite – or, perhaps, because of – over-slick, epic production. Happily, his third is a cheerfully offbeat adventure in the possibilities of studio recording. McKenna sounds like he’s having a ball. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In October 1977 Glasgow punk band Johnny & the Self Abusers decided to change their name. This was a problem for Chiswick Records, who were about to release their debut single. The records were pressed, the sleeves printed and the press release issued. There was no time to recall any of it and alter the band’s name. The single was credited to Johnny & the Self Abusers.The new name the band went for was taken from the “so simple-minded” lyrics of David Bowie’s “The Jean Genie.” After reconfiguring their line-up, Simple Minds began regularly playing under the new Bowie-derived name from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nailah Hunter’s debut album occupies a domain where trip-hop, Lana Del Rey were she recording in a deep, echo-filled cave and ambient-slanted pop overlap. There’s a kinship with FKA Twigs and Julia Holter, but Hunter’s propensity to channel what feels like a mystical experience means that Lovegaze is more inscrutable than what’s generated by first impressions.Her voice is distant, a low-ish soprano set in a wash of synths. Pattering percussion and the glissando of her Celtic harp pierce the aural mist. On the relatively sparsely arranged “Adorned” – which has a slight Alice Coltrane feel – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If Mélusine is encountered without knowing its background or themes it would still be remarkable. There is no need to know anything about what frames this journey through Chanson Française, electronica, jazz and show-tune sensibilities with lyrics in English, French, Haitian Kreyòl and Occitan. For all these aspects, Cécile McLorin Salvant’s seventh album is striking enough.Then, there’s the story told by the album: the tale of marriage, motherhood and an ensuing darkness experienced by a particular mélusine – European folklore’s mythical creature that’s half woman and half fish or serpent. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Some years there’s no obvious Album of the Year. 2023 is not such a year. Any one of five albums could have been my choice. I chose Kesha from that esteemed selection because her fifth album bombed commercially, and I want to BIG IT RIGHT UP.The album I’ve listened to most all year is Iggy Pop’s Every Loser. Partly this is because it came out in January, so I really did listen to it all year. But mostly it’s because, after years of often interesting albums which I cherry-picked, the great proto-punk survivor came up with a whole set that worked, a straightforward rock album, with hooks that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
FRIDAYRennes Airport Parc Expo is about three miles west of the city. It’s vast, consisting of 110,000 metres of cavernous warehouse-like hangars, and has hosted everything from Holiday on Ice to France’s hugest annual agricultural conference. Every December it welcomes Trans Musicales, the 44-year-old French music festival, with performances from around 9.00 PM until dawn.The first act I catch, Twende Pamoja (pictured left), typifies the festival’s laudable attitude to curation. They are a little-known electro-hop hop act whose members are of French, Nigerian, Ugandan and Tanzanian origin, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The KLF are endlessly fascinating. There’s never been a “pop group” like them. From the late Eighties into the early Nineties, they treated music, especially electronic dance music, as a laboratory for lunatic experiment. Unlike most avant-garde thinkers in pop, though, they made a glorious and highly unlikely commercial success of it, via a series of globally successful singles (and, to some degree, the album, The White Room).From their beginnings to demise, filmmaker Bill Butt was an accomplice, creating films and videos as asked. The BFI's 23 Seconds to Eternity gathers these together Read more ...
mark.kidel
Bony Biyake, whose vocals grace this delicious soup of ancient and modern sounds, from Europe and the Congo, once sang in a soukous band, and then made his name in collaborations with the French musical magician, the late Hector Zazou. Their most famous collaboration was a 1983 album, Noir et Blanc, which still sounds ahead of its time today.Biyake and his collaborators Guillaume Lozillon and Guillaume Gilles, masters of digital keyboards and programming, and percussionist Gaëlle Salomon weave a rich texture of sounds that speak to each other in musical tongues. This is a kind of sorcery, in Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is a great deal of sense in transposing electronic music to a symphony orchestra. However beautifully crafted, imaginatively constructed, and creatively programmed, the sounds that come out of synthesisers and other digital tools lack the knife-edge fallibility of music that is produced with the hand or the human breath. Brian Eno’s concert with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic provides compelling evidence that his compositions reveal more of their essence when taken on a trip into the world of strings, brass and other wind instruments, and the chance-prone reality of human moods and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For Finnish composer Osmo Lindeman, the decision to pursue electronic music was made in 1968 during a visit to Poland. He had recently started using graphical notation for the scores of his compositions and was having problems getting conductors and orchestras to follow what he wanted.In Poland, he met composer Andrzej Dobrowolski and visited the Warsaw School of Music’s electronic music studio. He found that Dobrowolski also used graphical notation. With electronic music, Lindeman saw that there no barriers to using any type of score. He had the way forward. He would embrace electronic music Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The music of Daniel Lopatin – AKA Oneohtrix Point Never – exists at the sonic/electronic vanguard. Were the likes of avant-gardists such as Iannis Xenakis, George Antheil and Edgard Varese around today, maybe even Stockhausen, they might dig what he’s up to.Unlike them, though, Lopatin places post-modernism at the centre of things. His latest album is, for want of a more technical phrase, completely out there. If you want to hear music unlike anything else, it’s a one-stop shop.Lopatin has said of the new album that it’s a “speculative autobiography” which “imagines what might have been Read more ...