electronica
Kieron Tyler
When I Hit You - You’ll Feel It opens with “When I Was Walt Whitman”. A French-language answer-phone message is abruptly cut off by a massive-sounding percussive pulse over which a borderline menacing voice enigmatically murmurs words which are hard to make out. There’re snatches about “repeating tiny fragments” and “when I was Walt Whitman you should have seem me…the words wrote themselves.”It ends with “Fragment #2”, a comparatively lighter piece which comes across as a distant relative of Suicide’s “Cheree”. Again, Leslie Winer's close-miked voice is near to a mumble. Full attention is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hinged ends with “Moment,” a vaporous mood piece where a reflective voice lightly floats over and weaves between two, three-note keyboard arpeggios, occasional Gamelan-style percussive interjections and odd bubbling sounds. “Moment of clarity” are the final words.Earlier, “A Feast” is rhythmically more unyielding but the directness is offset by a vocal where phrases phase in and out as if being subjected to Doppler effect. Again though, a sense of otherness suggests that what appears to be electronic music is rooted in the organic: an apartness placing what’s heard between two worlds. The Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The endless circles and spirals that dance music moves in can take you to some strange places.It is, after all, a little peculiar that a producer from California, who was first turned on to DJing by the edgy, claustrophobic, ultra-modernist sound of Chicago’s footworking DJs, should on her debut album sound like a blissed-out, hazy sunrise at a hippie rave somewhere in the English countryside 30 years ago. But Tomu DJ has captured a very specific mood and moment that feels slightly outside of time so well that this doesn’t even feel like a nostalgia piece. Back between 1991 and 1994 Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Scottish singer-songwriter Dorothy Allison pretty much defines cool. Her band One Dove was the first to snare Andrew Weatherall as producer after his success with Screamadelica, and together they created Morning Dove White: an extraordinary album that fused country and western melancholy with deep dub and electronica. It brought extraordinarily grown up emotion to the rave generation and creating the archetypal comedown soundtrack to the devoted few who loved it.Since then she’s worked with everyone from Massive Attack to Paul Weller, Death In Vegas to Pete Doherty (he used to be talented and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Willow Smith has done more during her life than the average 20-year-old. The daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith, she bounced off her childhood appearance in her father’s film I Am Legend to a No 2 UK hit with “Whip My Hair” a decade ago, and has since released a bunch of music. This is her fourth album and, where her last couple came from a musically contemplative, indie-tronic, singer-songwriter stance, Lately I Feel Everything ramps things into the sweary pop-punk and metal zone.Avril Lavigne appears on the slick self-affirmation power-pop of “Grow” (“I hope you know you’re not Read more ...
Joe Muggs
For 25 years now, LA label Stones Throw records has become one of the most reliable brands in music. It began with, and has always been associated with, the leftfield hip hop of founder George “Peanut Butter Wolf” Manak, and regular contributors Madlib and J Dilla. But from very early on, it was heavily invested also in the music that hip hop sampled, signing live bands, mining archives for reissue and providing platforms for underappreciated musical elders, always with emphasis on the strange and stoned – so in fact its aesthetic overall is probably better summed up as psychedelic soul Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Craig Fortnam’s music – solo or in the bands North Sea Radio Orchestra and Arch Garrison – sounds like a lot of things. It sounds like the 70s prog-folk-jazz interface of Kevin Ayres and Robert Wyatt as its influence feeds on into Kate Bush. When he starts looping things up or letting synthesisers dominate, it hints at early 90s electronica. His plaintive singing and natural surrealism frequently recall the early '00s folktronica songwriting of Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders in Tunng. A lot of the time you can even feel like you’re only a sackbut away from things going entirely medieval. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bobby Gillespie (b 1962) is best known as the lead singer and driving force of rock band Primal Scream. He was born and raised in Glasgow and met future Creation Records boss Alan McGee at school. The pair would later move to London and, after a brief period drumming for The Jesus & Mary Chain (he played on their influential Psychocandy album), Gillespie signed Primal Scream to the nascent Creation in 1985. After various different stylistic incarnations, Primal Scream captured the zeitgeist and hit gold in 1991 with their MDMA-electronic-dance opus Screamadelica.Primal Scream have Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The latest edition of theartsdesk on Vinyl combines the best new sounds on plastic with the vinyl reissues that are pressing buttons. Ranging from heavy rockin’ book-style boxsets to the funkiest summertime 7”s, all musical life is here. Dive in.VINYL OF THE MONTHThis Is The Deep The Best Is Yet To Come (Part 1) (B3)London indie outfit This Is The Deep make wonderfully eccentric but catchy music. The Best is Yet to Come (Part 1) is a mini-album that plays at 45 RPM, whose eight songs mingle quirky post-punk dub-funk with something altogether poppier and frothier. They are unafraid of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It takes a brave musician who thinks that he or she can do a better job than the combined talents of Russian electronica trailblazer Eduard Artemyev and Johann Sebastian Bach. However, Kevin Martin, also known as The Bug and a prime mover for such sonic experimentalists as King Midas Sound, Zonal and Techno Animal, is clearly not someone who lacks either artistic ambition or confidence. For his latest project, Kevin has taken on the task of rescoring Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 celluloid sci-fi opus, Solaris.It’s fair to say that Martin has produced an eerie and dreamlike alternative soundtrack Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There is never one Glastonbury Festival. There are as many Glastonbury Festivals as there are people who attend. Thus it ever was, even back in 1992 when the capacity was only 70,000 (plus multitudinous fence-jumpers!). What follows, then, is a cross section of memories, from bands, performers, journalists, rave crews, and those behind the scenes. Some of these are drawn from extant sources (listed at the end, along with further info about participants), but most are fresh interviews, including from artists such as Primal Scream, The Orb, Shakespear’s Sister and Carter USM.The interviewees Read more ...
John Bungey
With his band King Crimson laid up, the only chance to check out Robert Fripp's guitar prowess lately has been in the Robert & Toyah's Sunday Lunch videos that husband and wife post on YouTube. Their popular weekly assaults on classic rock hits are a game mix of the heroic and the cringeworthy. Toyah Willcox is someone to whom the label “shy and retiring” has never knowingly been attached.Anyway, here's a reminder of what Fripp can do in more serious moments, with his guitar hooked up to a container-load of digital gizmos, including a 76-second delay unit, as he creates his orchestra-like Read more ...