electronica
Joe Muggs
Young Echo is a sprawling Bristolian collective, comprised of individual musicians Jabu, Vessel, Kahn, Neek, Ishan Sound, Ossia, Manonmars, Bogues, Rider Shafique, chester giles [sic] and Jasmine, who combine and re-combine in various permutations like Bandulu, FuckPunk, O$VMV$M, Gorgon Sound and ASDA. But here, for the second time in album format, they've put everything together under the one name and allowed it to blur together into something that is, frankly, very, very Bristol indeed. Slow, slow, beats with deep, deep bass, murmured rapping and poetry, plaintive melodic vocals, and a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Vinyl matters. It matters to theartsdesk on Vinyl, clearly, as the name may hint. And it matters to many of you. But why? Why does it matter? We all have our own reasons for playing records, some practical, some sound-related, some personal, some ritualistic, some nostalgic, and many more that are harder to define. But for those who wish to dwell at greater length, Brit-based Californian music enthusiast and academic Jennifer Otter Bickerdike has put together “a manifesto from musicians and fans”, a chunky hardback book entitled, simply, Why Vinyl Matters. Within it the matter is chewed over Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
On paper Django Django seem a perfect band. The four-piece, half Scottish, quarter English, quarter Northern Irish, boast an indie songwriting sensibility, but filtered through a natural pop suss, an engaging sense of psychedelia, a desire to rave it up, and a ripe capacity for harmonisation. Their third album is fat with melody and interest, right from its ballistic opening title track, yet in the end, why is it eminently likeable rather than loveable?See, I keep trying to have a love affair with Django Django’s music. Their last album, Born Under Saturn (2015), sounds luscious but in the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The third album from Thomas White under his Fiction Aisle moniker is a match for its delicious, under-heard predecessors. White remains best known for his output with The Electric Soft Parade and Brakes but the prolific Fiction Aisle (three albums since 2016) deserve to gain wider purchase. This time round the mood is more tentatively upbeat than previously, and White’s Pink Floyd-ish tendencies are on the back burner, but, at its core, cosmic easy listening is still the game.The Fiction Aisle aspire to John Barry’s cinematic orchestrated scope, but tinted with hints of Morrissey’s vocal tics Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Eindhoven art punks Radar Men from the Moon have been around since 2010 with a sound that has knitted together space rock, strange electronics and shoegaze flavours with a psychedelic view point. Subversive III: De Spelende Mens, however, is a double album that marks a considerable sonic change, with the band largely dropping the rock elements of their sound, favouring instead a darker electronic approach that charts similar territory to last year’s Death in Vegas Transmission album and The Bug vs Earth Concrete Dessert collaboration. More experimental and less groove-oriented that 2016’s Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There are albums that reveal themselves to you, their hidden depths become apparent over time as familiarity helps one to acclimatize to the terrain. David Crosby’s Sky Trails was one such release and has stayed with me since its release.There are albums that burn with incandescent light from the get-go, albums that leave you smiling with glee as they bring warmth to your world and add light to your day. Indeed, in this category were two that, in any other year, would have been shoe-ins for my album of the year slot. The sparse, electronic experiments of Autarkic’s I Love You, Go Away Read more ...
Joe Muggs
From his days as a session musician in mid-Seventies Tokyo through global mega fame in Yellow Magic Orchestra and on, Ryuichi Sakamoto has always had a Stakhanovite work ethic. And that's still the case, even at the age of 65, and despite the fact he was not long ago given the all-clear from throat cancer. This year, Sakamoto has released the soundtracks to two South Korean movies, The Fortress and Rage, and performed two live commissions: one for Oslo's Ultima festival with dancer Min Tanaka and “fog sculptor” Fujiko Nakaya, and a live improvisation with long-time collaborator Alva Noto at Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the seven years since N.E.R.D last had an album out, Pharrell Williams’ profile, which was already massive, has achieved some sort of pop supernova. “Happy”, “Get Lucky” and the less loveable “Blurred Lines” have made him a megastar. He now returns with Chad Hugo, his childhood pal and production partner in one of hip hop’s defining production units, The Neptunes, and their reclusive associate Shay Haley. N.E.R.D’s original remit, when they began a decade-and-a-half ago, was to make their own R&B-marinated version of rock, but their fifth album sees raw electronic funk to the foreA Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the Hardanger Fiddle is regarded as a traditional Norwegian instrument, its use stretches back to no earlier than the middle of the 17th century. The music players summon from its strings is more easily seen as traditional though: music to dance to. Tuned differently to a standard fiddle, the hardingfele does not have a set amount of strings but instead has four for playing and four or five resonating, sympathetic strings underlying those which are bowed. The baroque viola d'amore, which also has sympathetic strings, is a near relative. Once heard, the keening, resonant power of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The Prodigal Son of Magnesia” is an attention-grabbing title. So are “Three Legged Giant Centipede” and “Public Execution of the Sleeping Lotus Eater”. Each suggests that the album from which they are drawn could be a prog rock epic inspired by conflating existing myths with newly made-up fancies. Track lengths exceeding 10 minutes further the impression. Yet despite surface impressions, 1 is not a showcase for instrumental prowess or tricky arrangements. The first solo album from Finland’s Timo Kaukolampi is instead about immersive, intense atmospheres.Kaukolampi has form. As a producer, he Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Robin Rimbaud, AKA Scanner, has been releasing music for over two decades. There was a point in the mid-Nineties when he was a media “thing” due to the way he sampled sounds plucked from the airwaves. Shockingly, this included phone calls because cordless home phones are as accessible as any other radio signals. He has long operated on the art-intellectual spectrum, bridging electronic, industrial and avant-classical, collaborating with everyone from Wire to Michael Nyman.So to Fibolae, titled for a word that came to him in a dream, and his first album in eight years. Giving background to Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
STIMMUNG is always an event. Stockhausen’s score calls for a ritual as much as a performance, with six singers sitting around a spherical light on a low table, the audience voyeurs at some intimate but unexplained rite. Singcircle has been performing the work for over 40 years, and its director, Gregory Rose, clearly has an innate sense of its pace, structure and aura. This performance commemorated the 10th anniversary of Stockhausen’s death, but also marked the last ever appearance by Singcircle, a fitting end for a group associated above all else with this work.As with most of Stockhausen’s Read more ...