electronica
Javi Fedrick
Perhaps most famous as the singer in seminal Nineties art-pop band Stereolab, Laetitia Sadier has worked hard in recent years to establish herself as a solo artist in her own right through a series of well-received avant-muzak albums, including this year’s Finding Me Finding You. She has not been to Brighton since 2014 – that visit had one audience member describing them as “God’s in-house band” – and the gig is a near sell-out, with a sea of happy faces awaiting the bands.The stage of the Green Door Store is decked out in golden sequined fabric for Batsch, a self-described “groove- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s been suggested that New Order’s “Blue Monday” borrowed from Gerry & The Holograms’ eponymous 1979 A-side. In July 2015, The Guardian ran an article saying “if ‘Blue Monday’ had a starting point, it was ‘Gerry & The Holograms’ by a group of the same name, an obscure Mancunian slice of electronica, released on Absurd Records.” Although the piece noted that members of New Order acknowledged their 1983 single drew on tracks by Kraftwerk, Ennio Morricone, Donna Summer and Sylvester, nothing was quoted from the band to acknowledge the apparent debt to “Gerry & The Holograms”.Yet, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Silver Eye is Goldfrapp’s seventh long-player in an 18-year career that has taken in electronica sounds of all stripes. It sees the duo make a stab at melding together the club-friendly electropop and the witchy rural folk-noir sounds of their repertoire. Not ones to repeat themselves sonically, this involves the band inhabiting a sound characterised by dirty and sparse electronics with distorted, helium-powered vocals that annoyingly bring to mind Thereza Bazar of Eighties pop-muppets, Dollar.While this is initially an interesting and intriguing concept, it soon starts to wear pretty thin. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan founded Beirut’s groundbreaking 1990s electro-duo Soapkills with Zeid Hamdan – the first Middle Eastern electro band to garner a cult following across the Arab world. More recently she featured in Jim Jarmusch’s 2013 movie, Only Lovers Left Alive, the same year she released her debut album, Ya Nass, on the hip Berlin label Crammed. Her latest is a dreamy, lyrical foray into the shifting soundscapes of contemporary Arabic and Western music.For Al Jamilat (The Beautiful Ones), she turned to UK producers Luke Smith and Leo Abrahams, who between them have worked Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Un Voyage Á Travers Dans Le Paysage Électronique Français, the French subtitle, goes further. French Touch is the first exhibition to celebrate and dig into France’s electronic music heritage: exploring the lineage which laid the ground for the world-wide success of Daft Punk.French Touch traces electronic music back from now to when the Futurist musician Luigi Russolo performed in Paris in 1914 – his home-country Italy had not received him warmly – and on through Maurice Martenot, Edgard Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Jean-Jacques Perrey (pictured below right in 1997), Jean-Michel Read more ...
Joe Muggs
OK, the title could be offputting, suggesting as it does the crassest of adversarial politics. But this record is something far deeper, far subtler and far more enjoyable than that. Yes, the Russia-born, Israel-raised, Berlin-based singer-songwriter Mariya aka Mary Ocher things to say about authoritarianism, xenophobia, and gender and sexual politics – but there is so much more to her expression.This record is produced by Hans Joachim Irmler of Krautrock and international psychedelic scene mainstays Faust, and features a variety of other German legends including long-standing electro- Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There is no band of the Eighties generation who've remained both as big, and as great, as Depeche Mode. Duran Duran? Lightweights. U2? Sunk into self-parody a long time ago. But the boys from Basildon are something else: they've come through all the pressures of fame, addiction, ageing and the rest with their mojo very much intact, sounding like themselves but still writing fresh songs and hitting new emotional spots. They are also clearly still willing to experiment sonically, as signalled by the drafting-in of James Ford of techno duo Simian Mobile Disco as producer for their 14th album.All Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The equipment pictured above is the Powertran 1024, one of the first digital sequencers to hit the market. According to the May 1981 issue of Electronics Today International magazine, which unveiled it to the public, the British-invented “1024 composer is a machine which will repeatedly cause a synthesiser to play a pre-determined series of notes either as short sequence or a large compositions of 1024 notes: i.e. several minutes long.” The article was headlined “Treat your synth to this sequencer/composer.”One musician who swiftly treated his synthesiser to the Powertran 1024 was Bernard Read more ...
Barney Harsent
2016 has been a big year for Tel Aviv’s burgeoning underground scene. Acts including Red Axes, Moscoman and Naduve have produced endlessly inventive music at an impressive pace and on a range of labels. Of these, Disco Halal, run by Chen Mosco and based at the Berlin record shop Oye, has been absurdly consistent in its releases, notably a series of re-edits that blend exotic Middle Eastern melodies with dancefloor beats and, in doing so, provide a groove for both head and heart.In May this year, they broke with their MO and released a mini-LP by Nadav Spiegel, better known as Autarkic. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pictured above is Sweden’s Ralph Lundsten. He might look like a guru or mystic but is actually a multi-disciplinary artist most well-known on his home turf for his pioneering electronic music. His first album, 1966’s Elektronmusikstudion Dokumentation 1 (made with Leo Nilson), was issued by national Swedish radio’s own label and recorded at the station’s electronic music studio. Lundsten (born 1936) began making music for soundtracks in the 1950s and has issued at least 38 albums.Lundsten’s “Bön 5 – “Förlåt oss våra skulder” (Prayer 5 – Forgive us our Debts) from the 1972 album Fadervår (Our Read more ...
Joe Muggs
At the Royal Festival Hall the cliché seemed complete. Milling around were white men, white men and more white men – all in their late thirties and older, most looking a little bohemian and a lot geeky, with a few of them a little more hardcore in black bomber jackets, black jeans, black trainers and black baseball caps. These were London's electronica fanboys out in force for Autechre, the duo who, second only to The Aphex Twin, epitomised the moment the rave generation went weird and disjointed, and since the mid-Nineties have explored all the sonic abstractions that technology has to offer Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Everything about Xam Duo’s debut album, out earlier this month on Sonic Cathedral, has a wonderful sense of self-indulgence: from the freeform, experimental feel, the stretched-out tones and resulting melodies that exist almost by implication, to the mournful squall of the saxophone, buoyed by a stubborn sea of sound.The project, a collaboration between Hookworms’ Matthew Benn and Christopher Duffin of Deadwall, was born when the former was looking to expand what had, up until then, been a solo project. Much of this album is formed of the pair’s very first, completely improvised, session Read more ...