Stumbling across the perfect pop hit must be its own kind of curse. It’s been two and a half years since Owl City’s “Fireflies” shot its way into the charts, seemingly from nowhere. With its lush, quirky melodies and wistful, lovelorn lyrics, Adam Young’s quirky electronic project seemed almost to have been custom-built by a crack team of pop scientists to appeal to dreamy girls like me. “Fireflies” used to play on a loop at the store where I was working at the time; Young’s vocals and programming a dead ringer for Ben Gibbard’s work with The Postal Service - a band whose one album I loved to Read more ...

Although the Eighties revival has now been going on for longer than the actual Eighties, it shows no sign of abating – to the point where maybe it would be more sensible to refer to it as a tradition or a palette of techniques rather than than considering it as retro at all. However you see it, Jessie Ware and her production team do it with style.Ware was initially best known for her collaborations with UK electronic artists like Joker and SBTRKT, and producers Dave Okumu of The Invisible and Julio Bashmore normally deal in post-Radiohead experimentalism and classic house music respectively, Read more ...

Sometimes a record tells you whether you're going to like it before you've even hit play. With electronica this goes double: track titles like "Scanlon's Leaping Gore Pull", "Pneuquonsis on Return" and "Fewton Tension Chords" are either going to intrigue a potential listener, or make you think "stop playing silly buggers". If the former, then this collection is for you; if the latter, then there's not one nanosecond in the collection of grinding, bending, warping electronic sounds that is going to make you think otherwise.Though there is some repetition to these grooves, there is nothing that Read more ...

“This is such fun”. Martin Horntveth, Jaga Jazzist’s drummer, can’t contain his excitement. Standing up behind his kit, he radiates joy. Considering that he and his band are Norwegian, typically not given to overstatement, what he describes as fun would be off the pleasure scale by non-Nordic standards. The meeting of Jaga Jazzist and The Britten Sinfonia was an unqualified success, one of those rare one-off concerts where band and their temporary collaborators seamlessly connect.The Norwegian instrumentalists and the British ensemble came together at The Barbican last night as part of the on Read more ...

Coming from a thriving East London improvisation scene, "aquatic Krautrock experimentalists" Snorkel have made a logical step forward and released a single that was entirely recorded in one, improvised take. We are very happy to present here in its full ten-and-a-half minute glory the video of the recording, as well as a free download of a remix by Crewdson of another track from the session.Snorkel now feature in their lineup trombonist/producer Ralph Cumbers aka Bass Clef, who is no stranger to improvisation as his previous collaboration with the London Improvisers Orchestra demonstrated. Read more ...

Though he first came to public attention via the Los Angeles-based Brainfeeder psychedelic electronic hip hop collective led by Flying Lotus, 25-year-old producer Lorn comes from “the middle of nowhere in Illinois”, and it's easy to see in his music a less sunny disposition than many of his comrades. Most of the Brainfeeder crew have a loose-limbed funkiness to their sound and an accumulation of sonic detail that speaks of heat and humdity. But while Lorn shares their aesthetic of complex rhythms that slip off the grid, there's something chilly and chilling about his industrial-sounding Read more ...

There is a shouty lady outside the Theatre Royal in Brighton who takes strong objection to us attending tonight’s Brighton Festival performance of Matthew Herbert’s One Pig.  The show is based around the life and death of a pig, from birth to plate, and includes pork being cooked. We are, she tells us as we enter, “hypocritical vegetarians with the blood of farm animals” on our hands. Matthew Herbert is not a vegetarian but she has hit on a crux contradiction about the evening (albeit in the unfortunate manner of Crazy Cat Lady off The Simpsons). Yet Herbert’s work is surely about Read more ...

“Post-classical” the FatCat label call it, and well they might. All three of the acts who played at the Barbican last night in one way or another used the instrumentation of the classical concert hall but in a way that was completely dislodged from tradition – not raging against it, nor fighting to escape it in the sense of high modernism, nor reviving it, but rather looking back on it as something other, something of a different era.Dustin O'Halloran's music is lyrical, strange and very pretty. It has something of the TV soundtrack about it, but as Noël Coward so rightly put it, it's Read more ...

In an on-point attempt to shake things up a bit, Artsdesk writer Joe Muggs suggested the new Squarepusher album should be reviewed by someone other than an old raver. There were, unfortunately, no takers so you’re stuck with me… an old raver. Then again, look on the bright side, look at this way - I’m fully qualified! Thus, although I cannot tell whether you’ll enjoy this if you wasted the last decade dredging slowly from The Strokes to Adele, if you revel in the sound of electronic trickery twisting your synapses inside out – wahay! – you’re home dry.Enough with the self-indugent intro, Read more ...

Grimes’ new album, Visions, her third, is an invigorating piece of work, a very 2012 meltdown of twitchy tuneful electronica and sweet indie-ethereal singing. It’s an album that cannot decide whether to put on its dancing shoes or sit back and smoke a joint, so decides to muddle heads with skewed sonics while also making the feet twitch. The 24-year-old pink-haired Canadian naturally goes for the energized option in performance, but the venue is so crammed that movement is restricted, in fact, it’s distinctly uncomfortable, not conducive. But let’s rewind the clock a little.XOYO is sardine- Read more ...

This is a techno album. A techno album on a British label best known for the indie-est of indie rock, from a duo whose last album featured rock vocalists Beth Ditto and Alex Turner among others, but a techno album nonetheless. It's all about pulse and texture, immersion and physicality, the power of the hypnotic beat, and it is absolutely bloody lovely.And why shouldn't it be? There's a school of thought that to make music in genres most popular in the early 1990s is “retro”, and that this is by definition a bad thing – but this is clearly idiocy. This is no more beholden to the past than, Read more ...