electronica
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 ...
Kieron Tyler
While recognisably a John Grant album, Boy From Michigan brings on board something new and unprecedented – an outside producer. Welcome, Cate Le Bon. Among her previous production credits are Deerhoof and Tim Presley, whom she’s collaborated with on an album. As these and her own releases attest, she’s not going to steer anyone towards the mainstream.For Grant’s fifth solo set, the follow-up to 2018’s Love Is Magic, Le Bon appears to have helped give Grant his most integrated sound in years, bringing a balance which last surfaced on much of 2013’s second solo album Pale Green Ghosts. Although Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Broken Hearts and Beauty Sleep has been five years coming. It’s only a mini-album but is spiced with a range of guests, and offers an array of musical styles, the whole sound ably built with alt-tronic producer FaltyDL. The press release tells us Blanco has recently come out of a calming three year relationship, but the album is neither morose nor studiedly reflective. It feels more like a sequel to the playful 2016 debut Mykki. Blanco may be a key transgender presence in hip hop, but rather than preaching, they prefer to entertain, and are not afraid of choruses.The one song that does seem Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ask someone in the early 2000s to predict which cities were going to be influential in electronic music in coming years, and it’s unlikely many would have picked Kampala, Uganda. But here we are. Across African countries, vernacular electronic forms and versions of DJ culture have been bubbling for a good while, but in Uganda, catalysed by two immigrants – Greek-Armenian Arlen Dilsizian and Belgian Derek Debru, founders of the Boutiq Electroniq club and Nyege Nyege festival and label – misfits from these various scenes, and indeed from none, have gathered, influencing one another and any Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gary Numan says that his new album “looks at climate change from the planet’s point of view… it feels betrayed, hurt and ravaged… it is now fighting back.” Intruder is, then, a bleak, apocalyptic concept album. Given his last album explored similar terrain and that gothic dystopian wordplay has been central to his work for a decade, this isn’t new territory. Then again, his Eighties fans shouldn’t quibble. His chart-topping classics are riddled with po-faced Ballardian sci-fi so, arguably, it’s simply what Numan does.Where Intruder is different is the sound. Numan’s recent work often placed Read more ...
joe.muggs
Lambchop leader Kurt Wagner has suggested that the title of this album is semi literal: that he wanted to write “something akin” to classic, Great American Songbook show tunes, rather than his usual country-tinged style. If so, it’s for a rather gloomy sort of a show. At the beginning, it does suggest you’re going to get some high drama: the rather Leonard Cohen-ish “A Chef’s Kiss” would certainly fit in a middle of a musical in the “how did I get here, where will I go?” bit where the protagonist is alone in the spotlight on a blank stage. But where you might expect such a number to pick up Read more ...