electronica
Thomas H. Green
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 ...
joe.muggs
“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 ...
Thomas H. Green
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 ...
Thomas H. Green
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 ...
joe.muggs
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 ...
joe.muggs
Welcome to our second show, brought to you again from the Red Bull Studio in London where it was recorded by Brendon Harding.This time, Peter and Joe are joined live in the studio by two guests: friend of theartsdesk and musical polymath Mara Carlyle, and Arthur Jeffes of Sundog and Penguin Café. Mara discusses sharing management with J-Lo, and sings Gershwin with a ukulele, while Arthur discusses continuing the legacy of his father, Penguin Café Orchestra founder Simon Jeffes, and exclusively plays us some new material from his Sundog project, hot from the hard drive.Elsewhere you can hear Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gravenhurst is Nick Talbot, a Bristolian multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter who recently completed his sixth album, The Ghost in Daylight. Ahead of its release on Warp Records next week theartsdesk premieres the unsettling film made for its lead single “The Prize”. Directed by Jenny Coan, Talbot says the video “suggests a journey towards an unknown destination”.The pairing of Gravenshurst with Coan makes sense. Both a film archive curator and filmmaker, the director has worked with Damien Hirst, Adam Curtis, Julian Temple and the Victoria & Albert Museum to make films Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two things are certain with music coming from the north: there will be some wonderful surprises and some of it will sound like nothing else on earth. It’s even more enticing when the two merge. Making the peculiar accessible is a uniquely Scandinavian knack. There are more than a few examples of that – the creation of new micro-genres – in this round-up of current and new releases, but some straightforward albums are equally striking. First, however, we head for the offbeat end of the spectrum.After my first encounter with Denmark’s Sleep Party People, I remarked they were “a peculiar Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There was time when “trance” was not a dirty word amongst connoisseurs of electronic music. It became, eventually, regarded as an aberration in the hip techno universe. Gentlemen of a certain age still make statements such as “I only like real trance music, like Brian Eno and David Byrne.” They speak of pre-acid house music that is mantric, tribal, original and brilliant but “trance” came to mean something else, a Nineties style that was created by two German DJs, Sven Vath and Paul van Dyk, a bangin’ club soundtrack that combined the pulse of techno with the great melodic flourishes of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Martin Schmidt of the US electronic experimental outfit Matmos once said, “If you make a living from your art, that starts to poison it. You can’t help thinking, how can I change this art to make a better living. The obvious answer is that you make it more palatable to more people.” It’s a statement that sums up the conundrum facing any creative person, excepting rich dilettantes, which is why it’s always a pleasure to be confronted by an album such as Black is Beautiful, the third from the duo of Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, who also record as Hype Williams.The pair have left a trail of Read more ...