electronica
joe.muggs
Browsing through various past reviews of The xx, two adjectives which occur time and again are “fragile” and “tentative”. These are wrong – but understandable. Certainly the young south-west London band (the members have all turned 20 in recent months), habitually clad entirely in black and quietly spoken if they speak at all, give the superficial impression of diffidence – and the construction of their music is skeletal to say the least, never more so than last night playing as a three-piece with keyboard/guitar player Baria Qureshi absent (whether temporarily or permanently was not made Read more ...
joe.muggs
It comes to something when the logic of a German act calling themselves “Gas” is the least troubling element of a perfomance. Not that Wolfgang Voigt's ambient music, or the slowly-evolving digital art of Petra Hollenbach projected on the Barbican's cinema screen, contained any obvious shock tactics – but the whole 80 minutes created just about as unsettling an experience as one could imagine from abstracted sound and image.As a club music producer and as one of the co-founders of Cologne's Kompakt label, Voigt has been responsible for some of the most emotive and lastingly affective techno Read more ...
joe.muggs
Orbital occupy a singular position in the pantheon of Nineties dance live acts that made it to arena-show status. Paul and Phil Hartnoll's trademark shaved heads and specs-with-headlights gave them a massively spoddy image that belied an everyman quality to their music, but although their early releases unquestionably helped form the distinctively British sounds of rave and hardcore, they never quite became part of those scenes.On the other hand, if their insistence on remaining vocalist-free meant they couldn't match the Chemical Brothers, Underworld or The Prodigy for hit singles after the Read more ...