New music
Peter Culshaw
Three years ago Karol Conka was a receptionist. Since then she had made a living from her music and, with the launch of her first international album Batukfreak, (“Beat-freak”, more or less) is making waves internationally. But that doesn’t tell you the punch her music has or her style (when I meet her, she’s wearing cute Japanese shoes, dyed short blonde hair, super-colourful jacket). Our rendezvous is in Concrete, a small basement club in Shoreditch where she is due to perform her London debut the same night as the opener for London’s always impressive La Linea Festival. She duly raises the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Art, real art, is a denial of the status quo. A tradition that values the role of the individual.” Speaking in Estonia’s capital for the opening of Tallinn Music Week, the Baltic country’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves is referring to what’s just over his shoulder. Freedom is on his mind.Estonia shares a border with Russia, and Tallinn is just 1000km from Ukraine’s capital Kiev. Taken together, Estonia, Latvia and Belarus share an unbroken border with their former Soviet master. On the Black Sea, Ukraine is on the southern seaboard of that border, and on the Baltic, Estonia is on the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gram Parsons: The Early Years Vol 1 & 2Without Gram Parsons, The Rolling Stones could not have transformed themselves into what they became in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The bond between the South Carolina-born walking encyclopaedia of the music of America’s south and Keith Richards changed the Stones. Without Parsons there would have been no Eagles. They emerged from what he developed with The Flying Burrito Brothers and turned it into platinum. Without Parsons, Emmylou Harris would not have had the opportunity to soar. Parsons died in 1973 and did not rejoice in the Read more ...
Aimee Cliff
It’s kind of a shame that for whatever reason (presumably SEO), Vienna-based producer and singer SOHN (formerly known as S O H N) had to drop the spaces in between the letters of his name. As well as a self-conscious aesthetic flourish, it was after all a neat tie-in with the artist’s overall approach: patience, space, cool restraint.Emerging in 2012 with the future pop jam “Oscillate” and grabbing the internet buzz machine by the ears with the irrepressibly catchy “The Wheel”, SOHN has always had a focus on movement, his tracks talking about life’s unpredictable twists and his production Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Jon Lord may have tickled his last ivory in 2012, but last night his spirit lived defiantly on. The great and the good from both heavy and contemporary music gathered in his memory. It was for a serious purpose - to raise funds for pancreatic cancer care. But, boy, what a time we had doing it. A revolving door of stars brought us wild solos, screaming vocals and thundering rhythms. But before all the classic rock, culminating in a set from Deep Purple, came something a little more classical.The first hour was devoted to Lord’s orchestral compositions. Our host was “whispering” Bob Harris, who Read more ...
joe.muggs
Yes, Peter and Joe are back, with a humdinger of a show this time, once again recorded in the insalubrious but highly conducive surrounds of Hoxton's MeatMISSION burger bar.Their continued explorations of the past, present and future of cross-cultural intermingling this time takes in jazz-acid, prog-electro, French roots'n'culture, pizzicato Elvis, sardonic Balkan beats, Belgian trip-hop, Appalachian dubstep, ambient country, Euro urban decadence, some Amazon grooves, Grace Jones and Françoise Hardy. Jump in! The Arts Desk 14/03/14 by Meattransmission on Mixcloud Tracklist: Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Aloe Blacc is at a crossroads. The 35-year-old Californian soul singer arrived slowly via the hip hop underground and Peanut Butter Wolf’s smart Stones Throw label, then blew up with the monster hit “I Need A Dollar”, which will surely be used as a recession anthem for decades. His next sliver of profile was as singer of Swedish EDM cheese-merchant Aviici’s chart-topping country’n’western’n’happy hardcore monstrosity “Wake Me Up”. Blacc’s new album, his third, can surely, then, be used as a guide to see which way he’s going to jump?You’d have thought so, but the man born Egbert Dawkins III, a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
About 25 years ago, the Cult decided that they were going to turn the punk/alternative crowd onto “classic rock”. While they were widely derided by most of the music press of the time, they did manage to increase their record sales immeasurably. The Afghan Whigs are also admirers of seventies’ guitar music, with band leader Greg Dulli previously stating that he wanted them to sound like a mix of the Band, the Temptations and Neil Young in Crazy Horse mode. While the Afghan Whigs may have achieved their artistic aim on Do to the Beast, the band’s first album since 1998’s 1965, it seems an Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“The most influential band of the last ten years. Period,” said Jez Nelson, of BBC Radio 3’s Jazz On 3, announcing Polar Bear to the XOYO audience last night. It’s difficult to live up to an introduction like that, especially when the band wanted the audience to focus on their new album, which was launched that night. They gave a typically committed and masterful performance of their well-received new album, In Each And Every One, which drummer, bandleader and composer Seb Rochford introduced with his trademark bashful charm. The playlist followed the order of the album quite Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Norwegian saxophonist Marius Neset is not yet 30, and he already has several acclaimed albums with smaller forces to his increasingly neon-lit name. With this release of new and adapted work for 12-piece big band, he sets out to work on a larger (and notoriously complex) canvas. It’s intense, dramatic and finely wrought, with numerous changes of style and direction.Some tracks are adapted from two previous albums, Birds and Golden Xplosion; others are original. The lion theme is everywhere: the Nordic blonde Neset himself, his gleaming sax over one shoulder; the Read more ...
joe.muggs
It seems that the gradual leakage of avant-garde-post-classical-call-it-what-you-will music from the rarefied environment of concert halls and into the spaces traditionally inhabited by alternative and club music is now inexorable. And violinist Aisha Orazbayeva is one of the instrumental (pun intended) figures in this move from trickle to flood. As one quarter of the organising team for the London Contemporary Music Festival (along with erstwhile classical editor for theartsdesk, Igor Toronyi-Lalic), she has helped bring Parmegianni, Schwitters, Radigue and other 20th/21st century composers Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's rare that you can trace a genre to one man. But house music is well documented: “house” originally simply meant the music played at the Warehouse club, by one Frankie Knuckles, who died yesterday in Chicago from diabetes-related complications. Knuckles was a disciple of New York disco, who'd served his DJ apprenticeship in the city's spectacularly decadent gay bathhouses in the mid-Seventies as an understudy of Larry Levan (who would set up the Paradise Garage, which itself gave its name to another genre – garage).Seeking a club where he could have complete creative freedom, he moved to Read more ...