electronica
Thomas H. Green
The Chemical Brothers have long had one of the most vital shows around. It’s a visual spectacular that can only be likened to peak-time Pink Floyd or Jean-Michel Jarre, yet precision-tooled, without the bombast of those acts. Their long-term visual designer, Adam Smith, is mostly responsible and now he’s shot a concert film of the electronic duo’s appearance at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan last year. Smith has directed a few bits and bobs before, notably the BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit, and he’s the perfect choice to take the Chemical Brothers experience into the cinema.He doesn’t, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A semantic side effect of my longish involvement in music culture has been hearing certain phrases pass from fringe slang obscurity to mainstream acceptance. Among these is the term “chill out”, purloined by ravers from the hippies to describe post-club Ecstasy comedown music, especially after the KLF used it. By the early 2000s, however, “chill out” was tired and ubiquitous, conjuring images of candlelit Primrose Hill dinner parties where Zero 7 played predictably, coolly in the background.If there was a tipping point in this process it was Air’s extremely successful 1998 debut album Moon Read more ...
Joe Muggs
I first heard Zed Bias's Biasonic Hot Sauce – Birth of the Nanocloud last autumn. He may have been one of the key players in the London-centric sound of UK garage, but he was never of that scene. Based in Milton Keynes through the first phase of his career, he releases through a Brighton label and is now resident in Manchester. This is key to understanding the connections in his tracks, which reflect the clubs in those cities that sidestep metropolitan scene micro-delineation and rave parochialism and lock into a wider soulboy set of connections.His sprawling album as Maddslinky earlier in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although they’ll still be filed under jazz, Portico Quartet’s third album takes them even closer to the ambient and trance they’ve been edging towards since they attracted attention in 2007 after the release of their Mercury-nominated debut, Knee Deep in the North Sea. It’s partly to do with the departure of founder member Nick Mulvey and his replacement with keyboard/percussion player Keir Vine, and also a natural progression.Much that’s familiar remains: Milo Fitzpatrick's pulsing, snappy bass, Jack Wyllie’s drifting, occasionally dissonant, sometimes squalling sax and the precision of Read more ...
Joe Muggs
I've seen some genre intersections in my time, but gangsta ambient takes the biscuit. Baghdad born South Londoner VersA Beatz began as a grime producer, but like many has moved from that genre's hyped-up energy into the slower, more menacing electronic “trap beats” of hip hop. This in turn has overlapped with a current American style of melancholic leftfield hip hop sounds pioneered by Clams Casino (best known as producer to Lil B and current sensation A$AP Rocky) to produce, in this free album of instrumentals, a narcotic sound that feels as if gravity has been loosened and the imagination Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Debut albums often set the bar high. How are you going to top a Psychocandy or a Piper At The Gates of Dawn? The answer is, not easily and, with rare exceptions, not at once. All those ideas that had been growing forever splurge out in those first excited studio sessions, years of passion and imagination explode into the open and the thrill carries to the listener.This especially applies when a debut album rewrites the book. It’s almost impossible to completely shift the musical landscape with the same finality twice, especially just a year or two later. Beardy Californian yoga mystic Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gonjasufi, AKA Sumach Ecks (b 1978) was raised in San Diego by a Mexican mother and an American-Ethiopian father. His musical ability first came to more than local prominence when he appeared on the Flying Lotus album Los Angeles in 2008. His own debut album, A Sufi and a Killer, produced by Flying Lotus, Gaslamp Killer and Mainframe, appeared in 2010. It was an extraordinary, uncategorisable piece of work that wandered across a musical landscape of Gonjasufi’s own making, taking in global rhythms, hip-hop, folk, heavy rock, pop and much else, all sung by him and bled through with trippy Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's become a fairly common trope for herbally enhanced rappers to hype up their individuality by referring to themselves as an “alien”, but with Wiley you could believe it. In “Can I Get a Taxi”, the odd extended skit that forms the centrepiece of this album, he inhabits various London archetypes – the yardie, the cockney wideboy, the posh bloke – but while his accents are hilarious, it all feels strange, curious, like a child poking at creatures in a rockpool, and his ever-wayward stream of thought keeps veering off course. As with so much in the decade-old career of the father of grime and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I’m a fan of a child-like musical sub-genre which some call toytronica. It’s the sound of retro-futuristic electronic music mashing into playroom sounds, sometimes using actual gimmicky children’s toy instruments. In its broadest definition, it could take in anything from the bizarre surrealist Moog cheese of easy listening doyen Klaus Wunderlich to the more outré outings from Warp Records acts such as Plone, although possibly the ever best album in this vein is Anglo-Norwegian duo Toy’s self-titled 2006 debut on Smalltown Supersound. A regular and great contributor to this micro-genre, Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Tunng are not as kooky as they might appear. Yes there is a preponderance of beards in their extensive lineup, and a rather byzantine tale to how that lineup has evolved over the years. And yes, their songs include bone percussion, electronic glitches, melodicas, clarinets, snippets of sampled beat poetry, collaborations with Saharan desert musicians and lyrics from the perspective of a dead man forgiving the brother that killed him (“Jenny Again”). OK, they're a bit kooky. But behind all that, behind the “folktronica” tag, exists a band that revolve around the writing and singing of really, Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Even in a bumper year for Xmas albums there comes a point where you really don’t “wish it could be Xmas every day”. After the third helping of turkey, and feeling like a cracker that has been well and truly pulled, it’s only natural to long for a glimpse of summer. Metronomy’s third album is just that. A long, hazy, coming-of-age summer on the Devon coastline.The English Riviera shared a mercury nomination with King Creosote and Jon Hopkin’s gorgeous arthouse long player, Diamond Mine, described as a “fictional soundtrack to a romanticised life led in a small Scottish coastal village”. In Read more ...
Joe Muggs
If 2011 was the year when dance music's natural tendency to fragmentation was taken to extremes, this album was the one that bound those fragments together into one demented but scintillating vision. Russell Whyte – Rustie – comes from a very particularly Scottish club scene that is the perfect antidote to the idea that musical connoisseurship means nerdiness.From the very simple imperative of moving a dance floor in fresh ways comes an explosion of ideas and influences: retro video game soundtracks, obscure Japanese noise bands, the hyper-capitalist hyper-pop of 21st-century R&B, the Read more ...