(Warp)
Six years separate Scottish producer Ross Birchard’s debut album under the name Hudson Mohawke from its follow up. That’s a long time, but in fairness, Birchard has been busy. He has achieved the British dance producer’s commercial holy grail of cracking the US market. He has worked with Drake, Lil’ Wayne, Azealia Banks and Kanye West. Signed as an in-house producer at West’s GOOD label, on his most recent album Yeezus, he was at least partly responsible for the sonic chaos of I Am a God. He also co-produced Blood on the Leaves, although whether it was him that made the eye-popping decision to apply a sample from Nina Simone’s cover of Strange Fruit to a song about how awful it was that Kanye West had to sit in a different part of the VIP area at a basketball game to his ex-girlfriend is unknown.
Meanwhile, in collaboration with Canadian producer Lunice, he inadvertently spawned what he recently described as “a kind of parody genre”. The two releases the duo put out under the name TNGHT were apparently intended as a sort of public pitch for work with rappers, a showcase of their ability to meld the rhythms of trap with rave synths. Instead, their more-is-more sound turned out to be precisely the kind of thing that EDM’s audience of gurning fratboys like to mosh to at festivals. You rather get the impression that this is not a state of affairs Birchard is entirely enamoured of, but a host of lucrative live appearances and musical imitators followed.
Related: Hudson Mohawke - Lantern: Exclusive album stream
Continue reading...by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
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